Author Archives: Dene Grigar

Exhibiting Uncle Roger: Challenges of Presentation

This post is derived from a part of the presentation I gave at the Electronic Literature Organization 2013 Conference in Paris, on September 26.  The  paper, which includes much additional information, will be submitted for publication.  If you are interested in reading it now, please contact me.

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Judy Malloy, author of Uncle Roger, with Stuart Moulthrop

My second question focuses on obsolescence and the challenges it poses for presenting works in exhibits––what I refer to as the “challenge of presentation.”

Christiane Paul addresses this issue for media art in her seminal essay, “The Myth of Immateriality.” Here she reminds us that “the digital is embedded in various layers of commercial systems and technological industry that continuously define standards for the materialities of any kind of hardware components” (252) and suggests that the constant upgrades of hardware and software may be addressed, in varying degrees of practicalities, by collecting technologies (hardware and software) for the purpose of display, emulating code on newer systems, and migrating works to the next version (269). We can extrapolate much from her ideas, but Paul’s view that the “lowest common denominator for defining new media art” is “its computability” (253) bears attention in that it signals a difference in aesthetics between media art and electronic literature and explains why she values one strategy (emulators) over others (collecting and migration).

Unlike media art where “media” is anchored in the tradition of cinema and “art” is associated with terminologies found in fine art and performance, electronic literature generates from a wide variety of disciplines and practices, among them digital humanities, which itself is described as a “mode of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and dissemination” (Burdick et al 122). Additionally, electronic literature embraces the technological origins of both coding and writing technologies, declaring this heritage in its genres’ naming convention.  Computability––functions made manifest by characters expressed in written code and which drives the words, images, video, animation, sounds, etc., of the work is the point––is the common denominator connecting hypertext fiction with flash poetry, generative poetry with interactive fiction.  So, what is the best way to present electronic literary works produced on systems that have been rendered obsolete?

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Judy Malloy reading Uncle Roger on the Apple IIE

To answer this question, I turn to Judy Malloy’s database narrative, Uncle Roger, begun in 1986 and published on the ArtCom Electronic Network located in the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectric Link”) in 1987.  It was contemporary with the Apple IIE and was, in fact, produced on this model.  Version 1.0 was originally written in BASIC and delivered as a serial novel comprised of 100 lexias over the network.

The version that was eventually sold commercially through the ArtCom catalog, however, was Version 2.0.  It was made up of three 5 ¼ floppy disks on which Judy organized the material from 100 lexias of the previous version into three parts:   “A Party at Woodside,” “The Blue Notebook,” and “Terminals.” Version 2.0 made it possible for readers to navigate the story by selecting and typing keywords on the command line. Each combination would result in a lexia or series of lexias relating to the keywords typed. Typing “David” followed by “Jenny” in the next query, for example, brings up episodes about the relationship between these two people: David’s messy apartment that Jenny recalls, the picture of David’s former lover that Jenny tears into tiny pieces and places back into his wallet.

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The advertisement for Uncle Roger in ArtCom Electronic Network Catalog

Judy sold Version 2.0 from her home as a hand-made artist package.  As far as she knows (Malloy, “Interview”), only three copies of the complete work exists:  two that she donated to Duke University along with other materials that now comprise the Judy Malloy Collection, and one divided, at the moment, between Judy and me. So, to present all these parts of this historically important work in the Pathfinders exhibit in at the Modern Language Association conference in Chicago, IL in January, I need to ask Judy to lend me the floppy I am missing (“Terminals”), then, ship my Apple IIE to Chicago in order to show them.  Recognizing these two constraints would limit her readership, Judy did produce an online version in 2012, Version 3.0, that runs on contemporary computers. [1]

Having access to Uncle Roger online sounds like a good solution to the problem of shipping a vintage computer across the U.S. and risking a rare work of electronic literature, but let’s step back for a moment and think about the qualities that may be lost if I blithely show Version 2.0 on any Apple IIE or Version 3.0 on a contemporary computer without thinking critically in advance about my choices.

