Komninos Zervos TEXT Vol 5 No 1Flip to Text Version Griffith University

 

      

      Komninos Zervos

      

       Teaching Creative Writing in Cyberspace

        

       

      In 1997 'Writing for the Web' was introduced at Griffith University, Gold

      Coast, as a four-week unit of the first year subject 'Effective Writing'.

      The following year the four weeks were expanded to fourteen and offered as

      a subject in its own right, which counted towards a major in Creative

      Writing in the Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Arts (Communications) and

      Bachelor of Creative Arts degrees. In 1999 a CyberStudies major was

      introduced, as part of these Arts degrees, offering the subjects 'Writing

      for the Web' and 'CyberStudies' in first year, and in later years:

      'Writing for Multimedia', 'Creating Interactivity', 'Digital Production

      Methods', 'Experimental New Media', and 'CyberFutures'. The major also

      included subjects from other areas: 'New Communication Technologies' and

      'Communication and Cybertheory' (from the Communications major), and

      'Cyborgs and Shopping Malls' (from Cultural Studies).

      Naturally the question was asked: Why should we teach computer code and

      graphics, animation, digital video and sound software programs to creative

      writing students? Surely this is the domain of a Design school, or an

      Information Technology school, not a School of Arts.

      And naturally we answered that our teaching needed to keep up with the

      virtualization of the publishing and book-selling industries online, and

      we were aware that the world wide web presented interesting new

      interactive forms, providing dynamic new mediums for artistic expression.

      The code, or HTML, is itself a medium for creating interactive

      interconnected documents, and learning this new 'language' (it isn't

      really a computer language, but rather a setting-out language, or mark-up

      language, hence HyperText Mark-up Language, HTML) demystifies and

      empowers. Being able to create and publish worldwide all in the same day

      is achievable and attractive to today's writers.

      A recent Queensland University of Technology study of students entering

      universities revealed that, despite the commonly held belief that young

      people today are computer whiz kids, they are not very computer-literate

      beyond the computer game and simple word processing. (Foreshew 15) These

      findings are confirmed by the experience of having taught 'ART 1111 -

      Writing for the Web' over three semesters and two intensive Summer

      Schools. Not only are many students only basically computer-literate, they

      also lack knowledge and prior use of the world wide web and email as

      research tools and as creative mediums.

      The CyberStudies major aims to allow students to fully understand

      developments in the creative arts (visual, textual, performative) and

      media arts within the context of the world wide web and interactive media

      formats. As potential artists in cyberspace, students require new tools,

      and call upon new technologies, in order to do the work of digital

      storyteller, digital artmaker, digital performer, digital documenter of

      life. New languages of discourse continue to be defined; new issues keep

      emerging. The interconnected interactive future requires people used to

      operating in three-dimensional creative environments, requires the reading

      and interpreting of symbols and signs, and requires new concepts of

      community, communication and collaboration. The creative use of technology

      by art practitioners, teachers and theorists is facilitated through

      analysis and understanding of fields such as the virtual, coupled with

      practical and generic knowledge of the way computers, networks, multimedia

      and the world wide web operate.

      The word 'virtual' needs to be immediately addressed, as its clear and

      consistent understanding is crucial to certain aspects of this paper and

      the future of writing. 'Virtual' already has many signifieds, one of the

      most common being 'non real', or 'not there'. Also 'virtual' is associated

      with 'reality', due to one of the earliest possible applications of

      computers and cyberspace. The 'Virtual Reality' (VR) environments of

      'shoot-em-up' games technology, where people wear VR glasses and hold

      controllers and jerk in various directions for seemingly no reason, is

      probably another image that is a signification of VR. The virtual, as

      associated with VR, is seen as a kind of pretend reality, or make-believe.

      The virtual has also been described as an artificial reality, a

      reproduction of a reality we know. The word 'virtual' seems to have

      acquired the sense of a negative state, a state of not-being, not-real,

      not-there, not-anything - an otherness that many cyber-feminists have been

      quick to recognize.

