I’ve just returned from an incredible opportunity as Visiting Scholar at Washington State University Vancouver, where I was embedded in Professor Dene Grigar’s extraordinary Electronic Literature Lab in order to access, document, preserve and perform my electronic literature/ interactive narrative works from 1997, 2004 and more using the beautiful vintage Macointosh’s from the ELL lab. Dene Grigar, known to so many researchers and practitioners in electronic literature through her tireless work as President of the Electronic Literature Organisation for many years, has instigated an extraordinary research facility at WSUV that is dedicated to the preservation, access and documentation of pioneering global electronic literature from the 1980s onwards.
While in the ELL at WSUV I was able to access my work from 1997- I Am A Singer- a project I have not seen for over 20 years. I can’t describe how gratifying it was to launch the work on a gorgeous old Mac and see it running like a dream. The work was originally funded by the Australian Film Commission and exhibited in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Brazil and the US at dozens of media art exhibitions in the 1990s, The project, built in Macromedia Director and including Super 8, video, animation, audio, text, music tracks written by Phil Kakulas and performed by musicians of the Australian band The Black Eyed Susans, received considerable attention and won several digital media awards. I was amazed by how big the scope of the work was- novel-like as Dene said- and how much content had been packed into the minimal capacity of a single CD-ROM. With the support of Dene and her team of young researchers in the ELL lab I undertook an informal videotaped “traversal” of I Am A Singer on Friday Nov 1.
In week 2 we did lots of documentation, interview and discussion in the leadup to a live-streamed 1 hour YouTube traversal of ‘of day, of night’ on Friday Nov 8. This traversal took place in a video studio in front of WSUV students, who were able to ask questions after I navigated and explored ‘of day, of night’ , my second interactive narrative work, again widely exhibited and also the only non-North American interactive work to be published by leading US hypertext publishers Eastgate Systems, in 2004. I also did video documentation of my 2015 iPad elctronic literature work, The Secret Language of Desire. Over the next few weeks I will post links to all of this work undertaken at WSUV including documentation and posts by Dene Grigar. Ultimately the ‘of day, of night’ traversal will be included in a chapter of Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop’s Pathfinders research project.
Handheld video snippet of ‘I Am A Singer’ (1997) running on vintage Mac in ELL lab, Nov 2019.
