"We live in the age of the instant replay… " (Marshall McLuhan, "Art as Survival in the Electric Age" [1973]:)
218
Digital narrative is a battleground. The digital is granular, molecularized, particular. Narrative, on the other hand, has an arching, linear trajectory that pulls us along with it. The two are at war with each other as the drive for fragmentation threatens to shatter the rhythmic ebb and flow of the narrative impulse. Yet perhaps, as the adage says, opposites do attract, for the quest for narrative — even in such a hostile environment — is a prevailing human concern. What passes for narrative in the new born-digital storytelling forms is hyperactive, postmodern, postdramatic, self-reflexive, and repetitive. Instead of emulating the act of reading, what we perform in these spaces is a visual task of browsing. It is the act of pattern recognition in a spatialized form. As a result, the whole concept of "story" has been transformed by its migration into the spaces of digital media. The interactive or performative nature of the new media alters how and why we read. In the intervening years since the electronic hyperlink was born, many new innovations have continued to transform the nature of storytelling space and our expectations of it. Some exemplary emergent forms have arrived, including interactive fiction, narrative computer games, responsive environments, podcasting, and tactile and wireless interfaces, and we can see them as indicators of present and future trends.
To understand where we are going though, sometimes we first need to take a look at where we have been. In 1967 a revolutionary new way of seeing was introduced to televised sports: the instant replay (Schoenherr). Media guru and visionary Marshall McLuhan was so enthralled by this effect that he dubbed ours "the age of the instant replay" (1973: 218). The replay was revolutionary because of the way it spatialized time-based events and, for the first time, allowed the viewer to derive the meaning of an event without having lived the experience (McLuhan, 1973: 219). A kind of flashback, it foregrounded the notion of seeing again or of recognizing the familiar in the new. McLuhan dubbed this "pattern recognition" (1965: 63) in sympathy with the ability exhibited by artificial intelligences to identify voices or visual repetitions. The idea of seeing again or revisiting the place of known moments is integral to storytelling as much as it is to the new kinds of narrative that are emerging within digital culture.
As the fluidity of multi-linear narrative forms allow the reader or browser greater and greater freedom to replay a text, the more the browser returns to her recollections of the intertwining threads of the story. She follows links back to earlier readings to construct a narrative from the fragmentary nature of the literary text. Like the instant replay, the return to see a familiar passage in a text a second or third time alters our understanding of the meaning of the whole. This is not pastiche, which merely celebrates or reminds us of an earlier telling. Like the instant replay, in the digital narrative revisiting passages is, according to N. Katherine Hayles,
a reshaping, a reconfiguration that changes what the text means precisely because what it means has already been established in the reader's mind. Rereading unsettles as much as it settles, an insight further emphasizing the exfoliating multiplicity of hypertext narrative. Given this multiplicity, it is not surprising that hypertext narrative also leads to a different sense of time than one that follows a more straight-forwardly linear progression.
(1997: 574)
While Hayles is specifically concerned with the literary form called hypertext, rereading or replaying — revisioning — exposes our earlier perspectives on and assumptions about the time of a textual event in any digital literary experience, and, by doing so, resituates us and it in place and space. An earlier hypertext theorist, Michael Joyce, sees rereading as actually forming another space in the continuum of the text: a theoretical one (1997: 582). Such is the webbed nature of new digital narratives: the browser not only becomes a part of the text, but the act of re/seeing it does too.
Digital narratives can take many forms including the aforementioned hypertext, networked art, mobile computing, and immersive virtual reality installations. What links these works of diverse technologies, motivations, and materials is the presence of the computer writ large as the medium of production, performance, storage, and distribution, and with the ever-constant notion of return or revisitation. Or to restate the obvious: repetition. The browser as she wanders these works is required to retrace her steps. Peggy Phalen notes in the context of theatrical performance that absolute repetition is simply not possible and that reversible time as a result is a fraught concept (1993: 127). Representation can never perfectly reproduce the real, she argues, for there is always a gap between them. Physicist Ilya Prigogine expanded the perspective of quantum mechanics in the same way, arguing that not only is time not reversible, but the repetition of an event — what he calls the "second time" of an event — is always a new and unique occurrence (Phalen 1993: 127). In our performance of these works, we can return to the same moment, but it is always a revisitation, and our experience is different because it is informed by our memory of past visits. These works require a peripatetic engagement that keeps bringing us back in contact with our earlier gestures and movements in space and time. A hypertext like Michael Joyce's Reach, for instance, keeps hands and gestures always in mind on a thematic level as we move through a space of saturated hyperlinking where every word is a doorway to somewhere else. Shelley Jackson's hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, Or A Modern Monster requires us to enter each section of the text through "her cut": a diagram evoking cuts of meat that form a palimpsest to Mary Shelley's unborn female Frankenstein monster's tale, sliced and diced for the digital browser in a fractured space-time. Another part of the text has us enter into the monster's thoughts and the voices of her unruly body parts' previous owners through a phrenological diagram of her competing subjectivities.
