Table of Contents
Interview with Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Robert Coover
by Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker
the Iowa Review Web
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
An interview & new work
1 June 2004
Push aside the thick, dark curtain, step across the cables on the floor and you'll find yourself standing on a white floor with white screens in front of you and to each of your sides. Above you are projectors and speakers. You're given a pair of goggles and a glove. You put them on and wait for Screen to begin. The space darkens. A voice begins to read: "In a world of illusions, we hold ourselves in place by memories." In the dark there is nothing for you to do but listen.
Screen is a literary work that can only be experienced in a Cave. In a Cave, images — or in the case of Screen, words — are projected on all three walls and on the floor. When you stand in the Cave wearing goggles, you experience the projected images as a three dimensional space in which you can move around. The goggles and glove allow the Cave to track your position, so you can control the environment by moving your body and your hand.
Light over the sill of an unshaded
bedroom window, into a woman's eyes.
She turns away, slips half back under sleep.
Words cover the three screens in the Cave and are read aloud as you follow them with your eyes. Each wall's words describe a double moment in time, a woman or a man remembering and feeling the memory slip away, hidden by the present.
She uncurls her arm,
reaches back to lay her hand across
his thigh, to welcome him home,
but touches only a ridge of sheet,
sun warmed, empty.
"We hold ourselves in place by memories," the first voice reads to you in the dark. These narrated memories refuse to stay still. After the voices have read the text aloud the words start to peel off the walls. You can try to catch them with your gloved hand, and for a while you may succeed in forcing them back where they belong, but before too long the words crash all around you. This experience in virtual reality is very different from the Holodeck vision of total immersion in a make-believe world. Screen does not attempt to replicate a real-world environment, but instead immerses the user in a reflexive literary representation, one in which words and narrative remain predominant.
Screen was created collaboratively by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Andrew McClain, Shawn Greenlee, Robert Coover, and Josh Carroll. They developed the piece in the Cave Writing Workshop at Brown University, which is led by Robert Coover. In December we visited the Cave and were able to experience several works created in the workshop, including Screen, as well as Vesper Stockwell, Dmitri Lemmerman, et al's "This is Just a Place," an interpretation of a poem by A.R. Ammons; "Hypertable;" and a work in progress, set in a local flat. After the Cave demo, we spoke with Joshua Carroll, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Robert Coover. The interview is divided into three sections: in the first we discuss the specific experience of collaborating on Screen with Josh and Noah, in the second Robert Coover discusses the Cave writing workshops in the context of his experience teaching electronic writing at Brown, and in the third we discuss Screen with Noah in the context of his other work in electronic writing.
Jill Walker: When did you start working on the project?
Noah Wardrip-Fruin: We started in Bob Coover's first Cave Writing workshop, which was in Spring 2002. Bob was able to arrange access to this facility that previously had only been used at Brown for various kinds of scientific computing. We had assembled an interdisciplinary group and Bob's idea was to start by trying out little ideas. So we were trying out ideas like the cube with text inside, as you saw, just tiny narrative moments. One of those narrative moments was words flocking around each other. Another narrative moment was words peeling off a wall. Both of these were created by an undergraduate named Andrew McClain. Andrew was focused on computer science and theater, and in a way these were small dramatic moments. But neither had any user interaction, and neither had any meaningful text. So I met with Andrew and said, "I'm interested in writing some text for these, and in us developing them into a coherent piece, with the swarming happening around the body, and introducing tracking of the hand to enable hitting the words back in place, or into different places." And then, working with Bob, I began to develop texts that worked virtual experience, touch, and memory. Shawn Greenlee joined the project and began creating the sound environment. Then we all continued to talk about those themes, and about those elements, and by the end of that first semester we had the initial "design document." But it wasn't until the next semester, when Josh came aboard, that we got further — producing the first complete version of the project. Once that happened we were able to more fully understand what we were getting at, and so we produced a significantly different text (including Bob's introduction and epilogue, which I believe are his first pieces of writing for electronic media), changed the behavior of the walls and other elements, and, until a few days ago, continued experimenting with the pacing until we developed the experience arc the piece has now.
Scott Rettberg: How was the work on Screen divided, and what roles did you and the other people involved play? How did the collaboration work?
Joshua Carroll: We never really explicitly divided the work. Whoever was best adapted to doing what needed to be done did it. I was best suited to programming, but when the team got together we would discuss the concept at all levels and brainstorm new possibilities. Everyone's basic ideas about the piece coalesced fairly quickly: its overall arc of activity, its essential look and feel, but we constantly debated the subtleties and the piece consequently continued and continues to evolve. As for who did what — that kind of 'just happened', there was never an explicit declaration of who was going to be responsible for what.
