Rob Wittig and Johannah Rodgers – an independent scholar and a digital writer – discuss the collaborative and community-building nature of Netprov.
Image: DALL·E 2023-03-02 19.55.13 - "a group of people writing collectively a novel on financial crisis."
SUMMARY KEYWORDS: people, involved, project, monstrous, morse code, thought, montreal, charm, grace, academic, jokes, evolved, interesting, platforms, identity management, terms, identities, prompt, specific, interested
SPEAKERS: Johannah Rodgers, Rob Wittig
Rob Wittig
How did you first get involved with Netprov?
Johannah Rodgers
I'd say my first formal involvement was at the 2017 Electronic Literature Conference in Porto, Portugal. I had been writing in the netprov Monstrous Weather. It was at that conference that we all sat around after lunch one day and read portions of our Monstrous Weather texts.
I believe it was at the ELO conference in Montreal the following year, where Netprov did a whole conference session with you, Mark Marino, Talan Memmott and Davin Heckman. It was a roomful of academics just laughing their heads off and doing improv! It was such a transformative experience for me for a couple of reasons. One was that I suffer from terrible stage fright when I teach; I have a lot of performance anxiety. And yet, in this particular situation, in this Netprov seminar, I had no stage fright at all, I was completely comfortable. Secondly, being involved with Netprov has been in some ways the culmination of a lifelong dream. Growing up in the late 1970s, I often wrote little skits, like Saturday Night Live skits. And if I had not become an academic — if I had really paid attention to what I wanted to do, and thought there was any future in it — I really wanted to be a comedy writer. Since then, my involvement has evolved. But I still think back on that seminar in Montreal. Everyone got so much out of it. Everyone was really communicating! It was unlike any kind of interaction I've ever had at an academic conference.
Rob Wittig
Awesome! As one of the writers of Monstrous Weather even before we all got together in person in Portugal, what was it like to collaborate at a distance, write at a distance in that way?
Johannah Rodgers
The Netprov writing prompts have always been very inviting. But I didn't realize how freeform they were until I started getting involved. As a creative writer, I've been interested in constraint based writing for a long time and frequently use constraints in my own work. So I guess it is no surprise that I felt that constraints somehow applied to the Monstrous Weather prompt as well. We were invited to tell a scary story on the day the internet failed as a result of weird weather and I decided to play around with the cento, which is a Byzantine form of patchwork composition in which lines from classic Greek and Latin texts are brought together to tell a story unrelated to the one in the original. The best known example of the form is Eudocia’s 9th c. A.D. Homericii Centones, which relates a life of Christ using fragments from Homer. I decided to write my story using lines from Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick.” Since I was using an electronic version of “Moby Dick,” I was able to select passages that had specific terms in them related to the Monstrous Weather prompt. I remember thinking: ‘Oh, there must be something specific that they're looking for in this promp.’ I was very curious to see what similarities and differences there were in how each of us approached it. It turned out that we all approached it very differently!
Rob Wittig
I really remember your participation and Jeremy Hight’s that were so interesting! You took things off in very different — and great — directions.
Johannah Rodgers
The other thing I found so satisfying about it was having instantaneous feedback from people, both in person but also via texts in response to your text on the Google Group. I'd never had such an immediate response to any of my constraint based writing. People seemed to be able to think about it differently, and engage with it differently as a result of writing in response to it.
Rob Wittig
How has participating in Netprov impacted your own creative and scholarly practice?
Johannah Rodgers
It's impacted my creative practice much more than my scholarly practice, though the two are intertwined. Netprov has made me much more open to collaboration, and much more interested and open to working on projects that have some set timeframe and just evolve over time. As a result, I’ve become more comfortable not necessarily knowing what a project is going to be about until I get involved and start engaging with it. So I guess another Netprov I would point to, which I didn't think was quite as wonderful a collaborative experience, but was certainly an interesting one for me, was Dwindle. In Dwindle we were invited by artist Ben Grosser to do a netprov within his social media network called Minus, “a finite social network where you get 100 posts — for life.”
(https://bengrosser.com/projects/minus/)
I've often been interested in the idea of there being, in general, a limit on the number of words people can publish in their lives. [laughs] So that project was of particular interest to me. But I didn't have any sense of the community. It was a much bigger community from the other netprovs I had been involved in. There were many more people involved and I wasn’t able to connect with featured players as much in that environment.
But in that project I ended up composing some messages in Morse code — there are several Morse code translators on the Web — and then getting responses back in Morse code from people I’d never met and whose messages I was only ever partially able to translate and understand because, at that point in time, there were virtually no automated Morse Code to alphabetic language translators. I like how Morse code looks and I think a lot about coding and communication in my work so to have other people pick up these threads from me was very gratifying. Encounters like that make me feel less alone in terms of my creative work. And also in terms of my academic work, I'd say.
Rob Wittig
I loved that Morse code passage of play! A brilliant move in that environment. Are there any other netprov moments that are particularly memorable for you?