In a similar vein, Juliet Davis's web-based Flash work Pieces of Herself explores the body in pieces through the use of an architectural metaphor. The aforementioned parts are divided up between domestic and public spaces — the shower, bedroom, outside, kitchen, living room, office, and Main Street — and linked together by voices that remix common sayings, motherly platitudes, banal phone messages, pop songs, religious vows, the American national anthem, office gossip, and a wide variety of side effects. Dragging and dropping portable items (including a fetus, Groucho glasses, germs, a vibrator, and a cauliflower) from these environments releases dialogues on consumerism, feminist politics, and other situated issues relevant to women's lives and domestic space. Woman's body becomes simultaneously both domestic and public space being remixed and spatialized for purposes of navigation.
Marek Walczak and Martin Wattenberg in their online work Apartment also use an architectural metaphor to explore social relations, but their spaces are filled with the interconnections of language rather than bodies. Inspired by the ancient visual Art of Memory's use of architectural forms as spaces that are navigated by the mind, the program constructs two-dimensional virtual rooms as the interactor types. The floor plan grows in response to these spatial relationships in language. So, for example, words relating to food preparation like "cut" or "chop" would create a kitchen, "plate" or "spoon" create a dining room, words about hygiene create a bathroom, outdoor objects like "tree," "sun," "rainbow," or "street" create a window, and so on. The authors explain, "The architecture is based on a semantic analysis of the viewer's words, reorganizing them to reflect the underlying themes they express. The apartments are then clustered into buildings and cities according to their linguistic relationships" ("About"). You can also view these floor plans collectively in an assortment of categories that includes vision, motion, body, work, group, truth, story, glamour, change, food, intimacy, and secrecy, pointing and clicking to pull up individual rooms. Or you can view your own or others' creations as three-dimensional visual models and sonic space which you can navigate through a VRML-based interface. This is an extremely sophisticated spatial narrative. If you select "story" you can pull up an assortment of tales that are rendered visually on the floor plan. One such that I selected mapped out a "story" of "Tim" typed many times floating in a circle in the dining room, and "Shea" in multiple incarnations in the living room. There is a definite narrative impulse here, and we can construct a story of isolation and the failure of communication (or one of anticipation, suspense, reunion, etc.) out of it, but in order to do so it requires us to insert ourselves into the space of the text and actively fill in the gaps.
This altered sense of the temporal and spatial is born of a unique or customized path through a digital narrative as a metatext of our reading. The more the text emphasizes our own displaced visual orientation, dislocation in time, and our sense of information overload, the more aware we are of the flesh and the bones and the individual cells of a narrative's complementarities, echoes and returns. One of the most profound transformations of the nature of narrative along with everything else in the digital revolution may also be one of the most visible. For perhaps the first time since the arrival of the vernacular media — the realm of the curiosity cabinet and the scrapbook, the happy snap and the home movie — professional standards of production are within reach of anyone who has access to the tools of creation. Hand in glove with this transformation comes the rise of Remix Culture, and customizable (or personal) media.
Five years after the birth of the instant replay, in 1972, musical engineer Tom Moulton introduced remixing into disco music to create the 12" single or EP. The new technologies that fractured music into multiple tracks — isolating, for instance, keyboard and vocals — allowed Moulton to manipulate individual musical threads, including adjusting the volume and deleting or adding tracks, to create a true extended play clubbing experience. Moulton foregrounded the rhythmic elements of the sixteen- or twenty-four-track master tapes designed for radio broadcast and private listening to enhance performative pleasures on the dance floor (Manovich 2005). The digitization of music has further enabled and transformed this process, replacing tracks with modular chunks that can be sampled, deleted, or altered far more easily. The concept of original authorship (who is the composer in such a work?) gets lost in these musical manipulations in the same way that authorial control is loosened when a browser uses Walczak and Wattenberg's words or random narrative fragments in any digital text Lego-like to construct her own story out of a mass of narratological components. In Jackson's Patchwork Girl, for instance, we not only get the monster telling her own story and speaking for her mother, Mary Shelley, but the text is colonized by remixed passages from literary theorists like Jacques Derrida and by jumbled sections of its two main mother intertexts, Frankenstein and L. Frank Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz. It was in this very drive for personal and personalizable narrative that the first commercially successful hypertext narrative was born. Michael Joyce enlisted Jay David Bolter to assist him in creating a software (StorySpace) that would produce a novel that changed every time it was read. While the reality they devised was less complex than what he had hoped for (and, as may seem surprising now, almost exclusively textual), the concepts of personal or customizable media, connectivity, and instant access were ideas whose time had come.
