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“Introduction: Interactive Style” / 180
Stuart Moulthrop
“Misadventure: Future Fiction and the New Networks”
/ 184
Beverley Curran
“Re-reading the Desert in Hypertranslation” / 204
Helen Thorington
“Loose Ends/Connections: Interactivity in Networked
Space” / 212
Marsha Kinder
“Doors to the Labyrinth: Designing Interactive Frictions
with Nina Menkes, Pat O’Neill, and John Rechy” / 232
Barbara Hayes-Roth
“Getting into the Story” / 246
R. L. Rutsky
“Techno-Cultural Interaction and the Fear of Information”
/ 267
Jon McKenzie
“!nt3rh4ckt!v!ty” / 283
Mark C. Taylor
“FuturePerfect: Tense” / 300
Becky Bond and José Marquez
“South to the Future’s World Wide Wire Service” / 309
Bill Tomlinson
“Dead Technology” / 316
As an introduction to the emerging field of new media studies, the essays in this issue chart the changes underway in the reception of new media and interactive narrative. These changes are similar to the reactions to Continental theory in earlier decades. Terms like frictions, misadventure, hacking, tension, and even death may help form accurate descriptions of the new media’s potential. The titles of the essays in this issue use these terms to point to new, paradoxically positive conceptions of new media as well as impasses and apprehensions. These articles argue that there is no single form or list of attributes for new media precisely because terms like interactivity point to paraformal and post?structural attributes. One way to appreciate this new area is to compare it to previous arts and literature as well as the competing conceptions of the future of this technology. Other ways of appreciating interactivity include comparing it to peculiar types of dialogue, relationships among people, animals, and robots, or to other forms of social interaction. In comparing interactive narrative to literary forms, the essays here argue that it is a unique type of narrative that has goals and attributes of great aesthetic significance even if exemplary interactive narratives do not achieve literary aesthetic goals. Beyond the specific comparisons to arts, literature, and social interactions, the new media also suggest new types of institutional organization. Essays here explain how the uses of new media create infrastructural problems as well as highlight new organizational possibilities. New media changes the social situation and context of scholarship, academia, and textual style. Among these changes, pedagogy now has a forum for experimentation as list servers and e?mail allow for alternatives to classroom settings. In all of the essays in this special issue, the main question is how to translate narratives and social situations into situations and narratives made possible by interactivity and new media.
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Stuart Moulthrop, “Misadventure: Future
Fiction and the New Networks” / 184
Traditional criticism relegates divergent narrative forms—e.g., computer
games, hypertext fiction, comics—to anonymous and subcultural status, arguing
that narrative must be defined in terms of what lies within the frame,
e.g., of cinematic vision or narrative attention. By reflecting on several
crucial misreadings of electronic texts, notably of the the adventure game
Riven, this essay attempts to develop an approach to narrative based not
on the hegemony of the frame but on a complex interplay between the focal
unit and the margins or interstices that surround it. The author proposes
a new conceptual category, interstitial fiction, as a way to think about
common properties of narrative forms outside the literary mainstream.
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Beverley Curran, “Re-reading the Desert in Hypertranslation”
/ 204
Nicole Brossard’s novel, Le désert mauve, developed as an interactive
discourse, a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two
writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Trajectories of
lesbian desire link the translator in Montréal, Quebec, with the
Nevada/Arizona desert of cactic and nuclear test sites. The linguistic
and cultural contours of media artist Adriene Jenik's Mauve Desert: a CD-ROM
translation further complicate the narrative spiral of Brossard's novel,
translating from print to screen; word to image; from North to South; from
one generation to another. In re-reading the desert in hypertranslation,
the narrative process is interrupted, extending the defiance of linear
narrative that Brossard has long been doing in print. Jenik's hypertranslation
conflates the site of the story, allowing the woman writing and her reader
to tutoyer in the flickering light of the computer screen.
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Helen Thorington, “Loose Ends/Connections:
Interactivity in Networked Space” / 212
Writer, composer, and radio producer Helen Thorington recounts the
story of her participation and growing committment to the digital world
both as an artist and as director of the Turbulence Web site. Focusing
on her lifelong interest in narrative expressions, she writes about the
evolution of her own work, from print stories to her 1995 CD?ROM, North
Country, to Solitaire (1998), a narrative exploration that combines a card
game with story telling, to her more recent participation as a collaborator
in the evolving networked performance event, Adrift. Her story is
guided by an intense and growing interest in process, collaboration and
public participation, and their implications for personal narrative.
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Marsha Kinder, “Doors to the Labyrinth: Designing
Interactive Frictions with Nina Menkes, Pat O’Neill, and John Rechy” /
232
Building on Benjamin's observation that every art form eventually aspires
to effects that can only be fully obtained in a new medium and on the concrete
examples of Fielding and Eisenstein, who both used their experimentation
in the theater to expand the boundaries of the newly emerging novel and
cinema respectively, Marsha Kinder describes her collaboration with independent
filmmakers Nina Menkes and Pat O'Neill and novelist John Rechy on three
electronic fictions designed to stretch the creative boundaries of CD-ROMs.