Uncle Roger centers on the semi-conductor chip industry of Silicon Valley of the 1980s, a time in which floppy disks and an Apple IIE computer with its black screen and green dot matrix type were familiar technologies.  This particular computer is one of the most robust that Apple ever produced, lasting 11 years on the market. When Judy began posting Uncle Roger on the WELL, the computer was only three years old. In fact, Judy wrote Uncle Roger on a version of the Apple IIE that constrained her lines to 50 characters, resulting in a narrative poem and Judy finding herself a narrative poet. Later iterations of the computer cause the lines to wrap in ways Judy did not plan for them to, but Version 3.0 running on a contemporary computer keeps the line lengths in tact. What is lost in moving to the newer version, however, is the look and feel of the period––the cultural context of the work itself.  On the circa 1988 Apple monitor, the aesthetic of computer and story design meet seamlessly, the time-stamp of the work’s technology making sense in the context of the material presence of the computer. Thus, in showing Uncle Roger at the Pathfinders exhibit at the MLA where over 5000 literary scholars convene, I need to be aware that I am doing more than showing content of a work––I am also providing a context for understanding and interpreting the work.

Additionally, as curator I am taxed with highlighting the unique features of Uncle Roger, such as its interactivity and ability to compel audience participation.  In fact, the work may very well be one of the first social media narratives, presaging twitterature and other familiar contemporary forms today.  With Version 1.0 Judy posted one to two lexias every day, in serial style, to friends in her network, who then responded by chatting with her about the story and riffing off to other topics. “Great stuff, Judy,” one reader wrote on December 2, “the ideas and the content are both up to ridiculously high standards. Thanks for the fresh air.” Another: “What jacket are you wearing?” (Malloy, ArtCom). This means that readers of both Versions 2.0 and 3.0 are missing a crucial feature of the work found in Version 1.0.

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Screen of Apple IIE showing interface of Uncle Roger

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Uncle Roger 3.0 displayed on a Dell computer

Translation theory holds that translation is ultimately a betrayal of the text by the translator.  Tautologically speaking, the best we can do to bring a work to a reader is just our best (Biguenet and Schulte).  So, for the Pathfinders exhibit, I will be carting my Apple IIE computer to Chicago since it wraps Judy’s text properly and, so, provides a better cultural context for the work than the Mac Minis or iMacs I generally use for exhibits does.  I will also provide examples of the conversations that took place at ArtCom between Judy and her audience, materials Judy has allowed me to photograph for my research.

 

 

 

Notes:
[1]  A more complete history of Uncle Roger can be found at Judy Malloy’s Authoring Software, http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/uncleroger/uncle_readme.html.

 Works Cited:
Biguenet, John and Reiner Schulte.  The Craft of Translation.  Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp.  Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA:  The MIT Press, 2013.

Grigar, Dene and Stuart Moulthrop.  “Exhibit.”  Pathfinders:  25 Years of Experimental Literary Art. 15 Sept. 2013.  http://dtc-wsuv.org/wp/pathfinders/exhibit.

Malloy, Judy.  “Interview for Pathfinders.”   Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop.  8 Sept. 2013.

—.  Uncle Roger.  ArtCom Electronic Network. 1987.

Paul, Christiane.  “The Myth of Immateriality:  Presenting and Preserving New Media.” MediaArtHistories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007. 251-274.

The Structure of Uncle Roger

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Judy Malloy reading Uncle Roger

Silicon Valley in the 1980s. Success in the semi-conductor chip industry measured by companies that could produce the fastest chip. Engineers who could deliver it, wooed away with the promise of more money. Industry espionage, a common practice. This is the setting of Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger, a serial novel created in BASIC and delivered to the tech savvy audience of the Art Com Electronic Network community that resided in the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectric Link”) [1] circa 1986.

From the beginning Uncle Roger was envisioned as a database narrative. Malloy began the project in 1986, ultimately taking six months to create 100 records (or lexias) and a database that made it possible for readers to navigate the story by selecting and typing keywords on the command line [2]. Each combination would result in a lexia or series of lexias relating to the keywords typed. Typing “David” followed by “Jenny”in the next query, for example, brings up episodes about the relationship between these two people: David’s messy apartment that Jenny recalls, the picture of David’s former lover that Jenny tears into tiny pieces and places back into his wallet.