Derrick de Kerckhove says "hypertextuality means interactive access to anything from anywhere" (1997: xxvii), which bears a particular resemblance to Thomas Pynchon's definition of paranoia in Gravity's Rainbow: the realization that everything is interconnected. But hypertext is, de Kerckhove continues, like digitization, a "new condition of content production," and so "hypertextuality is therefore the new condition of content storage and delivery" (1997: xxviii). The significance of this implementation of hypertextual principles on the World Wide Web in particular is the unprecedented scope — it is global (1997: xxviii): "The principle of hypertextuality allows one to treat the web as the extension of the contents of one's own mind. Hypertext turns everyone's memory into everyone else's and makes of the web the first worldwide memory" (1997: 79).1 This has significant consequences for the new digital narratives, for the same must be said of an electronic text, which can be navigated in a potentially infinite number of ways, providing original but complementary experiences for each interactor. Of course, our subjectivities are our own, but the text is communal, and our point of becoming is both informational and experiential.
Our point of becoming is the site of information storage and retrieval. Hypertex-tuality points, de Kerckhove says, toward the possibilities for a single global archive —one giant information storage and retrieval site, a giant Borgesian narrative composed of all possible narratives, a silicon Library of Alexandria of inconceivable magnitude. It points toward the possibility of pan-connectivity. Here is Pynchon's paranoia to be sure, but what electronic fiction suffers from by design, as opposed to these informational archives, is access. Not too little, but too much. It is submerged in noise. No information can exist without disinformation, Paul Virilio says (1995; and more and more the two are in fact indistinguishable), and the complementarity of the electronic novel in space and time requires us to continually exist in a state of reorientation in relation to the noise of the (flash)mob. Where hyperthought equals the speed of mind and memory in these story spaces, we are perpetually off balance and drifting, or leaping, otherwhere in space and time. Data overload functions to keep us perpetually at the point of becoming, holds us suspended in a single instant in what Paul Virilio calls trajectivity, a dynamic state between the perspectives of the subjective and the objective (1997: 24).
The very notions of public and private are being eroded in our technological age. In "Blogging Thoughts," Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker identify the eighteenth-century salon as something that "existed on the borderline between the private and the public; it was situated in private homes, but part of the public sphere being the site of the performance that was the salon-experience" (2002: 257). Similarly, they say, blogs, which unite conversation with the clarity of print,
stand where the salon did between private and public. A blog is written by an individual and expresses the attitude and conviction of its writer; it is strictly subjective though not necessarily intimate. This doesn't stop it from being in the public domain, and being concerned about questions which are in the domain of public authority. Each individual can use weblogs as he or she feels fit, there is no tyranny of news values to decide what is worth writing about or, as the term is: what is worth blogging.
(2002: 258)
The ubiquity of the web has consistently eroded this gap, for there is no notion of public and private on the Net at all. It is all simultaneously public and private. The cell phone, wearable computing, and the podcast (the personal broadcasting of multimedia files over the web) have taken this still further to the point where we are always immersed in information space.
The concept and practice of private space was born with the printed book. Prior to public education and widespread literacy, all reading was done in public and aloud. As the book became an affordable commodity, however, reading was translated into a private, silent act. In the same way that noise was born of the technological age, so silence and private space bloomed behind the innovation of glass windows. R. Murray Schafer says:
The glazed window was an invention of great importance for the soundscape, framing external events in an unnatural phantom-like "silence." The diminution of sound transmission, while not immediate and occurring only gradually with the thickening of glazing, not only created the notion of a "here" and a "there" or a "beyond," but also introduced a fission of the senses.