Produced by the Labyrinth Research Initiative on Interactive Narrative
(at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communicaton),
these fictions premiered at the “Interactive Frictions” exhibit in
June 1999, along with fourteen other pieces by a wide range of artists
(including Cindy Bernard, George Legrady, Vibeke Sorensen, Bill Viola,
and Norman Yonemoto), all positioning the viewer as a performer of the
narrative. Despite very different styles of interactivity, these
installations all embraced the Labyrinth’s broad definition of narrative:
as a discursive mode of patterning and interpreting the meaning of perceptions,
a mode that always carries specific historical, cultural, and generic inflections
and that always performs a complex weave of cognitive, ideological, and
aesthetic functions.
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Barbara Hayes-Roth, “Getting into the Story”
/ 246
This essay describes an approach to immersive story experience based
on the technique of directed improvisation. It shows first how directed
improvisation has been used traditionally by oral storytellers to
create immersive experiences for their listeners. These techniques have
also been used in important literary production processes. The essay then
shows how the technique can be used in combination with artificial characters
to create immersive story experiences in electronic media. (C.S.)
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R. L. Rutsky, “Techno-Cultural Interaction and
the Fear of Information” / 267
Fears of information and information overload are often figured in
terms of fluidity and otherness: as, for example, an ocean of information
that threatens to overwhelm or drown us. Interacting with this postmodern
ocean of data frequently evokes a sense of being lost, unable to chart
a course. In response to this fear of becoming lost, techno?cultural interaction
is often figured in terms that stress the importance of mapping and navigation.
Yet, the metaphor of navigation, with its emphasis on the human mastery
of the world, is as much a metaphor of colonialism and corporate strategy
as it is of empowerment and political action. In contrast to the figure
of navigation, the often maligned metaphor of surfing, with its non?Western
origins and emphasis on performance over instrumentality, offers a different
way of thinking about our interactions with the fluidity and otherness
of the data ocean. Instead of attempting to maintain a human mastery over
the world of information, surfing suggests an interaction with it??an interaction
in which human beings are not the sole actors.
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Jon McKenzie, “!nt3rh4ckt!v!ty” / 283
Interactivity on the Web is frequently posed in terms of individual
users and their internet?connected PCs, an approach seemingly manifested
in “personalized user experiences” and “customizable web pages.” Yet such
interactivity actually results from intense market research and technical
planning on the part of computer and web site developers. Such interactivity
thus has a sociotechnical dimension, which is theorized in terms of “interhacktivity,”
hacking that targets technical systems in order to influence the social
communities that use them. The author explores interhacktivity through
three recent cases of hacking on the web: Dale Hoke’s Pairgain stock hoax,
the infiltration of India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre by teenage hackers,
and the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s online efforts to aid the indigenous
peoples of Chiapas, Mexico.
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Mark C. Taylor, “FuturePerfect: Tense” / 300
The tension between perfections anticipated in the future and the imperfections
plaguing the present mark the story of history especially in times of transition
and instability. Theological fantasies with happy, if apocalyptic, endings
proliferate in the stories about a technologically fantastic future where
the Promised Land sometimes appears as an aesthetic utopia as in Constructivist
and Futurist manifestoes. Information and telematic technologies currently
drive the theological fantasies of a perfect future. In its current incarnation,
these stories often make the cyber?space into a move toward perfect immateriality
as a kind of merger with God. Disincarnation becomes a new fantasy, described
by many important contemporary scientists, of human consciousness surviving
without bodies as they evolve into machines. Immortality becomes a real
possibility as the distinction between machines and humans fades in these
fantastic futures currently under construction. As a corollary to these
perfect futures, the tension and worry arises because the technological
fantasies seek to expose everything to a connectedness until there is nothing
left but disincarnated machines. With the increasing eccentricity of information
flows, an uncertainty appears because no one can locate who has access
to what information. Transparent systems lead to opaque situations. The
inescapability of noise means that the future can never be truly perfect
or perfectly transparent. That noise also allows the systems to move and
for the fantasies to continue. Any completely perfect future is a dreamless
sleep without even the tense noise of speculations and fantasies of perfect
futures. (C. S.)
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Becky Bond and José Marquez, “South to
the Future’s World Wide Wire Service” / 309
Can a fictional newstory be more “real” than its fictional counterpart?
What does an excavation of the present actually look like? South
to the Future examines their own World Wide Wire Service, a weekly feed
of often fictional, though not entirely untrue, news stories distributed
like the Associated Press by independent newspapers across the United States
and throughout the rest of the world via the Internet.
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Bill Tomlinson, “Dead Technology” / 316
Humans and other animals have a variety of mental triggers that help
us recognize living things. We can tell if something is alive by how it
moves, what it does, how it sounds. Since we necessarily make decisions
about things based on imperfect information, however, we occasionally miscategorize
things. An examination of the way animals decide whether things are alive
can help designers of technology make machines that more effectively mimic
living creatures. One of the qualities that correlates most strongly with
life is death. Everyone dies; we all know that. A machine with an awareness
of death may feel more alive. But, machines that sport with death run the
risk of becoming abominations, that uneasy category that lies too close
to living for most people to be comfortable with it. Terms like alive,
dead, and not-alive are human constructs. They make it easier for us to
comprehend the gradient from alive to not alive. People are alive, rocks
are not. In between the two extremes lie viruses, artificial skin, and
life-like technological creations. Traditionally, people have not been
forced to confront the gray area between living and non-living. Technology
is beginning to chisel away at this artificial dichotomy.