Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/WAXWEB!

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 12KB | 281 lines

Topic 307       WAXWEB!
peg:agarton     cyberculture zone       11:12 AM  Feb 15, 1994

Subject: Waxweb (call for net-writers)
From: [e-mail] (David Blair)
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 94 18:41:24 EST
Organization: [MindVox] / Phantom Access Technologies / (+1 800-MindVox)

 Hi,

I'm writing to inform you of "Waxweb", and to invite you to
participate in it.

"Waxweb" is a large constructive hypertext (with hypermedia
extensions coming later), which has been converted to MOO-space
at Hotel MOO (more info below). There is full, simple hypertext
reading and writing functionality provided, made hybrid and
strange by the fact that this is inside a text-based virtual
reality.

[Following sections: Rhetoric; Background; What to do; How to
connect; Long term]


Rhetoric:

About 10 months ago, the electronic feature "Wax or the
discovery of television among the bees" (85:00, 1991) was sent
out over the mbone (multimedia backbone) of the internet by
Vince Bilotta. At that time, John Markoff of the NYTimes wrote
a story entitled "Cult Film is a First over the Internet",
casting the event as a milestone on the way to the 500
channels. Unfortunately, there were really only about 450 sites
at that time able to see the "film", a fact that was a bit
strange to point out to the people who wrote asking how they
could see "Wax on the Internet." In addition, the article
didn't mention that this was not a broadcast, but a multi-cast,
meaning anyone who could receive could also send audio or video
(or text, of course), so that an individual's reception screen
could be filled with little boxes of talkie.

Coming out of a media center/public access background, I
natively feel much less comfortable with "the 500 channels"
metaphor than I do with the idea of 5,000,000 channels of
intercommunication. Listening to Pavel Curtis (co-writer of MOO
software, and a researcher at Xerox Parc) talk this spring at
3CyberConf helped provide me with a good rhetorical base for a
personal argument in favor shifting the metaphor. In describing
his research into adding audio and video to the Xerox Parc
networkspace, presumably using the same technology that made
the Wax net-cast possible, Curtis said that the greatest
intercommunicative bang came in the transition from zero to
text. On adding audio, the graph's slope flattened
significantly towards the horizontal, though there was some
improvement. But adding video gave you a flatline... almost no
added improvement to the functionality already given by text
and audio. I tried this argument on a group of advertising
production execs this month, and it certainly upset them...
true or not, it's good rhetoric, in these days when new and old
media imitate one another.

"Waxweb" is an attempt, within some neccessary limits, to re-
multicast "Wax" at a bandwidth more appropriate to current
Internet.  My practical and perhaps counter-intuitive point,
(since I am a media-maker) is that currently available
networked text is inherently more interesting that the
potential for a Surgery Channel or Sock Club... (for some more
discussion of this point, see the Long Term section at the end
of this letter).

Unfortunately one important limit in this type of multicast is
that we can't have the whole internet there, in order to
preserve the functionality of the MOO as a workspace.  So I
have to ask you not to repost this info to netsurf lists, or
onto the USENET (Yes, there will be a WWW version, see below,
which hopefully will solve this problem of access).


Background:

"Wax", as a film, is what I describe as an image-processed
narrative,  where both the images and the narrative are
processed.... a description that indicates Wax is a heavily
associative film, something  almost like a punning machine,
with each click of its' time-base emitting a variety of
pointers across time or space, creating a virtual web of
associative connections for which you are the processor.

There is no dialogue in Wax... but there is a narrator who
delivers much of the story through voiceover. This fact,
combined with its' natural resemblance to hypertext, and its'
need for audience assembly, makes it a natural candidate for
retrofit into a constructive hypertext... i.e. a hypertext that
can not only be read, but also written to.

"Waxweb" formally began as a hypertext groupware project, in
which 25 people net-connected people around the world would use
the groupware functionality of Eastgate's Storyspace hypertext
software to add counter-writings, counter-structures, imaginary
backstory or characters, or simpler things, onto a hypertext
"baselayer" which I constructed. This baselayer consists of
about 600  nodes, roughly corresponding to the number of spoken
lines in the "film's"  monologue. Paving the space between
spoken words are text descriptions of the film's 2000 shots,
roughly padded with what might be called author's commentary.
These are connected on a single "script" path, so that reading
this path is morphologically similar to watching the film (like
hand-bones vs.  fin-bones.. .producing a certain type of
aesthetic tension). Surrounding this is a simple indexing
system, which allows  transport around the film. When all the
writers get through with the baselayer, it should have lost
it's current resemblance to a highway divider, and more
resemble the cloud of fog above the road... a textual cloud of
unknowledge. The editors of the web are Michael Joyce and Larry
McCaffery.

Not long after the above project began, Tom Meyer, a grad
student in computer science at Brown, decided to open the
hypertext-based Hotel MOO, which incorporated an extension he
had written that allowed the conversion of "Storyspace"
hypertext files into coherent MOO-architecture, as well as
modification of "room" creation and construction commands to
make building more resemble writing. Through this miracle, it
became possible to place the hypertext in a public place, so
that anyone with telnet, regardless of their desktop machine,
could read and write into the Waxweb. This is the hybrid place
I hope you will travel to, and read and write at. Traditional
writing, hypertext writing, programming,  as well as
synchronous and asynchronous text communication are all
supported in this environment.