(1998: 212)
When there were no windows to close, the community was invited in to listen; it was enclosed sensory space with its glass barriers that created a need for silence and privacy. de Kerckhove argues that books in the same manner created the sense of public and private space in terms of constructs of the "self " (1995: 206). The interior world housed our "private" self and our "innermost" thoughts and privileged subjective and introspective thoughts and sliced our senses up into separate units. The externalized or public media, however — radio and television, film, the internet, and the World Wide Web — allow us to participate in a kind of "collective imagination and collective thinking" (de Kerckhove 1995: 206) while simultaneously merging our senses in private space. We have a new awareness now in the Information Age of how the private informs the public and vice versa. They do not overwrite each other, but form a dialectical relationship. The podcast, like the blog, is just such a blending of the public and private. Networked or hypertextual thinking engenders (usually virtual) communities (although sites like Friendster and MySpace are changing that too). In the digital narrative, the browser gains entry into the innermost thoughts of a narrator, sharing her privacy and intimacy as she explores, but this is also a collective text available to multiple readers and readings and varied forms of sensory engagement. It is a way of splicing each browser's voice in with the narrator's own, but without making any of us the author of the work.
As we leave the age of mass production and private space behind in favor of this new time dominated by the instant replay, digital sampling, and modular remixability, it is apparent that we are becoming our own authors, readers, and publishers. Michael Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, and the other authors of The Mola Project (a text with total linking that becomes a many-layered quilted surface for the browser to navigate) observe that in hypertext fiction: "The reader is the structure, the builder, and the architect, and in this creation, it has created life. The burden of clarification is lightened because there is less of a need for clear-cut answers. The answers are a product of creation" (15c). Interactive authorship and personal publishing was a trend started not by hypertext but by xerography (patented in the 1940s, it did not become popular until the technology was perfected in 1959) (McLuhan 1966: 83). That tiny snowball became an avalanche with the introduction of desktop publishing by Aldus PageMaker for the Macintosh in 1985, and hypertext linking and other digital technologies accelerated the process still further. If anything, the remix factor of hypertexts and newer kinds of digital literary forms over-determine the organic structure, for the author has to assume that we will not visit the whole of the text in our travels, and so has to prepare for every contingency — as in life. The implications of the modular and customizable nature of digital literature as integral features are potentially enormous not just for our consumption habits, but in terms of everything from poetry to politics to pedagogy. This personal revolution includes the likes of blogs, podcasting, gmail, flickr, Google maps, Wikipedia, and YouTube as the harbingers of the coming new wave called Web 2.0. The database, variable content, iTunes, and personalized iSkins are some of the most telling hallmarks of how cultural interfaces are customized to mediate us in every aspect of our lives. And, the new digital literary texts foreground the personalized, experiential dimension since they are works that we must travel through.
It is perhaps not so surprising in that light, then, that world-creation becomes one of the authorial roles that digital media designers undertake. Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and Charlotte Davies' Osmose are two particularly interesting ones. Glide is a world made up of several parts. It has a digital game interface called the Collabyrinth, downloadable fonts, an interactive visual lexicon resembling a spider's web, and a print-based novel called The Maze Game, which explains the rules of the world and language to us. Subtitled "An Interactive Exploration of Visual Language," we must learn the embodied language of Glide in order to understand the sensory nature of the different kinds of minds (or states of consciousness) required for playing the game and navigating the maze game itself. Slattery divides narrative, space, and media, producing different kinds of environments for different kinds of telling. Her story is told in The Maze Game, a print-based novel, but the game is played online, as the browser becomes a player by learning the Glide language, evoking the oracle and "dancing" the discursive spaces of the maze.
Glide is the history of a future built on the ruins of the space of our present. The matrices that crisscross this text are elaborate and three-fold. The overarching web is the sentient computer program and cultural archive, the Outmind called Ó h-T'bee, who interconnects the society through time and space. The underlying web is the intricately networked web of blue water lilies that provide the pollen that was both the impetus for the Game, the Dance of Death, and the origin of its language, Glide. The third level is the intricate interweaving of social connections forged by the mortal dancers through time and space as they engage and interact with the Outmind, the lilies, the immortal spectators, called Lifers, the Maze or game board, and each other. These three networks are intricately interwoven to produce a complex social ecology: a web of cultural, political, and material life. As both computer matrix and lily pond are rendered as rhizomatic, topological systems, the organic network is revealed to be that which interconnects the social relations surrounding the Game and its players — just as the four kinds of Dancers are genetically engineered so they and their histories are intricately interconnected. Each Dancer knows the history of the victorious Dancers of her set intimately. It is when one of the Dancers is revealed to be of unknown origins that chaos is let loose in the system. As interactors in the experience, we too must learn how to think in Glide, that is, learn how to embody the lily-mind or the fourth level of consciousness enabled by the pollen of the lily matrix that governs this world.
