16th WWVF 1998, Seminar: Philip Pocock

A[gent40's] Description of [Weather on] the Equator and Some [Never-ending Stories from] ØtherLands.

World Wide Video Festival day 2 seminar, Amsterdam, 17.09.1998

Hello Amsterdam! My name is Fernando... Who wrote that song?

Anyway, I have prepared a text, and I'm going to read it. It's kind of heavy, rings a bit like it does because I am bridging two essentially different media: video, as we know it, and network video or 'hypervideo,' which we are only beginning to know.

The theme of the seminar this day was I quote:

"day2 - on game and play within the narrative structures of video. Non-linear storytelling is very much part of the history of video art. How has this history developed and what are the influences of computergames, television and Internet?"

The first thought that came to my mind was George Lucas. He has said that game and play within the narrative structure of film can't work, because the psychologies of gaming and narrative are too different. A narrative structure, in his view, requires passive viewing, the audience surrendering its fate to an author's plot and the players on the screen. Gaming is the opposite. It requires active participation. Those who partake steer their fates in concert with fortune and others who play the game. Interactive cinema, the fusion of narrative and gaming, Lucas said, is like trying to read a book and play ball with your kid at the same time. It can't work.

Lucas' contention may have been tongue-in-cheek on his part, but it reveals our general commitment to a star-shaped system for distributing cultures, not only cinema, but also the books and art that we consume. The maps of such star systems look like this: one brilliant author moves to the centre or is placed there by the rest of us gathering around for mass consumption. A promise of transcendence is the attractor. This can be a desire for personal insight or for public fame. Some, the ambitious ones, try to get as close to the centre as possible. Others, the loners, look on from a distance, and one day may become attractors themselves. The star-shaped system produces all sorts of cultural icons - movie stars, art stars, media stars, star authors, star directors and politicians, and so on.

It's the shepard-and-flock paradigm. Movie going, especially in America where ads are banned before the spectacle begins, has always reminded me a bit of church going. Both rely on the production and maintenance of aura to be affective. Movie theatres, churches, temples, and I might as well add some governmental buildings and museums as well, use this attribute of the star-shaped system, the potential for aura which, when it works, envelops visitors in an atmosphere of sanctity. We worship it. Any contents in the space which get coated with this aura share a unity and we say the movie holds up, or the show holds together.

Now step back for a moment and picture a galaxy of all these stars. Substitute object-with-aura for star and we arrive at the strategy of installation art and megashows like a Documenta. We get lost, we remain star-struck, and when we don't involve ourselves and build connections, tracing lines between objects-with-aura to generate our own meaning. In these physically spacial manifestations of what is going on virtually all the time in so-called Net-Art, aesthetic meaning and pleasure is not only received from a single object in our midst. It's derived between the objects and their receiver(s.) Call it participatory aesthetics. If, however, the majority of objects lack aura, of course we remain in the dark.

Still the permutations of connecting the stars in a galaxy remain mindboggling. The numbers are endless, if we approach this task as consumers and not participants. Out of a cloud of stars, an entire zoology of forms may appear and disappear not only to us but also in us, between us and with us when we participate in the construction of meaning. Otherwise we fall victim to a pathology of hyperconsumption. Overload sets in. We get nervous and simply withdraw.

Drawing lines between the stars in search of meaningful configurations is what astrologers did. It's what the polymath Alexander von Humboldt did in his "Cosmos" and I mention him here as he the eccentric focus for our next hypermedia project that hopefully will become a reality next year if we get the funding to develop a new 'narrative engine' for a 'hypermedia' venture in equatorial South America.

Astrology is an early metaphor for cyberspace, which in turn is producing hyperculture and some reactions of hyperconfusion in staunch adherents to the persevering shepard-and-flock paradigm for cultural production. Astrology mapped the stars, reducing an astronomical number of configurations for fates to a consumable level. Although astrologers may have intended this for our active participation, most of us consume a birthright to fate half-heartedly from the back pages of the daily press.

