Pathfinders

CMDC student Madeleine Brookman was awarded a 2014 Auvil Fellowship by WSU to work with me in ELL and on the Pathfinders project.  Specifically, Madeleine will work with me with the ongoing archival and preservation work for the  electronic literature in my media library and those collected from the recent acquisition of the online journal, Poems That Go.  We will be using the methods created for Pathfinders to our work in ELL. She will also assist in developing methods and best practices for preserving works of electronic literature created for the mobile environment, an area that is yet to be addressed by e-lit preservationists––we have just de-commissioned an early iPad for this purpose and plan to experiment with best practices for keeping versions of e-lit apps for future study. Finally, Madeleine will  serve as the Media Librarian, continuing the work of Amalia Vacca to document and organize the works in my library.

Stuart and I have uploaded the first three sets of Pathfinders videos to our YouTube channel.  These videos included the traversals of John McDaid, Judy Malloy, and Shelley Jackson.

The final versions will be the polished ones, with video and sound perfected by Aaron Wintersong, who captured the video footage for us.

Coming next are videos of Bill Bly and Stuart.

This article is appearing in WSUV’s Crimson & Gray (Spring 2014, Volume 4, Number 2) and features the preservation work that Stuart and I are doing in the Pathfinders project. A special thank you to the good folks at MarCom for featuring our research in this publication.

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Stuart Moulthrop reading his seminal work Victory Garden with the CMDC’s technical assistant Greg Philbrook and me looking on.

Many people tremble with excitement while ripping open a box containing a new computer or electronic gadget. Dene Grigar, associate professor and director of the creative media and digital culture program at Washington State University Vancouver, gets that same tingle when she opens a box containing an old computer.

“Guess what I got today?” Grigar claps her hands together in delight. “An iMac G3!”

Grigar directs the Electronic Literature Lab, where she has collected more than 28 vintage Macintosh computers, the likes of which have long since been forgotten, donated or discarded by most people. While she delights in the hardware, it’s not the hardware itself that fuels Grigar’s passion. The computers are the medium that allow her to access and preserve electronic literature.

Read the article at the Crimson & Gray

[Special Note:  This posting comes as a response to the traversal and interview that Stuart and I conducted with Bill Bly, author of the hypertext novel We Descend, at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland, where Bly’s papers are now archived.  A special thank you to Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Director of MITH, for allowing us the opportunity to visit the archives and to videotape in MITH offices and for participating in a traversal for us, and to Bill Bly for the time he gave us and for his art.  Pathfinders is richer for it.]

The Buzzfeed game I played yesterday about where I would reside in Dante’s Inferno placed me right smack in Limbo with the virtuous pagans, Plato and Aristotle.  Those of you who know me probably understand why spending eternity with these Greek philosophers does not seem much of a punishment, even if it is hell we are talking about.  Of course, in Dante’s world view this nether land of shades and shadows is actually a far better  location than any of hell’s circles below.

Dante’s story of his decent to this realm of the afterlife and his vision of the place he believes a great many of us will end up reminds me of Bill Bly’s We Descend, another epic structured as a journey.  My Pathfinders Co-PI Stuart Moulthrop and I had just spent the previous weekend with Bill at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities where we videotaped several traversals of his work.  So, Bill’s story of Edgerus digging through a maze of information in his journey to knowledge about the past was still haunting me days after my return.  Thinking about the metaphor of “the descent” as I played the Buzzfeed game, I was struck by the idea that Bill’s use of it has us going as deep into the abyss as we do for Dante’s underworld, for We Descend takes us through a complex scheme of space––and of time.

The up-to-date Map View of the Writings of WDvol2, courtesy of Bill, 10 Feb. 2014

I know.  It is difficult to imagine a more complex schema than Dante’s hell with its many circles and bolgias, but We Descend holds it own against the medieval masterpiece in this regard.  The story takes us through four timelines (five, if you count the timeline the reader represents), beginning with a future post-apocalyptic storyline of Edgerus who digs down through eons of data to reconstruct cultural history, encountering, along the way, Writings by an ancient who calls himself the Last One.  As Bill says, “The Last One transmits the even more ancient writings from the magnificent civilization whose self-destruction he has survived” (Bly, 10 Feb. 2014).  The metaphor of the “archaeological dig” that Bill talked about in his interview with Stuart and me, serves, he said, to “help us to visualize time.” (See Bly’s “Afterward” for a better sense of the levels he presents in the story.) And it does.  Here, I am reminded of how time unfolded below me as I peered down at the ruins of Homer’s Troy––Troy VI and VII––among the nine total possible Troys––and imaging Priam, Hector, and Paris having once dwelled upon one of stratum of soil among so many of them. And there I stood representing yet another Troy, one far removed from theirs.