In the novel, the language of the lily is for the Glides multifaceted, acting as "a navigational system, signaling to each other over the watery habitat of the giant blue water lilies whose pollen they harvested; as a poetic, gestural language; [and] as a secret code":
The game that defines their culture — the Dance of Death — is played on mazes of glyphs. Game moves and strategy are described in Glide terminology. Composition and translation in Glide is considered to exercise the cognitive function of making metaphor, which Glides believe increases the connectivity between minds, internally and socially, and which they link to creative thinking in general.
("Architecture")
The four minds — island-mind, gut-mind, sea-mind, and lily- or Glide-mind — are a means of cognitively navigating the sensory field of the body in space-time and performing the refusal of the Immortality Virus that pollutes their world. As Dancers, the characters must inhabit an embodied present moment, not as means of denying or exiting history, but as a way of embracing their sensory interface with the world. The Maze Game is also concerned with an evolutionary transformation. Rather than the old patriarchal binary system, the lily has an agenda to heighten the "sensory modalities" ("Emergent Forms" website) between the four "minds" of human cognition. The island-mind is the domain of reason, logic, and consciousness. The gut- or body-mind is the realm of the unconscious and reflex reactions of embodied response. The sea-mind is the immersive imaginative state of creativity, metaphorical engagement, and the world of dreams. The final mind is the new level of our cognitive interface with the world. The lily-mind is the hub or central node: it is the mind of connection, and the interface of connectivity between all four minds. It is the space-time dynamic in the system that is not only in a constant state of flux, but that allows us to make sense of the wave-like flux of the discourse network(s) swirling all around us. The Game world is in trouble, and like the last Glide Dancer, T'Ling, we must learn to incorporate all four minds to dance the Game. Excess choice leads to freefall — or nomadic voyaging — through the narrative spaces. The result of this random function is a sense of dislocation in space, time, and language.
Charlotte Davies also set out to create a new world that requires us to move and acquire, not a new state of consciousness, but a new set of navigational skills. Created by this Montreal artist and software developer at the cost of $1,000,000 CAD in 1995, breathtakingly beautiful Osmose and its companion space Ephémère (1998) are fluid, ethereal worlds that require full-body immersion as a mean of navigation. Hands-free environments, they are peopled with transparent objects and landscapes. In a conscious rejection of the controlling nature of the phallic joystick, the user interface was inspired by the experience of scuba diving and requires the immersant to use her breath to navigate through several interconnected worlds: drawing in a breath produces ascent, an exhale descent, and lateral movements allow for changes in direction (Davies 2003: 329). As a navigator of this new world, we are the living membrane — or the hymen — between the virtual and the real, between time and space. As body theorist Amelia Jones has observed, the hymen is both a joining and a barrier. It marks "the psychical openness to otherness" and "marks the interconnectedness of mind and body (both inside and outside, a liminal border within the self)" (Jones 207). The work itself is divided by the interactor's experience and that of her spectators as they observe her in medias res. An audience gathers in public gallery space that fills with the sound of the interactor's actions and vicariously shares the journey in real time projected in stereoscopic video on a screen. But, at the same time, the audience is always also aware of the corporeal immersant herself gesturing at their backs — an otherworldly silhouette back projected on a screen as she physically and psychically explores virtual spaces. Davies claims that: "The use of this shadow silhouette alongside with the real-time video projection serves to poeticize the relationship between the immersive body and the work, drawing attention to the body's role as ground and medium for the experience" (Davies 2003: 329). Drawing us in as a player, the immersant and her split subject shadow are two displaced subjects who experience their environments through disjunctures in time and space.
The Breathing Wall, an interactive narrative on CD-ROM by British novelist Kate Pullinger, Stephen Schemat, and babel, is the flipside of Davies' breathing apparatus. Instead of using breath to navigate, its interactive interface monitors the browser's breathing in response to the frightening events that transpire in this prison-based ghost story, and responds accordingly. This HyperTrance Fiction Matrix is an experimental, responsive software that performs the ultimate reversal and reads the interactor. Drawing the browser into the story space instead of making her body the craft of exploration, The Breathing Wall is an extremely effective story. If there is a drawback to it, it is the way that the story itself is confined within the bars and walls of a linear narrative framework. The browser is locked in a linear trajectory, policing herself as she submits to auditory surveillance as she pages through the narrow corridors of the text.