      The etymology of the word, however, traces its roots to Middle English

      usage and the meaning: 'possessed of certain physical virtues, from

      Medieval Latin virtualis, from the Latin virtus: strength, virtue. Date:

      1654'. This definition, from the online Webster's dictionary, does not

      have negative connotations. The philosopher Michael Heim defines 'virtual'

      as a philosophical term meaning 'not actually but just as if'. (Heim 160)

      Paul Levinson defines a 'virtual' X as what you get when the information

      structure of X is detached from its physical structure. (Levinson 363)

      Peter Skagestad, in his address to the Twentieth World Congress of

      Philosophy, thoroughly researches the word 'virtual', its origins as an

      adjective, its use as a noun and its introduction into the language of

      computers, cyberspace and everyday life. He makes a strong case for the

      word, and the concepts it embraces, to be seen from a more positive

      perspective. Of the two modern usage definitions, Skagestad shows

      'Levinson's to be closer to the Baldwin's Dictionary definition penned by

      Charles Sanders Peirce, i.e. "A virtual X (where X is a common noun) is

      something, not an X, which has the efficiency (virtus) of an X"'. In

      reminding us that Peirce is the universally acknowledged founder of modern

      semiotics, Skagestad goes further in claiming that Peirce placed

      virtuality at the centre of his doctrine of mind, knowledge and language.

      Pierre Levy in Becoming Virtual eloquently proposes the virtual as a

      process:

        In scholastic philosophy the virtual is that which has potential rather

        than actual existence. The virtual tends toward actualization, without

        undergoing any form of effective or formal concretization. The tree is

        virtually present in the seed. Strictly speaking, the virtual should not

        be compared with the real but the actual, for virtuality and actuality

        are merely two different ways of being. (Levy 35)

      Levy extends the work of Gilles Deleuze, who introduced the concepts of

      virtual, actual, real and possible in Difference and Repetition, his

      doctoral dissertation of 1979:

        The only danger in all this is that the virtual could be confused with

        the possible. The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone

        by the possible is therefore a "realization". By contrast, the virtual

        is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The

        process it undergoes is that of actualization. (Deleuze 207)

      If one accepts this definition of virtual as a problematic or process, one

      can ask the question, what is the virtuality of poetry? What is the thing

      that poetry as a process is trying to address? What is the function of

      poetry? The phenomenologists might say there is no function at all, no

      absolute meaning to anything, so why try to define poetry this way? Paul

      De Man reminds us of the futility of literature:

        Literature is fiction not because it somehow refuses to acknowledge

        "reality", but because it is not a priori certain that language

        functions according to principles which are those, or which are like

        those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain

        that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but

        its own language. (de Man 168)

      Nonetheless poetry has been spoken, written, read and experienced for

      thousands of years and despite the uncertainty of the nature of being

      itself, it is still valid to ask what is the problem that poetry tries to

      solve.

      I believe this is the question the virtual process of poetry asks: How do

      words express and communicate what is felt via the emotions, is observed

      with the eyes, is thought by the mind, is heard by the ears, is smelt by

      the olfactories in a code others will decode by their own mechanisms? And

      the listeners, the readers, the web users, how will they receive that

      code, and decode it by their own means of signification?

      The solutions of the past, to this virtual problematic, have given rise to

      sub-genres and styles of poetry, like the limerick, the haiku, the

      tetrameter, the cinquain, etc, and to all forms of presentation or

      performance. These have been viable but only ever partial solutions, all

      attempted actualizations of the same problem. The evidence of the virtual

      process is expressed as real poems in real books in real libraries and

      bookshops and personal archives, or real performances to live audiences,

      or recorded collections of live performances, or real website locations

      showcasing real cyberpoems created for and by the vector of cyberspace.

      Of course, new poems are possible in similar styles to those already

      identified. Also possible are new actualizations, new solutions, new

      genres. The internet and computers have facilitated the production of new

      actualizations of poetry, just as writing and the printing press as new

      technologies encouraged new genres previously.

      The digitization of text, image and sound has revolutionized the creative

      artist's workplace, in terms of ease and efficiency of use in creation and

      reproduction. The interconnectivity of the world wide web has provided a

      new exhibition, distribution and publication network for artists. We have

      seen a transference of the print publication industry to the world wide

      web, the sale and distribution of print products via online booksellers,

      the online presence of mainstream publishers promoting their authors and

      products, the electronic versions of literary magazines, and the

      appearance of totally digital online literary magazines (e-zines). Douglas

      Adams' exclusive internet publication and Steven King's most recent free

      offering of a novella over the internet (400,000 downloaded in the first

      24 hours of release) have marked a new era in print publication. John

      Tranter has embraced the internet with his successful international poetry

      publication Jacket:

        The shift to the Internet is the most significant change that publishing

        has seen this century. An earlier change, the move from metal type to

        photo-lithographic printing, was also important, but it wasn't what the

        trendy pundits call a "paradigm shift"; the Internet is. (Tranter)

      Tranter's online publication may have a more international audience than

      print published literary magazines, but they both serve the same purpose,

      and the desktop publishing skills for print magazines are just as

      difficult to learn as HTML for web-based publications.