NWF: Of course there's also an inevitable division of labor. If there was something Josh thought could be better about the text, he didn't say "Noah, I've got a new draft of the text." [Josh laughs] He said, "Noah, maybe you should try X or Y." If there was something like the timing we were just working on, I didn't say, "Josh, you know, I went in and I threw away your old version of the code and I put in the way I wanted the timing to work, tell me what you think."
JC: When Professor Coover originally organized the workshop, he assembled an equal numbers of writers, modelers, sound people, and engineers; so it was by definition interdisciplinary, and that made it an ideal environment for these sorts of discussions to happen. Everybody had a discrete area of expertise which they could feel comfortable sharing, and so no one really felt threatened in terms of sharing ideas and finding areas to contribute.
SR: It seems that text in the Cave is working against the grain of its medium. Can you talk about the way Screen works against our expectations?
NWF: We had a visual art professor come here. Screen started, he looked around, and he said, "Why isn't this using the medium?" He literally got a chair and sat outside the Cave to watch. And he acted almost put upon, I would say. Then the first word peeled off the wall and he leapt from his chair like something had tipped it over! I think we like that element of surprise, in both ways. There's a shock that the Cave isn't being used to create some sort of artificial landscape for you to fly over, but rather it's being used a box, and it's being used as a box with text on the wall, instead of pictures. And then we like the surprise when that is disrupted.
JC: We've talked at times about giving more cues to people about what they're supposed to do when the words rip off the walls, or starting Screen in 3-D, because people say if you're going to do a project for the Cave it should be more richly 3-D from the outset. But we've always ended up shelving those ideas, because they would completely rob the piece of the surprising quality it has — that sense of being taken out of where you thought you were.
JW: You force us to think, don't you? That's one of the classic criticisms of electronic literature, that there's no space for contemplation. Screen actually holds you in that contemplative confusion because for the first minutes, there's nothing to do except listen and read.
NWF: Right. We've had other electronic artists say to us that there has to be a way for people to interact right from the beginning. "You have to think about what it is that people should be doing to interact at the beginning." I think Bob has been the person who's most strongly said that what they should be doing at the beginning is listening and reading. That is the interaction they're supposed to be performing! If you give them something else to do they'll do that instead, and that's not the goal of the piece.
JC: The impetus that transformed Screen from being mothballed into being a living piece was this idea that — you know, the words tearing off the walls didn't really mean anything initially, it was just a gimmick, and then we were brainstorming about what themes could be behind the piece — there was this idea about the way that memory works. I'd read an article somewhere about how human memory works, and it discussed how when you remember something you don't just play it back. You play it back, and in doing so you re-experience it and then re-encode it, so every time you remember something, you're actually changing the way you remember it. When you've experienced an event with a group of people, and some time passes and you say "Oh, I remember it this way," and you end up telling a different version of events, it isn't that your memory is faulty, but that that you've actually physically changed your memory over time. Every time you thought about it you tweaked it a little bit. It was this idea that evolved into the idea in Screen of memories encoded as text on the walls which then starts to come apart. You have to participate in actively re-integrating and reconfiguring that text. For me, that idea was the impetus for getting involved in making it a real project. That whole first segment of the story, where you're being passive and just letting experiences happen to you, I think that's integral to that whole arc, that whole story.
JW: Noah, when you were at the art college in Bergen, you showed the DVD of Screen, and I remember one of the students asked you — what was it again?
NWF: She said, "Where did the text come from for the pieces you showed?"
JW: That's right! And there was this total lack of comprehension that text could be, you know, created.
NWF: I think electronic writing is in a weird position. I think the reason that question was asked is that I was scheduled in a speaker series of electronic artists. For the most part that means visual artists, and people whose heritage often comes from something like video art. That's the background that their work is meant to be seen against. I think she really expected my answer to be, "Oh, well, you know, I found this really cool text and it was on the same theme as the project I wanted to do, and so I put it in." And so for me to say — "That's my primary art form. When I create electronic art, writing is the field within the arts from which my work grows."— it was stunning, I think. That was one of the things Jeremy [Welsh], who invited me, was most pleased with. These were relatively new students and suddenly their whole expectation of what their field was, what electronic art was, got disrupted by having somebody come in and say "I wrote the text."
SR: Noah, you did much of your earlier work, including The Book of Endings and The Impermanence Agent, on the network. How do you feel about Screen only being accessible in one room, at Brown University, and not being able to be distributed as works can be on the Web?
NWF: Josh probably has his own answer to this, but in terms of my work, I think it's all still experiments. There may come a time when I feel that I've figured this out and I want to do something based on it and get the maximum number of people to see it, but right now it's all still the figuring. For me a lot of that figuring has to do with really trying to engage whatever medium I'm using. I'm not interested in the web as a distribution platform. I'm interested in the web as an information space, I'm interested in the way browsers work, I'm interested in saying "This is a piece of writing that is connected to this context." I feel that it's the same working in the Cave. Here we're saying, "What is the Cave?" Maybe you end up doing something with the Cave that people whose answer to that question would be "it's like a head-mounted display, except it's not as heavy on your head" wouldn't. Maybe you end up doing a different kind of work, but it certainly is Cave-specific work. It's work that is about standing in that box and about virtual experience.
