Pathfinders

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.

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.

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.

I 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.

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.

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.

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.

First, 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.

Lending 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.

Handling 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.

Stuart 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.

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.”