programming/general-discussion/ArtCom.43

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NOVEMBER 1990          NUMBER  43        VOLUME 10   NUMBER 9
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Welcome to ART COM, an online magazine forum dedicated to the 
interface of contemporary art and new communication technologies. 

You are invited to send information for possible inclusion. We are 
especially interested in options that can be acted upon: including 
conferences, exhibitions, and publications. Proposals for guest 
edited issues are also encouraged. Send submissions to: 
 
                    well!artcomtv@uunet.uu.net
                    artcomtv@well.sf.ca.us

Back issues of ART COM can be accessed on the Art Com Electronic 
Network (ACEN) on the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL), 
available through the CompuServe Packet Network and PC Pursuit. 

To access the Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL, 
enter  g acen  at the Ok: prompt. The Art Com Electronic 
Network is also accessible on USENET as alt.artcom.
For access information, send email to: artcomtv@well.sf.ca.us. 

*Guest Editor: Abbe Don
*Executive Editor: Carl Eugene Loeffler
*Editor: Anna Couey
*Systems: Fred Truck and Gil MinaMora

ART COM projects include:

ART COM MAGAZINE,  an electronic forum dedicated to contemporary art 
and new communication technologies.

ART COM ELECTRONIC NETWORK (ACEN), an electronic network dedicated to 
contemporary art, featuring publications, online art galleries, art 
information database, and bulletin boards.

ART COM SOFTWARE, international distributors of interactive video and 
computer art.

ART COM TELEVISION, international distributors of innovative video to 
broadcast television and cultural presenters.

CONTEMPORARY ARTS PRESS, publishers and distributors of books on 
contemporary art, specializing in postmodernism, video, computer 
and performance art.
 
ART COM,  P.O. Box 193123 Rincon Center, San Francisco, CA, 94119-3123, USA.
WELL E-MAIL: artcomtv TEL: 415.431.7524  FAX: 415.431.7841

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GUEST EDITORIAL: INTERACTIVE FICTION                           ABBE DON 
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Abbe Don, owner of IN CONTEXT, is an interactive multimedia artist and 
producer. Her interactive video "We Make Memories," which simulates the way her
great-grandmother told stories, has been exhibited nationwide. She has done 
research with Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group on the Guides project
which investigates the use of narrative and storytelling as a means of 
structuring and conveying information in large multimedia databases. She was 
also a guest artist at the Future Fiction Workshop in 1988 and 1990.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Is interactive fiction an oxymoron? If not, then what makes for both a 
meaningful storytelling experience as well as an engaging interactive one? And 
how does an artist accomplish this daunting task?

The next two issues of ART COM magazine explore a range of answers to these 
questions. Although many writers claim to be inspired by the conviviality of 
this emerging interactive medium, the discussion frequently focuses on 
well-funded projects emerging from corporations or big-name academic 
institutions. The authors included in the November and December issues of ART 
COM magazine write from a variety of disciplines with varying degrees of 
experience with computers, interface design, fiction, or narrative theory.  
Some are students new to the field while others are researchers who have been 
addressing these ideas for several years. 

At the risk of oversimplifying the issues, I will note that two common themes 
emerge. First,  many people recognize that this is a collaborative, 
interdisciplinary process. Second, we are simultaneously excited by the 
potential of this new medium, frustrated by the hardware and software 
limitations, and reluctantly accepting that in many cases, the theoretical is 
outpacing the actual.

The November issue focuses on the perspectives of participants in the Future 
Fiction class held at the California State University Summer Arts Workshop 
from July 29 to August 11, 1990.   In the course of two weeks, these artists 
tested their assumptions, pushed their creative and technical limits, and 
emerged with interactive works (produced in HyperCard) that acted as a 
catalyst for these essays.

This month also includes descriptions of two interactive videodisc projects: 
one on the subject of Gabriel Garcia Marquez produced at Santa Rosa Junior 
College,  and one entitled "LitDisc," a collection of original writings and 
readings produced by Yomama Arts in New York City.  Both describe content as 
well as process that might serve as models for other interactive media 
producers. 