========

What to do

So, what do you do? Basically, what you wish. However, I think
the base  requirement is that you have seen the film... but I
expect most of the people who will have  make it this far into
this letter will already have seen it. Waxweb is a deliberate
cross-disciplinary project, so hopefully everyone can find
someplace interesting to stand or start. Do what you will, be
it false  backstory, or simple linkages between places with
interstice boxes that  explain ordinary obsessions. You can
make a random structure of odd small stories, or a
counterstructure of formal mechanism or anti-story. You can
write an essay or anti-essay or faux-essay in linked little
boxes. You can do word counts, or use external software tools
(e.g. from natural language processing) to prove hyperbole. Or
create new paths that intersect the story in horrible ways. You
can learn the MOO software. You can talk to other people.

Please note that this is a DRAFT version of the base-layer of
Waxweb... certainly, my own writing will be unpolished in
places. But, isn't it obvious that, being a collaboration, this
is a work in progress?

It is possible that I will be able to find a way to easily
integrate parts of what is written at the MOO into the WWW and
disk-distributed Waxweb. So I just have to caveat here that
everyone writing agrees to duplication of their writing, in
whole or part, whether in net form, such as a WWW doc, or in
distributable physical media, such as floppy or CDROM. Please
understand that there is no way I can afford to monetarily
reimburse anyone for this subsequent republishing. If this
makes you uncomfortable, don't write, just read.

Feel free to write me at [e-mail]. I've got a bit
of tendinitis these months, so may not be as verbal as you
hope... but I am at your service.  I hope you enjoy the
baselayer, and most certainly hope you enjoy writing here!

Best,

David Blair [e-mail]

==========

How to connect:


FIRST OFF, PLEASE REMEMBER THAT "WAXWEB: IS A GUEST ON THIS
MOO. I URGE YOU NOT TO REPOST THIS INFORMATION TO "NETSURF"
LISTS... A RELATIVE AMOUNT OF PEACE AND QUIET IS NECESSARY FOR
EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO DO SERIOUS WORK HERE. PLEASE TREAT OTHERS
THAT YOU MEET ON THIS MOO WITH RESPECT... AND READ THE
MANUAL!!!!!

Proprietor of HotelMOO, the Hypertext Hotel,  is: Tom Meyer
[e-mail]


To connect to the Hypertext Hotel, type:

>From a Unix system: telnet count.cs.brown.edu 8888

>From VMS: telnet count.cs.brown.edu /port=8888

Once there, you can type: connect <character name> <password>

Or if you don't have your own character yet, type: connect
guest

You'll notice that there are several projects here, for
instance HOTEL, which is a long-standing collaborative
hypertext that's been in-progress on Brown software/networks
for years. Also Hi-Pitched Voices, a collaborative woman's
hypertext project run by the hypertext author Carolyn Guyer.
Please feel free to visit these projects.

And you will also see : type * "WAX" to node: "WELCOME",
traveled by [x] people.

Type Wax, and you'll be at the intro.

An introductory document to the hypertextual features of the
MOO is available by anonymous ftp from count.cs.brown.edu, in
/pub/hypertext/docs.txt.

=========================== ===========================
=========================== ===========================

Long term:

Personal long-term goals here: "Waxweb"  is a practical and
aesthetic experiment in multiple media integrated narrative. I
consider it a laboratory for my next "feature",  investigating
how artists can produce multiple media integrated narrative out
of a single data set, using hybrid tools to affordably create a
multitude of hybrid forms which all constitute a single
narrative.

Focusing on text, we can see that most text tools have
collapsed into  the integrated text amplifier... or computer,
allowing us to do anything we want to do with words, in any
order we want, on the way to composition. Concomitantly, we
have gained the ability to project these functionalities across
any distance, allowing us to not only to write or read, but to
do a lot of hybrid things which are neither exactly one nor the
other.

The continuing collapse of general media tools into the
integrated media amplifier.... or networked media
workstation... where hypertext, image processing and synthesis,
editing, and a variety of in-between functionalities can allow
anything to happen in any order, on the way to composition,
collaboration, presentation, and things in between, will not
only increase the number of hybrid media-production forms, but
the number of hybrid, multiplexed works, which are unitary, yet
take multiple forms... where a single, variegated chunk of
proto-narrative, proto-image, proto-anything data can, and
often will, take many different forms, which will all have the
esthetic tension of being morphologically similar, though in
different media.

Therefore text as the already strongly established base element
in the coming, polymathic/polymorphic, self-organizing (in any
order at all) electron networks and narratives and artworks to
be.

Short-term practicalities: A third version of the baselayer
will also be made possible in the coming months through the
availability of a Storyspace to HTML conversion utility from
Eastgate, which will make it possible to publish the baselayer
on the World Wide Web. I intend also to add stills and audio to
both in the near term.

Thanks for your attention to this long letter.

DB


=================================================================
WAXWEB mail: [e-mail] [don't forget to ID your message!]
Editors: Michael Joyce, Larry McCaffery .... and, in random order:
Ross Harley, Scott Bukatman, Carolyn Guyer, John McDaid,
Stuart Moulthrop, Jane Douglas, Barbara Page, Heinz Fenkl,
Arnold Dreyblatt, Florence Ormezzano, Nora Ligorano/Marshall Reese,
Bobby Rabyd, Mark Amerika, Takayuki Tatsumi, Reiko Tochigi, Erkki Hutamo,
Jalal Toufic, Kathryn Cramer, Simon Penny, Thecla Schiphorst