In conversation, Scott Rettberg engages with Roderick Coover and his multiplicitous career that started off as a forest ranger, a cinema projectionist, "a ski bum" and (further along) a winemaker in Burgundy, a couple of years of participant observation in Africa, the first all-electronic dissertation at the University of Chicago, works of combinatory cinema and other "differing narratives" that emerged in a still (inter)active literary and multi-medial career.
SR: On this episode of Off Center, I’ll be talking with Roderick Coover, a filmmaker, digital artist and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University about his career and about our collaborative work together in producing works of combinatory cinema, computer programs that produced different versions of a film every time they run. Welcome, Rod.
RC: Hello, Scott.
SR: Rod, tell me a little about your journey, your background and how you got into doing this type of work.
RC: The journey began with a kind of lost period of wandering around the world with a camera. I graduated from college with a mixed degree in history and filmmaking, and after a few months working as a forest ranger, a cinema projectionist, and a ski bum, and I got on a bicycle and biked along the southwest in search of disappeared pioneer sites and other obscure sites of strange occurrences. Because I was traveling light on a bicycle, a small camera and a notebook were the only things I could carry. So, the process was one that grew into something now called visual research. At the time was a kind of gathering, a scrapbook-making and multilinear travelogue that also involved map-making that spanned time. Following that experience and then similar journeys in Japan (where I was teaching for English for a while) and S.E. Asia, I started an MA and then PhD, in which I developed more precise strategies of research and creation. This took me to West Africa and to France. I started making what was at the time, one of the first interactive documentaries. This was in the early nineties, before the Internet of today and before we had DVDs. I was developing a structure to envision interactive DVD creation for documentaries that would blend text, image and sound. I was looking for methods that would enhance the creative-research process, and an output that better reveal that process to readers and viewers. I had an MA in experimental theater and film, and there was always an element of the surreal meets the documentary as well as a performative aspect, which was current in the scholarly discourse of the time in the writings of James Clifford, Michael Taussig, Hal Foster among others.
SR: And this was targeting CD-ROM technologies?
RC: Well, it was not targeting CD-ROM, but there was nothing else there at the time, so it was imagining the DVD that was yet to be invented. The approach emphasized process: a process of exploring, gathering data and using ethnographic methods of participant observation to tell stories that would emerge from the materials, to not just arrive on site with the story pre-made, but to let a project grow organically out of the database. Hypertext offered a good model in this process; it was a map-maker’s, scrapbook-maker’s, researcher’s and gatherer’s approach to organizing data and teasing out stories, interconnecting the parts and building out the web, which was the title of my first CD, actually, Cultures in Webs (http://culturesinwebs.com/). It’s about connecting different elements of a documentary story: the language, the metaphors, the images and the visual tropes, the sounds and their echoes to build webs of signification. How does one connect multimodal elements to live in the cultural world of a documentary, the way we live in our imagination, bouncing between references and understanding innuendoes?
SR: You did an interdisciplinary PhD at the University of Chicago?
RC: That’s right. It was the first all-electronic dissertation at Chicago, completed in 1999, in the early days of multimedia scholarship. It had taken several forms because the technology was not quite there – video, installation, hypertext. A lot of it was done in Storyspace. Still today, Storyspace has one of the most clear and useful interfaces for hypertext and interactive writing even if it is so limited in other ways. The way that elements are mapped, with boxes and files encased within files is so visual. Twine has that esthetic a little bit, but really there’s nothing out there that has the beautiful openness that Storyspace has. Some of the node-based editors have this structure, but not this sense of the embedded elements in the same way. It’s a beautiful visualization of what the creative process is for me.
SR: I know you did a documentary on winemaking in Burgundy, mixing two hobbies?