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Malloy’s print-out of an Art Com conversation about Uncle Roger

The work may very well be one of the first social media narratives, presaging twitterature and other familiar contempary forms today. Malloy posted one to two lexias every day, in serial style, to friends in her network, who then responded by chatting with her about the story and riffing off to other topics. “Great stuff, Judy,” one reader wrote on December 2, “the ideas and the content are both up to ridiculously high standards. Thanks for the fresh air.” Another: “What jacket are you wearing?”

Uncle Roger unfolds in three parts. “A Party at Woodside” takes place at, as the title suggests, a party––the ideal situation for keeping the narrative open and introducing the reader to the characters living this heady, highly competitive lifestyle. “Blue Notebook” consists of five parallel narratives told in retrospect by Jenny, a not completely credible narrator, with many of the episodes, a memory inside a memory. “Terminals” is both metaphorically and literally the end of the narrative, told from Jenny’s perspective.

Both Jenny and Uncle Roger serve as the common thread among the three parts, Jenny as narrator recalling this particular time in our country’s collective history and her uncle as the catalyst driving the action among the various players. Malloy suggests that Roger, a semi-conductor industry analyst (a kind of venture capitalist), is a Falstaffian character providing comic relief in a story about power and money in an industry that essentially built the U.S. economy from which we are still reeling, even now.

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A notice about Malloy’s work in the Art Com catalog

Limited to 50 characters per line on the screen, Uncle Roger is a type of constrained poetry. Though not a poet when she began writing Uncle Roger, Malloy became one, she says, during the creation of this work. Those who read the work may be struck by the use of alliteration, internal rhyme, and other poetic devices. The repetitive use of the “M” sound in one episode draws out the action, while the liquid sound of multiple “Ls” in another takes us to both undulating waves and unstable times.

Malloy sold Uncle Roger through the Art Com catalog beginning 1987. Each copy was a hand-made artists’ book that Malloy refers to as a “material hack.” Hack or not, Uncle Roger constitutes one of the first commercially sold works of electronic literature in the U.S., a serialized database novel, artfully hand-produced and structured in a way that compelled readers to interact with its author. [3]

References:

[1] The WELL, founded in 1985, is one of the first social networks.  It describes itself as “a cherished destination for conversation and discussion. It is widely known as the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born — where Howard Rheingold first coined the term ‘virtual community.'” See http://www.well.com.

[2] Malloy was originally known at the WELL (re: her “handle,” as names were called) as “badinfo.” Her name later shifted to jmalloy.  She was also known as Judy.

[3] The material garnered for this post is derived from the two-day traversal and set of interviews held with Judy Malloy at her office at Princeton University, on September 7 and 8, 2013.  We would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding to conduct these activities that has led to this posting.

 

Not Blue about Malloy’s Notebook

The Pathfinders team leaves tomorrow for Judy Malloy’s traversal.  Amalia and I read through my copy of Uncle Roger: The Blue Notebook on the Apple II e to make sure that it was working well before I packed it up for the trip.  Here is a brief video clip of the opening screen.

 

Contents of Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse

On August 8, pioneering electronic literature artist, John McDaid, read through his hypermedia novel Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.  As part of the Pathfinders project, we captured his performance on video.  This small clip of the longer video provides scholars with a complete inventory of the contents of the “black box” in which the work was packaged and distributed.  We would like to thank our videographer Aaron Wintersong who did both the camera work and editing.  The complete “traversal,” as we are calling these performances will be freely available later as a Scalar publication.

Inventories of John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse

931037-MJohn McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse is, as mentioned in the previous post, out of print and impossible to find used.  Therefore, scholars wanting to learn more about the work are forced to turn to secondary sources for  information.  Googling the title nets 32,300 hits, which seems a significant number that, at first glance, could shed light on the novel. In truth, it is really difficult to understand the breadth of McDaid’s genius through secondary sources without having access to a complete inventory of the contents of the box that constitutes the work, the art forms with which he experiments, and the media involved in the notion of Uncle Buddy as a “hypermedia novel”–and none of this information is readily found online.

