Hypertext pioneer Robert Arellano discusses the genre with Scott Rettberg, Director of the Center for Digital Narrative (CDN).
SR: Welcome to Off Center, the podcast of the Center for Digital Narrative. I’m here today with Robert Arellano, who is a Professor of Emerging Media and Digital Arts at Southern Oregon University.
RA: We just say EMDA for short.
SR: Fantastic. Bobby is a pioneer in the field of hypertext, also a recording artist, novelist, someone who wears a lot of hats. Bobby is the first guest researcher of the Center for Digital Narrative and will be giving the inaugural lecture on 50 years of hypertext. So, we’re very excited to have you here, Bobby.
RA: That’s great, thanks.
SR: And I hope you’ll enjoy your time in Bergen.
RA: Already feel right at home.
SR: Let’s dive right in and talk about your background and your journey first, how did you end up exploring the digital at all?
RA: I’m glad you’re starting with that because George Landow, the critic, theorist of hypertext that created some of the English department courses that built webs in Intermedia—
SR: And this is at Brown University?
RA: At Brown in the mid-eighties. He started on this stuff, I only got in around 1989. I took his Victorian literature course where we were building the Victorian web, and I might have gone on and also worked on the Romanticism web and the Cyberpunk web. These were all built on a platform created by something that existed, again, in the mid-eighties at Brown called the Institute for Research and Information Scholarship, IRIS for short. They got a lot of funding, I think, from Apple and maybe competing funding from Microsoft. It was one of those salad years in the mid-eighties that they were able to develop Intermedia, which was an intranet, a sort of local area network, a hypertext, multiple authoring system that allowed people to collaborate in real time on a single networked text with images and audio.
RA: And that was thanks to George, in 1989, that I kind of got bit and caught the bug, and in that course, when we contributed to a big collective essay that continued to be formed for the next several years on Victorian literature and English, I remember experimenting with some fiction as well, just in the Intermedia platform.
SR: You mentioned George Landow. He recently passed away, but he was a pioneering hypertext theorist as well, he really drove these ideas of the connections between post structuralism and this emerging technology. As you say, you started out doing scholarly hypertext?
RA: And that was the magic connection, thanks to George, I knew enough about Intermedia to be dangerous. So that when I visited Robert Coover in his office hours in the fall of 1990, he had just gotten back from sabbatical and I was an undergraduate getting ready to complete my undergraduate thesis in creative writing, that was an Honors Track inside the English department at the time, and you would find a thesis advisor, contribute some material to the university library as an honors thesis and get your bachelors in English with an honors in creative writing. And Bob told me right away, in the first five minutes in his office, that he was not taking any undergraduate advisees.
SR: “Get out of my office.”
RA: Exactly. Fortunately, at the time, I think I was so nervous, and I was also feeling so deflated that I didn’t want to let myself leave right away. He was kind enough not to kick me out, so I asked him what he was working on, and he mentioned a number of things, including, “And I want to use this new platform that George Landow over in English is using to create scholarly hypertext. I want to use it in a creative writing workshop.” And I said, “You mean Intermedia and hypertext fiction?” And he said, “You know about this stuff?“ And I immediately became my own best deputized authority in how we were going to transform the Intermedia platform to be used in a creative writing workshop. That was for the spring semester starting in January of 1991, the first hypertext fiction workshop with Bob Coover. I was his undergraduate teaching and research assistant. They called it a UTRA at Brown, it sounds like an infection.
SR: It does sound like it might hurt. You worked with Bob on the hypertext courses for a number of years?
RA: Yes. In fact, from that period of January 1991, right through until 2003, when I very happily after three separate postgrad fellowships moved on and moved out west, I probably taught two dozen electronic writing workshops, two or three a semester every year for six or eight years as the instructor of record, and the first two or three years as his undergraduate and then graduate teaching assistant. So, it took off like a rocket and drew a lot of interesting people from all over the world who heard about it to Brown.
SR: So, students picked up on it right away and jumped into it?
RA: Yeah, there was definitely some word on it. I remember my old college roommate who is the guy who kind of hoodwinked me into continuing to play music, Will Oldham, now better known by his music pen name Bonnie Prince Billy said, “Can I get into this workshop? I hear it’s really awesome.” He created an amazing hypertext called Riding, for Will Oldham or Bonnie Prince Billy buffs out there, that is the title of his first single, too.
