Textscape as Virtual Reality
( Techno-Aesthetics and Digital Literatures)
To find oneself on the deceptive axis between invisible up and down, front and behind, left and right. To cross the edge of a looking glass and enter a structure of a labyrinth offering hundreds of options on hundreds of crossroads. To fasten oneself into the seat of a simulator and experience the utmost limits of hydraulic hardware. To go bungy jumping and, at the lowest point, imagine reaching escape velocity (28,000 kilometers per hour) and setting free of gravitation… A part of such extreme sensations (including that of techno music exceeding 180 or even 200 beats per minute) is not only a fictional description or a metaphor, but a real sensation, which goes hand in hand with people entering the world of "high-adrenaline" technologies today. Man is talked about as an esthetic being (Lat. homo aestheticus) in search of growing doses of technomodelled stimuli and approaching the extreme limits of imagination. We are talking about journey as a motion, which does not have to do with conquering the outside physical world as much as it does with conquering the daring emotions (transition from motion to e-motion). This is an individual of a present-day world which is defined with a (new) media "enframing" as well as with the cybernetics (and with the cyber-, "second order" artificial) which is balancing between real and virtual space, physical presence and telepresence, its vulnerable on the physical body leaning person and cybernetic egos - meaning, that s/he is actually already a multiple ego who performs in different places and worlds. This is an individual who lives in a world of continuous hybrid, synthetic, imagined, and fictional events among which it is harder and harder to decide and choose. The motto clara et distincta is diminishing into the fog of picsels on the media highway from which an individual manages to escape into individualized transes stimulated by events of the techno/rave paradigm.
In immersive and interactive environments, towards the sense of being there
An aesthetic being is not stimulated only by such attractions characteristic of theme parks (for example, simulators for roller coaster rides and games in Cybermind centers and other digital arcades), but also by encountering different forms of the so-called computer (also electronic, cybernetic) arts based on two features of the new esthetics - total immersion and interactivity. These attractions are computer-based interactive artistic installations (also holographic and those enabled by virtual reality, robotic and simulation hardware), but the highly uncertain and unusual experience and sensations are also offered by works of interactive literature, that is hyperfiction, which require a reader who will curiously and even hazardously choose how to navigate through hypertextual landscape.
The post-modern epoch responds to the banishment of making and admiring transcendent images (Ger. Bilderverbot) in Jewish monotheism with just the opposite extreme, by almost commanding such making and admiration nearly without limits (Jean Baudrillard’s claim in Fatal Strategies). But the current culture with its dominant, smart and at the same time, on the perceptual level, "high-adrenaline" technologies, is also textual, which holds especially true for World Wide Web with approximately 60 per cent rate of textual material. At the same time, these technologies influenced emergence of the so-called techno-literatures. These literatures are coded in a special way, meaning that they cannot exist without the hypertextual medium, CD-ROM and web sites. The web does not only supply new modes of expression for this kind of creativity, but also "supplies" a new type of a writer and a reader interested in network communication. In this text we will concentrate on one form of hypertextual literature - hyperfiction - from the point of view of those qualities which rank it as electronic art. We are interested in which features of hyperfiction fulfil the requirements of the new techno-aesthetics with total immersion and simulation of "being there" playing an especially important role. We are also interested in what this new form of literature attributes to the technocoded perception and imagination.