We spend so little time on earth that we are fooled into thinking of time as a continuum.  Without realizing it, we are tainted by Plato’s allegory of the cave from the Republic, so seamlessly woven into the fabric of Western culture that we are unaware of its influence. And so, we believe that the journey of humankind––and our own personal journeys, for that matter––takes us from ignorance to wisdom, that evolution means eventual enlightenment if humanity can just stick it out long enough.  I mean, modern humans are a far cry from Neandethrals, right?  In this way, Bill’s descent differs from Dante’s.  Whereas Dante hikes into hell’s hole with Virgil as his guide and leaves a better person for it by learning the true nature of sin, we wander alone through We Descend facing hundreds of possible paths with no idea if we will come out of it with any understanding of anything.  Bill’s story is, as he says,  about “evolutionary descent” (Bly Interview).  We refer to ourselves, as Bill reminds us, as “descendants” of those who preceded us, rather than their “ascendants,” a far cry from the more noble pilgrim status conferred upon Dante.  Dante does, indeed, get to climb up Mt. Purgatory and the heavens after his sojourn through hell.

I exaggerate as writers sometimes do to make a point.  Actually, we do come out of We Descend with an understanding.  In fact, Bill revealed this truth when he related the genesis of this story to Stuart and me:  There were “five words,” he said, that came into his head, like a motif that had to be written down: “If this document was authentic.” Thus, the story suggests that humanity’s journey, our descent and ascent over thousands of years, is an odyssey to find those things that are authentic, to seek the true nature of truth.  We can see through this tautology if we remember that the Greek word for truth is alethe, or “not forgetting.” Truth, then, is simply those things that we remember. It is through seeking cultural heritage, through preserving the memory of a people, as the characters in Bill’s story do, that truth is located and maintained.

Ultimately, what We Descend suggests is that we––all humans––are capable of descending and ascending, depending on how heroically we fight for the truth, how hard we work to place truth at the center of our lives.

I have to admit that the below 0 temperatures and the black ice on the ground colluded to keep MLA conference goers from the usual moving between conference sites, resulting in light foot traffic for the Pathfinders exhibit at the MLA 2014. The amazing work of electronic literature that we shipped or hand-carried, some of which were so new that they were still in beta, did not get seen as much as I had hoped.  And of course all four of the vintage computers I brought with me to show early digital work were destroyed in shipment to Chicago.  It was, in a word, a tough show.

So, it is extremely gratifying to find, today, the mention of the exhibit by Anastasia Salter for ProfHacker––an essay entitled “Making Things at the MLA 2014,––in The Chronicle of Higher Education. I have cited the section from the larger article. Please read the entire essay because she does a great job highlighting the “maker” movement evident in this year’s sessions.  The image used for the essay is actually one of the two broken LCs. A pitiful site, indeed.

Electronic Literature Exhibits. As a scholar of electronic literature, or literature that plays with technologies and mediation as a fundamental part of its structures and poetics, I’ve been very excited to see an increased presence of electronic literature at MLA through recent years. Aside from several panels this year, there was an exhibition that highlighted an important history of digital making. Organized by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, the Pathfinders exhibit offered a living history of 25 years of electronic literature, pointing out the importance of preservation while highlighting just how difficult it is to truly keep anything digital alive. The exhibit highlighted this painfully thanks to the destruction of several archival computers during transport. (This further dovetails with important work on Preserving Virtual Worlds Kari Kraus shared during the Evaluating Digital Scholarship panel.)

Raw video from the Pathfinders traversals and interviews are going to be used in Noah Waldrip-Fruin’s graduate course, Playable Media, at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The course “focuses on media, such as computer games that invite and structure play. Work includes building and critiquing a series of prototypes; studying major examples in the field; and discussing both theoretical and practice-oriented texts.”

Station 1: Early Digital Literature–Original Research from the Pathfinders Project
Judy Malloy
John McDaid
Bill Bly
Stuart Moulthrop
Shelley Jackson

Station 2: Multimedia Books & Apps
Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, & Ian Hatcher
Samantha Gorman & Danny Cannizzaro
Andreas Muller

Station 3:  Immersive Environments
Christine Wilks & Andy Campbell

Station 4:  Participatory Media
Jay Bushman & Mike Dasiey

Station 5:  Augmented Reality
Jacob Garbe

Station 6: Mixed Mediums
Erik Loyer
Jason Nelson

Station 7:  Physical Computing
Josh Tanenbaum & Karen Tanenbaum

Pathfinders:  25 Years of Experimental Literary Art is included among the  77 sessions focusing on “digital tools, objects . . . practices in language, literary, textual, cultural, and media studies [and] . . . digital pedagogy and scholarly communication listed in Mark Sample’s annual Digital Humanities at the MLA.