SR: I didn’t know that Bonnie Prince Billy took a hypertext course.
RA: He took the first one I want to say, either the first or the second, and I can probably pinpoint that by looking back at the files. He created visual art too, and intermedia, really primitive stuff, sort of like MacPaint back then. I can still see it in my mind, an image of a character over a campfire that was made with these textures of like, wallpaper style Mac art.
SR: Oh yeah, Mac paintings, wow.
RA: So, Will was in that class, and within a few years Andrew Sean Greer, who’s since won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 in fiction, Mary-Kim Arnold, Alvin Lu, Mark Amerika, Shelley Jackson. And a lot of these folks went on to publish novels, poetry, story collections in print.
SR: As well as making major contributions in digital media.
RA: In what Coover might call the golden age.
SR: When writing reigned supreme, right?
RA: Yeah, that’s right. It was all about the word.
SR: Well, and I remember Bob, when I talked to him about these early hypertext courses, he said that the thing that excited him most about using this technology was to get writers to write against the grain of what they what they usually did, that he thought it would sort of help people to break out of boxes and rethink story structure.
RA: That’s right. To be able to escape the tyranny of the line, and think outside the box, literally and figuratively. The potential for non-linear, multivocal, to undermine the authority of the author and give the reader more agency in the process of creating literature, to have it be more of a collaborative, interactive process than just a dictatorial process. So, he really was about that, believing that hypertext was a tool, a step that you may not use for everything, but it was going to add something else to your box of curiosities moving down the line as whatever kind of literary activity you were going to work on.
SR: Yeah, and of course, he wrote several essays about the end of books. Although when I talked to him, I was like, “You know, Bob, you’re always writing about the end of books, but you keep writing books. I think your plan is just to write the last book.”
RA: And I’m getting goosebumps knowing that his last novel came out just this month. I’m still waiting to be able to grab my copy.
SR: What’s the title?
RA: The title is Open House. I heard about it a little from his son, our friend Roderick Coover, and it sounds like so many of his novels, fiercely experimental and subversive of literary conventions. He’s living in England now near his daughter and grandchildren, and I look forward to visiting him next month. I can’t wait to see what this last book brings out. By the way, The End of Books, he told me once, editors impose headlines, that’s the only thing you don’t get to choose. He appreciated the buzz it caused, but it was not his decision.
SR: I was an undergraduate at a little college in Iowa at the time, and I remember actually seeing that in the library, in the reading room, seeing that headline and just being instantly fascinated with this idea of hypertext.
RA: On the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it had interesting art, kind of like these characters in a labyrinth, in a sort of pseudo 3D perspective. In 1991, January, the first workshop, and by 1992 he publishes that first end of books article in the New York Times. Then there’s a second one that follows up on it in 1993. So, there’s really two New York Times pieces. But in the meantime, all these people are coming to Brown. I had to look back at the dates, but the first festival we organized together was a lot of fun for us. We worked on a half a dozen festivals and conferences over those years, between 1991 and 2003. The first one was the Festival of African Writing. Wole Soyinka was there, Ama Ata Aidoo. I think we got 20 authors from 16 different African nations and every time he would organize, sometimes optional, but always highly encouraged a voluntary drop-in workshop for the writers. A few years later it was Original Voices with women writers like Joanna Scott.
SR: A workshop with hypertext?
RA: Yes. Just to drop in at the CIT and hear what this stuff was about. So, in 1994, my festival of Cuban writing, we called it Crossing the Line. We had some prominent Cuban authors, award winning novelists and poets from Cuba who learned some stuff about hypertext, and Unspeakable Practices, two and three. We get to a kind of high point, I think, in 1999 with, I love the acronym, it rolls of the tongue.
SR: TP21CL. Technology Platforms for 21st Century Literature
RA: April 7th, eighth and ninth. I had to go back to the Brown News Archive.
SR: You’ve been studying?
RA: 1999, and I remember these four guys. Did you all come from Chicago?
SR: Well, the three of us. Frank was always a little off to the side. But The Unknown, yeah.
RA: And that had been created in 1998, it was a kind of a road trip story, among other things. So, it felt like we were living in your hypertext.