Since its emergence ten years ago (with Joyce’s Afternoon, A Story), hyperfiction has stirred philosophy, literary theory and cultural studies dealing with new technologies. We can almost claim that the amount of studies/essays dealing with hyperfiction and the amount of hyperfiction itself are equal. When answering the above questions, we will therefore analyze some recent views on those characteristics of hyperfiction which are relevant for technoesthetics. Marie-Laurie Ryan stated in her analysis of immersion vs. interactivity, "The reader of a classical interactive fiction - like Michael Joyce’s Afternoon - may be fascinated by his power to control the display, but this fascination is a matter of reflecting on the medium, not of participating in the fictional worlds represented by this medium." (Ryan 1994:34). Marie-Laurie Ryan has wisely contrasted the fascination by the medium (the pleasure offered by the manipulability and navigation through hypertextual links and by identification with the cursor, which enables the reader to be "present" in the text) and the reader’s cooperation in the fixed world, introduced with this medium, that is the pleasure of the fictional world of the story itself. Molly Abel Travis finds this duality essential and even points out the alternative, "Hypertext will not realise its potential unless it provides for the reader both the pleasure of immersion in an imagined world (the achievement of realistic fiction) and the pleasure of instrumental action in that world (the goal of virtual-reality technology)." (Travis 1996: 116) The deficiency is in this case undoubtedly the instrumental action, which is by no means as convincing and elaborate as it is in immersion environments of virtual reality with tactile feed-back playing an important role. Therefore Abel Travis mentions the reader’s engagement in reading hypertext as merely "low-level kinetic activity" and contrasts it with creative cybernetic experience. How to improve, to increase the reader’s co-operation in hypertextual landscape and in this way transform him or her into authentic user of textual virtual environment? Abel Travis suggests writers of hypertext should aim at a specific, nontraditional reading public, which is more attracted to film and television than to books. She concluded her meditation by saying, "To attract an audience that seeks interactive, collaborative creativity, hypertext must incorporate virtual-reality technology so that the reader becomes a role-player in "real-time" dramatic performance with other readers." (Travis 1996: 128)
This warning is critical of current writers of hypertextual fiction and implicitly also of artists of electronic art on general, who do not explore artistic and communicational options of the new media as much as they could. Ken Feingold, curator of the 5th New York Digital Salon, ascertains "that the current definition of net-works, as practices by artists, remains totally Web-centric"(Feingold 1997: 450). This means that making a website has become a synonym for art on the web. Similarly, writers of hyperfiction still pay too much attention to the medium of a novel (or, better, "a narrativity-as-we-know it") reproduced on the level of cyberspace and too little to cooperation with artists from other areas of cyberarts. Hypertext would surely be enriched by cybernetic feed-back loops between the author and the readers, who would have, while reading hypertext on a web, the opportunity to send to the author their suggestions in real time. The author would respond by changing the text’s structure (individual units and links). Hypertext as a process would in this way change and develop depending on the reader’s preferences. Is this possible at all?
Electronic art, namely its visual part, is already familiar with such a variant. We should also mention Karl Sims’s interactive installation Genetic Images (1993), which functions with the aid of a super-computer Connection Machine. The essence of this installation is to initiate a simulation process of images in the sense of interactive evolution, which means that the user of this installation with 16 screens can influence and select images according to aesthetic choices. The user steps onto the interactive "carpet" in front of one of the screens in the moment he or she sees the image which seems most aesthetically valuable, which is then memorised by the computer. In the following generation of images-successors the computer takes into account the user’s selection from the preceding cycle (the images which were not chosen are cast off and replaced with the successors of the chosen images). "The stream of 3-D computer images" generated by the computer becomes in this way a collective historical process in which masses of users co-operate.
Application of this process in the case of hypertextual fiction would enable this kind of fiction to be open. The texts could change constantly depending on the selection of possible links chosen by readers. The author would then prepare a series of continuations for, let us say, the following week on the basis of the readers’ preferences supplied by the super-computer. The author would thus establish a communicative response to his or her readers.
Such hypertext would in this way be changed into cybertext. The difference between hyper- and cybertext was introduced by Espen J.Aarseth in his text Nonlinearity and Literary Theory (1994). Aarseth pointed at the form of the self-changing and distinctively dialogue hypertext, which is, due to its cybernetic features, almost cybernetic text, that is cybertext. As examples of cybertext, which put reader into the role of user of immersion environment and also the role of the actor, he mentioned Joseph Weizenbaum’s dialogue program Eliza(1966), computer drama Adventure and the instant non-local form of interactive net communication Tiny MUD (this is an abbreviation for Multi-User Dungeon, a virtual community based on textual form). The problems arising out of the update of hypertext (with a relatively low level of interactivity) in the direction of a more sophisticated, text-based, interactive environment is also dealt with by Marie-Laure Ryan in the case of interactive drama. Critics argue on the question of whether narrativity is compatible with interactivity.