Abbe Don
Guest Editor
abbe@well.sf.ca.us

--------------------------- MENU OF CONTENTS ---------------------------

1.  FICTIVE TEXT AS INTERFACE, Lou Lewandowski
2.  THE QUIET MOMENT, John Doyle
3.  THE POINT OF INTERACTION, Rachelle Reese
4.  aNTIhYPERdECONSTRUCTION, Rob Swigart
5.  FUTURE FICTION WORKSHOP FIELD REPORT, Paul Mansell
6.  THE GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ VIDEODISC PROJECT, Roger Karraker
7.  LITDISC: A STORYTELLING INSTALLATION ON VIDEODISC, George Agudow
8.  EXIT

-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 --------

                          FICTIVE TEXT AS INTERFACE

                               Lou Lewandowski

Lou Lewandowski is currently the Associate Dean of Graduate and International 
Studies at San Jose State University. She is the past co-ordinator of the 
interdisciplinary Creative Arts program and has taught creative writing. In 
addition, she has served as course co-ordinator for the Future Fiction class 
at the Summer Arts workshop in 1988 and 1990.  


It happened again. The "Future Fiction" course was announced, as it had been 
the first time it was taught (summer 1988), as one in which students would 
combine word, image, and sound as they wrote their fictive pieces. Some fine,
balanced pieces were completed (Burnette, 1990 and Reese, 1990). But the power 
of integrated images mesmerized most of us and visuals swallowed up much of 
the text. In many of the "fictions," in fact, text disappeared altogether.

So too, in much of the professional work demonstrated for class, text was 
missing except when essential for directing the user. Even projects which had 
originally begun as text-centered had evolved into pieces which, with a few 
clicks of the mouse, presented whole factual worlds, via images and even 
videotaped sequences.

Despite our fascination with the images, we were aware that some of the class 
projects and professional material didn't quite "work." It was merely 
interesting, not engaging. Questions arose: What is the function of visuals in 
hyperfiction? What's the difference between narrative used to give information 
and that used to create stories? What is "interactivity?"  Is text (i.e., the 
printed words on a page or screen) ever interactive? Is it less interactive 
than images? Is interactive fiction really possible?

I understand the term "interactive" in two senses--one traditional, one 
computer-interface related. Taken in the first sense, interactivity refers to 
the active exchanging of information through a medium. In this case, working 
on a puzzle may be a kind of interactivity; one gives shape to material that 
exists in potential through the puzzle pieces. A more common example, however, 
is that of probing for and receiving information of any sort through a 
computer screen. The other use of the term refers to a kind of information 
seeking and manipulating in hypertext systems which, by means of computer-
interfaced modes of information, allow a user to experience "dynamically 
changing content and structure" (Gygi, 1990). This kind of activity might be 
compared to putting together a three-dimensional puzzle that can take any 
number of forms.

It seems clear that the goal of either kind of interactivity is to allow the 
initiator of the activity a way of becoming engaged with the material at hand 
in a special way, one that calls upon him/her to create or re-create the 
information which exists, however potentially, on the other side of the 
medium. 

Given that goal, then, can fictive text--by itself or as part of a hypertext 
product--be an interface for interactivity?

As I argued during our discussions at Humboldt, surely we are all aware of 
SOMETHING happening when we read a good novel. Our brains are working 
furiously, our image-inations are rushing along, our emotions are engaged. All 
sorts of logic-seeking activities are going on: we fit scenes together in time 
which, in text, are chronological; we predict lines of narrative and even the 
ending of the work; we evaluate character traits and motives; in randomized 
modern novels we work even harder--looking for redundancy and parts of 
patterns, seeking form.
                                               
In doing all this with a piece of fiction we are creating a world which, the 
author hopes, is something like the one s/he created in the writing of the 
work. The truth is, however, that the reader's created world is unique, a fact 
borne out by the anger we often feel when a filmmaker creates a different 
world from the one WE made with the novel. It's interesting that, as we mature 
as readers, even illustrations detract from the special worlds we create from 
fictive pieces.

Do we do the same with other kinds of texts? Clearly not. College textbooks, 
for example, may engage us in logic-seeking activities like fitting parts 
together and relating similar chunks of information. Unless a casebook 
approach is used, however, we rarely find our emotions being used in the 
reading, and often the novelty of the subject matter inhibits our imaging of 
the material. However, diagrams and visualizations of all kinds (including 
innovative computer-based presentations) help the reader enormously in 
creating the world of fact the author is presenting.

