Introduction: Interactive Style

...a blueprint or a cautionary tale? And one inevitably enters this conversation, about the pitfalls and potential of new media, already in progress as if subscribing to an on-going electronic list-server. The experience is similar to those early readings of strange literary and media theory based on Continental thought and philosophy especially as it entered the academia during the 1970s and 80s. Like that earlier shift in the humanities, especially in studies of narrative arts, the changes underway often lead to contentious resistance and rejection as well as opportunities for experimentation (cf. Saper, "Instant Theory"). In this issue the terms fear, frictions, misadventure, confusion, hacking, tension, and even death describe interactive networks and narratives. With this list in mind, new media sounds like a bleak and forbidding place confirming a neo-Luddite's worst visions of high-tech culture's impact and fate. The articles here do not, however, present a Spenglerian fantasy about the end of the wor ld as we know it; instead, they suggest that the impasses and problems in our current conceptions might give us clues to the emergent symbolic system now just appearing on the cultural landscape. In introducing this new style-interactive style-the contributors cover issues about translation from the literary into new media, infra-structural problems involved in those narrative and interactive productions, and the importance of the metaphors we use to describe work in the new media.

Confronted with impasses and anomalies in literary interpretation and production, a few of the contributors here, Stuart Moulthrop, Helen Thorington, and Beverley Curran, suggest ways to re-evaluate these misadventures and confusions. In this sense, the metaphoric and conceptual frames used to understand new media are not trivial, and may impact not just our view of life, but what it means to be alive or dead. A couple of contributors, Mark Taylor and Bill Tomlinson, examine precisely this issue of artificial death in terms of how our conceptions of death may help illuminate artificial life or the efforts to produce that monstrous possibility. And Sarah Bond and Jose Marquez's experimental essay-as-electronic-broadcast not only forms a second part to Taylor's essay, but also suggests how truth and fiction play into the current desire to predict the future potential and problems with new media.

The image of Dr. Frankenstein's monster might also describe the mix of media sewn together in these productions. There is no single schematic form or structural grid that corresponds with interactive narrative precisely because the new media make use of multiple media, platforms, and para-formal aspects like interactivity. In fact, because the images are electronic and include millions of colors, I have posted the illustrations on the Web as a supplement to this issue (http://www.uarts.edu/faculty/csaper). Marsha Kinder, in defining interactive narrative, notes that "[t]he creative boundaries of newly emerging media are frequently stretched more by being compared with earlier forms than by fetishizing a puristic notion of medium specificity." My forthcoming book, Intimate Bureaucracies, examines one potential model for interactive style in the earlier forms of experimental artists' networks. In stretching those boundaries in another direction, a few of the contributors in this issue even include interactive e-mail responses to their narrative projects - not as responses to their creative work, but as part of the works. And one contributor, Barbara Hayes-Roth, uses the dialogue between a mother and child as a model for constructing interactive situations.

No doubt the situation in the new media is different from that in the other arts. Unlike the cinema, even the most commercial forms of multimedia have not led to a Classical style of presentation, as in Hollywood. As a number of contributors, Moulthrop, Thorington, and Kinder, explain and demonstrate, the approaches to interactive narrative and multimedia work should not be lumped together (and, then, dismissed) precisely because the approaches are so completely different. With this divergence of approaches, one question that recurs throughout this issue, and in conversations about multimedia in general, is what are the possibilities and potential of this new field?

When the Provost of the University of the Arts, Virginia Red, appointed me Director of the New Media Center, we discussed the mix that these new media seem to demand or at least highlight. With the possibilities of networks, new administrative and business models become an issue imbricated in the use of the new media. Likewise, scholarship and aesthetics change with the possibilities of collaborative projects and interactive art and literature. So, the appointment was not simply a matter of directing yet another center on, say, the humanities precisely because, as Marsha Kinder notes in this issue, the infra-structural issues involved in producing interactive narratives impact both pedagogy and the way we conduct scholarship. The new media are not simply a conduit for disseminating the same information. My provost always reminds me how few of the New Media Centers--around 100 total--are connected to art schools--most are solving the technical issues and forgetting that content and "information architecture" are no longer separate from the media. Thus, this issue represents a possible blueprint for new media departments and centers.

The contributors in this issue form part of the cutting edge in the many experiments now underway in multimedia--even including the destructive graffiti found at hacked Web sites described in Jon McKenzie's article. As that article explains, the hackers' parasitic interaction with Web sites seek to use technology to change the social situation and context of the invaded site. The arguments about the morality of these viral invasions efface the issue about how hackers use technology, and, in turn, how we might borrow (or hack) their strategies for other ends.

One of the issues involved in the new social situation is the possibility of a democratization of communication. In this sense, the work of Jacques Ranciere on an alternative pedagogy is instructive. Ranciere recounts the story of the schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot, who, out of necessity fashioned a pedagogy that treated students and teacher as equals on a joint quest to learn. In France in the 1980s, Ranciere's contemporary championing of this method was offered as an answer to both those who wanted to return to teaching by rote memorization and those who wanted to make education relevant and uplifting to the majority of students. The completely democratic system seems futile in the context of the traditional classroom architecture and social organization. Students, after all, must make a journey to the teacher's room, the desks are arranged facing the explicator's chalk board, and the students expect explication when they arrive. Although it is unlikely that Ranciere's ideas would find much support in public schools even among students, his democratization looks like a simple description of the potential of distance learning and list servers. In the electronic media, there is the easy possibility of displacing a single explicating teacher with lists of aliases communicating and learning as equals. Moreover, as a number of the contributors here demonstrate and Barbara Hayes-Roth explains, the new media narratives might base their interactions not on a parent who explicates, but on the give and take between a directing child and a responsive mother. The scripts included in Hayes-Roth's essay demonstrate how the mother and child, together and equally, share in the creation of a story. Who would have thought that the internet's pockets of democratic pedagogy would be greeted with such enthusiasm by the public; not surprisingly, there is some doubt from academia as the eliminating of the gate-keeper function allows for illegitimate, fictional, absurd, libelous, and exaggerated information masquerading as news. The co ntributors here, especially Taylor, Bond, and Marquez, deal with these potentials and tensions. If we read this issue as a blue-print for interactive education, rather than as a series of explications and creative experiments, then we can see the beginning of a new style. It is as if Jocotot wrote a tract that had to wait for a new media machine to read it.

Finally, the challenge addressed in all of the following essays is translation. And, to allow for the many divergent languages, approaches, demonstrations, and illustrations included in this packed issue, my brief introduction ends as if the ISP connection were lost in the middle...

Craig Saper is the author of Artificial Mythologies: A Guide to Cultural Invention and the forthcoming Intimate Bureaucracies: From Visual Poetry to Networked Art. Recent essays include a chapter in The Allen Smithee Case, "Spinography" in Strategies 12.1 (1999), and "Collaborators," a catalogue essay for an exhibit at the Vienna Kunsthalle in October 1999. He is the Director of the New Media Center at the University of the Arts.

Works Cited

Ranciere, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.

Saper, Craig. "Instant Theory." Special issue of Visible Language 22.4 (Fall 1988).

_____. Intimate Bureaucracies: From Visual Poetry to Networked Art. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, forthcoming.

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