Talan Memmott Netprov Interview

by Rob Wittig, Talan Memmott

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, thinking, platforms, performance, linkedin, play, character, ultimate fate, twitter, nighthawks, labor, clickbait, cultural, ai, memes, add, question, mark, scaffolding, talk

SPEAKERS

Talan Memmott, Rob Wittig

 

Talan Memmott

I can't remember exactly how I got involved in Netprov. I have a theater background and improvisation was part of that, and online digital performance is something that I was doing already on my own with the digital culture lecture tour, which was a kind of Netprov. Netprov is a specific context of digital performance. Thinking about this a little deeper: the way identity is wrapped up with online presence makes Netprov a natural kind of performance agenda.

Rob Wittig

Yes! Thinking of the many Netprovs you've participated in, are there any particular passages of play that stand out?

Talan Memmott

Let's start with Link Dinn.

Rob Wittig

Yay! I was going to ask about him specifically, because everybody loves Link Dinn! Link Dinn was the union organizer character in I Work For the Web, trying to alert users to all the free labor they do for social media platforms.

Talan Memmott

My character Link Dinn, first of all, comes out of my own personal history, because I have worked for unions. So I thought of Link Dinn as someone who's a 'Crusader Rabbit', an instigator who's going to force the union to happen, regardless! In the Netprov, the character appoints himself union steward, you know, and starts to really become aggressive about getting everyone to join the union. That character played into the concept of the Netprov, but also touched on things in wider internet culture. And it touched on work culture in general, like wanting to unionize Starbucks, Uber drivers, DoorDash — the idea of a vast gig economy, which seemed like a utopian idea, but gets exploited all the time. A union is a very necessary way of protecting the interests of Labor. Both of those issues made me think about that character. And it really comes out of the contents of the Netprov itself. It made me want to address the larger issues about online labor.

Rob Wittig

I want to ask specifically about the little avatar for the Link Dinn character. And since you are a great crafter of memes and posters and other graphic design, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the visual aspect of that character.

Talan Memmott

The model for Link Dinn is one of the wooden Fisher Price Little People toys — it's the angry kid. I always thought that the heads are like little emojis. That's kind of what they're engineered to do. So it just seemed natural to use that one to represent this angry, ambitious labor guy character.

Thinking about the improvisation — you never know where these things are really gonna go. So his ultimate fate, where he winds up getting put through a woodchipper by the company, you know, I never anticipated that. [laughs]

Rob Wittig

[laughs]

Talan Memmott

It's also like a play on the mysterious disappearance of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. So it has wider connections to labor history. It's kind of a sublimated satire of corrupt union leadership as a cultural phenomenon. The graphics that I generated during that Netprov — that's the way humans work! You have to get those flyers out to make people aware of the issues and the enemy! You know, those sorts of things. So I needed to do the graphics just to stay in the character.

Rob Wittig

And the sad moment of the loss of Link Dinn you announced by posting an image of a pile of pencil shavings…

Talan Memmott

The little people are now made entirely out of plastic. But when I was a kid, they were all wood, so, certainly, it had to be that way as well.

Rob Wittig

I remember how many other Netprov players were very moved, very sad, to see Link Dinn go. Then, after a nice beat of about 24 hours, a Twitter account called Link Dinn's Ghost appears, and we were all very happy that your contributions were going to continue!

Talan Memmott

Well, you know, it's a renewable resource.

Rob Wittig

[laughs] How has participating in Netprov impacted your own creative and scholarly practice?

Talan Memmott

That brings me to another great thing that happened in the high school themed Netprov All Time High. In that one, my character's name was DD Pheromone, like the punk rocker Dee Dee Ramone…

Rob Wittig

[laughs]

Talan Memmott

…and I was the high school punk in a band. Which led to me actually starting to record music for the band! The band in the Netprov was called Spam Vomit, and I recorded and posted a couple of songs and those went up with with the Netprov. But it led to me really thinking — wow! — thinking about generating and writing in music and using it as research output. So now my band, Clickbait — in which every song is about an internet meme — is a direct spin off from from Spam Vomit. I think I even talked about that toward the end of the Netprov because DD Pheromone gets kicked out of Spam Vomit. But the rest of the band re-formed as Clickbait.

Whenever you look up Clickbait on Spotify or Apple music or whatever, it's all there. We've had regular airplay on the NYU radio station. Fresno State student radio plays us every now and then. A lot of internet radio stations that play punk like Clickbait.

Rob Wittig

That's fantastic!

Talan Memmott

So that's a direct impact Netprov. One of the reasons I got tenure is because of my ideas on this kind of research output. So that's great!

Rob Wittig

What do you think about the community building potential of Netprov, and/or Netprov as a tool to build bridges in a polarized society.

Talan Memmott

Well, going back to I Work For the Web I think there was a kind of a subtext to that performance, really thinking about the gig economy and the expectations of a lot of free labor for digital work. I think the sub-chatter of that entire Netprov was highly political and had a kind of activist bent to it. I think that community within that Netprov was strong and tight.

The labor organizing in the imaginary IWFW Nighthawk's Café — where all the web workers in the world go to drink after work — is an example of that. There were the people involved; we were all still playing, but it became more like a social LARP (live action roleplaying game) that was only using the internet because it was available for community. That's super cool!

Then there's the Kaliningrad / Kralovec thing. That's an example. You know the term "interactivist," which is really old, that started in the late 90s, I believe. That concept never really developed. Bitching about stuff on Twitter is not being an activist. Netprov, because of its performative aspect really does have a kind of activist potential.