Digital words can rave, shake and jump
Hyper-/cybertext as virtual reality? We are facing a number of problems on this issue, which are challenging not only writers of hypertext, but also the concept of virtual reality itself and designers of its technology. Virtual reality represents to us, especially on the basis of applications massively available in american Cybermind centers, an immersion environment into which we can sink through special interfaces (Head-mounted display, Data-suit, Data glove), and by virtue of special high-tech effects. These interfaces enable navigation through a 3-D landscape of computer graphics and complete immersion into the medium. But such a hardware-driven entrance into a virtual world is by no means the only option. For a long time there has been a more subtle concept of virtual reality, which is familiar to one of the pioneers of this technology Myron W.Krueger. His installation Videoplace is an attempt to design unencumbering, environmental artificial reality, "unencumbering in the sense that people can experience it without wearing special instrumentation. It is environmental in the sense that technology for perceiving the participant’s actions is distributed throughout the environment instead of being worn." (Krueger 1991: XV) Such an orientation towards a minimalist and more subtle form of VR is undoubtedly close to the strategy of hypertextual literature, which must never be allowed to change its medium into a theme park for contemporary literature (i.e. Disneyland), in which the proportion of the use of internal literary techniques to the high-tech effects would lean in the favour of the latter.
When attempting to update in the sense of interactivity
as well as immersion into a relatively poor hypertextual
medium, the alternative is open between two considerably different options. The
first option is to design technoliterature as
authentic, text-based virtual reality, which gives the user the function of
role-player in textual games. Basic mediums for VR are not novels and dramas,
but also games, which take place in real time, meaning that the space of a text
opens in the direction of a ludic (game) culture. The
second option is to leave hypertext in the well established form of hyperfiction, which means that we do not want to hypertext
to be
Hypertext is also an "unencumbering immersion environment" if not looked at superficially in the sense of a sophisticated substitute for a book in a new high-tech medium, but as immersive 3-D landscape, made possible by that kind of perception when the user has enough sense also for fineries of the new, hypothetically speaking, techno-esthetics. If the reader only wants to co-operate in the fictional world intended by the text, this is not enough. The reader must change her/his attitude, which means that not only does s/he read the text, but also navigates between words and considers them as words-images and words-bodies. We will try to present this function of hypertext.
Hypertextual fiction is interactive literature. We are dealing with a complex interaction between the reader, the author and the medium. An especially important role is assigned to the reader, who has the opportunity to compound, take apart and recombine the story in a markedly individual manner, which is made possible by the author’s net of links. This means that a part of the author’s competence is transferred to the reader, who is, while reading, directed towards multisequential or multilinear reading. Hypertexts are abstract machines translating the linear syntagmas into a multidimensional net structure, composed of a number of texts, which are equal to the original, basic text. It is important that every part of the text can be opened as a link to another text and that the latter is not inferior to the preceding text as a kind of a remark (as in traditional texts), but is its wholly equal part. Creating a net out of links is therefore the basic driving force of hypertext, which is a nonlinear structure without an obvious connection of a specific unit with the preceding and the following one, without the obligatory before and after.
A word in hypertext is, as George P.Landow (the author of Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, 1992) explicitly points out, digital and not physical. It is not articulated by means of a record on a physical material, but is very manipulable and movable.Words in hypertext form a new class of words, which can be, as is the case of cyberpoetry, moved around in time and place, they can shake and jump, change form and colour, which means that they can take over functions they could not in the traditional medium of press, but only with the aid of a computer. Digital words are displayed as a parts of virtual text on computer screen (the "framing medium" of electronic writing), which is "a temporal rather than a structural unit" (Snyder 1997:8).
Hypertextual net acts centrifugally. It makes the reader go beyond the limits of a given text by switching to other connected texts. This is why hypertexts require of the reader imaginative interactive navigation through the given options. A text actually looks like a rhizome labyrinth lacking beginning and end, middle and boundary, so that the theoretics of hypertextual literature often resort to Borges’s text The Garden of Forking Paths. The reader is given the role of a detective and co-author, who has the task to realize and concretize the story out of the text with n-dimensions. That means that the user must overcome manual clicking by mental switching, taking to pieces and putting together. Besides Borges, different scholars mention as works announcing hypertext or practicing nonlinear writing in the traditional medium of print above all Joyce’s Ulysses, Stern’s Tristran Shandy and Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars.
Electronic linking in hypertext is a challenge also for literary theory, which in conceptualizing this medium resorts to structuralist and post-structuralist authors such as Julia Kristeva (intertextuality), Mihail Bakhtin (polyphony), Michel Foucault (power nets), G.Deleuze and F.Guattari (rhizome), R.Barthes and J.Derrida (author’s and reader’s altered role).
