Jason E. Lewis
Submitted
to the School of Design for Industry in Partial Fulfillment for the
Requirements of the Degree Master of Philosophy in Design at the Royal College
of Art.
This thesis investigates the
processes by which media evolve in order to suggest future directions for the
digital medium. It develops the notion of content-lag
to describe the time-span between the introduction of a medium and the point at
which it is used to produce artifacts which exploit the affordances particular
to that medium to their fullest. Current difficulties in developing strong
content in the digital medium are discussed in terms of content-lag. The thesis
then argues that a more considered approach to interactivity will assist in
decreasing content-lag in the digital medium. A framework is proposed for
rediscovering the ways in which interactivity
is deployed in the digital medium. The arguments of the thesis are embodied in
project work which explores the possibilities of a computer-based poetic genre.
This project work exists as a collection dynamic
poems, which are available for interaction on a companion CD-ROM.
Thesis Supervisor: Gillian
Crampton Smith
This text
represents the submission for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the Royal
College of Art. This copy has been supplied for the purpose of research for
private study, on the understanding that it is copyright material, and that no
quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgment.
© 1996
Royal College of Art
The work
reported herein was supported in part by Interval Research Corporation.
I am fortunate in that many
colleagues and friends have assisted me both in my studies while at the Royal
College of Art and in the preparation of this thesis. The following people
deserve my gratitude and more.
The staff of the Computer Related Design department:
Gillian Crampton Smith for believing
that my lack of formal design training was not a bug, but a feature.
Bill Gaver for pithy commentary on all things relating to people and computers.
Colin Burns for being one of the most brilliant teachers I have ever had.
Michael Fields for teaching me, with infinite patience, that V = IR and from that simple equation all
good things flow.
Durrel Bishop, Jane Roderick and Geoff Smith for offering up snippets of code
and coding advice which saved the day many a time.
Gail Neary and Brigitte Lievre for patience, kindness and perspective, even
when faced with the lack thereof.
The members of Interval Research Corporation:
David Liddle for believing that art and design have an important role to play
in the structuring of emerging digital technologies, and for believing that I
had something important to contribute to this arena.
Kären Weickert for opening the door and Bonnie Johnson for bringing me into
IRC, collecting together a great group of people with whom to work and
encouraging me to push my limits.
Brenda Laurel for refusing to believe that this RCA thang was not going to
happen, and lobbying to make sure it did.
Noel Hirst for trusting that what I say I need, I need, and making sure it gets
to me whether I am 3,000 miles away on a rock-n-roll tour or 8,000 miles away
on an art-n-design tour.
Bud Lassiter for performing his video voodoo at the very beginning and very end
of this whole affair.
Interval Research Corporation as a whole, for sponsoring this work and for
providing unbounded opportunities for realizing my ideas.
The friends and family who have suffered:
Sanny Lustig, Daniel Potter, Angela Quail and Brent Williams for not running
away when this beast landed on your desk and instead taking the time to read it
carefully. Ms. Quail, you deserve special thanks for phoning edits in from up
in the mountains and catching all those misplaced apostrophes.
Leroy Bradford Brown, Jr. for teaching
me , a long, long time ago, that the life of the mind was mine for the
taking.
Elaine Brechin for listening to two years of blather about poetry, media and
interactivity, and still providing considered criticism and unfailing support.
There is a poem about you to be written as soon as this thesis is accepted.
My family for supporting me even when I do not make myself clear, and for enthusiastically supporting me when you
do.
Laurel Lewis for teaching me all the basic truths about life. It’s been a long
haul, but, for a couple of hicks, we have managed to do alright.
Table of Contents
Abstract........... ii
Acknowledgments........... iii
Table of
Contents........... v
Illustrations........... vii
Chapter 1 Introduction........... 8
1.1 The
Problem 8
1.2 Motivation 9
1.3 Related
Work 10
1.4 A
Comment About Scope 10
1.5 The
Structure of this Thesis 11
1.6 About
the CD-ROM and the Software 11
Chapter 2 New Media........... 13
2.1 Paradigm
Shifts 13
2.1.1 Manuscript
to Print 14
2.1.2 The
Evolution of Film 15
2.2 Shaping
a New Medium 17
2.3.1 Nativity
and Multiplicity 18
2.3.2 Computer
Art/Digital Art 20
2.3.3 Well-trodden
Paths – Hypertext and Usability 20
Chapter 3 The Word........... 22
3.1 Poetry 22
3.2 Concrete
Poetry 25
3.3 Typography 28
Chapter 4 Interactivity........... 30
4.1 The
Need for Definition 30
4.2 Dynamics 32
4.2.1 Constructive 32
4.2.2 Reactive 33
4.2.3 Active 33
4.2.4 Static 33
4.3 Response 34
4.3.1 Dependent 34
4.3.3 Independent 34
4.3.2 Hybrid 34
4.3.4 Non-responsive 35
4.4 Time 35
4.4.1 Cycle-time 35
4.4.2 Real-time 35
4.4.3 Interactive-time 36
Table
of Contents (cont.)