At a time when works of electronic literature were packaged in slim folios of cardboard or vinyl, Uncle Buddys’ came in a box, a black one with silver lettering.  And because the boxes were purchased from a candy company, the publisher Mark Bernstein, according to McDaid, referred to Uncle Buddy’s box as “the chocolate box of death.”  The conceit upon which Uncle Buddy’s was built (Re:  you receive a box of seemingly random items from your Uncle Buddy’s estate) was derived seesfrom McDaid’s personal experience:  In 1986, the same year McDaid began work on Uncle Buddy’s, his dying Aunt Rita sent him a See’s candy box filled with odds and ends that constituted a portion of her “estate” she wished to give McDaid. It may be impossible to tell from this photo, but some of these contents included a 5 pound note from the Provincial Bank of Ireland, a calendar she used for remembering the  medicine she took each day, and a gift card.

ubpf-boxThe contents of Uncle Buddy’s box includes five floppies (or the later version, one CD); a booklet introducing you to the work with directions for how to get started (in the later version, the booklet is condensed into one small sheet); two audio cassettes of music; one letter from a publisher; and one set of page proofs of a science fiction short story.  While these items, like those in Aunt Rita’s box, may seem at first incongruent, they aren’t. Instead, all equally serve as elements comprising the narrative.  A case in point, the borrowed copy I have includes only four working cassettes, the booklet, and the publisher’s letter.  To access the work, one really needs to load the information on all five of the cassettes into a folder on the computer desktop for the work to function properly–four just won’t do.  The publisher’s letter makes no sense without the page proofs because without them, the reader is not clued into Uncle Buddy’s interest in science fiction or that the genre permeates the work.  Without the audio cassettes, the lyrics that make up part of the work are untethered and, more importantly, it also eliminates one of the media from the multimedia.

Additionally, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse experiments with artistic forms and genres.  We find generative text, photography, hypertext fiction, musical lyrics, music, sound, images, animation, the multimedia book, and text driving a story that is all at once science fiction, mystery, game, farce, and children’s book.

ubpf-mediaIn a sense, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse goes beyond even what Ted Nelson claims in  The Literary Machine (1987) literature to be:  a “system of interconnected writings.” McDaid’s literature, instead, includes a vast array of interconnected letters, email messages, tarot cards, riddles, conference program, journal (replete with essays), story story, book, screenplay, poster for a film festival, poetry, and, of course, code.  Also part of this imaginative world are audio cassettes, the system audio utilized in the narrative, a map, and photos and illustrations.  It is important to note that McDaid produced all of the writing and media himself, and the section of the work called Hyper Earth presages Google Earth, right down to naming the view from the street, the “street view.”

Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse is an opus and, I would add, a work of genius. It may very well be the first work of multimedia, and, along with William Gibson’s Agrippa, one of the first works of  electronic literature to come packaged in a box and augmented with additional media.  It may also be considered one of the first artists’ books of electronic literature. When I read this last paragraph, I am glad that Stuart Moulthrop wrote me on that August evening in 2012 from Santa Cruz where he was attending a workshop with Anne Balsamo, Tara McPherson, and other “DH folks” and invited me to join them all in a grant “to make video records of readings of early e-lit works.”  It has turned out to be considerably more than that.  As I mentioned in the previous post, we are contributing to the history of electronic literature, and part of that history is making others aware of the rich and complex works, like Uncle Buddy’s, that generated from the early digital literature of the late 20th century.

 

 

A Case for [Electronic] Literary History: John McDaid and Pathfinders

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The Pathfinders Team (sans Moulthrop) with John McDaid in the Electronic Literature Lab at WSUV

The Pathfinders team worked this week with John McDaid to preserve his work, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse. Begun in 1986 as a challenge to write a novel that no one else could write, Uncle Buddy’s was expressed in hypermedia and published by Eastgate Systems in 1993.  It constitutes the second work we have documented now––Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden was the guinea pig that tested our theories and plans.  While we recognized the importance of documenting these works for posterity,  it was Uncle Buddy’s, a work out of print and impossible to find even used––that made us acutely aware of the historical implications of our efforts.  The fact of the matter is, Pathfinders is about contributing to the future of literature through documenting its past––and the past we are documenting focuses on the digital literary experiments that emerged in the 1980s and has continued to grow and develop into what we call electronic literature today. We are, in effect, involved in creating the infrastructure for a literary history of electronic literature.