That's my two-fold answer. Whatever medium I'm working with, it's about engaging that medium. The reason it's about engaging that medium is that I'm trying to do a series of different experiments with different media — and it's because they're experiments that it's OK that very few people see them. I still learn something.
JC: We're hoping that it won't just be something that people can only see at Brown University. There are several other Caves out there, and we're trying to make it so that people elsewhere can experience it. I'm interested in the idea that we can find out new things about how interaction works, about what text means, new kinds of behaviors, or perhaps ways that meaning can be intentionally embedded in things in novel ways which could be employed for other purposes that may or may not be artistic. I'm interested in finding out what those side effects will be. We're spending a lot of time working on this piece of art but at the same time we're discovering a lot of things about text, and unexpected ways of interacting with text in this environment. And that could have significant repercussions in other mediums and other applications.
JW: Leading this workshop, you've taken a hands-on role on the projects?
RC: It's exploratory collaborative work, and I'd say the role I've played has been something like producer/director. The pieces are workshopped as in all writing workshops, and I play the usual directorial role of critiquing and advancing the projects, but I also have to watch budgets and manage expectations. Anything is possible in there, but not everything is practical or affordable. These are teams of students, not professionals, so it is a learning experience for all of us, including our young programmers. We pay for coding and some modeling and sound engineering, so we have to estimate in advance the amount of hours required. A pro might get something accomplished in one expensive hour that our relatively inexperienced programmers need four or five less expensive hours to do, learning as they go. Moreover, given the need for the graphic servers to read the trackers and continually reload the stereo images of any given project at a terrific speed, there is a significant memory limitation. Finely pixilated intricate models can eat up a lot of memory and make things pretty stuttery in there.
SR: It sounds like it's important to have all the collaborators actually working together in the Cave. I could see that being a problem, where a writer comes into the space with a great idea but no realistic notion of how to implement it.
RC: Designers too, because most young artists, like most young writers, have not actually attempted any hard coding or modeled anything in 3D, so they often underestimate the work involved, work that has to be paid for on a very limited budget. There's the desire, for example, to bring realistic-looking people into an interactive story or poem. But each one of those models, if articulated and individualized, would take an enormous amount of time to build and then get into motion, and then they would not likely work all that well anyway, in part because of the memory limitations of the ceaselessly reloading graphics server. Maybe ten years down the road, one will be able to keep a whole stable of virtual actors in a file folder, and you'll be able to select from the model-base as you would actors from a casting agency, then layer on eccentricities and costume them with a mouseclick and send them out to play in multitudes, but right now everything has to be built, element by element, from the ground up within the strict limitations of the servers. So I encourage people to try to keep things relatively simple, using texture mapping instead of intricate modeling where possible, achieving their effects by means other than the attempted imitation of the real world, using their own imaginations to challenge and stimulate the imaginations of others. Thus, the forest that comes out of the night sky and surrounds you in This Is Just a Place, which you've just seen, is merely a texture-mapped cube, but there's a seeming depth to the photo imagery, you hear the sounds of crickets and perhaps the faint fall of rain as it breaks around you, and it feels convincing enough to express a forest, even if it doesn't deliver it tree by tree. If we'd spent a year or two modeling a whole forest, it likely would not have felt that much more forestlike than the existing version.
SR: So maybe it's not mimesis that you're after anyway.
RC: It isn't, absolutely not. Virtual reality is in reality virtual artificiality. In fact that's one of its principal charms. In a way, the more realistic it gets in there, the less interesting it is.
JC: The Cave was built as a scientific visualization facility, so the stuff that has been modeled in there is nothing that you have traditional visual experience with: proteins, subatomic particles, the surface of Mars, or some ancient temple — these are things that you've never seen before. You have no context, so you don't have that jarring impact — you don't mind if your model of snake venom protein resembles a blob of soap bubbles. But when you're trying to do something like a workshop story, to represent everyday life and objects, you have so much familiarity with them that you can't do it in the traditional way that it would be done in the Cave.
RC: That's a good point. A conventional fiction workshop story is not the kind of thing that works well in there. Of course, it's my feeling that conventional fiction workshop stories don't work all that well in fiction workshops either. But this is a wondrous imaginative interactive space where marvels can happen and the imagination can be turned loose all around you. Abstraction works well in there, especially in virtual deep space. Metaphoric and symbolic suggestion do. Theatrical material — it is a kind of stage, after all: you bring your elements on stage and interact with them, immersing yourself in your own drama, your own story.