Why this difference?  What is it that is working on the other side of the 
textual interface in a work of fiction? Abraham Moles argued some time ago (in 
INFORMATION THEORY AND AESTHETIC PERCEPTION) that works of art (including 
poetry and fiction) contain two kinds of information: semantic and aesthetic. 

Described simplistically, the words and sentence patterns shown on the page or 
screen comprise the semantic information; embedded in that semantic text, 
however, and released by our reading, is the aesthetic information--that 
which, by use of verbal symbol systems and imagistic couplings, encourages the 
creation of the worlds of human values and emotions we discover when we read 
novels. This second kind of information, says Moles, is infinitely 
interpretable and is untranslatable. That is why we are eager to see HAMLET
twenty times while we read a textbook only once.

Thus, the attempt at Humboldt to translate our works of fiction into images 
was, on one level, doomed to failure. Whereas creating worlds of pure image 
may enhance a factual text greatly, such efforts seem to turn fictional pieces 
into something game-like. Visuals added to illustrate the text, or to actually 
replace the text, tend to reduce tremendously the interactivity we expect with 
short stories and novels. These attempts reduce the piece to purely semantic 
information. Such action is anti-fictive; it produces denotative works rather 
than connotative ones, worlds in which the reader can move around and in which 
s/he can perhaps associate images but ultimately worlds in which the reader 
has no power to create.

If hyperfiction is ever to exist as a viable art form, writers must find a way 
to blend word and image and sound in ways which are not merely illustrative 
but also aesthetically extending, ways which leave open the possibility for 
the imaginative re-making of fictive worlds by the user, worlds that are even 
richer than those possible through the reading of text alone. Fictive 
interactivity, the kind of joy we experience in creating with a writer a world 
of human emotional experience, has united minds through space and time for 
over two thousand years. If we can make it work, hyperfiction may produce 
works that are even richer, and more interactive than ever.

NOTES

Burnette, Kay. "The Gardenias in My Mother's Garden." (Original Hyperfiction), 
1990.

Gygi, Kathleen. "Recognizing the Symptoms of Hypertext...and What to Do About 
It." THE ART OF HUMAN COMPUTER INTERFACE DESIGN. Brenda Laurel, ed. 
Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1990.

Moles, Abraham. INFORMATION THEORY and AESTHETIC PERCEPTION. Joel Cohen, 
trans. University of Illinois Press, 1966.

Reese, Rachelle. "Bus Stop." (Original Hyperfiction), 1990.


-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 --------

                               THE QUIET MOMENT

                                  John Doyle

John G. Doyle is a graduate student in the Educational Technology
Department at San Diego State University.  His current interest lies
in discovering motivational techniques to enhance learning capability.  He is
currently working on an "interactive fiction" piece using HyperCard to
teach Chapter 1 high school students critical thinking skills.


It's the most dreadful time when designing an interactive computer
program.  It's the time when procrastination reigns over determination,
when I've created something I know in my heart is not quite right, but I
don't know why.  I visualize the user's disappointment as she's yanked
from the reality I've so painstakingly designed into the realm of the little
black box.  I've lost her.

The engagement is over.                        

The importance of interface slaps me again across my left cheek, making me 
keenly aware of the complexity of designing human-computer interfaces that 
communicate, yet show no signs of communication. 

Some would call it "seamless."  I feel it's experiential.
    
I sit in agony rehashing previous projects and how I dealt with this
problem only to realize, again, that each problem is different from the
previous one.  When frustration becomes a lurking force, it drives me to shut 
down my computer in favor of a pleasant volleyball game in the sun.  "Yeah, 
that will help.  Just get away from this  @!^&#%* computer for awhile." 

As I leap into the air to take my aggressions out on an innocent leather 
sphere, I realize that I'm not having a good time; and I probably won't until 
I resolve this problem.  Does that force me back behind my 9" monochrome 
screen?  Heck no.  I let it boil inside me. Tuesday. Wednesday. Thursday.  The 
frustration becomes my alter-ego amiably residing on my spinal column between 
the third and fourth vertebrae, constantly reminding me of the importance of 
my user.