IMG_1572I have to admit that I love literary history and have, in my life, collected volumes of books about it. Baugh’s A Literary History of England, published in 1948, is a case in point. Close to 1700 pages, the book covers over a thousand years of English literary heritage, beginning with the middle ages. The copy I own was purchased second-hand well after I finished my undergraduate degrees in French and English and merely studying British literature for my own edification. I was delighted to find the previous author’s marginalia and underlined text, for they linked me to the book’s own history. At the first university where I held  a tenure-track position, the PhD students in my department were required to know the literary history of England and America, in a strict chronology, for their exams.  The department has long since revised this requirement, but during those early years of my career the “Baugh,” as I called it, served as a sort of bible for me because I was not an expert in British  literature and needed to have at my disposal the information it contained between its covers.  Keep in mind this was the mid 1990s when the browser was just introduced and the web still in its infancy. Books like the Baugh constituted the references we used for research.

Eschew literary history all you want––and, yes, making grad students memorize historical “facts” found in them for their exams is a good reason to complain––but print literary scholars at least have a documented history to argue about or from.  Those of us working in electronic literature should be so fortunate. We are working to construct ours, pixel by pixel, frame by frame, tag by tag.  Making the task challenging is the fact that the works we seek to historicize are rendered obsolete sometimes seemingly overnight.  The truth is, in order to have a history, one needs a stable present so that one can readily study the works one needs for that historicization. Pathfinders represents one of many efforts scholars in the U.S. and abroad are undertaking to document the heritage of electronic literature before it is too late.

I use the phrase, too late, not so lightly.  During the panel presentation that I participated in at the 2013 Digital Humanities conference held in Lincoln, NE, an audience member asked the panelists how early electronic literature was received by the public when these works were first released.  Two of us in the room (a man in the back of the room and me) of about 50 people could share with the audience the memory of picking up the slim folio (that contained the floppy disk and directions for how to install and interact with the work) of a hypertext novel in our hands and trying to figure out how to begin reading the work.  The truth of the matter is that when that man and I are dead and gone from this world, it may very well be up to pure conjecture to figure out what people thought of these works when they were first released.  We absolutely have no idea what people thought the first time they heard the Odyssey recited by the Homeric poet either, but we expect to have this gap of cultural history with a work written thousands of years ago when orality was the only mode for sharing one’s heritage.  However, in an age when we have such such a wide variety of communication channels with which to express our views, not having a record of human experience with a cultural object produced a mere 20 years ago is a problem.

More challenging is that even if you got your hands on a copy of Uncle Buddy’s (doubtful, as I mentioned earlier, since it is currently out of print), you would need a Macintosh computer running the Classic operating system with the ability to read either floppies or a CD and loaded with Hypercard.  Without it, you cannot do much except explore the contents of Uncle Buddy’s estate contained in the box with little idea of how the various items connect to the story.

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John McDaid giving his traversal of Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse

So, this week the Pathfinders team documented John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse.  McDaid was on hand to give a traversal;  an in-depth interview about the works’ origins, its influences, and its challenges; and a public lecture. Two readers joined us to traverse the works themselves.  Taken together, these activities should provide information that will help others to gain a better understanding of this particular work and the experiments that led to the development of electronic literature.  We will post here at this website information about the work, including: 1) a complete inventory of the contents of his box (replete with photos of each), 2) a complete inventory of the media included in the work itself, and 3) a complete inventory of the art forms he experiments with in the work.  The special video of John opening the box containing Uncle Buddy’s (what he said Mark Bernstein referred to as “the chocolate box of death”) and talking about each item and the part each plays in the story will also be made available.

So, I have a vision.  Hear me out, and don’t laugh. One day, 70 years from now, literary scholars will argue about the 1700 pages (or screens or whatever the heck they  call the presentational modality at that time) of electronic literary history that some future Baugh has painstakingly detailed.  These scholars will exclaim that such labor is not necessary, will complain that such work is hegemonic, a  master narrative in need of overhaul. In that imagined future, these scholars can well afford the luxury of rejecting literary history.  But we can’t.  Not today when we cannot even locate Uncle Buddy’s at our local library.