As for the seeming real, I've been convinced from the first time we put anything up in there that what reality one is likely to achieve in virtual reality can best be delivered by sound. Sound expands the space vastly; it can move into the Cave and leave it, can be attached to and enrich an object or a portion of the space, as you, as user, transport yourself past or through it. In that party scene, for example, you hear people talking both in the space you momentarily occupy and beyond it in the ambient party chatter. It is a sound story in the making and though the persons speaking are not visible, even as simple 2D models, they seem to be more there than the beautifully elaborate but make-believe model of the flat itself.
SR: What drew you to the medium after teaching electronic writing workshops primarily using Storyspace and Macromedia software? Why did you want to bring a workshop into this experimental environment?
RC: Probably the same reason I once made a movie and once got into electronic writing. At first, in all those cases, it was curiosity and wanting the language. And it's always a challenge to see what happens when you move storytelling into an unfamiliar environment. Before I got involved in the first hyperfiction workshop a little over a decade ago, one of my pedagogical goals was to attempt to break young writers out of old workshop habits, the tired conventional well-told-tale habits. To do that I often used to teach a course called "Exemplary Ancient Fictions," a reading of tales from the Gilgamesh Epic through medieval romance, including the Bible, Greek mythology, Ovid, fairy tales and suchlike. The purpose was to put into play alternative narrative strategies, once popular, now abandoned, so we wrote little one-page fictions in there as well as doing traditional literature-class work like exams and papers. The fiction assignments were linked to modes of storytelling that were exhibited in these other forms. It was modestly successful, but a lot of work. But the first day of class in that pioneer hypertext workshop, I found that many of the goals of that other course were accomplished the minute the screens were turned on — with the simple discovery, for example, that if you wanted a line you had to draw a line. The new technology simply erased the comforting structures of the old and proposed new ones. So that was an early motivation to continue teaching the workshops — it was a good pedagogical tool to help people free themselves from stale writing habits. I supposed most of them would go back to print writing, but with a different perception of what it might be to tell a story.
Then, year by year, as computer memory expanded, new software was developed, the Internet opened up via the new browsers, and hypermedia exploded on the scene, we kept exploring all the new possibilities to see where they might lead us. So, by the time they opened up the Cave at Brown (in 1998), we were ready for it. Even if they were not ready for us. At the opening, I remarked to the Cave's managers that "My writers are going to love that space." "No, sorry," they said, "this is strictly a scientific instrument for scientists." We bided our time and a few years later, when they'd grown accustomed to their toy, I came back to them with something of a quasi-scientific proposal. I offered, firstly, to introduce text — no one had been using text in there of any kind, visual or audible — and, secondly, with the notion of voiceovers, sound effects, and music in mind, to hook up their unused speaker system and develop positional sound, and, thirdly, to introduce narrative movement, as opposed to spatial movement through static models, which was the way most of their own projects operated. That worked. They opened the doors to us and we launched our first Cave Writing workshop in the spring of 2002.
I thought I'd just have a single-semester go and move on, but we're still in there. For one thing, it's a lot of fun, a lot of fun. The excitement of getting something to run in there, and then having other people experience these things, and see the excitement that that generated, that was and continues to be part of the draw. The wow factor. But we also didn't accomplish all that we'd set out to do that first semester, or even very much of it. It was just too hard. We had to work our way through a variety of finger exercises just to figure out how the thing worked, and so came up with a lot more ideas that first semester than finished projects. We also learned the critical importance of creative programmers. Bryant Choung, who's still with us, joined the team that semester, and almost all of our successful pieces, such as Text in Outer Space and Hypertable, dreamt up by writers and artists, were initially built by him.
The summer following that first semester, with the help of a research grant, the undergraduate artist Vesper Stockwell, programmer Dmitri Lemmerman (also still working with us), and I set about to make a fully elaborate and finished project that would respond fully to our three goals of visible and audible text, positional sound, and narrative movement. This is This Is Just a Place, Vesper's lyrical interpretation of a poem by A. R. Ammons, which not only incorporates all three of those goals, but also introduces such novelties as a prologue, rolling credits, and a restart button — or stone, as it appears to the user. In it, one goes from dark outer space into a green forest out into a fractal sphere rotating in a blue sky to a petri dish with a tiny squirmy movie in its base and whining, swarming words, thence to a room full of old family photos with ghostly figures that come out at you, and finally to a cemetery, all following the logic and imagery of the poem. Most pros in the field have just never seen anything quite like this and are always pleasantly surprised that the facility can be used in this unexpected way.
Screen was launched that first semester, but was only a set of appealing little technical experiments by Andrew McClain, including word flocking and peeling. Noah picked up on these experiments and came in with an idea for a story that might work with these devices, and the second semester he began working seriously on it, bringing it, with the help of Josh and electronic music composer and sound engineer Shawn Greenlee, to its present state in the research semester that followed. We were in general focused a lot more on content that second year, Talan Memmott's experiments with Josh's help being good examples of that.
