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an interview with Espen Aarseth Espen Aarseth is Associate
Professor, Dept. of Humanistic Informatics, Univ. of Bergen
since 1996. His research interests are Aesthetics of
Cybermedia, Ergodic Literature, Hypertext, MUDs, Computer
Culture Studies, and History of media thechnology. He has
widely published on these topics and is well known as the
author of "Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature", one of the most thoughtful and challenging
publications in the field. Roberto Simanowski talked
with Espen Aarseth about hypertext resaerch and curricula in
Norway, about classifications and categorisations, MUDs, the
new umbrella term medium, and the distinction between art
and commerce. dd:
Espen, you were teaching "Hypermedia og
Nettverkskommunikasjon" (hypertext of network
communication). What exactly is this course
about? EA: That was an old
60course, which I don't really remember that well anymore.
Just a web ghost now, I suppose. I am not teaching much this
year or next; this year I am working on an open source
digital learning environment using MOO, and next year I am
comissioned to write a book on digital power and culture for
the Norwegian Power Structures Survey, as a small part of a
big four year research project funded by Norwegian
government. dd:
You are the head of "cyber/media/culture", a
multidisciplinary project in your department, that aims to
provide an environment for cooperation and growth, gathering
researchers and practitioners in the broad field of
humanistic cyberstudies. Could you tell us a little about
your experiences with this project and about the role this
topic plays in the academic field in Norway? EA: As in all other
countries, this is a new field, and there is no fixed way of
teaching and research yet. A lot is going on in many
different places, but largely uncoordinated and mostly
small-scale. This is changing now, witness for instance the
"Nordic Interactive" initiative (http://www.nordic-interacti
ve.org), an attempt
to bring "Scandinavian design" to digital media. In my
department, we are, as of January 2000, five (out of six)
researchers working in various subfields of digital culture.
15 months ago, there was just me. Obviously, the field is
expanding rapidly, and takes different paths depending on
the interests of the people involved. In Bergen, I hope we
will be able to combine critical and exploratory
perspectives, doing both criticism and design; programing
and cultural/aesthetic theory, and training the same
students in both. The C/M/C-project is an umbrella for all
our pratical and theoretical projects, and has so far been
funded nicely by the Norwegian Research Council, among
others, which has made the DAC-conferences
possible. dd:
The title of your book "Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic
Literature" already shows that you are very critical
regarding common terms, as well as common assumptions like
'freedom of the reader' and 'death of the author'. How does
the term Cybertext differ from more traditional terms such
as Hypertext, and what does Ergodic Literature
mean? EA: In constructing
the term Cybertext, I wanted to show that there are many
forms and machinations of text, of which hypertext (in the
node-link sense) is just one. Hypertext was at that time
(early 90s) getting all the attention, and I wanted to
change that, by constructing a larger perspective. But both
"hypertext" and "cybertext" are, it seems to me, ideological
constructs rather than actual technologies. The term Ergodic, on the
other hand, is an attempt to define the quality that is so
inapropriately usually referred to by "interactive"; a
hopelessly unfocussed and ill-conceived term, completely
void of analytic meaning. I needed a word for texts that was
structured in more complex ways than standard, sequential,
written discourse, and "ergodic", meaning a path constructed
by some kind of work, fit the bill. dd:
You are calling "hypertext" and "cybertext" ideological
constructs. Does this mean, one should stay away from any
umbrella-term and typologies? What are the "actual"
technologies? EA: Classifications
and categorisations, if constructed carefully, can only be
useful. Words like that will always have ideological
connotations, but as long as they are part of a well-defined
theoretical framework, the risk is acceptable. We must of
course never confuse the theoretical concept, say hypertext,
with the numerous material "incarnations", from Hypercard to
XML, to name a few. Few researchers define "hypertext" in
the same way, however, which indicates that hypertext is not
a technology, but rather a dream of a technology. In other
words, a (scientific) ideology. dd:
In your article "Nonlinearity" in "Hyper/Text/Theory",
edited by Geprg P. Landow (Johns Hopkins University
Press,1994. S. 78) you write: "a MUD can not be read, only
experienced". How does the MUD as adventure game or
immersive storytelling fit into the field of digital
literature? EA: Only by its
eventual contributions to literary language. The players in
a MUD generally do not regard what they do as literature, so
why should we? Btw, the phrase "immersive storytelling" is
meaningless to me; all storytelling is immersive, unless it
is really bad storytelling. (It reminds me of that really
stupid term "interactive games".) dd:
Well, the term "immersive storytelling" might be
misunderstood. It is meant to stress the different ways in
which stories are received. While the audience was much more
involved with reading books and seeing plays in the 18th
century (sometimes theater directors were even forced not to
let Hamlet die) the viewers in theaters have learned to keep
themself controlled, the readers have learned to see what is
happening at a distance. However in the present time, MUDs
immerse the reader directly into the story, because it is
their own story. EA: What goes on in
MUDs is not storytelling, but something else. It may contain
elements that are also associated with storytelling, but so
does, say, taking a dog for a walk, or talking to your
neighbour. To comment on the quote from my book, a MUD is an
ephemeral phenomenon, with innumerous, mutually exclusive
perspectives, and no one can have a total view of it all.