SR: It was a road trip novel about a book tour. And then, of course, as we began to actually do a tour, the tour itself became part of the narrative. It was a big, sprawling hypertext, which reminds me of another work, the first hypertext novel on the web, to my knowledge, Sunshine ‘69.
RA: That’s right.
SR: Which was published in 1996.
RA: Yes. By SonicNet. It was a Silicon Alley startup; you might remember Lower Broadway back then called itself Silicon Alley as a contrast to Silicon Valley, that ended up selling their platform to VH1, the competitor for MTV. But in 1996, one of the principals at that company was Nicholas Butterworth, an old friend of mine at Brown. I called him and said, “I’ve got this thing.” I built it in Storyspace, but it was when the next version of Storyspace came around that allowed you to export to HTML. I knew I wanted this thing to be born on the web, and to have visuals, audio, even a little animation. We used real audio for the music.
SR: I didn’t realize that you actually wrote in Storyspace.
RA: I love to brag about that. And in fact, at the time and to this day, Mark Bernstein, the person who’s continued to promote Storyspace, and I actually just got the most recent version so I can tinker around with the Hypertext Hotel, I give him all the credit for it. I don’t think I could have built such a sprawling, over 500 nodes, some of them as short as a sentence, others that you had to scroll a good long time to get to the bottom of. Between those 500 nodes, if we don’t even include the menus, which would add an exponential power of ten, there were probably 5000 links between those passages, and it was Storyspace and the nesting of major areas, elements, characters and places that allowed me to do that. But I knew I wanted to export to HTML, and I asked Nicholas Butterworth whether he might help me publish it serially because I was into Dickens at the time, and I had learned about how Dickens’s long sprawling novels had been published in serial format on newsprint at the time.
RA: He connected me with a producer on his team named Alison Dorfman, who is kind of the midwife of Sunshine 69. We started cooking it in March of 1996, but the publication date was June 21st. It was summer, the solstice of 1996 and it was serialized with a chapter or a passage.
SR: The first web browsers were, what, 1995?
RA: Yeah. We had just gone from Mosaic to Netscape.
SR: Right when that came out.
RA: And yes, so it was a little complicated. I remember we were updating the HTML and we had reverse links as well as links from the chapters that had been dropped on the first week or so into the new chapters. But there was a method to it all, and by December 6, which we set out to be the climactic date, because that was the anniversary of the Altamont concert, that some still referred to as the spiritual death of the Sixties, a year after Woodstock—
SR: Well, let’s dig into that a little bit, because one of the things that I loved about Sunshine ‘69, I taught it for many years when I started teaching courses on hypertext in electronic literature. Nothing against Mark Amerika, I love GRAMMATRON, but there was something recognizable in the sense of this is a novel. Not that it was a complete reinvention of all forms, but that there was really a story, a number of stories that you could sink your teeth into and follow through many threads, and follow in a bunch of different ways, ranging from character perspectives to a calendar or to items in people’s pockets. It was really centered around this idea of California culture during the 1960s, characters like Timothy Leary, The Glimmer Twins, The Rolling Stones. Wasn’t there a CIA agent?
RA: Yeah, that’s right. A CIA undercover agent, who is historically accurate. There’s rumors of Ali Stark, that was just one of his many names he went by, who infiltrated the hippie counterculture and according to some of the underground literature, created a version of Orange Sunshine that was actually not even LSD. It was a psychotic drug that he dropped on Altamont.
SR: There was this connection to Hallucinogens or psychedelic culture as well, and I think about what happens when we process a story through those types of neurons.
RA: That’s right. And in fact, Coover egged me on. I remember he had read earlier versions of it, and in fact the first iteration was Brown’s first electronic graduate thesis, which I titled Altamont, with an anarchy symbol as the first letter. That was still in Storyspace, and I submitted it to Brown for completion of my MFA in May of 1994. But I kept tinkering with it, and I built it out a lot. Then Storyspace with the HTML export affordances came along and I said, “This is great, I now know how I want to publish it.” I recall at one point, Scott, five or six years ago, a Rutledge collection came out where you gave a really good survey of the hypertext novel, including GRAMMATRON, including Sunshine ‘69. I think Patchwork Girl was in there, too. And you really got it, you read it closely and you taught it over the years.
SR: Yeah.