The author of The Impermanence Agent, developed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, and Duane Whitehurst, is truly non-linear and nonhuman. The text itself, the Agent, derives storytelling materials from the contents of a person's web browsings to allow it to tell its own story. By rifling through the cache of a user's browser, it transforms itself into The Agent's retelling of a user's interests. Strangely enough though, the Agent is not interactive. Instead, it seems to have a mind of its own; it extracts information from visited websites and adds its own concerns as well, displaying the content unique to each user's foraging. Its contents replay again and again, faded, altered, and adjusted, always running on the desktop whenever the browser window is open. Virus-like, The Agent steps in between your machine's http requests and the web and delivers its catch, hauled in while surfing by proxy, to the browser. From there the Agent inserts images and text drawn from webpages that revolve around its own self-reflexive prevailing concerns — "impermanence, hypermedia, preservation, agency" (Wardrip-Fruin et al.) — onto other pages the user has surfed. More importantly, the Agent also "writes back," inserting its own story into the user's movements over the course of five days: "They are The Agent's annotations, The Agent's mark, in the scrapbook of the user's experience" (Wardrip-Fruin et al.). Its aesthetic engagement is what Camille Utterback calls "ambient interactivity": that is to say, the work is autonomous and freestanding, but the more the browser interacts with it the richer the experience (Chapman, "A Well-Dressed Agent," in Wardrip-Fruin et al.). The Agent opens several windows on the browser's desktop, but it is the right frame that contains The Agent's story. It holds images, stories, and fictions, particularly sepia-toned family photos and cemetery statuary. As the work moves through a browser's own space and time on the web, more and more of the linearity in the original text is leached away, and a collage-like narrative takes its place. While this all seems like a storytelling engine, in fact what The Agent does is use metatagging to simulate life and a mind of its own. Its metatags select less frequently used words, give preference to nouns, and rank words in terms of importance. By this means, the browser's concerns become The Agent's own story.
Will Wright, the original developer of the incredibly successful games SimCity and The Sims, is developing a new game called Spore that takes narrative interaction to a whole new level.2 Where other narratives have a personal or customizable aspect, Spore has user-generated content. Seen by many as the greatest game yet invented, it allows an interactor to create species as the system procedural generates the ecosystems they inhabit, and then allows that species to interact across the network with others created by other players. Starting with a single-celled organism, the user can modify its shape and abilities with each subsequent generation. The computer extracts probable movements and lifestyles from each change in body shape and attributes, so that the organism adapts to its environment as it evolves toward intelligent behavior — intelligence being marked by a species' ultimate culmination in space travel. It is a game that embodies the principles of "teleological evolution," a belief that there is a goal or master plan in nature's design:
Spore's main innovation portends to be Wright's use of procedural generation for many of the components of the game, providing vast scope and open-endedness. Wright said, "I didn't want to make players feel like Luke Skywalker or Frodo Baggins. I wanted them to be like George Lucas or J.R.R. Tolkien." (Wikipedia)
Like postdramatic theater, which leaves the dramatic tradition behind and pushes the audience member into becoming the performative centre of a multi-perspectival theatrical event, Wright's Spore enables us to become a god-like author of a life form and its environment. Once world-creation is possible, who is the author of such an organism and its story? Where, as we saw, in hypertext the reader created the life in the narrative, in Spore the interactor creates both narrative itself and the life that lives it. It may in fact be a postnarrative game. If postdramatic theater shifts the focus onto performance, postnarrative shifts the emphasis onto the interactor's experiential or performative dimension in the storytelling experience. In short, a postnarrative game entrusts the user with generating her own story.
When we perform our interaction with other kinds of media instantiated as art forms — with a book or a television, for example — we are very aware of the fact that we insert ourselves into it as its audience, and that we choose to interact with it. With the new born-digital forms of narrative, however, there is no such conscious separation between us and them. It is harder to say where we end and they begin. When a medium becomes responsive, as interactive computer games and environments can be, we are no longer observers. Instead, we become performers on the stage of its interface even as we are that which is being performed through its machinations. I want to underscore here that, while we are the input, without its acts of conversation there is no work of art. This is where responsive environments like virtual reality or interactive game spaces depart from their paler cousins that set out to entertain us. These are discursive spaces and experiences that require us to talk back. The environment itself becomes an extension of us in more intimate ways than we ever imagined, coming to act simultaneously as our audience and as a "third skin" (Prince 2003: 13) that privileges our sensory engagement. Multimedia "environments," McLuhan has observed, "are not passive wrappings but active processes" (1964: 12).