And even if everything was recorded, the reading of such a
recording will not reproduce the MUD, it will only be some
kind of museum. On the other hand, there are
MUDs (especially MOOs) that are being used for selfconscious
literary experiments, and I think that as far as
"Literature" is concerned, these experiments are much more
easily fitted in the "Literary paradigm" than adventure
games. Which is not to say that they are neccessarily more
interesting in themselves. dd:
In the same article you ask: "How can reviewers of
cybertext face the fact they probably missed large numbers
of scriptons?" You suggest "a shift in method from a
philological to an anthropological approach in which the
object of study is a process (the changing text) rather than
a project (the static text)." What exactly would this shift
involve? EA: We are just
starting to find out. How do you review a multiuser computer
game such as Quake III Arena? By rating your opponents? A
good player will have a very different experience from that
of a poor player. Perhaps the best way to find out is by
looking at actual computer game reviews and how that genre
is different from other types of reviews. Perhaps the
difference is not that great, in which case my initial
concern was completely unneccesary. dd:
Do you know of any reviews that might serve as examples
of how one should approach cybertext? EA: It depends on the
context. There is a big but natural difference between the
reviews you find at places like Firingsquad.com and say, a
scholarly paper discussing the same types of games. Both
have their uses. But to answer your question, my notion of
cybertext is so broad that there is no one ideal
way. dd:
In your book "Cybertext," in the chapter "Textonomy: A
Typology of Textual Communication" you stress that, "Since
there are paper texts that function more like some digital
texts than other texts in the same physical medium, the
paper-digital dichotomy cannot be given analytical power as
such ..." (59) This is clear with respect to hypertextual
printed texts such as I Ching (ca. 1000 B.C.), Marc
Saporta's Composition No. 1 (1962) or Randi Strand's
Norisbo (1992). Therefore your conclusion about the
inapropriateness of the paper-electronic dichotomy is quite
understandable. But there are other digital texts that may
not be found on paper and will never be found there: texts
which include sound and animated pictures, texts which
immediately respond to an interactive, collaborative set up.
In the light of this, couldn't one still employ the term
digital as distinktive and thus defining? EA: I often do so
myself. "Digital" is a much more honest word than say,
"interactive," or even "cybertext". As long as we are clear
that it only means something that is, in some way,
computer-mediated. Being digital does not signify much in
itself; there are so many digital ways of being, that by
itself it tells us very little. That there are radical
digital works means that some works are more radical than
others, not that they are more digital than
others. And the example you
mentioned: "texts which include sound and animated
pictures", those are far from impossible on paper! My
daughter has several such books, with figures that move when
you open the page, and buttons that make sounds when
pressed. It doesn't have to be digital, but the ideology of
information technology makes us see it that way. Or, should
I say, makes us blind that way. dd:
What will the Cybertext of the next millenium be like?
Given the growing 'multimedialisation' of the net, will we
need another term besides text? EA: We have one:
Medium. The natural corollary to cybertext is
cybermedium/-media. As for what the next millenium will
bring, I am not too eager to speculate. The future is not
nearly as interesting as the present. Not to mention the
past. dd:
"Medium" might be the best term in deed. There is only one
problem: it does not distinguish between fictional and
nonfictional text, not between art and commerce just as
"digital" does not. Do we need a distinction like this at
all, or will, for example, Flash-Aesthetics flatten
commercial and artistic websites anyway? EA: Personally, I
find the distinction between art and commerce to be a
completely commercial one. Artists need it to sell their art
as art. There may be a good philosophical argument for such
a distinction, using aesthetic considerations only, but I
have yet to find it. The best counter-example these days is
commercials in TV series, which are often more enjoyable
than the series themselves. Of course, I also find the
distinction between fiction and non-fiction rather
fictional. But these are not really distinctions, merely
cultural prejudices. Finally, the last part of
your question seems to invoke that old McLuhan
clichée, but I believe that the media serve the
messages, rather than dominate them completely. We choose
the media that serve us. dd:
Thank you very much for the interview and good luck for
your work on cybertext and cybermedia. |
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