Sleeping is the only release, or at least I think it is.  4:00 AM, that's
before the sun dares to show its face.  I wake to do what most men forget
to do when they go to bed.  As I lay myself back down, I take note of the
constant stillness of the room.  A thought bolts into my head causing me to 
sit straight up staring at the blank wall.  Could it work?  My cautious side 
steps back and analyzes my discovery.  "Why not?  If I just...Yeah!"  An 
incredible flow of excitement takes over my mind.  "What if...?," followed by, 
"What if...?," continuing until my user is satisfied.  

I forget that I hate early morning.  Everything seems to fit together now.  My 
third and fourth vertebrae rejoice and tingle a bit.  It seems so obvious in 
concept.  Why all the agony?
   
What a sincere challenge it is to merge humans and computers without taking 
one or the other for granted.


-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 --------

                           THE POINT OF INTERACTION

                                Rachelle Reese

Rachelle Reese, an interactive fiction author, recently received her master's 
degree in English from San Jose State where she completed a HyperFiction piece 
entitled "Storyboard." She is currently working on a new piece entitled "Bus 
Stop" and  on an educational HyperCard stack about Australian aboriginals for 
Earthquest. 


"You are in a dark room, sitting on cold wet soil.  You hear a repetitive 
knocking noise above your head."

Writers of interactive adventure games often use a second person point of view 
to involve users in a story.  Each user takes his/her place as a character 
within a plot filled with violence, intrigue, and eventually, after numerous 
fictional deaths, a happy ending and a pat on the back. After 977 repeated 
attempts and an entire week of nights spent sleepless, trying to explain 
his/her battle plan in basic sentences, s/he has managed to kill the monsters 
and return the world to its idyllic state. And what does s/he feel? What kind 
of understanding has s/he come to over the course of the battle s/he so 
gallantly fought? Monsters usually attack very four or five moves, unless you 
have on your ring of extra protection--if x is false and y > 4 then produce 
encounter.

In an essay entitled "Interface as Mimesis," Brenda Laurel suggests that 
adventure games are more fulfilling when the user is led to feel like s/he is 
experiencing the adventure first person, rather than giving orders to a system 
which then tells him/her the consequences of his/her orders on the action 
behind the scenes. And as far as allowing the user to feel more caught up in 
the world of the game, her notion of "first-personness" seems to work. A user 
feels much more involved with a game which presents him/her with animated 
monsters to fight by aiming an arrow and pulling back the string.

However, no matter how physically interactive the interface is, the experience 
of the adventure game is strictly intellectual. The user tries to second guess 
the developer--to solve his/her puzzles, defeat his/her monsters and avoid 
situations which result in death. On the other hand, a good piece of fiction 
engages its readers in some emotional way with what is going on in the story. 

The reader does not literally play a character in the story, but somehow 
identifies with one. That character interacts with other characters on an 
emotional level and the reader follows, and sometimes even experiences, those 
emotions.

Allowing the phenomenon of character identification to occur in an interactive 
context seems to require the developer to create a "user-character" and invite 
the user to interact within the framework of story through the eyes, hands and 
lips of that character.  A writer of interactive fiction must develop a 
"user-character" as conscientiously as a writer of paper-based fiction 
develops a protagonist, and the user should be filled in on how the "user 
character" thinks and feels about the things happening around him/her 
gradually, as the feelings of a protagonist might be revealed in a novel.

In "Bus Stop," an interactive fiction I developed during the CSU Summer Arts 
workshop on Future Fiction, the user is introduced into the role of the "user 
character" by clicking around a sparsely furnished bedroom. Gradually, s/he 
learns that the person whose bedroom s/he is in reads a certain type of book, 
keeps a diary and has "ghosts" in the chest of drawers with stories of their 
own. Gradually s/he assumes the role of the person who sleeps in the unrumpled 
bed. However, at this point the user only has a vague idea of the character 
whose hand s/he points with. S/he has only entered the person's mind briefly 
and then only to see snapshots from the memory album. It is when the user 
guides the hand to pick up the telescope and focus it on the people at the bus 
stop, that the story inside the "user character" begins to unfold.  The user 
sees the people at the bus stop through the eyes of the character s/he is 
playing--and since that character is a voyeur who projects her own past, 
present, and fantasies onto the people she watches, the user begins to 
understand more and more about the role s/he is playing. By the time the 
fantasies of the "user character" climax and she puts the telescope back on 
the window sill, the user understands the root of the character's obsessions 
and has felt her emotional swings. The user also understands that the 
character has deluded herself, once again, into thinking that her demon has 
been destroyed.