Those of you attending the MLA 2014 convention can find the Pathfinders exhibit in the Sheraton II, Ballroom, Level 4.  We are bringing, once again, trained docents to assist visitors and to help answer questions about the works.

We open on Thursday of the convention at noon.

We are pleased to announce that Shelley Jackson, the author of Patchwork Girl, is coming to Vancouver, WA for her traversal in the Pathfinders project.  She will be giving a free public lecture at Angst Gallery on Friday, October 18, from 7-8 p.m.

Posts about her traversals and images from her talk will be published here beginning Friday afternoon.

We are pleased to have artist Judy Malloy guest writing a post for Pathfinders that lays out the timeline for the production for early Uncle Roger.  Please join me in welcoming Judy.

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Judy Malloy, author of Uncle Roger with Dene Grigar (left) and Stuart Moulthrop (right).

1986

April 1986 – At Carl Loeffler’s invitation, I go online on Art Com Electronic Network (ACEN) on The Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectric Link).

August 1986 – I begin writing the text and designing the structure of File I of Uncle Roger: A Party in Woodside.

Fall 1986  – I begin programming A Party in Woodside in BASIC and create the authoring software BASIC Narrabase.

December 1 1986 – Using the BBS topic form as a story telling vehicle, I put A Party in Woodside online as a serial narrative on Art Com Electronic Network on The WELL. Keywords are included so that users can use any database software to create their own version of the work.

1987

January 29, 1987 – The telling of A Party in Woodside is completed on Art Com Electronic Network.  I program A Party in Woodside with UNIX shell scripts, and ACEN publishes it online as an interactive hyperfiction on ACEN Datanet, which also published works by John Cage and Jim Rosenberg.

July 1987 – I begin telling The Blue Notebook, File 2 of Uncle Roger on Art Com Electronic Network.  My essay, “Information as an Artists Material,” is published in Whole Earth Review no. 57:48-49, Winter, 1987.  It includes Uncle Roger.

I create the first BASIC artists’ book disk version of A Party in Woodside, and this version is distributed by Art Com. The disk version of A Party in Woodside is exhibited at Ultimatum II, Exhibition, Images du Futur ’87, Montreal, Canada, Sept. 1987.

1987-1988 – I program The Blue Notebook with UNIX shell scripts with funding from The California Arts Council and Art Matters. The interactive version of The Blue Notebook is published online on ACEN Datanet.

1988

For file 3 of Uncle Roger, my authoring system Narrabase is expanded to include a generative function and implemented with both UNIX shell scripts and BASIC.

File 3 of Uncle Roger, Terminals, is published on ACEN Datanet as an interactive generative hypertext, programmed with UNIX shell scripts.

All three files of Uncle Roger are implemented in BASIC Narrabase, self-published on disk with packaging and documentation, and distributed internationally by Art Com.

Based on my Card Catalog HOME, (circa 1978) Molasses (for MacIntosh Computers/HyperCard), one of the first HyperCard hyperfictions, is produced at the Whole Earth Review under sponsorship of Apple and self-published in 1988 on disk with packaging.

Uncle Roger and Molasses are included in the traveling exhibition Art Com Software: Digital Concepts and Expressions, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, NY, NY, Nov. 4 – 22, 1988. The show also traveled to San Jose State University, University of Colorado, Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), and Carnegie Melon University.  The show is reviewed by High Performance and Art Week.

I begin writing and programming its name was Penelope, based on the program for file 3 of Uncle Roger.

1989

The artist book version of its name was Penelope is implemented in BASIC Narrabase and exhibited at the Richmond Art Center in an installation with painted text on the wall and the work running on a computer.  (See: Revealing Conversations, Richmond Art Center, CA, Oct. 3 – Nov. 19, 1989. Catalog)

A Party in Woodside is exhibited in ARTWARE at A Space, Toronto, Canada, April 6 – May 6, 1989.

Uncle Roger is listed as a new genre in the Wall Street Journal’s Centennial Issue.  See Michael Miller, “A Brave New World: Streams of 1s and 0s” Wall Street Journal Centennial Issue, June 23, 1989.

1991

My essay, “Uncle Roger, an online narrabase” is published in  Leonardo 24(2):195-202, 199, a special issue entitled “Connectivity: Art and Interactive Telecommunications” and edited by Roy Ascott and Carl Eugene Loeffler.