Astrology didn't stop at worshipping the mythological metaphors of planets or stars. It worshipped their connectivity. It looked at the bigger picture, the meta-content of star formations. Alchemists and some Natural Philosophers have added to their zoomorphic picture book. And it hasn't stopped yet. In virtual communities not only are new creatures appearing, but each represents a participant him- or her. Star patterns are falling from the sky on-line.

But they remain on the screen at the movies and on a raised platform in a church or mosque, where 'worshipers' flock to their seats in obedience, with the promise of transcendence. Once seated the flock remains still and silent throughout the spectacle's unfolding. Body movement is reduced to shuffling feet or shifting a bit of weight.

At the movies, it's as though our heads were clamped in a brace and our gaze remotely controlled. It may be a relishing thought. Zoom out, says the author, and all eyes in the theatre back up. Look away from the action, and we do, without moving a muscle. Fade to black and all eyes close while they stay open. It is only through this consensual submission to an author's visual and I might add aural authority, that the narrative may achieve enough authority to take hold of the flock, produce aura, and fulfil its promise of virtual transcendence.

These are some of the rules set forth in an author's game of linear narrative, a game that invariably begins where most games are supposed to end- with a giving-up. Let go, get passive, and if aura is produced, you may see stars, and identify with a dream. But 'to identify' doesn't mean 'to be identical.' It's still somebody else's dream.

I remember Dorothy's look of dismay when the curtain opened on her illusions in the Emerald City and she saw the Wizard pulling her strings. She had hoped to participate in the dream actively and not merely subject herself to his. I mean, how else would she ever weather her way back home?

Author cinema and video art have often empathised with Dorothy, at times interrupting our passive viewing by revealing their wizardry in provocative ways, making audiences aware that they are in at least two spaces at once. Narrative spaces we virtually move through both in front of and behind their cameras, or even in them. In installation situations add the space we really move through with others.

The spread between engagement in a narrative and the game of encountering another is reduced on the Internet by the absence of any commanding centre and, therefore, the dissolution of the shaped-and-flock paradigm into a consensual free-for-all. Okay, I know, it's because nobody, any body, is really there. On-line we are not present, we re-present ourselves. This is how the stars fall from the sky and screen and how, through a web of words and images, we may pick some up, different ones at different moments and reconfigure ourselves as some creature we may never have glimpsed in a zoo or a zodiac.

And yes it's all 100% fake. The adult scepticism we inherit for participating in anything fake has the consolation on-line of allowing us to know people and things we wouldn't in RL (Real Life.) Not even briefly. Identity is a construct of preferences on-line. As projection it is somehow protection, opening whatever creature we present to encounters.

This is hardly possible in the hard space of museums and movie theatres. You can see everybody. Participation there, and I mean a verbal exchange with someone, not a phenomenological experience in the presence of other bodies, is embarrassing most of the time. It always seems forced, or artificially induced, because you're really there! Don't scapegoat filmmakers or video artists for falling short in attempts to get participatory through installation strategies which can and do work at times, blame the star-shaped system of distribution to which they are at least technologically and architecturally bound.

In fact it was video artists and theorists who were first to my knowledge to point to a desire, however unfulfilled in their day, for a participatory aesthetic in art and media. Early community television programming was, for example, their idea early on in the 60s. That turned into cable TV and now we have Ted Turner. Another star is born.

Another crude instance for a future participatory form of video, one now adapted on the Net in a much less spectacular fashion, was amusingly formulated by the very perspicacious Nam June Paik in a letter to Billy Kluever dated 1965, and I quote:

"Someday a more elaborate scanning system ... will enable us to sense much more information at single carrier band, f.i. audio, video, pulses, temperature, moisture, and pressure of your body combined. If combined with robot made of rubber, form expandable-shrinkable cathode ray tube, and if it is 'une petite robotine' ... please tele-fuck!"