The "user character" is not a "you" persona, but it is not a "she" or a "he" 
persona either. The "user character" is a role which is assumed by the user 
while s/he is experiencing the work of fiction. Other characters within the 
story should address her as "you," talk to other about her as "she" and her 
own diary should refer to her as "I." Her thoughts can be implied through the 
articles around her and what they mean to her or through what others say she 
has said. However, an author should be subtle in revealing a "user 
character's" thoughts in order to shape but not dictate the user's experience. 
In an interactive work of fiction the user's (and therefore the "user 
character's") actual experience and what s/he takes from it will differ from 
user to user and even from time to time.

NOTES

Laurel, Brenda K. "Interface as Mimesis." USER CENTERED SYSTEM DESIGN: NEW 
PERSPECTIVES ON HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION.  Donald A. Norman and Stephen W. 
Draper eds. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.

Reese, Rachelle. BUS STOP. Original interactive fiction created in HyperCard, 
1990.

-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 ---------------

                           aNTIhYPERdECONSTRUCTION

                                 Rob Swigart

Rob Swigart is a novelist, science fiction writer, hypermedia hacker and 
conceptual maverick.  He teaches Interactive Fiction in the English Department 
at San Jose State University and has been the lead instructor of the Future 
Fiction class at the Summer Arts Workshop in 1988 and 1990.


So-called hypermedia offers opportunities for new narrative: interaction, 
mixed-media, electronic digits that ebb and flow through the noosphere can 
carry units of story (narrative units, NITS), have done so and will continue. 
More and more the planetary network carries tides of storytelling, from 
Eastern European peaceful revolution or tanks in Tienanmen to Peter Jennings 
face to face with Saddam Hussein the Golgotha monster. These stories, which 
are not true at all, and are also completely true, alter our perceptions, 
shape our take on global culture.
                                               
Images are there, and sounds (the grit of sand in the air filters of American 
helicopters, or the Cajun music in the desert), and smells (hot wind, the 
polluted Danube, rotting bodies of Kurd children gassed from the air), and 
touch (Gorby's warm handshake?), not to mention the taste of poverty on the 
tongue. Religious fundamentalists want to stomp out fantasy because it leads 
to devil worship, prevent Texans from studying yoga, for the same reason; they 
want to wage holy war on someone, us, or some other neighbor. They have faces 
distorted by rage, or is it fervor?

So far all this material is relentlessly post-modernist: earthquake victims 
weeping over the bodies of their neighbors flow seamlessly into an equal 
admonishment to purchase a brand-name pie crust, and carry nearly equal 
emotional weight. 

Television was a centralized medium, totalitarian, heavy-handed, a little dull 
in a Richard Nixon fifties way. In the eighties it proliferated, along with 
fax and satellites, decentralized into cable and VCR, timeshifted, xeroxed, 
montaged and mosaicked, and the world fell apart like bread dissolving in a 
fluid of hyperactive hypermedia. And all this just as we thought we were 
learning to cope with television, now hopelessly out of date. Minds now MTVed, 
destructured. Deconstructed.
                                              
Should we get in and co-opt it? Teach HyperCard in kindergarten? We need to 
dip our hands and tongues into this swirling media effluent, pull out the nits 
that will make stories meaningful, give shape to world, or shapes individual, 
personal, local.

There's a lot of raw raw material out there.

It's why we're so confused, so we might as well make it conscious. We're doing 
it all the time anyway.

-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 --------

                     FUTURE FICTION WORKSHOP FIELD REPORT

                                 Paul Mansell

Paul Mansell has a master's degree from the Educational Technology Department 
at San Diego State University. He is currently the programmer on the Telephone 
2000 project.