Hypertext is also an eminent immersion environment, a 3-D landscape, which leads the user into a unique subtle virtual reality without ‘disneyfication’ of the text’s structure. While describing hypertextuality in Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis, John Tolva resorted to Riemann’s cut and to the question of post-Euclidian geometry, based on the visualization of extra-dimensional space. When the reader surfs into the link, s/he expands traditional linear reading into the third dimension. "Like the cleft between flatland worlds, links add a spatial dimension to the primarily temporal medium of text" (Tolva 1996). Words in hypertext are also point-and-click interfaces for transition to new chunks/lexias of text, they enable reading at a deeper level. This means that they are not merely words in their semantic functions, but they are also words-images and words-bodies. During the process of reading, the reader sinks into them, watches and touches them. The word-image and the word-body are emancipated words. We do not only read them, but use them in a complex relationship including tactility. The current trendsetting culture is not only visual, but also tactile. It ‘hits’ its users, makes an impact on them with its high-tech effects, but the readers are also in a position to touch interfaces, to click the mouse, operate the switches and hit the keyboard. In his text Techno-literature on Internet cyberpoet Komninos Zervos points out that writers no longer put words into lines on 2-dimensional surface, but into 3-dimensional cyberspace in which the text moves around (Zervos 1997).
In The Beaubourg effect Jean Baudrillard writes about the affirmation of tactile perception in mass culture and reactualizes Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the subject of tactile nature of avant-garde and film from his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. "The work of art of the dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality." (Benjamin 1986: 43) Tactility can be achieved directly through powerful technical effects, which is the case with of virtual reality technology (one of the main challenges for its constructors is how to achieve convincing tactile feed-back). It can also be achieved in a more subtle way, for example, in literature. Visual and concrete poetry are already familiar with the tactile aspect of a word, which is in hypertext or cyberpoetry radicalized (the case of Komninos Zervos). Here should also mention Eduard Kac’s holographic poetry written as 3-D holograms.
The aim of hyperfiction is to experience the complex spatial organization, the main attraction of which arises from the nonlinear structure. Its aim is therefore not only to immerse into the intended artificial world by means of the text’s syntagmas. Curiosity as a driving force in linear literature is present, but in such a way that it directs a suspenseful search for new, hidden chunks of the text. One clicks to move further. In a way, one searches for lost treasure on a high-adrenalin trip between different options. In doing so, one does not read words as mere words, but looks at words-images and touches words-bodies. Identified with the cursor, one gropes through the labyrinth picking out building-blocks to create a new construction.
Such words as constituents of cybernetic literary, visual
and tactile culture are not to be found only in hyperfiction,
but also in other areas of cyberarts. Words,
functioning as elements of a landscape, building streets of virtual cities, are
included in Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (1990). This interactive
installation makes the reader able to go on a journey through different cities
(for example,
Rescuing the Word from the Stream of the Trivial
The medium of hypertext is a part of a current trendsetting computer culture, which aims at multimedia special effects, is global and, due to the links with transnational media, profane and trivial. Disneyfication, MTV-fication and McDonaldisation of its contents are a constant threat to its creative potentials. The question arising is whether the medium of hypertext is only fashionable hype and a form of trivialization of the word, which is in it transformed into digital raw material, intended for manipulation, infected with mainstream demands for Disneyfication and MacDonaldisation of all cultural contents. It is by no means self-evident that the answer is positive; the computer medium and the web are by no means a priori hostile towards written documents. On the contrary, the standpoint of the German scholar Hartmut Winkler (the author of Docuverse, 1997) is that on the web there is an explosive expansion in natural languages of written documents and that today we see a crisis of the visual medium rather than a crisis of writing. Similarly claims author and scholar Umberto Eco: "The present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a computer-oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen is that it hosts and display more alphabetic letters than images. The new generation will be alphabetic and not image oriented. We are coming back to the Gutenberg Galaxy again…" (Eco 1996: 297) In the same way a word can benefit from the hypertextual medium. It gains authority. The digital word-image and the word-body express in this way something more.