All along, I'd been wanting to get the sound files out of the graphics server and into a separate sound server, believing that sound would be a major key to successful literary projects in there, and needing more flexibility and more memory space for the graphics servers. So I shared out the costs with the Cave managers and, because music students here work primarily on Macs in MAX/MSP, we set up a Mac server. Consequently, this past semester, our third official workshop, with the help of electronic music composers Jason Moore and Tom Owen, we've focused much more on sound, tinkering with old projects like This Is Just a Place and Screen, developing new elements in projects like Hypertable, and launching new positional sound experiments, most notably in Telephone Flat, the party sound-story, which uses an elegant complex model created by Edwin Chang. New projects like Talan's Spread and William Gillespie's Word Museum will also experiment with sound.
SR: So does the project then stop here, or does it become part of the curriculum of electronic writing at Brown?
RC: I'm not sure, that remains something of an unresolved mystery. The prospect of a permanent electronic writing position here is one of those on-again-off-again things, and even should it happen, there's no certainty the person chosen would be particularly interested in playing in immersive 3D. Meanwhile, though I'm not scheduled to teach again until the spring of 2006, I'll at least be here through midwinter, working with a small research team headed up by the electronic poet John Cayley, tidying up old projects and getting them safely archived while launching a new project or two, including innovative new work by John. I do hope the Cave Writing workshop continues. It has been very useful in drawing us much closer to the Computer Science department, and the university now does feel this is something for which they receive a lot of national and international recognition, so I think they'd like to see it carry on. Andy Van Dam, the professor who was largely responsible for bringing the Cave to Brown and who is now Vice President in charge of research, very much wants to see the Cave become, not just a narrowly employed scientific tool, but a widely used university facility, so we're not without support. Our next goal would be to create collaborative workshops with Writing, Music, Computer Science, and RISD's New Media program. So Cave Writing's future is both bright and uncertain. It has enthusiastic support, but right now I'm the only one teaching the course, and I'm headed off for a long spell, so six weeks or so from now, it could all be over.
SR: Something that's occurred to me, thinking back to your essay "Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age," is that one of the frustrations you expressed there with the Web is that it's this sort of distractive environment, where you can easily be drawn away from a story. In that respect, one of the advantages of software like Storyspace is that it's a standalone application, rather than content in a browser of an immense network. I'm wondering if there's something appealing to you about the literal immersiveness of the Cave environment.
RC: Well, there is something compelling about being wrapped in your own creation. We speak of the user and the user's experience, but in fact it's the maker of the piece who really has the most exhilarating experience. I'm reminded somewhat of theater rehearsals when, as author or director, you're onstage amid your actors, your characters, all your words come alive around you. The Cave is similarly collaborative, too, which might frustrate some writers, but which I often find rewarding, especially given the talent you find yourself working with. Also, I have to confess, I've always been fascinated by optical illusions like 3D. As a kid, I used to make my own 3D comics with red and green inks. This is an incomparably better inkpot.
The writing itself in here is often more like script writing than story writing, except for the dialogue or voiceovers: precise and clear instructions to programmers, modelers, artists, and engineers. There's a lot of work involved in building a literary project that has little to do with the writing to be read or heard. Noah's writing for Screen got done pretty quickly, but we still had a long time to go after that before the piece would work as a literary experience. Which it is. A literary experience. It dismisses all the pretty graphics associated with VR and leaves you in a space which is really 2D for quite a while, nothing but text on the literal Cave walls, something like posters of text. The user/reader is lured into this, partly because of the sound track and the compelling voices over, reading the texts aloud, partly simply because of the intriguing prose itself. Then suddenly the whole thing becomes interactive in a very unexpected yet meaningful way, the very 2D-ness of it coming apart, and the absorption becomes total without losing any of the text's intentions or impact. I've seen it hundreds of times, and I still get a charge out of it. Just last night, we spent hours getting the timing right for the way the words peel off the walls en route to the climax, and when we managed it, there was a real rush of pleasure, and partly because now it "read" right.
JW: Is it closer to performance than most other literature, then?
RC: Well, at least as a writing space, it's a different thing from performance, though of course it can be a literal performance. Jeffrey Shaw has a piece, for instance, that presents the user not with a wand or joystick but with a life-size wooden puppet mounted in the very center of the Cave itself. Its articulated joints all contain sensors, even the fingers, and the user, wearing glasses, creates a surrounding flow of imagery by manipulating the puppet, twisting and working the joints. The more you abuse the puppet, the more exciting the imagery, so you find yourself bending it upside down, stretching the limbs apart, pushing back the fingers, twisting the neck, doing, in effect, creative violence to it. It's possible to have an audience sitting at the periphery with glasses on, watching the show, as though sitting at the edge of a theater proscenium. In our Cave, we now have the sound server and graphics server speaking to each other, so we're hoping to create sound-and-graphics compositions that are driven by midi instruments. These too could be performed in or out of the Cave for an audience. So certainly it has performance potential. But for writers, it's more like building a little interactive literary world around yourself, and then, in an intimate one-on-one sort of way, inviting readers in to experience what you've written.