Those of us who participated in the CSU Summer Arts Workshop on Future Fiction 
experienced an intense two weeks. During morning lectures, we explored the 
meaning of interactive fiction; surveyed the evolution of computer fiction; 
and discussed technical issues. In the afternoon and evening, we focused our 
energies on designing and developing interactive fiction using the software 
authoring tool HyperCard.

I needed a week to decompress once it was all over. 

During those two weeks, we spent a lot of time talking about interactivity. My 
first view towards this concept was in terms of stimulus-response. An image is 
presented on the computer screen and the user spontaneously pushes a button or 
clicks on a mouse. Users interacting with action games display this behavior. 
They see and do.

As the discussions evolved, my outlook towards interactivity changed. 
Hypermedia fiction requires a different set of responses. Users need to be 
engaged in making mediated responses--responses that draw them into the story 
and let them take control over the story. 

The most rewarding aspect of the class was collaborating. I came to Humboldt 
State as part of a software design and development team. Each of us had 
specific responsibilities: project management, graphic design, narrative 
development, HyperTalk scripting. 

Our team's planning sessions would go on for hours. We recursively tackled 
issues. Repeatedly, we revisited issues that we had hashed out only minutes 
before. We ended up discarding 90% of the ideas that we generated.  Ideas that 
first seemed hot quickly cooled. Often we had to settle for "kludges"  as we 
waited for the right idea to emerge. This running in circles forced me to 
place a premium on respecting my colleagues and maintaining an optimistic 
attitude.                                      

I left Humboldt State realizing that I knew few answers to future fiction. 

However, I am excited about being part of the process that might supply them.

-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 --------

                 THE GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ VIDEODISC PROJECT

                                Roger Karraker

Roger Karraker is a journalism instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College and an 
interactive video producer.

Earlier this year I led a small team of volunteers in creating an
interactive videodisc and accompanying computer resource materials
about the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The disc
contained more than 400 video items: documentary clips, maps, paintings,
segments from eight movies written by Garcia Marquez, and Colombian
songs and music.
        
For the accompanying computer resource materials, we obtained bibliographies, 
full text articles, even verbatim interviews with Garcia Marquez.  We used 
Apple Computer's HyperCard program to create inter-related "stacks" of
information where the data chunks were able to control the videodisc and
play video items from that visual/aural database.
        
The videodisc was designed to accompany a spring semester project
at Santa Rosa Junior College called Work of Literary Merit, where
1500 or so beginning English composition students studied
GarciaMarquez's novel 
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE.
       
Our project had no institutional recognition or budget. We just
wanted to see if we could create something useful in a short period of
time with essentially no resources and a small team--two instructors,
three students, one staff programmer and the help of the college's audio-
visual staff.
        
We also had the kind assistance of friends at ABC News Interactive,
Apple Computer, the Sundance Institute, Fox/Lorber Associates and
several other individuals and organizations.
        
Our original plan, to dub the entire second audio track in Spanish,
was abandoned when our volunteer translators could not meet our
production deadline. To have delayed the disc would have meant that
students would not have been able to use it while studying Garcia

Marquez's book.                                
       
I have a parallel interest in searching electronic databases so we
combined my interests to acquire print resource materials. We searched
several Dialog databases and acquired --in violation of Dialog's rules --
bibliographic abstracts that students could search in the HyperCard stack to 
find additional data on Garcia Marquez.
       
I also used CompuServe's Electronic News Service (ENS) to create an
automatic "clipping" folder that searched eleven news wires and "clipped" full
text of all the articles mentioning Garcia Marquez or Colombia. In this
fashion students were able to follow the bloody election campaign in
Colombia and the parallels to the events portrayed in ONE HUNDRED YEARS 
OF SOLITUDE, with a degree of detail that far surpassed even the best U.S.
newspapers.
        
I couldn't find a graphic image that worked as an opening title for
the videodisc or as an intro to the computer interface. So I asked my wife,
an artist, to paint an illustration that showed major characters from the
book, as well as other elements such as art, music and the environment.
We hung the painting in the English Department Macintosh classroom and a
black-and-white digitized version became the user interface for the
HyperCard stacks of resource materials.        
        