Chapter 5 Experiments........... 37
5.1 Conversions 37
5.1.1 Flash I & II 38
5.1.2 Scratch 39
5.2 Concrete
Poetry Redone 41
5.2.1 WordNozzle 41
5.2.2 WordNozzle – desktop version 42
5.2.3 WordNozzle – installation version 44
5.3 A
Digital Poetry 46
5.3.1 Breeder 48
5.3.2 Dying Lying Rotting 52
5.3.3 Telecommunication 54
5.3.4 Cross Purposes 55
5.4 Beyond
the Word 56
5.4.1 Aura 57
5.4.2 Life is Bait 58
5.5 Minor
Reflections 60
5.5.1 New
Poetic Forms 61
5.5.2 Punctuation 61
Chapter 6 Conclusion........... 63
6.1 Conclusion 63
6.2 Future
Directions 64
Appendix
A Technical Discussion........... 66
Aura........... 66
WordNozzle........... 67
Life is Bait........... 71
Breeder........... 76
Telecommunication........... 79
Appendix
B Illustrations........... 82
Bibliography........... 120
Illustrations
Number Title Page
1 F.T. Marinetti, Aprés a Marne, Joffre visita le front en
auto 83
2 Club Dada prospectus 84
3 T. Tzara, Une Nuit d'Eches Gras 85
4 Guillaume Apollinaire, Lettre-Océan 86
5 Augusto de Campo, Here Are The Lovers 87
6 C. Fernbach-Flarsheim, Mirror Field Inside Random Field 87
7 Katherine McCoy and Michael
McCoy, The New Discourse 88
8 David Carson-edited issue of Ray-Gun 89
9 Phil Baines, Can You...? 90
10 Erik van Blokland, Nimida 90
11 Jonathon Barnbrook, Burroughs typeface 91
12 Visual Language Workshop,Information Landscape 92
13 Yin Yin Wong, Little Red Riding Hood 92
14 Jonathon Steuer, Interactivity Matrix 93
15 John Maeda, Flying Letters 1 94
16 John Maeda, Flying Letters 8 94
17 Amiri Baraka, Wailers, Poetry in Motion 95
18 Flash I, Initial State 96
19 Flash
I, Cycling 96
20 Flash
II, Initial State 97
21 Flash
II, Progressive re-construction 98
22 Tom Berrigan, Whitman in Black, Poetry in Motion 99
23 Scratch,
Initial State 100
24 Scratch,
Composed State 101
25 WordNozzle,
Desktop Version 102
26 WordNozzle
Installation, Nozzle and Screen 103
27 WordNozzle Installation, Close-up Nozzle 103
28 WordNozzle
Installation, User, Nozzle and Screen 104
29 Breeder,
Sequence 105
30 Dying
Lying Rotting, Sequence 106
31 Dying
Lying Rotting, Zoom-in 107
32 Telecommunications,
Sequence 108
33 Cross
Purposes, Sequence 109
34 Aura,
Detail 110
35 Aura,
in Self-Storage Exhibition 111
36 Life
is Bait 114
37 WordNozzle
Installation, Electronics Overview 115
38 WordNozzle
Installation, Circuit Diagram 116
39 WordNozzle
Installation, PIC Chip Flow Diagram 117
40 WordNozzle,Installation,
IR emitter and Potentiometer 118
41 WordNozzle
Installation, Computational Overview 119
Chapter 1 Introduction
Poetry,
in a sense, is the noise of science.
– Michel Serres (Lechte 1994)
1.1 The Problem
Digital
media force us to look at traditional media in a new light, both in terms of
how works of art and design are produced and how users receive those
productions. Digital media’s ability to subsume the functionality of many other
media means that artists and designers have an extraordinarily powerful tool
with which to work; at the same time, current focus on functionality has
retarded the development of both a mature aesthetic and a conceptual framework
specifically suited to this new form of communication.
In the initial development of any
new medium designers rely for a time on the paradigms of previous media. The
time between the technical development of a medium and the development of an
aesthetic native to that medium I have chosen to call the content-lag. Just as it took several decades for film to fully
separate itself from theater and photography, and much later, for video to
separate itself from film, the computer-based medium will take some time to
move beyond obsession with functionality, overcome content-lag and develop a
character all of its own.