      Most university English and Australian Literature departments and creative

      writing programs have established online sites and web based publications.

      Australian poets have also been quick to set up their personal websites:

      Coral Hull, Billy Marshall-Stoneking, Richard Tipping, Phillip Salom, John

      Kinsella, Pam Brown, to name a few. These advances have had their affect

      on the publishing industry because the world wide web competes so

      efficiently in the areas of production and distribution. But these

      activities simply translate from one medium to another. The poetry

      published in these web publications looks like pages from a print

      publication, addresses the same issues as print published poetry, and is

      presented in a way that resembles the structure and organisation of print

      published books and magazines. Such publishing has been called

      transmediation or remediation. It is a realisation of an already possible

      rather than an actualization of the virtual.

      George Landow, of Brown University and hypertext evangelist, states that:

        What is perhaps most interesting about hypertext, though, is not that it

        may fulfill certain claims of structuralist and poststructuralist

        criticism but that it provides a rich means of testing them. (Landow 10)

      Landow uses the terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' interchangeably to

      argue for a richer experience of hypertext over traditional print

      publication of branching narratives. But hypermedia literature is

      distinguished from solely text-based hypertext by the introduction of

      image, sound, animation, random selection, intelligent objects, etc.

      Hypertext fictions, which we associate with the world wide web and

      cyberspace, were already possible and realised in the print medium. I do

      not see hypertexts as new actualizations of literature in cyberspace,

      although hyperlinking may facilitate the construction and presentation of

      these texts. To construct the simplest of hypertexts requires a basic

      knowledge of HTML code, but a great knowledge of writing practice. One

      must have this basic knowledge of HTML though; the code remains invisible

      like the invisible knowledge behind literary devices, or the typesetting

      instructions, or editor's mark-ups on a draft manuscript.

      Most importantly, however, the interactivity possible in cyberspace holds

      the greatest potential for the conception and development of new art. New

      literature that performs itself is already in abundance. The world wide

      web allows a poetry which performs itself 24 hours a day, seven days a

      week, without the author needing to be present. This can be perceived as

      digital performance of poetry that allows the user some control over the

      navigation and some decisions over how texts are accessed. In a recent

      article in TEXT I describe seven forms of writing, created by and for, and

      only able to exist on, the world wide web, with references to

      practitioners.

      Janet Murray sees the future of narrative in cyberspace as extending or

      enhancing the experience of interacting with a fiction in new ways.

      Through immersion, agency and transformation, hypermedia heightens the

      pleasures of traditional media and creates a uniquely new experience.

      Immersion is achieved in cyberspace relatively easily. Practically any

      world or scene can be constructed in three dimensions, the user able to

      navigate through the space of the fiction rather than over the surface.

      Objects within the scene, even if these are text objects, can have

      pre-programmed behaviours which can be triggered by the user's

      interaction. In cyberspace you can fly, move across terrains much faster

      than you could possibly walk in physical space, teleport to other areas,

      other environments, other planets, other spaces.

      In traditional narratives, scenes and characters are developed over time -

      as we know more about characters and the places they inhabit we become

      more engrossed in the story, more immersed in the narrative. Also our

      disbelief is suspended over time; we gradually begin to be immersed by the

      action.

      In three dimensional cyberspace environments, we are immediately placed in

      a space we can see, interacting with objects, words or characters; our

      immersion is almost immediate. Agency also aids in the rapid suspension of

      disbelief; one more readily believes an object that offers valuable

      information, endowing these imaginary objects with 'life'. The user's

      concepts of time and space are radically affected by the ability to

      navigate through spaces faster and to go to places previously unavailable.

      Murray argues that in cyberspace we not only suspend disbelief but are

      encouraged to 'create belief'.

      Murray also states that digital narratives allow us to enact our stories

      and not just witness them happening.

        Enacted events have a transformative power that exceeds both narrated

        and conventionally dramatised events because we assimilate them as

        personal experiences. (Murray 170)

      In 3-D environments, because of their constructedness and

      constructability, we can collide objects/ideas/places/spaces that may

      never connect in the real world. These (sometimes bizarre) collisions can

      trigger new kinds of knowledge within us. In cyberspace, there is no real

      sense of resistance to the world - so, you can fly, but you can fly

      through pre-designed walls. It is difficult to see the relationship

      between self and world when the negotiation of our own identity in

      relation to the cyberscape is thus problematised, because the boundaries

      between self and world are blurred by the lack of definable perspective in

      these reconstituted forms of embodiment and place.