Traversing McDaid’s Funhouse

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The “READ ME FIRST” page from John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse

Created in 1993, John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse may be considered one of the first multimedia/mixed media hypertext novels, as well as one of the first electronic literary artists’ “books.”   Readers opening the black box that holds the remains of Uncle Buddy’s estate found––along with five floppy disks––tapes of music, tarot cards, and other items of the titular Uncle Buddy (who may or may not be dead).  The story unfolds through these various objects, with the information provided on the floppies as hypercard stacks providing the narrative structure of the work.  The novel is inspired by many sources, but those familiar with John Barthes’ “Lost in the Funhouse” will see connections to Uncle Buddy’s house described in the Home card.

One only needs to think back to the technological realities of 1993 when the work was published to understand that makes Uncle Buddy such a compelling work to study as multimedia.  Predating the introduction of browsers by several years and the ability to deliver media-rich content by several more, McDaid’s novel pushes against these constraints by including sound as an external media source.   The inclusion of tarot cards and other objects found in the box mixes analogue with the digital giving rise to a mixed media environment, heightened by the sense of touch.  Anyone who has ever gone through the personal effects of a late relative recognizes the power that interacting with such objects holds.

John McDaid will come to WSUV to participate in the second Pathfinder’s traversal on Thursday, August 8 from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.  That evening he will be giving a public lecture at the Vancouver Community Library at 7:00 p.m. For more information, contact Dene Grigar at dgrigar@mac.com.

 

 

First Traversals Complete

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Stuart Moulthrop traversing Victory Garden for the Pathfinders project

Pathfinders broke new ground this week with Stuart Moulthrop’s  “traversal” of Victory Garden.  The project, at its core, centers on digital preservation, specifically preservation of early digital works of the late 20th century.  This first round of works we are preserving includes four electronic literature novels––two of which were authored in Storyspace (Mouthrop’s Victory Garden, Jackson’s Patchwork Girl), one in Hypercard (McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse), and one with command line programming (Malloy’s Uncle Roger:  The Blue Notebook).   These works, for the most part, demand reader interaction in order for them to be fully realized, so preserving them does not simply mean we capture the nodes and lexias of Victory Garden, for example, but rather that we document the experience that readers have with the work.  To that end we have videotaped Moulthrop traversing his work on an mac-classicApple computer (as seen in the photo to the left) that readers in 1991 would have used when they themselves read the work.  This is what is meant by “breaking new ground”––the documentation of the experience of traversing his hypertext novel in the native environment––for even in  the interview with Lev Manovich published today in Rhizome Manovich expresses shock in “how little visual documentation of the key systems and software (Sketchpad, Xerox Parc’s Alto, first paint programs from late 1960s and 1970s) exists.” Obviously, we are on the right track with the project.

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E-Lit artist David Kolb

By “traversal” we mean one passage through a work that is comprised of multiple layers and heaps (e.g. stacks, mounds, mass) of potentially contradictory narrative elements in which the reader is taken back to the beginning.  Using talk aloud protocol, Moulthrop traversed his work for 20 minutes for the camera––and for an audience of six people (David Kolb, author of Socrates in the Labyrinth, drove up from Eugene, OR to join faculty and students of the CMDC Program). The following day we invited two people unfamiliar with the work to traverse it: Pat Kutkey a computer science teacher from Frontier Middle School in the Evergreen School District in Vancouver, WA, and Sean Philbrook, a sophomore at WSU Vancouver.  We captured both reader’s traversal (also using talk aloud protocol) on video and, then, interviewed each (also videotaped).  Not surprising was that both men had little difficulty understanding how to move through the work. Kutkey’s experience with computing environments and Philbook’s with games and gaming systems led to the comfort and relative ease with which they worked through Victory Garden.

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Aaron and Dene preparing Stuart for his traversal

Our videographer Aaron Wintersong (a CMDC student who graduated this year) will collaborate with us on the video editing,  eventually combining it with the footage from the next three traversals.  Ultimately, all of this information will be made available as an AppBook that we are producing with  our Scalar consultant Will Luers.

We were fortunate that the Marketing and Communication department on our campus sent photographers to take photos during the two days of traversals.  Here is the archive of all of the photos.  We were also fortunate to have Morgan Hutchinson, a graduating senior from the CMDC program, liveblogging that day.


Here is a short video of Moulthrop talking about what it is like to go back to Victory Garden after two decades of its creation.  This clip comes from the interview that followed his traversal.  Grigar is conducting the interview videotaped by Hutchinson for our YouTube channel.