JW: What's it like when you're all working together? It seems there are many different kinds of work involved, and a lot of it. Are you all sort of looking over each other's shoulders at the screen?
RC: For all the collaboration involved, much of the work in there is accomplished like any other artistic work: alone. The various tasks are accomplished, pretty much in isolation, and then assembled. Only when it comes together when you're in demo mode is there an over-the-shoulder relationship. The programmers especially have to spend a lot of time quietly ticky-tacking away on their own. None of the rest of us can really read what they're writing, and once they have in mind what they're trying to do, we're pretty much in the way. A little gesture gets accomplished, we all gather and admire and critique it and then we separate again. Creative programmers are the key players on any Cave Writing project team. There's really not much comparison here in theater or film. They are genuine co-authors. There's a growing rapport between computer programmers and all the other art forms, but it's especially closely felt between text writers and code writers: we both spend a lot of time at keyboards trying to make artful things happen, and in the Cave we very much need each other.
JW: Do you find people actually read what you write? That sounds rude, doesn't it! It sounds terrible!
NWF: It's not rude at all! Clearly, I'm not writing in spaces that encourage the kinds of reading one gets from print readers. If that's what we mean by actually reading then people don't do it with what I write. But I think other kinds of reading are possible, and worth exploring. Take a piece like Talking Cure. In that piece I was writing for the textual space created by Camille Utterback's "Written Forms" video processing technique. This technique posterizes a live video image down to three colors — and the dark, medium, and light areas of video each reveal the corresponding parts of three different full-screen texts. It looks like a normal full-screen text until someone is in front of the camera — in the reading space. Once there's a reader the different texts are continually blending on the horizontal plane — so left-to-right reading will produce a collage — and people often read the text in more vertical color patches produced by the video image (which means words from one text, but not in the usual line-based groupings). For Talking Cure I wanted to write something about word pictures, about the gaze, about the kinds of things that Camille's technique brings up. I wanted to write something for that kind of reading, not for the kind to which we're accustomed. So I was doing my composition in strange ways — running the text of all three screens parallel to each other, line by line, in my text editor, so I could be creating the sorts of blending and border opportunities I wanted. Also I tried to compose with an eye toward what would happen in semi-vertical patches. It was a challenge. But I think people read it, and often for longer, with more surprise, and more intense interest in the possibilities of the language there than I can imagine if I'd put it on even the nicest paper. A couple of people have even slowly, methodically, used their hands to scan across the whole field of the camera and read individual layers in isolation — but that's probably an artifact of paper reading.
Screen, on the other hand, actually does ask for some of that traditional, paper-style reading. That's what's happening through the whole first section of the piece — we're projecting text in a traditional paragraph shape onto the wall as though you aren't in a VR space. But then the words start to peel loose, and the reading of individual words as they peel, as they fly around, as you hit them with your hand, this is a new type of reading. And then, peripherally, there's also the reading of the alterations that are taking place in the wall text as words, or parts of words, end up in different places than where they started.
JW: Peripheral reading, that's a great concept. That's rather like The Impermanence Agent, isn't it: things happen around the edges of what the reader is focused on. Is that something you think about?
NWF: Yes. Text has to be different to live in the electronic environment, and I think being peripherally situated in relation to some "primary" information-work task is a textual situation to which I'll probably return. I think The Impermanence Agent's relation to web browsing worked well. But this is not to say that I'm not interested in the physical environment. I could imagine putting text on walls, or in other parts of the physical environment. And I have been thinking about a piece that would end up on that classic physical medium, paper, probably in the form of a map. But to return to your question, yes, I'm interested in things that are experienced peripherally, and I'm interested in things that you play indirectly. People do play The Impermanence Agent, but they play it much more indirectly than they play Talking Cure.
JW: A lot of people talk about the network and about its being electronic, but this point about its being peripheral is less emphasized. It's something a lot of people have been anxious about, you know, the lack of attention, and here you're saying that that's what you're aiming at.
NWF: There are things on my computer that I pay the old-fashioned attention to — for example, when I'm reading a news story in my Web browser, I pay attention to it once and then it's gone. But the things that are on my screen, perhaps covered by other things, or partially obscured, or over in a corner, the things that are there for a long time are the things that really inhabit my electronic environment and are specific to it, rather than just an importing.
JW: Your latest works, Talking Cure and Screen, are very much installation works in a physical space that you can't take home.
NWF: If there's any thread that runs through everything I've done — and you could argue with me and say "you know, there isn't," but if there is — it is that I'm trying to be specific to and investigate whatever medium I work with. The Impermanence Agent is about browser specific, Web specific artwork. The Cave is the specific space for Screen. No, Screen is not part of your day-to-day information life at all. It really is a place where you go and pay that old-fashioned kind of attention.