RC: That’s right. That was also part of the thesis work, a couple of years of participant observation in Africa and the couple of years in the vineyards in France. I had gone there in part, because at the time I was looking at medieval history in the naming of places, and you can’t escape the naming of vineyards working in medieval Burgundy. So, one of the ways to get to learn about how time and history are integrated into the senses of place was to start doing harvests, working at the vineyards. I got more and more into the question of how one lives a sense of place through work, through touch, through the activities of picking the grapes: the buckets, the clippers, the daily routines, the relationship to the land that is very intimate, very intense, and very much a part of the expression of a wine, of its place. How the winemakers innovate in a space where the land is very small. In Burgundy, defining characteristics can vary even one row to the next, and these differences have been learned over centuries, so the land begins to carry different histories. The towns can’t grow because the vineyards are so valuable, so everything is contained by a medieval history of wine that was developed by the monks in that area. This represents both a gift of history and an enslavement to it. There’s a sense of history in the terrain where one lives every day working on those fields and in those traditions. I worked multimodally to try to find a way of thinking hypertextually about movements through space, using movements between photo and text to suggest how we inhabit a landscape not as a surface of maps but as experiences that are lived, breathed and change with the moods of the day.
SR: If I think about your body of work, there’s a lot of interest in landscapes and in the way that landscapes connect to stories, and there is also a lot of interest in the environment and the long-standing crisis of the environment. Maybe you could talk a little bit about those projects that you did around the Colorado River?
RC: Yeah, I’d be happy to. That was in the 2000s, of course this was the era of Flash, so these are a little harder to get back to. Some of them have been saved, but others were harder to save. In that era, I was looking once again at how spaces become theaters for the performance of grand narratives, the pioneering of America, and then its destruction and so forth. One set of those was looking at the Colorado River Basin. I started that project when I was teaching at U.C. San Diego. I had a collaborator, a poet named Lance Newman, who went on to become a dean at Westminster College in Utah. I had met him when we were both graduate students at Brown University. He had been working previously as a river guide, and he continued to run river trips in Grand Canyon every summer. So, he got me on some trips, and we started this project revolving around the works of Edward Abbey, who is something of hero among the river guides. I also got very interested in the contrast between Abbey and John Wesley Powell, who was one of the first of the pioneering Americans to boat down the Colorado River and map it. One of the first of the invading Americans, as it were, to arrive and begin to transform what was already a lived landscape into a mapped landscape, and all the cultural transformation it anticipates: the mining, the road building, the dam building, all the different ways of thinking about land use as a story of capitalism and conquest, as opposed to just a story of human lives engaged in the land.
SR: And it came into Edward Abbey as well.
RC: That brought me directly to Edward Abbey, who wrote so much about this area a century later. I then did a much larger project on Abbey, an interactive map-based film. This was about, in a way, how time and place both work together to create the performances or gestures toward an act or acts, in his case, political acts. Both Powell and Abbey first promoted coming West. Powell was laying foundations for Western expansion and then realized the dangers of building beyond sustainable watersheds. But by then the forces of expansion were too great, and he failed in his attempts to put on the brakes. Abbey first promoted nature tourism to combat the industrialization of Western wilderness suggesting an army of lug-soled hikers would fight to save the places they learned to love, and then he witnessed and decried new dangers and destruction brought about by mass-tourism, with travelers often pointing to his iconic books as motivation to visit the deserts. My supporting research was drew upon photos, diaries, historical logs, maps and histories of land use. The layered structures of interactive film and maps helped draw these together with my original filmmaking, photography and writing – a process which I discussed in some other ebr publications as well as in Switching Codes (2011). At the same time that I was working on that series of nonfiction works in the desert southwest of the United States, I was starting more experimental collaborations with fiction writers and poets. One of the first of these was a fragmented panoramic narrative project filmed in Mexico City with author Deb Olin Unferth and entitled Something That Happened Only Once. In this project, song fragments narrativize the actions of individuals picture upon a rotating panorama in impossible ways, spinning and twisting so that the route through time and space would start to become a little jumbled the way it does in memory and the imagination. The viewer is compelled to follow some narrative fragments while losing control of others. Which is, I think, also the way political struggles go. The public can grab on to a couple of stories at the time, and meanwhile, the full force of environmental or industrial expansion keeps going.