More and more, the new digital narratives are something that we take out into the world with us rather than something we sit down to enjoy. Advertisers are now catering to fourth-wall broadcasting, the new trend toward using digital billboards in malls, in the hope of recouping lost revenues arising from the popularity of media like TiVo and iPods that sidestep commercial messages (Elliott 2006). This is a byproduct of the arrival of what McLuhan calls acoustic space, the fallout of the Information Age. He says:
With the advent of a world environment of simultaneous and instantaneous information, Western man shifted from visual to acoustic space, for acoustic space is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose boundaries are nowhere. Such is the space created by electric information which arrives simultaneously from all quarters of the globe. It is a space which phases us out of the world of logical continuity and connected stability into the space-time world of the new physics, in which the mechanical bond is the resonant interval of touch where there are no connections, but only interfaces.
(McLuhan [1972]: 194; emphasis added)
In electronic media, we can limit the depth of our search: "we can decide how far back we want to go, how deep in time, just as we can decide how defined, how prepackaged or open-ended, that information should be" (de Kerckhove 1997: 84). The idea of surface and interface are privileged over depth when our media operate in surround sound. Connectivity has become so total that we are always plugged in. If we used to be members of a passive audience watching performers on a conventional stage, we have now become performers in our own play, playing to a responsive environment as audience on the stage of the digital interface. We have become Donna Haraway's cyborg, and now inhabit an entirely mediated and technologicalized environment.
This began on October 4, 1957, the day that the role of narrative changed forever, as did our relationship to life and the world. That day marked the beginning of the Space Age with the launch of the first artificial satellite, Sputnik. (In fact, fifty years hence, it is hard to appreciate the magnitude of this event and the consternation that greeted it. On a superficial level, it was read as the triumph of Communism over Democracy, at a deeper level it changed irreparably our relationship to our planet. On a practical level, it most significantly, for our purposes here, engendered ARPANET, the first incarnation of the internet, as a safeguard against communications breakdown in the event of a Russian nuclear attack.) McLuhan argues that this event flipped the world inside out to inhabit a simulated environment for the first time:
When the planet was suddenly enveloped by a man-made artifact, Nature flipped into art form. The moment of Sputnik was the moment of creating Spaceship Earth and/or the global theatre. Shakespeare at the Globe had seen all the world as a stage, but with Sputnik, the world literally became a global theatre with no more audiences, only actors.
(McLuhan [1972]: 197)
We can no longer be spectators in a mediated world. In a postnarrative act of reversal, we become actors by virtue of being immersed in what New York Times columnist Stuart Elliott calls the "screenery" of information space. And because we are actors this space is personal and personalized.
The iPod is the most visible trendsetter in this transformation. What has made this product so hot is the way that it turns us all into performers, DJs, VJs, broadcasters, publishers, authors, composers — you name it. In fact, Apple uses the maxim "Take Podcasting Personally" to promote its iTunes service. The iPod collapses all the barriers by allowing us full access to the technologies of production, storage, and distribution. Telescoping all of these functions into one small and perfectly portable interface has created the kind of immersive creative space that artists have long dreamt about. In the nineteenth century, composer Richard Wagner yearned to create what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk or Total Artwork, a seamless environment where art could inhabit the real: a place where "there are no more arts and no more boundaries, but only art, the universal, undivided" (qtd in Sayre 1989: 108). Wagner's "totalizing" or immersive effect of music drama was one of the first modern attempts to devise a schematic or model for the integration of different arts. Bringing together art, theater, opera, song, dance, poetic recitation, narrative, and the visual arts (Artmuseum.net) for the first time since Classical Greece, he actively tinkered with the technology of stagecraft ("Richard Wagner: Total Artwork"). The theatrical innovations he was responsible for include the orchestra pit, a darkened house, surround sound acoustics, and a return to the Greek amphitheatre-style seating that focused all attention on the stage ("Richard Wagner: Total Artwork"). Wagner's longing for an "Artwork of the Future" resonates to us in an age of personalized media and dynamic information environments, but it is in fact an ancient impulse that can be found in many media and genres — from sacred caves to Greek theater to medieval cathedrals. In similar ways, multimedia immersion attempts to engage all of our senses in virtual space, drawing us into the stories of its world through opulent graphics and interactive features.
Many artists, like Charlotte Davies, now seek to create such environments of total immersion. Hungarian-born Australian Agnes Hegedüs's Memory Theatre VR, for example, has taken the realm of multimedia performance onto a whole new level of theatrical experience. Playing with the idea of the stage and auditorium as a site for her work, she explores different historical periods (cast as separate rooms or spaces) through the style of the artworks of those same periods. Looking specifically at the precursors of virtual computer architecture, she explores "mannerist, futurist or even deconstructivist virtualities" as door openers to new worlds. The piece is:
An interactive film on the history of deception in space … cleverly staged through a doubling of the situation in the interface. These concepts of virtual reality are based on works by Libeskind and Ivan Sutherland; along with concepts of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and cabinets of curiosities.