SR: How was working with print writers in the MFA workshop at Brown? Were you writing for print, writing print for works that would become electronic, or presenting electronic work to writers who worked only in print?
NWF: Well, when I was an undergrad, I went and spent a month at Irvine. I was working with a writer there, and one of the things I did was hang around the MFA workshops. There were interesting people there, certainly, but it seemed to me that, at that moment, what they were trying to do was very similar. They were all trying to write a certain kind of literary fiction and get an advance for it. It became clear as I got more and more involved in electronic writing that it wouldn't be pursuable in a program like that. Brown is a program for freaks and misfits. In the first fiction writing workshop that I took at Brown, I was the only person who was writing in a computational form, but another writer turned in an audio tape, and everyone got a copy of the audio tape and everyone listened to it and we critiqued it — that was his fiction practice. A different person turned something in that was on videotape. Many people turned things in that were collage oriented, really trying to explore the space of paper, and some of those were irreproducible. So I didn't feel out of place at all in the MFA program. Also there was very little emphasis on traditional publication. Students who expressed interest in immediate publication in fact might get told by the faculty "I hope that you won't take the time that we're paying you to be here to write a bunch of letters to publishers or agents, I hope you'll use it to explore work that you wouldn't be able to explore if you had to have another job, or if you felt pressured to get published. I hope you'll use this time to do strange work you'd never do otherwise and find out whether there's some other place for you to go, rather than pursuing what you already know." So in an environment like that, electronic writing was the weird misfit activity I was up to, and it was no different from the weird misfit activities other people were doing or are being encouraged to find and try. Also, Brown's long history in electronic writing and interdisciplinary collaboration gives some indication of the environment. After all, Ted Nelson and Andy van Dam created a hypertext system at Brown in the 1960s, when computers were still basically seen as number crunchers. And Bob and others have been doing electronic writing workshops and research projects at Brown through the writing program, continually, for nearly 15 years.
Which is an answer to only part of your question. The answer to the other part of your question is — because of that encouragement, because of that model, I viewed being in a workshop with someone like Carole Maso as an opportunity to encounter her as an artist and teacher. My electronic work was happening somewhere else. She would say "I want you to write something that has the structure of a symphony, and I want you to figure out what you're going to mean by the structure of a symphony, because you're going to have to mean it." So we each went and did our different research about what we thought a symphonic structure and fiction writing might have that could connect them. Nobody was doing something that was meant for print or non-print publication, we were just exploring the idea of a symphony. Some of the things that came out of those experiences did end up connecting with my electronic writing. An exercise in Carole's class produced a sentence that was the beginning of the first draft of the text that became Screen.
JW: I wanted to ask a bit about collaboration, which we did touch upon before. I think you've collaborated on all your electronic writing projects? Maybe not The Book of Endings?
NWF: Yes, everything since The Book of Endings has been a collaborative project.
JW: Why?
NWF: First, let me say that I think almost every new media art project is collaborative, and it's often more of a question of how much that is acknowledged or foregrounded or treated as a strength rather than an unfortunate necessity. A project may have been worked on by three people or five people or an entire laboratory, but it can end up credited to one person who brought in the funding or is the most famous or thinks they had the idea. I think, increasingly, we're going to see our field become like theater or film. There will be a very small number of people who write their own script, are their own dramaturge, are the only actor, are the lighting designer, and so on. There are people who do that in theatre and film and there are going to be people who do that in electronic art. But for the most part it's going to be people who are coming at the project from different directions, sharing their thoughts, coming to decisions by various more or less hierarchical means about what will end up in the piece, and then making it happen together. My work has been collaborative because I have wanted to do projects that were going to be better as collaborations than they would have been if I did them on my own, and because I've found people I've wanted to collaborate with, and because I've felt that interdisciplinary collaboration was an important, exciting direction for electronic writing.
JW: Your work is more based on concepts and physical objects than any other electronic literature I can think of, at the same time as the words are very meaningful and present. Do you care whether this is called art or literature? What are your thoughts about that relationship?
NWF: At least at the moment, I think we find a lot of electronic writing is better accepted in the art community than in the writing community. In the art community however it's sometimes seen as being "that really wordy electronic art that takes a long time to consume." As though John Cayley's work is somehow belabored Jenny Holzer. Nonetheless, I think it is good that there is an interdisciplinary view of new media art that includes writing, and I think it is good that people are doing electronic writing that engages well with the art community. In the long term there's also the disciplinary background that work like mine is coming from, work like Talan Memmott's is coming from, which is important to the work. I say this even though Talan has been a painter and I've worked in a computer science lab. I say this because we've also both been writers and readers. And to repeat something else I've said before: I think the problem might be that electronic art can be in the Whitney, whereas electronic writing can't get a publishing contract from Knopf. So it will be a longer time before the traditional parts of the community accept the electronic work, because it can't occupy the place of pride the rest of the community wants their work to be in. They won't say, "Hey, that got into the place where I wish my work was!" But eventually writing goes where people read, and people don't just read paper any more. Maybe people already don't primarily read paper.