SR: The philosopher Timothy Morton talks about hyperobjects, these processes and entities that move at scales that are beyond our linear comprehension of time. They are so much larger or smaller than human scale that we can’t really grab on to the whole of them, but we can see them and understand them in these little facets, and that maybe that’s a way for us to begin to process, for instance, climate change. That brings me to, we’ve worked together closely on a number of projects over the years, we’ve been friends since we put a show together right when we started the ELO in 2000, right at the turn of the millennium. But then in the last decade or so, we’ve done, I think, seven different projects. Some short films, three different combinatorial generative film projects and the CAVE-based virtual reality piece. So, I thought while you’re here it might be interesting to talk a little bit about those projects, but also one of the things that I think is really interesting about the way that we work together, and you’ve worked with other artists as well, is the collaborative process where we’re sort of moving between approaches to media, approaches to story, and the creative exchange. So, do you want to talk about some of the early projects?
RC: Yeah, I’d love to. One thing that might be interesting to go back to in this moment is to think about interface itself, because back in the early nineties there was a real hunt for what this screen space was, a space of theater or a space of desktop? The desktop had yet to be invented as a concept. It wasn’t a desktop to begin with, and then someone calls it a desktop. Macromedia back then had this theater stage with casts of characters, and for me, I really liked this notion of the environment as a space of performance.
SR: Like Brenda Laurel?
RC: Yes, well conceptualized by Brenda Laurel and, perhaps a little later, by folks working at the Labyrinth Project at USC. I think part of the collaborative process that we’ve shared has an improvisational theatricality. We rejected the process of working with in an assembly line process: “Here’s a fixed script, here’s a fixed image and compose or make a fixed piece of music” and instead followed one of collaborative exchange an open one: “Here’s a trigger, you respond to this trigger.” The creation of triggers leads to other triggers similar to a theatrical process of starting with improv to build a story or stories iteratively. The resulting works are an expression of what happened through these exchanges and iterations. In out collaborations, these exchanges build upon specific and often substantial documents, political events and scientific research but the projects are really about the performances we live: how humans tell stories to make sense of the muck of all this stuff – how they succeed or fail to find meaning in the deluge of facts and lies. I am interested in how emerging tools might help us to find to a different way of telling stories to reveal forces working behind this deluge of information. So, we would often take events in the media as launching points to explore underlying questions, like when I was in Norway, what was it, 2011 when the Grímsvötn volcano was erupting in Iceland?
SR: Right after the volcanoes.
RC: Yes, that volcano eruption had been disrupting travel all over Europe, and then you dug up the histories from the 18th century of even greater volcanoes that caused crop failures and animal deaths across Europe, flour production went down, bread prices went up– it is even considered one of the triggers of the French Revolution, right? So, current events become triggers for connecting times and places. These stories from the past that you gave me were triggers that altered my perspective as I headed out to document conditions of the present time. What do I see today on the fjords around Bergen on smoky, cloudy days that resonates with that text? I made photographs that I gave back to you as a next provocation. And, now we have something beginning to take place as a story.
