Gimlé

Dust or Magic Conference Report (Part Two).

Ideas. My disgust for those who reduce a work to its ideas. My revulstion at being dragged into what they call “discussion of ideas.” My despair at this era befogged with ideas and indifferent to works.
Milan Kundera—The Art of the Novel.

I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with hypertext.

I remember sitting, locked in fascination, in front of my dad’s Mac SE, playing with a few Hypercard stacks that he had acquired from God-knows-where.

I remember being around sixteen when I bought my first modem ten years ago and had, for the first time, the freedom to explore on my own on the net, to wander from mad homepage to mad homepage. A world of personal story with barely a commercial venture in sight.

I was sixteen, hooked, and I remember being annoyed beyond belief.

The concept of hypertext has always fascinated me and at the same time infuriated me.

I’m a sap. If you can’t write a story that plucks at my heart’s strings then you’re incompetent (I’m a Capra fan for crying out loud). Loved Notting Hill, thought Titanic was the living equivalent of Purgatory (proving my ‘incompetence’ statement). I blubbered at the end of Toni Morrison’s Sula. Felt heartbroken at the end of The Third Man. Mourned at the end of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

When it comes to cheap, emotional closure, I’m easy. So why haven’t I found a hypertext that affected me?

Eastgate’s more famous hypertexts were an interesting exercise but if you want confusion then Pynchon and Paul Auster did it in a more emotionally effective way.

But there’s something there.

Social software? Bah, humbug. When I want people’s opinion or input in something I read, I’ll ask them.

I just want a well told story

A different kind of story. Told in a different kind of way.

It’s only recently that the web began to, in my mind, fulfill its promise of being a public medium. The well crafted equivalent of a good pub chat with the other regulars. Like being in a campus pub at a college that has the majority of the country’s best conversationalists as daily regulars.

Like a pub where you can tune out the loud drunk in the back but keep on chatting with the physicist and the priest on ethics in science.

And Mark Bernstein’s talk (The Eastgate Story) on the second day of Bob Hughes’s Dust or Magic conference makes me think that the same might be happening to hypertext literature.

You can quite fairly assume that anyting smart or profound in the following text can be attributed to the presention that I’m rehashing, summarising, pondering and analysing at that point.

Proving that I need to catch up with what he’s been publishing in the last couple of years. The HTML hypertexts in Eastgate’s Reading Room do not look promising. Ugly, ugly, ugly. I’d bin any print novel that had equivalent aesthetics. HTML with stylesheets does not have to look that plain.

And, yes, I have returned a book because its typographic design was horrid, unattractive and unreadable. I see no reason to give HTML works more leeway when i know web design can easily be much more attractive and readable.

Civilized Software and Cottage Industry Publishing.

Civilized software. Respect for art and science. Human values. Literate computing.

It seems that Mark, in the first few minutes of his presentation managed to sum up the hopes and desires all of us had towards computers. Conjuring up an image of digital culture rather than simple digital consumerism.

Balanced. He pointed out that the state of hypertext critique (or new media critique for that matter) was horrid.

But the fact that Eastgate, the epitomy of a niche publisher, is still around gives us hope for the future.

And the past. As he gave us an overview of how far hypertext has come in the last twenty years, one thing became obvious.

Most of the fears turned out to be baseless. Legibility, especially with recent flat panel screens is not an issue, anymore.

He took issue with the longevity/archivability argument (“It won’t last”) pointing out, quite rightly, that texts will last as long as somebody cares.

Although he conveniently ignores the countless times in history where we didn’t know we cared until it was too late. We only know the Greek tragedies that the Arab scholars cared about (scholars in the same city that we are now bombing the shit out of).

Quite a few of the texts that were noted for their quality in contemporary Greek writing are lost to us.

But archivability is not a digital problem. 90% of the 20th century’s literature and film is out of print. We risk future historians regarding the Twentieth Century as a cultural wasteland if we’re not more careful (although preserving some works might only emphasise and strengthen our future ‘wasteland’ status).

The problem in digital art is not archivability (which is something we’ve never had the knack for, really) but openness.

I can’t read Storyspace hypertexts on my iBook running Gentoo Linux. Nor can I view flash files.

I’ve got no issue with authoring tools being closed but closing the format and the player software as well is just begging for obsolescence, isolation and dissappearance.

At least Eastgate controls its own authoring tools. Others are beholden to Macromedia, vainly believing that Macromedia will continue to view Director as a profitable enterprise in perpetuity.

Want to release a FreeBSD and Linux version of your cd-rom work?

Tough.