While trying to understand this phenomenon we will not take into consideration structural linguistics, semiotics and semantics, but rather Edmond Jabes’s (1912-1991) poetic philosophy based on thematization of a book, writing and word. What is interesting for and relevant to understanding the word’s role in hypertext, is Jabes’s visual and analytical view of writing and its units, therefore on word, letters and punctuation marks. He does not approach to words only in the function of the bearers of the meaning, but he analyzes them as a series of signs, which are coded in a special way and are in a suspenseful relationship with "letterless", empty spaces, that is with emptiness. In his text Answer (Ger. Antwort) he says, "In writing emptiness is absence, whiteness. Writing uses the space of emptiness, the stillness between one word and the other word, this makes words readable. Written words cannot be read, we know that, without the space between them and the moment of silence between spoken words makes them "hearable"." (Jabes 1995: 104) Knowing this makes us understand words on their background of emptiness, absence and silence. These elements are constituent for the word, for its rise from the background of silence. Jabes expressed this idea in a even more poetical way, "Like a star in the night, a word is in exile at the heart of a blank page. All words participate in this same exile." (Jabes 1985:30) A word is confronted with the whiteness of a blank page and therefore Jabes regards it as isolated. A word is for him also material, objectified; he has this in common with Paul Celan. This poet objectified and set the words and even its parts free. In his poem "Nightly Girded" he meditates about a word-a corpse, which is ritually prepared for its entrance into the new talk, "A word you know:/A corpse./Let us wash it,/Let us turn its eye/Toward heaven."(Glenn 1973: 83) A word on the background of whiteness is a part of a traditional, topographically fixed text, but a special suspenseful relationship between a word and the space of a non-word is essential for hypertext as a medium of spatial itineraries and trajectories, which includes actions of movement, that is mobile paths-links.
In hypertext, the role of that which is between, as "the third space that marks the site of encounter between the two nodes" (Odin 1997: 605), is also essential and decisive. What we have in mind, is the link and with it integrated time of transition from one word, sentence or chunk of text as a node to another. Links do not acknowledge spatial whiteness, emptiness and paper, but rather unmarked temporal emptiness such as depth and pause filled up with expectations. This emptiness is such that one can slip into it, fall or fly up high as if the expectation would reach escape velocity. Expectation, stimulated by curiosity about high-adrenaline experience of the unknown (for example, Poe’s Maelström) is essential and generates the tension, which is no lesser than with linear, crisis-intensified reading. Uncertainty arising with the click at a mouse is what the interactive texts are about. Clicking is always a procedure accompanied by intensive expectation of the effects following. Between two chunks of a text, there is a space, a sharp interruption of the preceding series and the transition to the following. Espen J.Aarseth says that "the main feature of hypertext is a discontinuity - the jump - the sudden displacement of the user’s position in the text". (Aarseth 1994: 69) The reader of a traditional text has all of it in front of him or her (in a form of a book or magazine), while in hypertext most of the text is hidden from the reader-user.
Navigation through words-images and words-bodies in hypertektual landscape takes place in complex time. It seems that in the moment of linking "nows" start to pile up. These "nows" are torn out of temporal continuum and form a certain between, which is constituent for reading and tension in hypertext. This is the between, which is characteristic of the apocalyptic moment. One waits for arrival of the unknown, one wants it. It seems that we are dealing with uncertain time following something no longer and preceding something not yet. This is time of expectation, the time nourishing the deepest dreams and mythic visions. Everything is left open, the link simulates a narrow door through which messianic word may enter. Such a between has therefore the function of Jabes’s emptiness, of whiteness in traditional writing and of Maurice Blanchot’s pause (Interruptions). The between gives rise to expectation of arrival of a new word. The word, which one awaits for with suspense, is a stressed word. (With "Follow me before the choices disappear", simulates Michael Joyce a kind of technosuspense in his Twelve Blue.) It has authority (semantic as well as that of image and body) and is rescued from trivialisation of words/images in the mainstream culture. It is rescued in such cases when it is carefully selected and creative, when it is in the nature of silence rather than in the nature of noise.
With the preceding observation we have actually captured the very essence of hypertext. Its technology on the basis of linked structure enables us to confront a word as something that is following suspenseful expectation and afterwards appears as a gift. This technology has a markedly creative function. It is not a source of trivialization, but it adds to the stressed role of the otherwise traditional medium of writing. All words are not (yet) given, but come out of the virtual depth. The task of the writer of hypertextual fiction and non-fiction (for example, technical texts) is not to let down the reader and her/his expectations. The user has to overcome the depth and the long between articulated with links to finally come to words-images and words-bodies. This is why the author must offer the reader carefully selected, rare and precious words. Although the writer is enchanted by the cybernetic medium, s/he must not forget Jabes’s The Book of Questions. The author’s creative task involves also the selection and forming of links, which must be such as to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense.
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