SR: Yeah. And to continue with the particular example, The Last Volcano, one of the interesting things that happened there was that we did have a script, and we got together with an actress who’s also a novelist, Gro Jørstad Nilsen. She was reading this script and all of a sudden, her husband shouted down a question because he’d overheard something and there’s a sort of irritated look on her face because of the recording being interrupted. But then you, Rod, said, “Do that again,” because it was this moment of serendipity, where we saw that once this narrative was interrupted, it would change. It introduced this question of when did this happen? Is this happening in the past or is this happening now? So, I think those moments of serendipity have been important, too, about the projects that we’ve done. Another thing I think about is the idea of the database, even in the short linear films that we’ve done. You can think about database as a kind of literal structure which we use in the works that are computational, that are driven by algorithms to generate new versions of a piece each time that it runs, but also this act of, “Okay, I have some text, you have some image, you create an image in response to a text, I create a new text in response to that image.” We talk through some themes, and we bring in another theme. So over time, we really accrue these buckets of related material and then kind of come up with a process of what to do with them together. This idea of database and narrative I think is really important, this is something that Lev Manovich wrote about many years ago, the idea that can a database be a narrative? They’re sort of maybe the opposite of each other in some ways. So, this becomes an interesting challenge, I think, in the same way with hypertext. Can a fragmented text that will be read differently every time by different people, can that still create a kind of cohesive sense of a shared story, which is an interesting challenge.
RC: It exposes the narratives involved in creating the database in the first place, and I think that’s something that’s been fun. There are many ways to conceptualize collections and databases, from those of libraries to those of scrapbooks. There’s something very explicit about this process of first going out and filming with the idea of gathering collections of images that will eventually offer a topography of references from which differing narratives and poetics will emerge. That is different from filming to populate a pre-written script. Say I’m out filming on the river and shooting all these sets of materials around different towns that might be impacted by flooding or chemical zones with incredible chemical pollution and all these brownfields, as they’re called, and sorting these into different collections, all along different themes. Maybe the same image event shows up into different sets and contexts. You were then developing fragmented narratives that were drawing on the scientific and historic data that I got because I did a lot of archival data on chemical pollution zones, and you were mixing that will other research you were doing, for example comparing that to how people live and die during recent storms, how people survive, which is again collecting a database, but you’re telling stories and you’re saying, “Look, these fit just by gathering them together.” Then we start to go through the database and new stories come up and they keep switching back and forth. We did this in the film Toxi•City: A Climate Change Narrative, but it was already a structure that was there in the film we did just before, Three Rails Live, which is in a way, one character living in a moment of floods. In Toxi•City we expand this; there are all these other characters now. There are the stories of actual individuals who died during Hurricane Sandy, and there are the stories of fictional ones, those documenting conditions in a possible future (or futures), in which, despite the difficulties, life goes on. The project goes back and forth through time. Like memory one re-weaves past, present and future each time one tells the story.
SR: Right.
RC: The database contains within it all these acts of gathering. It’s not neutral by itself, but it becomes reanimated.
SR: Yeah, and just to maybe explain a little bit more about Toxi•City, because I think the process that occurred there was fascinating. First, you had a commission from the Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum that was originally funded by Dow Chemical, as I recall, to do a project.
RC: DuPont, mostly.
SR: DuPont, sorry.
RC: So, it was funded by DuPont and it’s now called the Science History Institute Museum, but then it was called Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum.
SR: You had been doing this work with your students where you’d been doing surveys of the Delaware River estuary. You had been doing a lot of filming in kayaks, basically Superfund sites, and mapping out all these places where there was a lot of toxic waste or where incidents had occurred, and your students had gone out and done interviews with people who worked in these areas. So, there was this big pool of source material that created a sense of environment. You gave those to me, and I started thinking through creating small fictional narratives that combine these elements. And then, right when we’re working on it, I used to live in New Jersey, and Hurricane Sandy hits. I remember looking at the newspaper and there’s a picture of President Obama standing on this ruined shoreline, and he’s standing a block from the house where I used to live and it’s just an area of ruins behind him. That brings me to flooding, hurricane, climate change, it’s become material and real in that moment. We talk about this and then have the idea of bringing in these obituary stories from all the people who died in New Jersey from Hurricane Sandy. Then those become this element where there’s one layer of fictional stories that are based on these facts and these places and these occurrences projected just a little bit into the future. We also have this layer of obituaries, and then remixing on these images that some of them are just sort of shot flat in reality, but then you also do a lot of modifications of the images to take them in a new speculative direction.
