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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Vol 5 No 1 April 2001
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