For example, clicking on the image of Ursula, the grandmother, took
students to essays and videodisc segments concerning family structure,
the roles of women, etc. Clicking on the banana plantation in the
background brought up materials on colonialism, the United Fruit Company and
the banana workers' strike (a central element in the book), even segments
on the modern destruction of the tropical rain forests.
        
Within four months, we had created a one-sided interactive
disc, designed an innovative user interface and had amassed more than
seven megabytes of textual resource materials that were linked to
segments on the videodisc. Many of our students -- but fewer than we
would have wished -- used the disc to help research their print term
papers.
        
At semester-end we took those print term papers, imported them
into HyperCard stacks and quickly and easily annotated the papers with
video clips, stills, music and maps located on the CAV videodisc.
        
What we learned:
        

1. It's not that tough to create a good interactive videodisc if you use
existing video source material. Essentially you edit a 30-minute
videotape, a visual database of clips, sounds, paintings, slides, maps, etc.
I estimate we spent 400+ hours of logging tapes, getting permissions,
creating an edit decision list, and editing tape.
        
2. Shooting new video is slow, expensive and difficult. It's much better to
steal the good stuff from motion pictures and documentaries. Get
permissions if you can (We got permission to use excerpts from six of
Garcia Marquez's films). If you can't get permission, don't steal so much
from a single source that you infringe on copyright.
        
3. The slowest part of the process was shooting artwork (everything from
Picasso to Colombian artist Fernando Botero to my friend, the Colombian
artist Gabriel Sencial). It is very difficult to frame, focus, get correct
color balance, etc. We used a team of four and rarely got faster than one
slide per minute. Worst of all, creating the HyperCard slide database is
incredibly labor-intensive. If you don't have guaranteed labor to compile
your database, use the smallest number possible. Significantly, ours isn't
finished yet.
        
4. You can create an integrated videodisc/HyperCard setup for very little
money. It cost only about $500-$700 to create a single "one-off"
videodisc. Replicating a disc costs about $2,000 for a single-sided master
and about $10 for each copy. Be careful about replicating for sale if you
haven't obtained copyright clearance for the items on your disc.
        
5. Most importantly, pick a project that will be of interest far into the
future. Don't assume that teachers or students will necessarily flock to
your creation. The more you can involve teachers and students in the
production process the more likely they will be to use the disc. It's quite
possible to thumb your nose at the institution, then go ahead and create
your disc. But more people will see and use your creation if you can
arrange institutional cooperation.
        
I'd like to hear more from others who have created interactive projects.
You can reach me by telephone or electronic mail. Please don't write.
        
Roger Karraker, journalism instructor
Santa Rosa Junior College
707/527-4440
Internet: roger@well.sf.ca.us
Applelink: U0613

-------------- A R T  C O M / NOVEMBER 1990 / VOL. 10(9) / #43 --------

              LITDISC: A STORYTELLING INSTALLATION ON VIDEODISC

                                George Agudow

George Agudow is co-director of Yomoma Arts and program co-ordinator at the 
Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University.

We came at this project from the point of view of a typical luddite, low-tech 
arts organization not particularly enamored of machines but wanting 
desperately to reach the huddled masses who can't bear to drag themselves away 
from their TV sets.  How is a live reading going to compete with the 
"Terminator"?   First of all you forget about art and your basic distrust of 
technology and try turning some basic assumptions upside down.  Let's bring 
the videos to THEM.  Let's put a reading where you can't miss it -- on your 
corner, in your backyard -- and let it run all day.  Let people play with it, 
let them tag one wall of the kiosk with graffiti.  Feature the faces, the 
accents, the language you hear on the street, in the subway -- English, 
Spanish, Chinese.  Mix it up!                  

We took our inspiration from the video displays that can be found outside of 
Times Square movie theaters -- they invariably draw a crowd by condensing two 
hours worth of special effects -- explosions, crashes, gunshots -- into a hot 
two minute tape loop.  Couldn't this same idea work for storytelling, if the 
stories, and the performances were compelling enough?