RC: Yeah, they get polluted, don’t they. A lot of the shooting also was done with panoramas that would later be animated, and that allowed me a lot of space to manipulate, to create in a way, a color palette that is either one of looking forward into a chemically polluted color palette or the kind of palette one has looking back at memory on tinted photographs. So, I was trying to play a little bit with that sense of color, that kind of language element along with the actual language. The movement from story to story was interesting too. There are six characters. They’re very specific characters, living stories that are different from each other, drawing attention to the variety of ways that people might adapt to changing circumstances. The environmental conditions envisioned in the film affect each person very differently. The chorus of stories can be a powerful entry point into problems that are otherwise very abstract. The approach helps to ground abstract notions of climate change in the details of everyday life. I think we see that effectively set against the nonfiction accounts from deaths that occurred around Hurricane Sandy; most people in and after storms die very mundane deaths.
SR: Yeah, the diesel generator is the largest cause of death after hurricanes.
RC: You have all sorts of heroics in newspapers and action movies, and then the actual deaths are very unglamorous: people turning on their generators and suffocating, falling in the dark, tripping on live electric wires in the basement…
SR: Doing things with chainsaws, and then having the trees they’re trying to clean up fall on them, you know?
RC: Yeah, exactly. There is a tremendous set of after-stories.
SR: That was a grim month, researching those stories.
RC: We did a few projects that produced some grim months of production. I think of Hearts and Minds…
SR: Well, let’s talk about Hearts and Minds. This is another collaboration that we did with a pretty big group of people, really, but the core collaborators there were Daria Tsoupikova and Arthur Nishimoto at the Electronic Visualization Lab in Chicago. I was on sabbatical at UIC (University of Illinois, Chicago) and had the opportunity to do some things with the EVL, and we started bouncing around ideas of how we could collaborate with them in that space. You came with this proposal, at the time I thought, “Wow, that would be sort of an insane way to work with this environment.”
RC: I had been introduced to a text by John Tsukyama by Jeffrey Murer. John was an older doctoral student who’d had a full career as an investigator for insurance companies before returning to university to embark on a PhD. He is a remarkably patient and thoughtful interrogator. He had been shocked by the revelations that came out of the Abu Ghraib scandal and similar news reports about U.S. military interrogation practices during the U.S. led war in Iraq, so he reached out to veterans, to listen to their accounts. It was through his advisor, Jeffrey Murer at St Andrew’s, who I knew via the University of Chicago, that the idea came up because John wanted some way to make the material public without sensationalizing it. It was shocking material, really, detailing war crimes.
SR: He wrote a dissertation, and he maybe could have gotten an academic book out, but he did want to think about different ways to communicate this. We had this ability to work in a 3D visualization environment, I often think a lot of the work that comes out of these things are sort of gamey, cartoony types of environments. So initially I was sort of, “Well don’t we risk trivializing things or making it look like a game?”
RC: That’s right. We had to really work with this. When John first came to me, we discussed making a film, and we both had the sense that the material might be too sensational for a film. We wanted a medium that would give a space for viewers to pause and listen– a space to stop and digest the material without the insistent forward motion of film. We wanted to see if an interactive experience would allow the user to hold, contemplate, face quite ghastly stories. However, presenting such material poses a challenge, that of being close enough that the story moves you, but not so close that you turn away? We found the large-scale VR experience, the CAVE environment useful. Immersive, interactive spaces allow one to be submerged into worlds that are very different, in this case, shocking, but also to pause in that world, to digest material before moving on. That aspect was fascinating. The other challenge was to show the tensions within the individuals telling the stories. In the case of the original texts, the veterans frequently describe alienation when they return home unable to fully make sense of what happened, having been either witness to or implicated in acts of torture in many cases. We began with an interactive game environment. Users find themselves in a suburban home, but it’s somehow slightly off because it’s an artificial game aesthetic. There is a level of alienation. When one reaches for an object in these mundane, domestic spaces, the walls fall away and one falls into photographically real but slightly surreal landscapes. One is not quite sure where one is in each desert setting, some with bombed out buildings, but one is definitely not in that artificial suburban home. That tension mimics something that was very strong among the stories - a sense of alienation or displacement.