I undertook the Dynamic Poetry
project to explore the consequences of developing a computer-centric aesthetic
while simultaneously exploring functional capabilities. Composed equally of
theoretical and historical investigation and practical experimentation, the
Dynamic Poetry project has investigated ways of re-designing the inscribed word
for a computer-based environment. As the many attempts to make a useful
electronic book have shown, simply transposing words from the printed page to
the bit-mapped screen does not create an expanded reading experience. Instead,
these attempts accentuate the failings of the machine and fail to leverage its
strengths. Furthermore, when text appears alongside sound, video and animation,
it becomes very evident that the behavioral and temporal possibilities of text
have not been well explored. In well-designed computer-based work, one can see
how most of the major components establish presence through movement and
change. Yet, hyperlinking and deconstructive fonts aside, the text in digital
media remains as inert and commonplace as it has in 450 years of printing. Part
of the maturation process for the digital medium will require that text move
beyond what we expect of it from its life in the printed environment. Those who
work with text in the digital environment will need to developed a more nuanced
understanding of interactivity,
particularly in the confluence of program dynamics, user responsiveness and
time control.
I have chosen poetry as the textual
application for this study because of the way it, in its disruption of
commonplace speaking and reading patterns, provides a model for how far the
structure of language can be stretched while remaining intelligible, functional
and enjoyable. In the moment the reader is made aware of the difference in
structure, he must also be led to not only accept that difference, but to also
incorporate the significance of that difference into the overall meaning of the
poem. The space between disrupting the normal communicative methods of the
language and destroying that communication is a delicate one. Through the
Dynamic Poetry project I have sought to develop interactions, representations
and content which can inhabit that delicate space, as well as argue for various
ways in which designers can inscribe and users can receive text as it changes
to accommodate its latest home.
Finally, as the title suggests, my
purpose in this thesis is not to define the
digital medium, but to lay some of the groundwork for a digital medium. Someday
there will be a vast range of digitally-enabled communication and expression;
this paper does not presume to propose a basis for the entire spectrum.
1.2 Motivation
Within
the scope of this thesis project, I have sought to present several new ways of
perceiving and interacting with text within the digital space. By grounding my
exploration in a historical timeline that pays attention to previous changes in
communication technology, I hope to illuminate both the blindness and the true
feats of transcendence that accompany such change. In this way, I hope to
minimize the former and maximize the latter in my own experiments to transform
our use of text.
The dynamic poems themselves exist
simultaneously as experiments in the state of the art and experiments in poetic
expression. I hope that my commentary on both aspects will not only contribute
to the discussion of what is happening to traditional literary forms as they
are metamorphisized into the digital realm, but also expand the acceptable and
familiar range of interactive expression.
As somebody who has been interested
in and writing poetry for a decade now, I have a desire to see a halt to the
digital repurposing of existing texts in favor of a writing that is explicitly,
and in some essential sense, exclusively dynamic and/or interactive. Even
though poetry remains as powerful a mode of expression as ever, its modern audience
is minuscule in comparison to that of other forms of communication. If we do
not find ways to adapt poetry to the new digital environment, I fear it will
become even more isolated. The poems I produced as part of this project suggest
how such an adaptation may take place.
1.3 Related Work
This
thesis draws from a wide variety of research topics. Typography and digital
media, the history of the book and the cinema, and the theory and practice of
poetry all play a role in the following discussion.
The Visible Language Workshop of The
Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed digital
typography which gave me interesting examples of how to leverage the computer’s
strengths to heighten type’s ability to communicate emotions and ideas. Of
particular use to this thesis was the work of Suguru Ishizaki, Yin Yin Wong and
David Small.
John Maeda’s manifesto on
“metadesigning” and his subsequent efforts to create digitally authentic
design-forms appeared mid-way through this project, providing both inspiration
and confirmation of the concepts I explore below.
The Fuse series on font design represent one of the few examples of
on-going experimentation in digital letter-form design. Fuse supports the development and publication of many fonts that
either take their inspiration from the digital environment or which possess the
interactive and dynamic qualities which I explored.
Various work on hypertext,
particularly that of J. David Bolter and George P. Landow, offer a deep
analysis of the culture of writing and how digital technology is effecting that
culture. They, in turn, owe a great deal to historians such as Walther J. Ong
and Elizabeth Eisenstein for the background out of which they – and I –
extrapolate future literary trends. Related to this corpus are the writings of
Gregory Ulmer, who does a splendid job of proposing a full theory for a new,
video-based interactive media.
Just as this thesis was being
completed the work of William Seaman was brought to my attention. His work
explores the relationship between language and image within a digital
environment, and has produced such interesting efforts as navigable poems and
automatic poem-generators.
The work that more than any other
triggered this project is Poetry in
Motion, vol. I from the Voyager
Press. This CD-ROM represents both the promise and the pitfalls of digital
media in general, and of the next stage in poetry in particular.
