dd:
Your project GRAMMATRON was released in June 1997 and has
received praise from numerous publications. Wired writes
that it "exemplifies how online literary creations are
developing into an entire multi-media experience". What is
the story of GRAMMATRON, how is it told?
MA: GRAMMATRON is
many things at once. It's one of the earliest and more
elaborate works of Internet Art that was created exclusively
for the web as a way to track the developments of "web
culture" in a networked-narrative environment. That is to
say, GTRON is a metafictional narrativization of the network
culture that was beginning to erupt at the time of its
conception. My first notes started on yellow legal paper,
but then quickly moved into an MS Word document that I now
see was created on April 3, 1993. That's significant to me
for a couple of reasons. One, the seed concept of GTRON is
over seven years old! But, more importantly, that's exactly
the same month that the beta-version of Mosaic, our first
serious GUI-web browser, came onto the scene. The
story-world that GTRON depicts, where writers become
networking artists operating in cyberspace, predates my own
[pseudo-]autobiographical development as kind of
Internet artist and, in many ways, the story prophesizes not
only my own future, but the future of the publishing and
what it means to Go Digital.
In essence, the GTRON
project used the evolving net culture itself, particularly
the GUI-version of the web, as the perfect R&D platform
to develop alternative story interfaces as well as new modes
of distribution, reception and public presence (which we now
often refer to as "web presence"). I was especially
interested in how some of the vaporware language that was
coming out of the growing new media scene could be used
against itself, to rub and / or remix alternative discourses
together, everything from cyberpunk, dialectical materialism
and California ideology to experimental narrative riffs from
the likes of James Joyce, Arno Schmidt and Jean-Luc Godard,
to name a few.
And then there is the
Cabala. The old scripture, the metadocumentary, the Book of
Creation, and the Golem myth. In many ways, GTRON is a
retelling of the Golem myth remixed with narratological /
rhetorical effects sampled from the alternative discourses
mentioned above.
I was also very conscious of
the fact that I wanted to experiment with many of the
evolving technological features that the web could offer me,
features that I would never have reason to consider when
writing my novels. So there are time-based meta-tags,
javascript-encoded cookies that create alternative and / or
random linking structures, some very detailed and
labor-intensive animated gifs, an original digital audio
soundtrack, etc. These bits and pieces could only become a
part of the story when the technology was made available to
me. I remember when I first out about this Clear Audio
compression technology and wondering how it could work for
what I had in mind regarding streaming sound in the
narrative environment. Clear Audio soon became Progressive
Networks Real Audio which then became simply Real Networks.
In those early days (not too long ago), there was a certain
degree of co-dependency between GTRON and the new media
industry that I felt very strongly as everything was
developing, and I often took trips to corporate offices and
trade shows and remember thinking, "I never had to do this
when I was writing my novels."
dd:
GRAMMATRON comes with a theoretical section about new
storytelling and Hypertextual Consciousness. In it, you
write that the readers or co-conspirators "create meaning
out of the textual morass that they find themselves immersed
in" (
source).
In another node the text reads "I link therefore I am"
(source).
Does the readers' activity lead to a shift from an
aesthetics of contemplation to an aesthetics of activity or,
to put it that way, of spectacle?
MA: It all
depends on how the Internet art is created. Right now I'm
working on more contemplative or, I prefer the word
meditational, interfaces for my stories. It requires a
greater investment of time and even patience to draw meaning
from the work. The idea of readers becoming co-conspirators
I have taken from
Cortazar, who wrote the proto-hypertext novel
Hopscotch. The reason I was emphasizing the need for
readers to "create meaning out of the textual morass that
they find themselves immersed in" has more to do with my
approach to applied grammatology than any major theory on
aesthetics. HTC is really more of a critifiction (to borrow
Federman's term) than a straight
theory piece. I see it as an early work of online conceptual
art that remixes a lot of discourses, similar to what
happens in the GTRON narrative, but with more
post-structuralist and new media theory language thrown in
the mix to help accentuate the easy malleability of
critical language. In
this way, it becomes cite-specific, as well as
site-specific, but with no citation to speak of. Just links
-- or meta-refresheners that play on issues of speed,
bandwidth, network-value, knowledge workers, the end of the
book and the beginning of writing, etc.
What I liked about playing
with HTC is that it became a work of conceptual art that
soon was being exhibited, on its own, in many shows around
the world. It got me to thinking about ideas I had read
about "picturing theory" and allowed me to morph those ideas
into ongoing ungoing practices of
"exhibiting theory" which then led to various collaborations
around the world using the piece in performance, musical
composition and even techno-clubs. When theory itself begins
to migrate into these other venues, these other modes of
cultural production, I think we start seeing its
optimum exit
strategy.
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