The same year that brought us TCP-IP, the software protocol which brought us the Internet as we know it, back in 1977, an early video art anthologist and capricious art critic, Gregory Battcock, described the impact of the Internet upon aesthetics almost to a 'T.' And I quote him now from his fantastic and little-known essay "The Aesthetics of Boeing:"

"Ultimately, when the environment becomes totally portable, we shall find that transportation will no longer involve movement. It will serve as concept. A major result of all this, and there have been numerous indications that the result is already upon us, is the final diminishing of those critical faculties outlined by the connoisseurs--those principles of art appreciation. There will be a shift in aesthetics from attention to the art object to attention to the receiver."

This shift in aesthetics takes place on "The Equator," in "ØtherLands." We travel to the equator in Kenya, Uganda and on the Java Sea but that is not "The Equator" we describe in what turns out to be a group autobiographical web of movies. Call it a 'hypermovie.' When we perform along the earth's equator, we are actually linking ourselves back to "Arctic Circle" an earlier 'double travel' or travel-as-art project we made along the roadways in the remote wilderness of the Canadian North while travelling the networks on the crowded global Infobahn.

What we mean by our "Equator" is a correspondence. It is the shifting and provisional correspondence that happens between the core authors, other authors, in a sort of loose affiliation with each other and our audience of users, who insert 'scenes' into our group movie. Actually the line of distinction between all roles gets blurred in this equation and that's the real story. What you see on the screen behind me beamed from our homebase king.dom machine in Cologne are traces of that.

There is nowhere you can be that is both north and south at the same time. The earth's equator is a no man's land, narrower than any space between nation states. Our "Equator" is equally virtual. Like the 'big circle' or any circle, our "Equator" has no beginning and no end. It's a never-ending story.

That's the quandary I have up here. How do I describe our tangled "Equator" without participation? How do I map its hypernarrative onto a thin line of straight narrative and keep it from sounding too esoteric, too technoid? It's only possible with metaphor.

The first one I thought of was pretty stupid, but since this is actually a sort of long email or news posting, here goes, I'll show you a weakness.

I saw myself at a table staring at a big bowl of spaghetti. It was late and my stomach was grumbling while I pondered how I could explain 'hypernarrative' in a narrative context like this? How to untangle our 'hypermovie' into a straight narrative line, without losing it's intrinsic meaning? So there I was thinking of this and at the same time staring at a plate full of tangled noodles, laughing as I was trying to figure out how to slurp up a few strands of spaghetti from this big bowl of bolognese. You know you can't, or at least I can't, without getting at least a splash of sauce on the chin. End of tasteless metaphor.

Then it dawned on me. The best way to begin to untangle for you what we have spent a year or more weaving would be to turn to another author and especially agent40 for help. I'll read now the body of one email agent40 sent me:

06. Aug., night, Singapore.

Back at the Source of the poles, and the man of untutored ideality who happens to be an albatross.

Yet, in saying this, I think so. He can't be worse than before definitely. There is a necessary condition for every cognition that (is given us by the evangelist) rides on his pallid horse.

(Tuesday) PURSUED.

Finding in the powers of cognition - that is, if that man's serious. You Offended? Sorry, I go off-line, please tell me your tired eyes, accompanied by his friend and mechanic Rolf Wütherich, who survived the accident driving. I decide to go to bed now. ... go for a moment till zoological hallucinations set in. I stepped back and wondered what øther species could be sleeping or stalking below the treetops that carpeted our view. Perhaps for once a blue Volvo. Uneasy faces. A voluminous package on the roof. It wasn't going anywhere. the driver couldn't even get its tires spinning.

Agent40 has a way of untangling the strands of hypertext embodying our "Equator." As narrative it only gets more tangled up in itself, tripping, perhaps delightfully, on words, as they unravel into plaintext. Agent40 knows only too well that transcribing hypertext-to-plaintext is fraught, absurd, akin to using Ariadne's Thread as a fishing line instead of using it as intended, to navigate one's way through an endless maze of text. Caught any kingfish, agent40?