For
the most part, this thesis does not discuss two genres within the digital
medium which have been the sites of vigorous creative activity: games and
virtual reality. In the case of games, a responsible treatment of the genre’s
goal-driven, action-oriented nature
would require a thesis of its own and would have necessarily meant a
less thorough treatment of the subject at hand. Though examining virtual
reality would have introduced an interesting dimension to the discussion of
cinematic pursuits of realism, it would have also required a phenomenological
and ontological investigation of immersive environments which, while part of
the larger future of the digital medium, is not essential to my discussion of
non-immersive poetic creations. I believe that the historical approach I
present here would benefit the creators of games and virtual realities, and I
hope that others will find the framework I introduce to be of use in examining
those genres.
The
next chapter introduces content-lag as term useful for understanding some of
the processes by which a medium reaches maturity. This introduction draws on
the evolution of the letterpress and the cinema as historical grounding, and
then connects this history to the present state of the digital medium. Chapter
3 discusses the reasons and inspirations for employing poetry as the vehicle
with which to drive my experiments in overcoming content-lag and developing a
framework for understanding interactive design. Chapter 4 dissects that
framework and provides examples from the Dynamic Poetry experiments to
illustrate it. In Chapter 5, I discuss each of the experiments in depth. For
each piece, I describe its appearance and how the user is meant to interact
with it[1] and the effect of the piece. The final part of
Chapter 5 contains a discussion of two pieces which are not dynamic poems but
which were created during the same time frame and embody some of the “native”
media arguments I offer in Chapter 2. Finally, Chapter 6 concludes with a
review of the arguments presented and suggestions for further work. This last
chapter is followed by two appendices, the first of which contains
illustrations and the second of which contains a discussion of technical issues
which arose in the course of the experimentation. After the appendices is the
bibliography.
Dynamic Poetry, the CD-ROM which accompanies this written text,
should be considered an essential component of the thesis. All of the discussed
experiments can be accessed on it. The reader can either use the Dynamic Poetry Finder to navigate
between the experiments, or he can access them directly. Both the self-launching
files and the associated source-code can be accessed.
In Chapter 5, under the heading for each experiment, I have put a
pointer to where that file exists on the CD-ROM. The pointer is in the format of [drive:folder:file].
I created all of the experiments
with Macromedia’s Director. Director is an application for interactive design
which utilizes a scripting language called Lingo. In some cases, such as Aura and the installation version of WordNozzle, I augmented this software
with custom-made mechanical-electronic subsystems. In other cases, such as Life is Bait and WordNozzle, I employed extensions to Director written by others in
the mid-level language C and called X-Commands (XCMDs) and XObjects (XObjs).
All of the work is designed to run on a Macintosh computer (the faster the
machine, the better the result) in 16-bit color or better.
Some people think to make a color
photograph, you just have to put color film in the camera. The result is not a
color photograph.
– Harold Allen (Smith 1992)
The
introduction of any significant new mass medium is often accompanied by both
wildly dire predictions of how the new medium will destroy literate culture and
wildly optimistic predictions about how it will supersede existing mediums in
expressive capability. Several thousand years ago, Plato decried one of the
earliest communication technologies:
[Writing] will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented not an elixir of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom. (Bolter 1991)[2]
While
a much more recent voice, describing the arrival of video technology in the
Manhattan arts community in the early 1960’s, triumphantly declared “[a]s
collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the
canvas.” (Danto 1995)
These extremes of prognostication
very rarely come true. What is true is
that a new medium filters slowly through a culture, augmenting existing media
rather than replacing them and evolving the communicative gestalt rather than
revolutionizing it (Ong 1977.) The speed of this filtering is
retarded or accelerated by a myriad of different factors, many of them –
economic, political and very simple human factors – which are independent of
the functional or evocative qualities of the medium itself, and of those
working within the medium.
However, some factors affecting the
artistic acceptance and maturation of a new medium reside more fully within the
control of those advancing the medium. The willingness of artists, in concert
with technologists, to look for affordances native to that medium, the degree
to which they are willing to devote energy to basic experimentation, and the
context they create for their audience to be able to receive such
experimentation all fall within this category. Taken together, these factors
all contribute to content-lag. Content-lag is the time it takes to develop
content which is uniquely and powerfully suited to a new medium. Closely
related to content-lag is medium
stability, or the rate of change within the technological structure of the
medium. Both phenomena influence each
other.
In the following discussion of the
evolution of two mediums, print and film, I will strive to illuminate the basis
and usefulness of these terms for considering the current state of the
art.
For almost a hundred years after the invention of the printing press in Europe in 1450, the form of the book remained similar to that of the manuscript. (Febvre 1976)