The topics of Netprov are always kind of cultural and contemporary. Netprov performances are reactive — not "reactionary" reactive — to the concepts. You and Mark come up with ideas that are really contemporary and relevant. They may be really urgent at times. I think that adds to the idea of this being a social performance and social experiment.

Rob Wittig

I like that you're thinking about it as performance. I'd forgotten that you have a theater background. Nobody has a Netprov background [laughs]. By definition everybody comes to it from different fields.

Talan Memmott

I think there's also almost a game design, world-generating aspect to every Netprov. There's nothing there until you start creating it. There's the concept, and that's it. And I don't know… one thing I like to do with Netprov is read through the initial, conceptual scaffolding — and then completely ignore it.

Rob Wittig

[laughs] That's great!

Talan Memmott

That's my way of doing it. I think breaking the rules is one of the rules of Netprovs. Generally, the contents are very broad. Like I said, it's a world generating process. You're reacting to what other people do. And they're reacting to the scaffolding in very different ways than you are.

The way stage improv operates, the audience gives you a context. How long does that activity last? Five seconds, ten seconds. So one of the rules of improv is to keep expanding the context. That's part of the world generation process.

Rob Wittig

For me, that's one of the great joys of playing Netprov with you and the featured players. I sign on every day and know I'm going to be astonished by something that Mark and I never conceived of at the launch.

Talan Memmott

I think that's part of the joy of it. You have to respond and react to all these different trajectories that are coming at you, sometimes destroying what you just built, or completely not aware of what you posted just before. How do you navigate that, negotiate that? I love it that way! That's part of what motivates you to keep working with it.

Rob Wittig

What are your thoughts about how Netprov and its platforms have changed in the past ten years or so?

Talan Memmott

I gave a talk at the Electronic Literature Organization conference in Montreal in 2018 called "Dank Memes and Tactical Media" and I mentioned Netprov. I was talking about Twitter and how it's become this overwhelming troll culture, how it's a post-truth platform. It has been since day one, in my mind, way before Trump. All these exchanges are about reification, which is less about being tactical than about being tacit. By that I mean that it's not about public discourse. It's about making something unintelligible for the other. That's the reification that I'm talking about. Ultra-right memes are not meant to convert anyone. They're about reification of a certain non-truthful political position and cultural view. In my talk I said I thought that MAGA Make America Great Again, Trump's whole thing is probably the biggest, most widespread, most successful internet fiction ever. And I don't mean successful in a positive way. That whole 'launch a context and see where it flies' is exactly what he did.

When I mentioned it in my talk, my hope was that someone who has more time to write will write a book about it. Myself, I'm interested in a more aphoristic kind of theory. I was hoping someone would pick that up, but I haven't really seen it.

Rob Wittig

As you know, Mark and I have drifted, or veered, away from Twitter in recent Netprovs and gravitated to threaded discussion groups as platforms. I always say that like cuckoos, we lay our eggs in other bird's nests, we use available platforms instead of programming them.

Talan Memmott

I think one of the reasons that Twitter was super successful for Netprov is the way Twitter didn't really control what could be seen. It meant a lot of happenstance of people coming in without knowing what the hell was going on and commenting on stuff and then going away and then other people drifting in whatever. I think with more closed platforms it's like going to see a play. It's not 'out there' as much, not as vulnerable to cultural interlopers, the uninvited guest, the inadvertent performer. Discord seems too closed off. Discussion Boards are probably still too closed off for that sort of accidental creativity. Could good Netprov be done on TikTok?

Rob Wittig

Mark is starting to play with TikTok, the duets thing has a lot of possibilities — you record reactions and then ask people to do the content. 'I'm gonna react to your poem, and then you write the poem that goes with these reactions.'

Talan Memmott

And then I think about what VR platforms will be like. I think back to the performances Adriene Jenik did in the late 90s. There could be performances in Avatar-based chatbot forms. It reminds me of how people have done flash mobs in that sort of environment as well. So I wonder if VR is something that could be revisited, or if it's already dead as a model, because it's already been taken over by corporate ideas of performance. Adriene Jenik did a very good production of Waiting for Godot in the chat platform like that. But is it already taken over by Meta? has it been too Zuckerbergized, tainted by Facebook, to be a legit platform for Netprov? As a platform could be an interesting experiment. I'll get on there and then you know, every character has to be a Russian revolutionary. I get to be Trotsky! I got dibs on Trotsky, if you do that. That would be hilarious. I wonder what would happen.

Rob Wittig

Cool. The last question here is on how Netprov has evolved over the last decade — is there a historical shape that you're seeing?

Talan Memmott

I think the prompts became more sophisticated over time. And they also became more open. I think earlier there was more of an idea: of this is the direction we want this to go. I think that's expanded and loosened up considerably over the years. Maybe because of the way I play and the way others play. Maybe it's just the natural way of any kind of improvisation, it's gonna spin that way. I think it's proven itself to be a valid form of digital practice that is really democratic. Democratic in terms of its open-ended, collaborative spirit, which is appreciated.

I contrast it with the way AI prompters, AI artists, are complaining about the dismissal of AI art and at the same time are bragging about getting commissioned to do designs. I wonder about them copyrighting it, claiming it as their own work, when the work is really a collaboration — an anonymous, mechanized, digitized collaboration with many, many others.

Rob Wittig

Yes.

Talan Memmott

That kind of territorial thing that's going on with AI artists is something that Netprov has always steered away from and I love that about it.

Rob Wittig

Well, wonderful! Thanks for your time, Talan!

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