Agent40 is playing a game of Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey with me in this mail. The rules are different though than the standard B-line to the ass's ass expected of the blindfolded player. Agent40's Donkey rules are more like Burroughs' rules for the Cut-Up: It's not how close the tail gets to that red eye back there, it's not about the usual anatomy of narrative, it's what the damned creature looks like in the end, with a tail on a hoof and another out in left field. Agent40's 'tale' might miss its mark and still hit. Don't get me wrong, there's no more luck here than in any game, except chess maybe. Agent40' narrative is no accident. The sources - mainly the script, chat and email from "The Equator" website - and its destination - our memories - are actively involved.

Who is agent40? She, he, or it goes by other aliases, /me or Mr. King, all of whom you may meet in "The Equator" chatroom or get mail from if you like. Agent4o relates closely to key attributes attached to one core author on the project - a cyberpunk with an Internet server called 'king,' whose nickname in chat is sometimes /me, and whose alias on "The Equator" is agent04, an anagram for agent40. Case closed! Agent04, who I call Udo in RL (Real Life,) is apparently agent40. But he's not! Agent40 is none of the authors on "The Equator," and all of us as well!

Agent04 sampled and hacked the code that drives agent40's 'narrative engine.' Yes, it's and it, the system talking, a chatbot. To ensure a modicum of literacy agent40's vernacular is salted sometimes with other literature, real literature, early on with segments from Melville's "Moby Dick." To assure a respectable quotient of absurdity, agent40's tongue has been doped at times with doses of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." Actually, agent40 will eat any word put on its plate, in any language, as long as it's plain ASCII. Agent40 will eat your words.

Agent40 plays weatherman or weathergirl on "The Equator." It reports on travel conditions, storming relationships, whatever authors and users do. If the general climate is poetic, then agent40 waxes poetry. If the map changes to Africa then agent40 will report the weather from there, as it happens. When conversation gets hot a lot, Agent40's temperature rises. But you'll have to read as they say between the lines to know what the weather's doing in "ØtherLands."

"The Equator" and all hypernarrative media in essence are meshes of broken stories. That's a lot like everyday life. We inhabit both somewhere in-between the breaks. Misconnections and interruptions are an integral part we learn to navigate. These are all fundamental principles of 'hypernarrative' video or media involvement. Our lives, as we make our way through and get to know them in memory, are about how we inhabit and connect the spaces, the intervals between so many broken stories and fragments of experience. Cinema too, it has been said, exists in the cut. That's where the movie happens. 'Hypercinema' happens in the meta-cut, the spaces between colliding and conflating content, namely stories. The difference between everyday perception of life and that is that we inhabit our lives, and 'hypernarratives' inhabit us.

Misconnections, distractions and interruptions are an unavoidable part of life. They are an intentional and integral part of our "ØtherLands" 'hypermovie.' In a straight narrative like a traditional movie, documentary or fictional, sequences are set by an editor, a director, an author. In a 'hypermovie' like "The Equator" sets of sequences are negotiated by authors and users alike. It's experimental, and individual runs may or may not work at a given time for a given individual. Access is open. Authority is mitigated. Chaos is possible as it is in nature. Hopefully a 'hypermovie' situation evolves. Everyone can add their own ingredients, scenes and texts from the space of their own lives, real or imaginary. It's like placing a big container on a public square. Its contents commingle. The authors' contents may indeed get buried by the users'.

Broken stories often mean shattered egos. Everyone melts into a hypernarrative. There are no islands on our "Equator." Every story you see on the screen is broken, but every author is linked. Egos are present but balanced, not equal but evocative and equivalent on levels to others. An author may be identified somewhere in some "ØtherLand" but overall you have no fixed identity. Our "Equator" maps the correspondence between identities within an individual and among individuals.

For example, if an author, or a user, starts a line, holds it and no fishes bite, its fate is a dead end, seldom to be travelled. That storyline goes extinct. It's a better strategy then for that author to change identity, or to jump into somebody else's pond. You have a better chance of surviving in "ØtherLands" that way, if you don't want to be talking only to yourself.