RA: All those things you say were deliberate and Coover would tell me, “You’re actually creating an acid trip here with hypertext.” He was egging me on, he was like, “Make it so.”
SR: Definitely. It’s taking the experiment to the next level, which I guess is ultimately text. Another thing I remember about it is, I’m not sure it was working even at the time, but there’s a soundtrack, right?
RA: I managed to get it working again because RealAudio Player got completely left behind, and so I’ve since reloaded the 8-tracks as MP3’s. There were suggestions of which tracks to play with which chapters. Another note here is that my good old friend Colin Gagon and Will Oldham, there he is again, were the collaborators on the soundtrack. Colin and I played with and toured with Will for many years in the Nineties and early 2000s, but they both contributed instrumentation as well as vocals to the original soundtrack.
SR: I’ll have to come back and give that a listen. Looking back at that work, one of the amazing things was you think about that moment, right when people are first opening up web browsers and being exposed to this as a new medium. You’re already thinking about how you can bring in sound and really doing some deep thinking on what changes about the nature of story structures and what it means when you have a novel that people can read 50, 100 different ways. That stories can accrue in a different way than they do when you read print novels. At the same time, you sort of bounce between these practices, and of course, you’ve done a lot of writing for print. A lot of people, Shelley Jackson’s an excellent example of this, someone who’s done a lot of work in digital media, but then kind of transferred it back to print. What do you think you take away from the experience of writing hypertext into the way that you think about writing other kinds of fiction?
RA: Sure. I think now, novels, beginning with Fast Eddie, King of the Bees in 2001, which I knew had to be in print. The interesting thing for me is that I still write with Storyspace or Twine, and yet usually I would be experimenting with some characters, maybe get 500 or 1000 words into some scenarios, and the text itself would tell me whether it wanted to be interactive or whether it wanted to be linear. I think Coover once made the analogy getting off a train with a backpack in a foreign city, that’s the experience of exploring in hypertext, that it’s not just a different platform or medium, it’s also a different genre. We go to an interactive story for different things than we tuck into a novel and let the author control our perspective. That led me with subsequent novels, like the one that was a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Havana Lunar, a Cuban noir. Writing that I looked at it as a Rubik’s Cube. I was shifting chapters in the sequence, both in time but in multiple points of view up until the last draft and the freedom I felt of not being stuck in a linear way of constructing it, but instead of moving and shuffling passages around for the most effective building of narrative wouldn’t have happened without those years, both writing and teaching hypertext.
SR: Yeah, it’s so funny, I’m still thinking about the fact that you were writing in Storyspace, and then thinking back to The Unknown, because I think we didn’t even really know about Storyspace when we started writing. We’re just doing it in flat HTML, and I think eventually a pirated copy of Dreamweaver. But it was interesting to think about that ecosystem later on. I would realize, of course, that Storyspace had some functionalities that just HTML did not have at the time, things like guard fields or stuff like that. But it was also the sort of gesture of, okay, there’s this piece of software that costs like 500 dollars. We were like, “Well, we can’t afford that. Let’s just see what we can do on our own.” And even just that basic linking, and thinking through the poetics of what a link is was certainly enough for us to play with and be fascinated with.
SR: Maybe for people at home, hopefully people do know now, but what is hypertext?
RA: I just like to boil it down to the simplest definition. The writing process is non-linear, meaning as a writer, you’re not thinking they’re going to start at the top of page one, get to the bottom, turn the page, and go to page two. We always love the Choose Your Own Adventure analogy but imagine Choose Your Own Adventure on steroids. It’s going to be that much more involved and intensive if you’ve got a non-linear network like a computer can afford you, as opposed to flipping around pages and going backwards and holding your thumb there in case it turns out to be a dead end. If the writing process is non-linear, therefore it follows the reading experience must be interactive and requires a different kind of attention and participation on the part of the reader. That is, they’re not just allowed to turn the page, they have to make a choice whether it’s clicking on one character point of view or another, whether it’s a more discrete, abstract text phrase that you don’t know where it’s going to lead. The following of the link develops its own meaning on the process of, “Whoa, that phrase took me someplace and maybe it doesn’t seem like there’s a direct correlation. What am I making out between the author’s non-linear writing as having yet another valence of communication, of story that I have never experienced before.”
