Brown has its first graduate fellow in electronic writing

Although the average reader may not have seen Talan Memmott’s work, it’s attracting an impressive amount of attention. Last year he was awarded the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award for his piece "Lexia to Perplexia," and he was one of five finalists for the most prestigious prize yet offered in the field, the Electronic Literature Organization's prize in fiction writing.

by Mary Jo Curtis

There’s no doubting the world has entered a new millennium when one reads the award-winning work of Talan Memmott (left), Brown’s first graduate fellow in electronic writing.

Gone is the old-fashioned notion of curling up with a good book borrowed from the local library. You’ll find Memmott’s work in various locations on the Internet, including the online hypermedia literary journal BeeHive, of which he’s been the creative director and editor since 1998.

Although the average reader may not have seen Memmott’s work, it’s attracting an impressive amount of attention. Last year he was awarded the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing Award for his piece "Lexia to Perplexia," and he was one of five finalists for the most prestigious prize yet offered in the field, the Electronic Literature Organization's prize in fiction writing. He is also a tutor for the trAce Online Writing School and has spoken at various conferences and universities.

There are many forms and styles of electronic writing – that is, “writing that occurs at and through the computer,” Memmott said. “My own work is certainly electronic writing, but I would call it literary hypermedia. It takes advantage of not only the computational aspects of the computer, but utilizes the various media that are available for the computer and the Internet. That is to say that my electronic writing is interactive, graphical and participatory for the user.”

Memmott was trained as a visual artist in painting, video, installation art and performance, and he has dabbled in theater, primarily as a director.

“Electronic writing sort of pulls together all of these interests – from painting, to performance, theater and text. It’s all part of what I think of as electronic writing,” he said. “Once the Web took off and the technologies involved started getting better, that is when I made the serious leap into electronic writing.”

Now he creates the graphics for nearly all of his work; with his Web-based work, he also does all the coding.

“Writing code is part of the writing,” he said. “It’s an expanded view of text.”

This semester Memmott’s taking his work to the Cave (above) – Brown’s Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization. As part of the Cave Writing Workshop taught by Adjunct Professor of English Robert Coover, he is adapting one of his Web-based projects, “E_Cephalopedia//novellex,” using the Cave’s high-resolution stereo graphics to project the interactive piece onto the walls and floor of the eight-foot cubicle, creating a virtual reality experience.

“It’s a whole reconceptualization of the project, since the space and the interaction are so much different,” said Memmott, who is pursuing an MFA.

Although the audience is limited, the Cave “puts literature into exhibition mode,” he continued. “There’s great potential for what I refer to as narr-act-ivity, rather than narrativity. That’s something I find exciting about Web-based work, as well.”

Coover recruited Memmott after they both spoke at a conference at UCLA last spring. Memmott was already considering returning to school so he could teach hypertext; working with deans Karen Newman and Joan Lusk, the graduate faculty of Creative Writing sought and gained approval for a new fellowship to make that possible for him and future electronic writing students. He’ll teach workshops here next fall and spring, expanding the current curriculum.

Memmott came highly recommended to the program, with more than a dozen leaders in the field sending “hugely supportive reports” praising his work for its innovation, creativity and sophistication, according to Coover.

“He’s a major talent,” the professor said. “It is as though [he] is seeking to think as the machine thinks, his intricate and elegant designs, precise and classical, being a way for that character, that ghost in the box, or beyond it, to dress itself up for spectators.... His vision of the electronic writing medium as an imaginative theatrical space where the word itself might be the top banana is, for me, one of the most promising and intriguing aspects of his art.”

Memmott’s work can be viewed online.