Johannah Rodgers
The Netprov that I've been involved with most in terms of the length of time of the project has been Grace, Wit & Charm. And it continues. It's a project that has its own history that I've been able to hear about and talk to others about and see some clips from. In my own creative work I'm always working around issues of identity management and … I wouldn't call them unstable identities so much as multiple or possible identities. My networked digital fiction and literacies project “DNA” [DNA: www.dnanovel.com ; About DNA (Brief) https://johannahrodgers.github.io/DNA.About.Project.Overview.Brief.pdf ; About DNA (Extended) https://johannahrodgers.github.io/Rodgers.About.DNA.A.Networked.Fiction.Project.2019.pdf ] is about someone who decides he doesn't want to be “himself;” he wants to separate his genetic identity from his biographical identity and to live the life of one of his code partners, or clones. Made up of five separate but interconnected storyworlds, DNA’s main narrative depicts a year in the life of a clone who begins plotting to take on the identity of one of his code partners
and includes a series of hyperlinks to real and fictional Wikipedia entries that provide a peek into the dystopic future of economic, agricultural, cultural, social, and political systems. Grace, Wit & Charm allowed me to really play with this concept of identity management and mobility a lot because, in some instances, it involves helping characters — “clients” — pretend to be other people. In the roleplaying we’re thinking about how information and communications technologies can be used to assist “clients” in augmenting or improving their identities. Social media has always seemed to me something that could easily be used to outsource certain human functions, actions, and conversations and feelings. And that's exactly what Grace, Wit & Charm is about.
Rob Wittig
Building on that, what are your thoughts about the various kinds of platforms that netprovs can use? And how that's changed in the last 10 years?
Johannah Rodgers
Well, in the last five years, certainly, video has become so much more a part of the interaction for netprov, for instance playing Grace, Wit & Charm on Zoom. Video was probably always part of Grace, Wit & Charm in its earlier incarnation. But for me, prior Netprovs had always been text based. You know, my favorite application for collaboration is email! [laughs] I think Monstrous Weather was actually shared via email, and I would be very happy still doing that. But Neprov for me has become more and more like stage improv over time. I never expected to be having a conversation with someone and pretending to be in character, as we did when we were playing Grace, Wit & Charm in 2022 and 2023. I always assumed that netprov would involve me taking some kind of prompt and writing on it, then sharing it with other people. One of the craziest things is that, in the spring of 2022, I actually attended my first improv class IRL, which I never would have done if I hadn't been involved in netprov.
Rob Wittig
Fun! What are your thoughts about the community building potential of Netprov? And/or Netprov, as a tool to build bridges in a polarized society?
Johannah Rodgers
It's a tough question. Personally, I love laughing with people. Humor really brings people together. But I also think that humor is a very, very culturally specific thing. Part of what is so satisfying to me about Netprov is that people find my jokes funny. [laughs] And I find other Netprover’s jokes funny. I wouldn't call our shared sensibility “academic humor,” per se, but it tends toward it. A lot of our jokes have to do with things that we've read, or are thinking about, or silly technical things or technical trends. In that respect I think it's very community specific.
On the other hand, I have always been somebody who's socially very self conscious in groups. I am less so when there is some structuring principle around social interaction. So I could see specific Netprov projects being used to facilitate that. But it would have to be designed to be more inclusive than I find Grace, Wit & Charm to be. I know that it works for students, but if I were getting together a group of people from various backgrounds — widely different educational backgrounds and cultural backgrounds — I feel like I would want to design a Netprov that drew more on people’s existing knowledge. I see a lot of potential for Netprov in group work, but I think it needs to be customized, depending on the group.
Rob Wittig
Do you have any thoughts about netprov in the post-truth era — the significance of fiction in the current media environment, including politically and socially controversial aspects.
Johannah Rodgers
I think that depending on the platform, and depending on the audience, I'm going to have a different sense of freedom in making sarcastic remarks. I think the platforms are becoming differentiated significantly at this point. In 2022, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, all have very different profiles. I have a personal Twitter account that's kind of a professional account. And I would never make the kind of jokes that I make in Netprov on that account, because I wouldn't want people to misunderstand me; I would not want to be perceived by any reader as being someone disseminating misinformation, which is something that happens all of the time on social media because messages are not restricted to specific audiences. I'm so interested in satire, but I tend to think you have to have an understanding of where your satire is going and who is receiving it for it to be received as satire. Statements can be easily mistaken for some kind of sincere or factual communication when they are divorced from their original rhetorical context. And that's not what I would want.
Rob Wittig
Any more thoughts on how netprov has evolved?
Johannah Rodgers
When I first got involved with the Electronic Literature Organization, I thought Netprov was a project made up of a specific group of individuals. Over time, I've come to understand that it is largely project based and, depending on the specific project, different people will get involved. I've been involved since 2017, and I would say I’ve done maybe one or two projects a year. I'm much more involved than I used to be at least in part because, during the pandemic, Rob, you would host a Friday evening Zoom salon, which was not a Netprov per se, but which fostered a real sense of inclusion and community. From those events, I was able to meet other netprov people who I've since written with and played with, some of whom I’ve never met in person.
Rob Wittig
Great! That’s wonderful. I guess I’ll stop the recording.