RA: Folks can recognize that Wikipedia, for us, has always been a hypertextual nonfiction reference. If you take that concept, and it can have many appearances, it doesn’t have to look like blue underlined text links on a page of long paragraphs. It can, as the ELO awards over the years have shown—
SR: The Robert Coover Award.
RA: Those examples we’ve seen over the years are really just playful kinetic poetry that works great on a tablet, right? Ways of allowing words, phrases, paragraphs, passages to really be non-linear, almost like a globe.
SR: To come back to that, just what a link is was one of the things that when I was working early on in the Nineties, early 2000s with hypertext, it’s one of these things where I think we still haven’t finished exploring. Because it becomes its own grammar that is multi-functional. So, like one of the things when we were going through The Unknown, we’d say maybe this is like a line break in a poem, or maybe this is like just like a footnote. Maybe it can function as a joke, or some new way of indexing. I guess the idea of associative indexing is core to the idea of hypertext, so maybe you have a novel, or a story that moves closer to the way that we move through thoughts or move through a conversation than it is through the typical structures of a novel.
SR: One thing I want to bring up, because it’s something that’s occurred over the years to me. There was this period where people said, “Let’s try to make novels in hypertext.” And if we look back now, this five- or six-year window, maybe it’s the case that the novel and hypertext are just too completely different to actually work and function together. Maybe that getting pulled away and getting distracted by the structure, maybe that pulls away from that leading the reader down a path.
RA: You know, I’ve wondered that myself, and just recently rereading Coover’s essay on the golden age of hypertext, and just looking over his shoulder as a very sensitive and attentive reader at Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl makes me want to say "No." There’s still potential for hypertext in the novel and that was one moment, everything from its affiliation with Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein to Shelley Jackson’s metafictional and introspective chapters, as Coover points out, sometimes really deeply buried like an Easter egg. You get Shelley’s reflections from the time she was writing it about how strange it was to be a long and comprehensive story, but if you have the right metaphor of structure and then try it. I liked your reminder that we really could spend a lot more time digging into what we mean by the link. I’ve thought of the link, if I was going to use an analogy, if hypertext is like the brain, the link is the firing of an electrical impulse through the synapses. And that can go a lot of different ways, and as a result, the outcome, the future of this object, this intelligence, will change.
SR: One of the things you mentioned, Twine, just to provide a little bit of background: Storyspace was a hypertext software where you can create nodes and visualize them and the connections between them. And then Twine came along, a free, open access software that does a lot of the same things and enables people to use code, conditional fields to move things around. So, it was really interesting to me as a moment, just the last eight years or so, that there’s been this explosion of activity around Twine, people call them Twine games. It has elements of interactive fiction from Zork onwards, but then it’s sort of right between those two forms. So maybe we’re having a moment where hypertext has been coming back again.
RA: I hope so, and it’s been building. I think you’re right to point out seven or eight years back, I remember for me, the luck was I was really getting anxious to teach hypertext fiction again, but I didn’t know that I could justify buying a lot of site license copies of software I had used to teach in the past. Then I heard about Twine and your textbook came out at the same time, the Electronic Literature textbook. It places things in a historical context for them and Twine now, my students kind of dragged me at first, kicking and screaming, because I was a little suspicious of certain genres. But it’s a great place for fanfic, it’s a great place for gamification of narrative. There’s a community attached, twinery.org, and the Internet Fiction Database, and you can type in almost anything and find a story.
SR: And there’s not a lot of barriers to entry. Our students love Twine. My kids have made Twine fiction, you can hop into it pretty quickly, which has been a big thing holding people back. A lot of people who are writers say, “That’s great what you do, but I could never work with code like that.” And we’re like, “Here, just try this.”
RA: I’m porting the original Hypertext Hotel, the first version of which was in Intermedia and has since passed through Storyspace and HTML, and back into Storyspace into Twine right now so I can use it next week at the Hypertext Hotel (Bergen Version) workshop.
SR: Hypertext Hotel, tell us about that project really quickly.
RA: It was born the same day as the original Hypertext Fiction Workshop. Coover figured out that a good way to get folks comfortable in this new space would be to have a collective, collaborative and always organically growing hypertext with a metaphor. Whether it’s Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, Sunshine 69’s acid trip or the hotel, there’s a private space that the moment you check in, you can do whatever you do behind your door and create your character, come up with some drama and then take that down into the Hurricane Lounge or up to the Celebrity Suite.