Even if you could prove that it would be a profitable enterprise for your publishing company, you’d still have to prove to Macromedia that many more of you would be interested in a Linux version of Director as well. Which is not likely if you are a niche publisher catering for a specialist market (which, if you are a new media/hypertext publisher, you almost certainly are).

Being indebted to a large corporation and tied to a closed proprietry format is destructive for a small scale, cottage industry, digital publisher.

You are not independent anymore. You are just another soiled organ, a serf in our world of corporate feudalism.

Which highlights how advantageous it has been for Eastgate to be in control of their own main authoring tool.

That’s what allows them the luxury of being a small publishing house in an industry full of worn cogs.

Afternoon is still available, though. Allowing Mark Bernstein to prove his own point rather effectively.

And in turn it highlights why archivability and two-platfrom availability isn’t an issue, contrary to the worries of the academic herd.

Ideas that Worked

The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
The power of imagination goes right to my head.
And I said…
Eurythmics—I’ve Got and Angel (Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This): Track 2)

“The audience is smarter than your think” and, to be honest, once you realise that, most of your problems and worries go away.

What matters is the quality of the writing, the structure and associations (otherwise known as links).

Virtual reality, the holodeck dream, will never really work according to Mark. Add a sensible person to Hamlet and the whole play falls apart.

What people want are stories, texts, and a chance to be engaged, immersed in a narrative (to use a word with about as much value as Baghdad currency).

Weblogs are a hope for the future. Not because they are new things (just homepages by another name) but because it gets people writing, criticising, analysing, debating and gossiping.

Things are happening. Tekka.net has just started. People are becoming authors in greater numbers than ever before. Opining and telling stories on their weblogs. Mark’s presentation demonstrated that the past, while not brilliant, was alright. That the present, although barren of money, has interesting things happening.

That if we work hard, the future might be alright for the small scale digital publishing house.

And he also proved that the subject of hypertext can spark a lot of thoughts, ideas and rubbish writing in a person like me, who prefers hack writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett over overblown noir clones like William Gibson.

Bob Stein

Ryan is better now.

The hallucinations have passed. Some dreams still disturb him, but not seriously.

He paces the spaceship. He paces down the central passageway to the main control cabin and there he checks the coordinates, the consumption indicators, the regeneration indicators and he check sall his figures, at length, with those of the ship’s computer.

Everything is perfectly in order; exactly as it should be.
Michael Moorcock—The Black Corridor

Bob Stein, a pioneer in digital publishing who along with his ex-wife Eileen Stein founded the Voyager cd-rom publishing house, had urgent questions.

Why are we doing this?

What kind of world are we going to invent here?

If we are to create any sort of long term vision for the new media industry we need something to aim for. Fumbling about, and competing aimlessly with mainstream media will only result in the same sort of zombie culture we’ve been living with in tv and other mainstream media.

We can encourage thought and reflection, publish our ideas, put them out for others to respond to.

Or we can recreate the same old dumb media we’ve been force-fed for the last fifty years.

Where does new media lie in the large scheme of things?

The original vision of a new kind of discipline.

New media workers for social responsibility.

The artificial separation between your daily work and your political work.

The internet is fabulous but is descending into a bogstandard broadcast model. The media expells their gunk, the masses consume/download. The pipes are controlled by a small number of people—the internet is not under our control.

It’s only a matter of time before we get too subversive and they come down on us.

The great firewall of China proves that the internet’s freedom of speach is an illusion the allow us because it sells.

Believing in technology does not make sense. People—not hardware—change the world.

Paraphrasing Bob Stein.

Bob Stein’s call to arms comes at a time where the last remnants of the naive nineties belief in an inevitable technologically created utopia is being torn to shreds by the Anglo-American war-machine.

And in a spirited presentation he pointed the other door out to us:

• Refuse to be hopeless about it.
• “My work should be my political work”
• Talk to each other about things that matter is how things work.
• Digital publishing, small publishing houses, personal stories, personal expression. Political expression. It’s all coming to a boil.

We’re faced with a medium with megatonnes of untapped potential. What should you do when you’ve got the cultural equivalent of an A-bomb in your hands?

And That Covers Only Friday Morning.

I can’t really do justice to the thoughts and ideas presented in Bob Stein’s and Mark Bernstein’s presentations, or the debates that followed. My rambling thoughts and summaries are inadequate. They don’t manage to represent to you that feeling of hope that was pervasive in throughout the conference.

That glimmer of faith.

A bunch of people. Jaded youngsters like me. Victims of the dot-com crash. Academics that have been ground to dust. War. People that, all things considered, shouldn’t really have any faith in humanity or progress.

But there’s one thought that the conference lodged in my mind, and I’d like to think that the same applies to all the others that went there:

“We can change things—

No.

“We will change things.”

More on the rest of the conference later.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.