(qtd by Hegedüs 1997)
This trip through the looking glass remains the ultimate, personal immersive experience, an experience whose time seems to have arrived.
Consequently, I suspect that the next big leap forward will continue to be, not in the specifics of hardware development, but in innovations that insert us still deeper into our interface with technology.3 Once the interface becomes entirely transparent, the gap between fiction and reality will have the potential to become fully permeable. Although still bound in space, Jun Rekimoto's DataTiles prototype for Sony is one such possible contender. (Rekimoto is a long-time developer for Sony whose previous creations include the Navicam, GesturePad, ToolStone, and PreSense.) Building on his earlier creations SyncTap (a device that uses synchronous actions like keystrokes to establish network connections), the FEEL User Interface (a device that permits secure ubiquitous connections between devices), and SmartSkin (a hand- and gesture-sensitive tabletop), the interface operates with the use of a special desktop, like a drafting table, with slots for the clear plastic tiles and an interactive pen. Titles (which are dual functioned as both software and memory storage device) that he has developed so far include "weather," "time machine," "photo album," "music," "baseball statistics" and "parameters," a "paint" program, a "people/mail" tile, and a "shopping basket" (that charges items directly to you through your cell phone). Rekimoto has also pioneered the use of dynamic hyperdragging not just from one tile to another, but directly onto a wall, screen, desktop, or another tile. When tiles are placed side by side they interlink, making, for instance, a map dynamic over time and space, enabling seamless creation of animation or other time-based events, and permitting all manner of files to be copied, mailed, or altered from one tile to another. This takes modular interface technology to a whole new level, but is still in developmental stages and has not yet been scheduled for commercial release. The possibilities of the potential uses of such a technology for narrative ends are extremely provocative. Another prototype that is taking the world by storm is the Nintendo handheld Wii wand. Pronounced "wee," it is a device that has long been gossiped about in hushed tones by its code name "Revolution." 4 Like the iPod and DataTiles, it is a harbinger of how our engagements with interface are changing. (One of the most profound changes is Wii's inclusion of a whole new demographic in video game use: senior citizens.) Marrying the game console with a web browser, computer mouse, and television remote technology, it provides two controllers per player, one for each hand, and enlists Bluetooth to perform its wireless and motion sensitive gaming mission.5 It does not quite transform your living room into Star Trek's holodeck, but it is close. It offers the ultimate personal gaming experience to date. Does this mark the arrival of a new embodied subjectivity? Perhaps this is Virilio's trajective subject made flesh. Wii removes the wall between the game and the player and, like Sputnik, will likely leave a wake that transforms our engagements not just with our technologies but with the world. While Apple is still spelling the future "i-P-O-D" (Haddad), Nintendo is set to give them some Wii for their buck in the coming months and years ahead. (It was released in November 2006.) The potentialities for the future of narrative within and via these new technologies are as open-ended as the modular plots of digital narrative themselves.
1 See my discussion of Jun Rekimoto's DataTiles later in this chapter, which so clearly makes use of modular, hypertextual thinking to revolutionize interface design.
2 For an in-depth exploration of the Spore project, see Wright's introductory video at: <http://video.google.com/videoplay docid 8372603330420559198&q spore>.
3 In November 1999, the MIT Technology Review published a list of what they deemed the ten most influential interface innovations. They were: 1. the loudspeaker; 2. the touch-tone telephone; 3. the steering wheel; 4. the magnetic-stripe card; 5. the traffic light; 6. the remote control; 7. the cathode ray tube; 8. the liquid crystal display; 9. the mouse/graphical user interface; 10. the barcode scanner (qtd by Crow 2001). Given the acceleration of technological innovation, we can expect this list to change dramatically in the next few years.
4 Watch the video, "Trykk Startknappen for a Ú se Video," that accompanied the initial announce-ment of "Revolution" in Denmark in September of 2005 at dagbladet.no: <http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2005/09/16/443527.html>.
5 The Step User Interface (SUI), announced by Microsoft in February 2006, also works with the principles of embodied navigation and command. The press release states:
The StepMail application uses an off-the-shelf "dance pad" to let a user carry out commands in email — such as scroll, open, close, delete, flag, and place messages in folders — by tapping a set of six buttons on the floor. Another prototype application, StepPhoto, allows foot-controlled scrolling and sorting through digital photographs. (Microsoft)
The technology is designed to help people be more active at their desks, to enable work to continue while assuming positions other than sitting, to open technology for people with limited use of their hands and to help avoid repetitive strain injuries.
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