SR: Sort of like Life: a User’s Manual by George Perec.
RA: Very much. A structural architectural metaphor for floors and rooms, and then it started to grow outside the walls of the hotel, first with the pool, but then folks also recognized, "well, there’s this restaurant down the road a little bit." So that was part of every hypertext fiction workshop for the first seven or eight years or so at Brown. It went dormant for a bit in the early 2000s. And I just love this story, my students at Southern Oregon University and I set out to find whatever the most recent version was and reopen the hotel just five years ago. It was almost exactly five years ago this month at the beginning of 2018 academic year, and all the king’s horses couldn’t find an existing version of it. It had disappeared from all the servers at Brown. There were backup servers in the Netherlands at one point and it was no longer there. Everyone wrote me back and said, “We’re sorry, we assumed someone had it.” I happened to be in Providence in 2018 for a literary festival, and I told Bob this and he was just as dismayed as I was, but he gave me an old first-generation PowerBook that he had forgotten the password to. I took it back with me on the carry-on bag across the country and found a hacker I knew and hired him to break into Bob’s old laptop, and we found the only existing version of the Hypertext Hotel.
SR: Wow. What a great media archeology story.
RA: It’s a novel, it writes itself. And so, I think it was in a conversation with you, Scott, because we several times this year had Zooms to brainstorm and catch up that I realized the hotel is not only an artifact of net art and a collaborative literary creation that has historical significance, but it’s also a treasure for teaching creative writing as a whole, specifically digital narrative. And so I am still around, still teaching and using it at Southern Oregon University, and I look forward to opening up the first European wing of the Hypertext Hotel next week by taking students on a two day generative writing journey where they create their own rooms that they will then, at the end of the workshop, link back to rooms made by people who wrote them. Many of these students weren’t born when the original rooms were built in the Hypertext Hotel. Coover has got original material in there, and he writes about The Unknown and you and your friends. It’s great, It’s alive. It’s both an archeological dig, and the walls are beginning to come out of the new wing so that we can actually move in.
SR: I remember an essay by George Landow, he wrote about exploratory hypertext and constructive hypertext, and the idea that there’s the exploratory hypertext that’s meant to be a reading experience. It’s primarily a different way of encountering literature, and the constructive hypertext, which is a collective writing environment and a collective writing experiment, and that in a way this is a new way to teach writing and thinking about writing. So, I think these collectively written works, especially, also fulfill that purpose as well. So yeah, glad to hear you’re bringing that back.
RA: Right back full circle to where we started. And George, we can credit him, I only remembered thanks to your podcast, that Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl was first conceived not in Bob Coover’s creative writing workshop, but in one of George Landow’s theory courses.
SR: Yeah, that’s right.
RA: So, I like that reminder about the constructive, collaborative being really different in the case of something like the Hypertext Hotel from the exploratory, passive. That’s going to be where we pick up where we left off 22 years ago I’ll say, since the last time someone built a new wing, a major new area of the Hypertext Hotel. And I love that, to borrow a little phrasing from Taylor Swift, that it’s going to be Bergen’s version.
SR: We skipped a few years between the early 2000’s and 2023, and some exciting stuff that you’ve done along the way, not only writing a number of novels and recording a number of albums, but also starting a center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts. Can you just tell me a little bit about that experience of moving into an institution and trying to create an environment for creative practices and digital media, what was that experience like and what have you learned along the way?
RA: Thanks for giving me that chance, because the Emerging Media and Digital Arts, or EMDA for short, began because a very forward looking group of faculty and the dean recognized that the best way to encourage innovation at the university was not by just hiring a faculty member to be the figurehead of an existing department, but instead to create an interdisciplinary center that would bring people together. From art, computer science, writing, communication and media production, and really almost any other department that wanted to chime in. So, we had visiting fellows, intra-university visiting fellows from the very first year we were open, and then we built a minor degree and a major degree out of that. And what I love about my dear new home, 13 years now, of Oregon, is that the students were so ready for it. I guess I caught the tail end of Gen Z and now into something else that’s happening, and thanks to things like fanfic and the resurgence of RPGs, the paper based, Dungeons & Dragons style role-playing games makes it so that they immediately took to the interactive and non-linear aspect of it. I’m glad we chose the term emerging from the start because we batted around “new” and “multi” and “post,” but emerging gave us the chance to be a little cheeky every time someone wanted to know what it’s about.
