October 16, 2003
Ex Caverna
I got to spend my long weekend up at Brown University, where I met up with numerous digital media folks in literature and the arts, including several of my collaborators: Rachel, Noah, and William. I also got to talk with Robert Coover and Talan Memmott and see some of the work they (and Noah, and William, and others at Brown) have been doing in the TCASCV, where they’ve been bringing literature into virtual reality in the Cave Writing project.
I saw Screen (by Noah and other collaborators) finally, which I’ve seen documentation of but hadn’t gotten to experience. I also saw a dynamic word lattice that was part of Talan’s in-progress project and heard about William’s in-progress museum of words to rotate and manipulate. An A.R. Ammons poem has been used as the framework and text for one complete, elaborate piece; a piece called Hypertable provided a setting for several shorter works that incorporated texts in different ways, one of which is pictured here.
Cave Writing is an intriguing project. The new possibilities of 3D virtual environments lie in what they can do that ordinary environments can’t: allowing a space in which distant participants can be telepresent, fashioning physically impossible spaces, creating spaces with new physical laws. But these virtual spaces fail to do many things as well as ordinary space does. As when comparing a computer monitor and the printed page, virtual realities are not as high-contrast or high-resoluiton as what Richard Powers calls “NSR” (non-simulated reality). But they are certainly more dynamic, seeming as changable as chameleons and rapid as lightning. Coover pointed out that few people remember many lines from A.R. Ammon’s “In Memoriam Mae Noblitt” after seeing the virtual reality experience based upon it – and this was true in my case; I’d probably have remembered more if someone had simply recited it to me.
But the VR journey did highlight how quickly transforming a poem itself can be as it moves along, syllable by syllable, line by line – and how appropriate it is that “stanza” means “room.” However difficult or strange it may be to work on literary projects in such a space, the swiftly tilting rooms of this environment can call attention to the dynamics of a poem, what Robert Pinsky calls the poem’s “glorious speed and lordly indifference to old divisions and separations.” We’ve all had the discussion about whether or not computer environments (games and otherwise) are narrative; perhaps it is more interesting to figure out in what ways they are lyrical?
October 16th, 2003 at 4:02 pm
Susana suggested that a few years ago (The Lyrical Quality of Links, short paper, Hypertext ’99) but I’m not sure that the idea’s been followed up much?
I think both the lyrical and the episodic are good modes for new media…
October 16th, 2003 at 10:12 pm
I think the idea has only been followed up in a few contexts, as yet. I first knew of it from Robert Pinsky’s “The Muse in The Machine: Or, The Poetics of Zork,” published in The New York Times Book Review on March 19, 1995. (Not online, unfortunately, although a few important points are in the Pinsky speech linked above.) Susana’s idea to apply this to the way links work in hypertexts seems like it could be a fruitful one. Pinsky had some specific suggestions about how poetry’s qualities of speed (moving rapidly between images) and memory (aiding in the recall of words) were related to qualities of the computer.
I find poetry to be an essential figure for understanding interactive fiction in my analysis of that form in Twisty Little Passages. There are still many unexplored connections there, I’m sure, and many questions about how poetry and its qualities relate to other forms: hypertext, spaces that are simulated graphically on 2D screens (such as those seen in first-person shooters), and immersive spaces such as those offered at Brown.
October 17th, 2003 at 5:13 pm
For those who absolutely must know more about “The Poetics of Zork,” I’ve put a brief summary of it in my bibliography of interactive fiction.
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/bibliography/all.htm#Pinsky_1995
October 17th, 2003 at 5:59 pm
Thanks, Dennis – a good summary which I should have linked to. (I wish the article itself were online…) I actually had to use this as a link because your anchor tag has “#Pinsky_1995” as a name attribute instead of “Pinsky_1995”, which you may have intended.
October 17th, 2003 at 6:17 pm
Huh… I never noticed that. You’re right… but Win IE6 resolves the URL properly, even though I stupidly put “#” in the tag. I’ll add that to my list of “rainy day” fixes.