People Power

With Stuart Moulthrop, arriving on  campus next week and Pathfinders revving up into high gear, we have brought in some people to give us some high octane power.

amaliaFirst, we are excited to announce that we have hired Amalia Vacca as our undergraduate research assistant.  Amalia is a senior in the CMDC Program and has been studying electronic literature for over a year, serving last April as docent at the Library of Congress exhibit, “Electronic Literature and Its Emerging Forms”.  Currently a Fellow in the iPublishing Summer Initiative where she is learning how to build (code, design, conceptualize) new models for online publishing, she brings to her position experience that has prepared her for organizing the traversals and the events surrounding them and the development of the AppBook in which the videos of the authors and readers will be featured.

morgan-p-hutchinsonLending a hand with the liveblogging for the authors’ traversals and interviews is Morgan Hutchinson.  Morgan is graduating from the CMDC program this August.  Like Amalia, Morgan has served as docent at the Library of Congress exhibit; she also joined us as docent at the electronic literature exhibit we curated at the MLA 2013 in Boston.  Morgan is specializing in project management and, to that end, led the team of six students who produced the augmented reality environment for the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington.

aaronHandling the video work for the project is Aaron Wintersong.  Aaron graduated in May 2013 and is also producing videos and animations for the iSci project that Grigar is collaborating on with Mathematics professor Alex Dimitrov.  Aaron will serve as both videography and video editor as well as helping to prepare the material for the AppBook.

We are also fortunate to have two excellent folks joining us on Wednesday, July 10 to read Moulthrop’s Victory Garden for our project.  Pat Kutkey, who teaches computers at Pacific Middle School in the Evergreen School District, will read from 11 a.m. to noon, and Sean Philbrook, a sophomore Computer Science major at WSUV, will read from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.

 

First “Pathfinder” Arriving on July 8th

Minolta DSCStuart Moulthrop, who for the last 25 years has produced many critically significant works of digital writing and art, is arriving for a series of videotaping, on July 8-9, at Washington State University Vancouver, and a public lecture on July 9th at Nouspace Gallery.  The videotaping, taking place in the Electronic Literature Lab (ELL) located at the university, is aimed at producing a performance of his work that can be archived for posterity in international databases and made available in a multimedia web book.

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A screenshot from Moulthrop’s Victory Garden

The impetus for the “Pathfinders” project is hinted to in its subtitle, “Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature.” So, our project is unique in that we want to preserve the human experience of interacting with early digital literary art rather than the simply preserving the art itself.   This experience includes, of course, the computer.  Moulthrop’s early work, like Victory Garden (1991), was produced for computers that are not compatible with current standards and, so, not available for web-based archives without changes to its original form.  To preserve the beauty of the original work, we will videotape Moulthrop in ELL performing his work on a vintage Mac Classic, as he talks through the work, a process we are calling a “traversal.” We will follow his traversal with two others by readers unfamiliar with his work so that we have a record of several readers’ experience with Victory Garden.

Moulthrop makes a good choice for the first Pathfinder:  Beginning with various HyperCard experiments in the late 1980s, and the pre-Web hypertext Victory Garden (1991), which Robert Coover described on the front page of The New York Times Book Review as a “benchmark” for electronic literature, Moulthrop has long been considered one of the pioneers of digital literary art.  Early Web projects like “Hegirascope” (1995) and “Reagan Library” (1999) have been written about extensively.  In the mid-90s Moulthrop co-edited the groundbreaking online journal Postmodern Culture, bringing out its first digital-only special issue.  In 1999 he became a founding board member of the Electronic Literature Organization. 2007 brought two Flash projects, “Deep Surface” and “Under Language,” which won the international Ciutat de Vinarós Prize for Digital Narrative and shared the prize for Poetry.  In 2011 Moulthrop was a visiting fellow at three Australian universities, and an In(ter)ventions resident at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada in 2013. He lives in Milwaukee, where he is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Moulthrop’s public lecture at Nouspace Gallery, 1005 Main St, Vancouver, WA), entitled “Failure to Contain:  Electronic Literature and the State of (Machine) Reading,” is free and open to the public.  For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, dgrigar @mac.com.  “Pathfinders:  Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature” is funded by a 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities “Digital Humanities Start Up Grant.”