SR: After your experience of teaching at Brown, do you think that teaching electronic writing is the kind of academic job you'd like to have?
NWF: You know, both my parents were academics, and the first real job I had was working at a university. I think that I would probably rather do electronic writing workshops with bright, enthusiastic students, like those I taught at Brown, than most any kind of work. But I know not every teaching situation is as rewarding, and I think I would probably rather be a research scientist like I was at NYU, or maybe any number of other things, than put my energy into teaching people who don't care.
SR: What kinds of assignments did you give your e-writing students when you taught at Brown? Did your students mostly write for the Web, or did you do installation things?
NWF: Let's see, there were many different things the students did. One of the student projects I enjoyed was a text that appeared to be an installer script. You ran the program from your command line. He and another student in the class got it running on a number of UNIX variants, which means you can run it on Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and so on. You type something into the command line, and it says "I'm unpacking this, I'm installing that, I'm looking for this," and then it does the typical thing of throwing up impossible to interpret errors, and then it waits. It does something else and waits. Then it starts being self-reflexive and funny, and telling little stories. Another student created a story in a Yahoo! Mail account. There were messages received by a character in the inbox, the character's responses in the outbox — but also texts nestled in other places, in the box for unsent drafts, in the filenames of attachments, on items pictured in the attachments themselves. We also used blogs in the class, and some people wrote things that were specific to their blogs. In some ways they were an entry, but in other ways they were playing with the form of an entry to be a writing assignment. There were projects that didn't necessarily have to have an electronic form but that were about thinking through things that are related to electronic media. For example, everyone had to go out and find a game. We did playtesting of the games. Then they had to take the interaction structure of the game and alter it in a way that was appropriate to some particular kind of textual production. They had to talk about the text, and about the change in the game, and then we tried to evaluate the changes in the structure along with the text that was supposed to accompany them. There was no digital implementation of that at all, that was all done on paper. All of which is not to say that people didn't also do things like Flash projects for the class.
SR: I think that's a wrap.
JW: Except that we didn't mention Ted Nelson.
NWF: Well, I could talk about my electronic writing definition, and sneak in a mention of Nelson's name.
SR: Yeah, why don't you do that real quick? But make it three minutes or less.
NWF: [laughs] Well, I've been traveling and talking quite a bit, and people ask me what I do. So I say that I work in new media, and that what I mean by new media is "computation used as an expressive medium." This is what Nick Montfort and I came to when we were working on The New Media Reader. Just as film can be used for data storage (like microfilm) or it can be used as an expressive medium, so the computer can be used for something else (like number crunching) or it can be used as an expressive medium. And I think there's a subtype of new media — new media as approached by writers — that I am calling "electronic writing." My other way of putting that, of defining electronic writing, has been: "writing that requires computation at the time of reading." At first I ran into controversy involving the term hypertext (and yes, I have a rant about people who use this term without reading Ted Nelson's work), or things like that. But more recently I've had discussions — and this week, Jill, you witnessed a heated one — in which people have said, "This is unfair. You're drawing the lines of your club to leave out people who do things like print writing that is generated by a computer program. Those people are deeply addressing computation. They are deeply engaged with digital culture and digital media — it's just that their work ends up on paper. So your definition is just as exclusionary as many of these other definitions I've heard, which do things like include hypertext but exclude interactive fiction." I think that's funny, because nobody would say that if our topic were educational materials. They wouldn't say that it's unfair to differentiate and say that you're talking about new media materials, leaving out all materials that are on paper, even though some of them were created using computers that calculated statistical models of the contents. And yet I think that on some level those who object to what I'm saying have a point, it's true that this category may at times be too narrow for the conversation we want to have, and so we also need to think about larger categories — "digital literature," for instance, which Roberto Simanowski talks about. He's providing a much bigger tent. Maybe we always need to reference that bigger tent, even when our topic is a more focused one. But I am also unshaken in my belief that just as people in the visual arts, or people who are in music, have types of new media that they identify as coming out of their disciplines, we as writers should embrace electronic writing as new media growing out of our discipline and history — and we should be proud of it, not berating ourselves for drawing too narrow a boundary, or concerned that its breadth includes writers of web pages, computer games, email narratives, installation artworks, and much more. We can see that text — along with rules for sequencing, altering, and collaging text — is increasingly being created for computational media. We can see that reading text — and hearing text performed, by human or computational voices — is increasingly happening through a computer that's doing more than just playback. Writing is happening for computational contexts that enable interaction, communication, and transformation. It's our chance to discover written language anew.