      In this way, what we 'see' is different in cyberspace than in reality

      because our relationship to the world undoes many of our notions of being

      separate from our surroundings. Thus, in cyberspace, what we see does not

      establish our place in the (virtual) world. On the contrary, it places our

      position (our relationship to the world) into question. When we question

      this relationship, we open ourselves up to the potential of learning. In

      this way, cyberspace offers a vast potential for uncovering that which we

      don't know.

      At the same time, we 'know' this is an illusion. We know that we are

      really in our lounge room/computer lab, smoking a (real) cigarette/picking

      our (real) nose. Our eyes are deceiving us. It is this awareness of the

      constructed nature of virtual space that widens the gap between what we

      see and what we know. In creating this space, virtuality offers the

      potential to explore this seeing/knowing tension. Because the gap is

      expanded there is more room to see the discrepancies, the contradictions,

      the holes. In this way, virtuality promotes the discovery of new ways of

      thinking about the relationship between our sensory experiences and our

      knowledges. Because the virtual/reality dichotomy is a (false) construct,

      that which we learn in cyberspace is applicable to our selves in real

      space. So, new ways of thinking/seeing/knowing that are revealed to us in

      the virtual world do not vanish when we turn the computer off.

      My own specific area of interest in Cyberpoetry (poetry that can only

      exist in a hypermedia form on cd-rom or the WWW) offers random moments of

      illuminating poetic satisfaction, and often highly relevant human

      insights, through very robotic text generating software programs - digital

      programmed Gertrude Stein-type cut-up machines. Cyberpoetry allows another

      physical dimension for words to exist in, move around in, and perform in,

      apart from the two-dimensional surface of the page and the linear

      arrangement of the sentences on a page. There are not the traditional

      devices of rhythm, metre, or even rhyme when words are suspended in a

      three-dimensional space; but there are new devices of motion, colour,

      depth, action, and weight of words that can be used by the cyberpoet. This

      literature exists in a space and not on a surface or landscape. This space

      is being explored, this is the area of the unknown, this is a virtual

      space where thinking is required to solve new problems, actualise

      solutions, speak in new languages, new voices.

      In offering a CyberStudies major in a school of arts to creative writing,

      theatre and visual arts, and communications students, we are not only

      encouraging the use of technology as tools in an art practice, but

      concurrently placing students in an unknown space where they have to think

      creatively. It is easy to see in cyberspace what already exists in the

      'real' world; it requires creative solutions to envisage narratives that

      don't yet exist.

       

       References

      De Man, Paul. Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

      Press, 1986. return to artilce

      Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York:

      Columbia University Press, 1995. return to article

      Foreshew, Jennifer. 'Students Baffled by High-Tech', The Australian,

      4/1/2000. return to article

      Heim, Michael. The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality. Oxford: Oxford

      University Press, 1993. return to article

      Landow, George P. Hypertext and Intertextuality. Johns Hopkins University

      Press, 1992. return to article

      .

      Levinson, Paul. 'Review of Harvey Wheeler's The Virtual Society'. Journal

      of Social and Biological Structures, 14, 3 (1991). return to article

      Levy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual. New York: Plenum Press, 1999. return to

      article

      Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck - The Future of Narrative in

      Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997. return to article

      Skagestad, Peter. 'Peirce, Virtuality, and Semiotic'. 20th WCP: Paideia

      Project On-Line. August 1998. Accessed 13 Mar 2001.

      <http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cogn/CognSkag.htm> return to article

      Tranter, John. 'The Left Hand of Capitalism'. In Jacket. Ed. John Tranter.

      1999. Accessed 13 Mar 2001. <http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/lefthand.html>

      return to article

      Zervos, Komninos. 'Techno-literatures on the Internet'. TEXT, 1, 2

      (October 1997). Accessed 13 Mar 2001.

      <http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/oct97/kkztext.htm> return to article

      

      Komninos Zervos convenes the CyberStudies Major at the School of Arts,

      Griffith University, Gold Coast campus. He is currently a PhD candidate at

      the School of English, Media and Art History, University of Queensland.

      The virtual Komninos has had previous actualizations of performance poet,

      microbiologist, youth worker and coffee lounge proprietor.

      He is the editor of the TEXT Special Issue Website Series No 2, Writing

      On-Line/On-Line Writing

       

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       TEXT

      Vol 5 No 1 April 2001

      http://www.gu.edu.au/school/art/text/

      Editors: Nigel Krauth & Tess Brady

      Text@mailbox.gu.edu.au 

 

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