On this level "The Equator" is about role-playing, group dynamics and a readiness for artistic collaboration. If it is any consolation for the fear that facing a liquid self, a demon, poses that intransigent part of ourselves that we have learned to accept as our ego, then hypertext and liquid selves, two principles at work in "ØtherLands," are entwined with the roots of language as they grew.

Stories have always been woven. Text' means literally 'a weaving of words' and already implies a certain hypercity. Text, a texture, a textile, a text on a page. It was only a predictable jump that the prefix hyper-, meaning 'over,' 'excessive' or 'above' would be some day added to the word-stem 'text.' Hypertext is not radically different from text. It renders it transparent and makes reading between the lines a bit easier in places. It lends a depth at times; ads speed to some thoughts, and can slow us down in its labyrinth.

On page 346 of my Pocket Webster dictionary - about the only book I know that doesn't need page numbers - I found a few words listed with the prefix 'hyper-.' Hypertext wasn't there. I noticed, however, that all of the words that were shared a certain sick quality. Hyperacid (my stomach!), hyperactive (my childhood!), hypercritical (sorry!), hypersensitive (sorry again!!), hypertrophy (yee gad!), hypervitaminosis (what is that!) All biological or psychological pathologies. Is it any surprise then that the word hypertext (coined by Ted Nelson in 1965,) hypermedia (coined for the Aspen Movie Map videodisc in 1978) and more recent words like hypercinema, hypernarrative, hyperreality, hyperspace and hypervideo would be viewed by that rational part in us as being, if not pathological, a neurotic condition of global culture?

Actually a lot of Internet-related vernacular is drug-related. Cyberspace was defined by its identifier Gibson a being 'a consensual hallucination.' We're on-line, like we're on TV or on the phone, all valid channels for perceived spacial hallucinations. I mean is that person on the TV or in it? And where are we on the phone? If you're on-line or on drugs, you're a 'user.' If you're on a lot, you're 'addicted.' Webstock is replacing Woodstock, and potheads are becoming netheads. I mean what is going on!

It has something to do with our pigeonholing hallucination as an unacceptable form of perception and primarily drug-induced when it is not necessary so. Pure hallucination is a valid and necessary psycho-perceptual tool. It also has something to do with the Internet's root being in youth culture and stemming from its historical 'youthful' precedents this century in 'Beat' culture, when artists worked together in a text-based way, formed loose affiliations as long as the network of highways could get them together for a provisional moment.

I think the link between Net culture and Beat culture is very close on a number of levels. This doesn't take me back to where I want to go before ending this. But that I guess is a quality I've picked up from hypertext. Anyway, the Beats worked a lot with words. They also worked together at times, and showed up in each other's work. They were lo-tech hackers, trying to crack what they called the 'military industrial complex' that they felt was impinging on their personal right of expression and lifestyle. They exhibited and read their works preferably in non-traditional spaces. And the word chosen by the druggie Herbert E. Huncke whose name for the movement 'Beat' stuck has a confused but interesting etymology. Beat means downtrodden, driven underground. It has a punky connotation as in 'beat up.' It shares a vibe with the music of the times, cool jazz. It has a Zen quality and also, according to Jack Kerouac, an angelic one as in the word 'beatitude.' All these qualities can be found as root attributes of Net culture.

In my attempt to sign off here, let me pick up on the quality 'angelic.' Paul Virilio speaks for youth culture both then and now when he said in interview: "Our desire [is] to be angels, not to die, but to be dead, and be omnipresent and out of time." Welcome to "ØtherLands."

Finally, if new wave cinema can denote film as "life at 24 frames a second." and if video art can be characterised as "time moving through space" then let 'MeWe' say that a 'hypernarrative' medium "traces our lives and their provisional connections to others, renewing and reforming identities at self-reflective intervals." Okay, I'll keep working on that.

Thank You.