SR: And what I had done was sort of taking those interviews, trying to distill them down into the actual stories, not deviating from them, but sort of combining them into characters that each represent a different type of experience. So, putting them into one voice that actors could interpret. But an important thing to say about those stories and about that project, I think, is that these were stories from the point of view of people who either witnessed acts of torture or even more prevalently committed acts of torture. The project that John was doing wasn’t about demonizing these individual people but trying to create an understanding of the processes that led to the possibility of that occurring. So, it wasn’t about this futile gesture of, “Okay, look at all these bad people. Look at what they did, put it in a box and make it go away.” It was more, “Okay, this is something that’s happening. This is something that that we need to confront collectively as Americans with a shared sense of responsibility.” So, I think one of the things that we were trying to do in creating these environments that really do immerse you, where you have someone who’s back in America and then they trigger an object, and the walls drop away and suddenly they’re in a surreal desert environment. Then you just listen, you never see these acts of violence, you see the spaces and you hear the stories. It really does have this effect, I think, of putting them in your head in a way that I think is surprisingly powerful.
RC: In fact, one of the characters even had a line along that thread. The character says, “...On a one-on-one basis where it’s just me and one other person and no matter what they look at, how they look at me, they actually have to live with what I tell them. It’s them that has to go to sleep with the images that I had in my head. And I started to look at it as “fair is fair,” you’ve asked to do this, why can’t—why can’t these people look at these images and see these images that are in my head?” These young soldiers, who for the most part didn’t sign-up to become torturers, were thrown into a military that had leadership that had chosen to use intensive interrogation and torture. The soldiers found themselves in very compromised situations having to decide what to do when the platoon leaders and the commands from above are telling them, “You’ve got to use waterboarding,” telling them that they’ve got to get information by any means possible. Those who spoke up describe being ignored or ridiculed. It poses the question, “If you were thrown in that situation, what would you do?” We follow evolutions in the characters from their initial reasons for enlisting to their experiences in training, then on to their experiences in extreme interrogation conditions, and finally to how those experiences shape their lives today. One of the first steps in working with fragmented elements and building narratives out of the fragments is to ask, “Where's the energy? What's the underlying force?” It's not just about the evidence, but rather about the forces that tie the evidence together. We don't show people dying in the floods in Toxi•City any more than we see torture in Hearts and Minds. We avoid the sensational imagery to focus on individual narratives and underlying forces, such as forces of nature, of exploitation, chemical exploitation, exploitation of humans in the military, all sorts of exploitation of the land. What's driving those narratives are forces hidden behind a surface spectacle and noise. The algorithmic structures, with their ruptures and sutures, help to provoke the question “What's driving these stories?” In the case of Hearts And Minds, it's perhaps not, as media reports, the demonized individual, not just "a few bad apples" that caused the Abu Ghraib scandal. There’s something else that's pushing those actions along, as if these characters -- whether mean, heartless, caring, loving, lost or confused or all of the above -- find themselves caught up in a place whose script has been transformed by new authors, a theater gone wrong.
SR: The way that you do your work with images is often, in a way, spectacular, but it’s the effect, in a way that we’re using that with the narratives, kind of becomes the inverse of spectacle, when we’re talking about violence or we’re talking about these really profound tragic things that occur to people living in contemporary situations, that’s not what we see on the screen. We’re hearing about it in stories, and we’re seeing reflections of it in a landscape environment. We’re creating a thinking space; the visual environment becomes a thinking space that I think hopefully helps people to process and to have a more complicated relationship.