In many respects, the idea succeeded quite well.  Audiences have responded 
well to the installations -- they are always surprised, initially by the 
intervention of the the object (the kiosk is over 6 feet tall) into their 
normal frame of reference, and then by the stories they hear.   As in any work 
of complicated public art, there were monetary, technical and logistical 
obstacles to get around.

Raising funds was, to put it mildly, a challenge.  Fortunately, the Literature 
Program of the New York State Council on the Arts made a leadership grant 
which launched the production phase of the project. The late Gregory 
Kolovakos, who directed the Lit Program, had confidence that our track record 
of producing accessible, multicultural literary events would translate into a 
new, untried format.  The Architecture and Design Program of the Council 
likewise embraced the multimedia aspects of the project.  Our strong 
relationship with municipal government resulted in other public funds.  These 
were the exceptions -- in general we found that LitDisc was not "literary" 
enough for foundations interested in promoting literature and not "arty" 
enough for those who support video art. 

The other factor that took us by surprise was the "dirty words" problem.  It 
never occurred to us that language would become an issue with this project.  
Even though we have produced many public events where profanity or sexual 
references were part of the works presented, LitDisc took matters to another 
level.  Because this electronic performance was permanent, some potential 
"hosts" for the installation freaked out at the thought of someone saying 
"fuck" several hundred times in their space.  Needless to say we sought other 
sites, but it is definitely something that anyone working with public art 
should consider.  Thank you Mr. Helms.

LitDisc: The Formal Description 

"A space, an artist, an audience."  That is Kwok, one of the artists who 
appears on LitDisc, talking about creating and performing in NYC today.  This 
elemental notion is also at the heart of LitDisc's pilot project that uses a 
videodisc player housed in a sculptural kiosk to bring the performances of a 
diverse group of writers and storytellers to unexpected public sites 
throughout the city.  LitDisc is a unique performance opportunity for artists, 
as well as a way to bring storytelling into public life in a typically New 
York "in your face" style.  LitDisc makes the entire city a performance space.

The intent is to use technology to bring a cross-cultural artwork to urban 
audiences that might never make the trip to alternative performance spaces, 
museums or galleries.  The execution is straightforward -- two monitors in an 
eye-catching kiosk that continuously present five performances and related 
biographical segments.  The installation can be plugged into a wall outlet or 
draw on its internal battery power for outdoor sites.  It is meant to go 
anywhere -- to show up unexpectedly on a street corner, a building lobby or a 
park.  The emphasis is on the voices and faces of the artists, not the 
technology.

Kwok, originally from Hong Kong, is joined by Bruce Benderson (New York), 
Marithelma Costa (Puerto Rico), Kurt Lamkin (Philadelphia) and Kelvin C. James 
(Trinidad).  Their stories, poems and biographical portraits make up the 30 
minute disc.  Viewers can enjoy the entire program or can use a bar-code 
scanner to select particular "chapters." 

LitDisc has been seen in various NYC locations -- outdoors at the Greenmarket 
at Union Square Park and Schomburg Plaza in Harlem, and indoors at The East 
Harlem Music School, New York State Council on the Arts, Empire State College, 
and Brooklyn Arts and Cultural Association Downtown.  LitDisc was also 
featured at the IICS show "Chroniclers of the Media Age:  Artists and 
Historians Use New Technology" at the New York Historical Society and will be 
a part of the Performance Studies International Conference at NYU's Tisch 
School of the Arts in October.  

LitDisc is a project of Yomoma Arts, Inc. a non-profit, tax-exempt cultural 
organization which has presented free music, performance and literary events 
in New York City since 1984.  

LitDisc Credits:

Co-Directors of Yomoma Arts and LitDisc: George Agudow, Eric Darton.  
Production Manager on LitDisc: Kiersta B. Fricke.
Technical Director:  Kyle Chepulas 
Principal Videography and Sound:  Jorge A. Gonzalez, Marianne Petit.
Editing: Bernadine Colish.
Kiosk Design: Lea H. Cloud, AIA; Victoria A. Rospond, AIA of CR Studios.  
Principal funding for LitDisc was provided by the Literature and Architecture 
Programs of the New York State Council on the Arts and the NYC Department of 
Cultural Affairs.

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