SR: It’s a lot better than being post, right?
RA: That’s right. It worked out and if I think about that founding of the center in 2010, it really helps me put milestones in the rearview mirror because in 1991, my own actual first year of completing my bachelor’s degree, I was an undergraduate teaching assistant for Coover in my final semester when we started the workshop. 1999 and the ELO really ranks as significant to me too, because it really felt like, "Wow, this is so much more beyond the walls of Brown," which was a relief. It’s like we weren’t shouldering the figurehead role of electronic literature anymore, but it was also exciting. We wanted to see what was going to come of it. And the fact that ELO was a movable feast and continues to be for years in terms of its home bases at different institutions. Then 2010, after some years at University of New Mexico, which was a great time for me, but let me just say that the area I was in didn’t need a hypertext guy. They wanted someone to reboot their freshman composition and their expository writing program. I was glad to do that because I dig that stuff, and I like that teaching how to write a cover letter and write a good technical writing report gets people jobs. That was exciting for me.
SR: Now people just ask ChatGPT.
RA: Exactly, now that that’s become obsolete, I’m glad I pivoted. The Emerging Media and Digital Arts program gave me a chance to get back on the horse a little bit. And that was the year I reconnected with people like you and Dene Grigar and others. And I think I’ve been made a founding member of the committee, the board of ELO for life now, thanks a lot. I got an email to that effect recently.
SR: You were always on the literary advisory board.
RA: That's it. And I remember being a judge, one of the many over the years for the Robert Coover Award. It kept me paying attention and now we have non-linear writing workshops every year. We also create games and apps. The more things didn’t require a huge computer suite, but instead became something you could make on your laptop or your phone, w’ve been ready and emerging into those areas and students are creating the next generation of innovating digital media thanks to that program and the great colleagues who work with me on it. I just want to say though, that looking at the milestones, 2023 stands as a really significant year because this Center for Digital Narrative has given not just me, but I know others who are coming in as researchers, postdocs, other teachers, faculty members a reason to really feel like we’ve got not just today, but a decade.
SR: At least.
RA: Exactly. And I appreciate the model that the Norwegian Center for Research Excellence has come up with. It’s what’s necessary to both capture some things that you and I always discuss. We haven’t been able to record that yet as part of the history of digital narrative, but also then to really think forward. And I’m excited about the generative digital narrative discussions happening, the conversations about AI as being just another tool in the many millennia old relationship between humans and tools.
SR: And texts.Well, it’s a really exciting moment and it’s been great to have you here. We’ll also be recording your keynote lecture on A Half-Century of Hypertext: Living e-Lit. And I want to thank you Robert Arellano, Bobby Rabid, for being here with us today on Off Center.
A Half-Century of Hypertext: the Center for Digital Narrative Inaugural Lecture by Robert Arellano
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References
Amerika, Mark. 1997. GRAMMATRON. https://markamerika.com/artworks/grammatron-by-mark-amerika
Arellano, Robert. 1996. Sunshine '69. https://bobbyrabyd.github.io/sunshine69//’
Arellano, Robert. 2001. Fast Eddie, King of the Bees. Akashic.
Arellano, Robert. 2009. Havana Lunar. Akashic.
Coover, Robert. 1992. “The End of Books.” The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27/specials/coover-end.html
Coover, Robert. 1992. Hypertext Hotel.
Coover, Robert. 1999. “Literary Hypertext: The Passing of the Golden Age.” Keynote Address, Digital Arts and Culture 1999. https://nickm.com/vox/golden_age.html
Coover, Robert. 2023. Open House. OR Books.
Gillespie, William, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt. 1998. The Unknown. https://unknownhypertext.com/
Infocom. Zork. Personal Software. PDP-10. 1977.
Jackson, Shelley. 1995. Patchwork Girl. Eastgate Systems.
Oldham, Will. 1992. Riding.
Perec, George. 1978. Life: A User’s Manual. Hachette Littératures.
Rettberg, Scott. 2018. Electronic Literature. Polity Press
Shelley, Mary. 1818. Frankenstein.
This research is partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centers of Excellence program, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative and project number 335129, Extending Digital Narrative.