RC: Absolutely. I think there’s something about the undoing of spectacle by, in a way, throwing oneself into it: to create these spectacle-like experiences where one can begin to unravel the media forces present actuality - to expose forces by disrupting that content. The surface of images might change but the underlying patterns are remarkable consistent. This is also something I have been working with in large scale projects like “It Will Happen Here” – working with digital technology to look for ruptures in technology from which we might see where some of those other powers are hiding in the grand spectacle. In a way, part of that is about articulating absence. Looking at the spectacle, there’s often also an absence – a shadow, and one’s asking, “Where is it? What’s the thing that’s missing? Is it really the dead body? Is it really the burning town?” You hunt for explanations and then you become an active participant as opposed to a sucker in the audience.
SR: We’re going to have to get going here shortly, but I did want to say after the pandemic and both of us having some other projects in the mix last few years, we really now have an opportunity with the Extending Digital Narrative project in the Center for Digital Narrative to create some new work. Also, to think about some of the more recent emerging media environments, XR, AI, environments that we speak to and speak back to us, to think about how we can really use these technologies in ways where the poetics of the work are actually suited to these technologies. Not simply to explore new media forms for the sake of exploring them, although of course there’s always an experimental benefit to that, but really thinking about what the unique capacities of these environments are and then actually telling some stories.
RC: It’s an exciting moment, Scott. We’ve got some good stuff ahead and some tools that really are bringing the things we’ve been doing all along to the next level.
SR: It’s going to be really exciting to work with you on these projects over the next years. So, thank you very much Roderick Coover, film maker, explorer, digital media storyteller.
Listen to the full episode of Off Center.
References
Bartscherer, Thomas and Roderick Coover, 2011. Switching Codes; Thinking Through Digital Technology In The Humanities And Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coover, Roderick. 2003. Cultures in Webs: Working in Hypermedia and the Documentary Image. https://www.eastgate.com/catalog/CulturesInWebs.html
Coover, Roderick. 2008. Voyage Into the Unknown. https://collection.eliterature.org/2/works/coover_voyage_into_the_unknown.html
Coover, Roderick and Deb Olin Unferth. 2009. Something That Happened Only Once. Chouette Collective.
Coover, Roderick. 2009. “Taking A Scroll: Text, Image and the Construction of Meaning in a Digital Panorama”. Hyperrhiz 06. http://hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz06/artist-statements/taking-a-scroll-text-image-and-the-construction-of-meaning-in-a-digital-panorama.html
Coover, Roderick. 2011. Canyonlands. https://directory.eliterature.org/individual-work/327
Coover, Roderick, Scott Rettberg and Nick Montfort. 2011. Three Rails Live. https://dtc-wsuv.org/elit/elo2012/elo2012/Coover-Montfort-Rettberg.html
Coover, Roderick and Scott Rettberg. 2015. “The Last Volcano / Det siste utbruddet.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, 12. https://doi.org/10.20415/hyp/012.me02
Coover, Roderick and Scott Rettberg, 2018, “Voices from Troubled Shores: Toxi•City: a Climate Change Narrative.” Electronic Book Review, 11-04-2018. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/voices-from-troubled-shores-toxicity-a-climate-change-narrative/
Coover, Roderick, Arthur Nishimoto, Scott Rettberg and Daria Tsoupikova. 2015. Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project. https://isea-archives.siggraph.org/art-events/hearts-and-minds-the-interrogations-project-by-roderick-coover-arthur-nishimoto-scott-rettberg-daria-tsoupikova/
Coover, Roderick, Nick Montfort and Adam Vidiksis. 2023. It Will Happen Here. Chouette Collective. https://itwillhappenhere.net/.
Laurel, Brenda. 1993. Computers as Theatre. Addison Wesley Longman.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816689231/hyperobjects/
Rettberg, Scott and Roderick Coover. 2014. Toxi•City: a Climate Change Narrative. https://elmcip.net/creative-work/toxicity
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.