From: ETO Kouichirou <t91069ke@sfc.keio.ac.jp> Real-Date: Wed, 16 Feb 94 07:10:57 +0900 Subject: [infotalk,00844] Waxweb (call for writers) Message-Id: <9402152211.AA28653@cs3.sfc.keio.ac.jp>
慶應大学の江渡です。 「WAX」という映画の作者、David Blairからメールがきました。 あの映画を、MOOの中でHyperTextとして実現したそうです。 アクセスしてみたところ、scripの中をどんどん進んでいくという感じ。 しかも多人数で書き込みができるようになってます。 将来はWWWからアクセスできるようにすることも考えてるとのこと。 楽しみ楽しみ。 来たメールを転載しておきます。 江渡 浩一郎 / 慶應大学環境情報学部 / t91069ke@sfc.keio.ac.jp ------------------------------------------------------------ To: +hotel7@phantom.com Subject: Waxweb (call for writers) From: thebees@phantom.com (David Blair) Message-Id: <FZHRHc9w165w@mindvox.phantom.com> Date: Mon, 14 Feb 94 19:02:50 EST Organization: [MindVox] / Phantom Access Technologies / (+1 800-MindVox) Hi, I'm writing to inform you of "Waxweb", and to invite you to participate in it. "Waxweb" is a large constructive hypertext (with hypermedia extensions coming later), which has been converted to MOO-space at Hotel MOO (more info below). There is full, simple hypertext reading and writing functionality provided, made hybrid and strange by the fact that this is inside a text-based virtual reality. [Following sections: Rhetoric; Background; What to do; How to connect; Long term] Rhetoric: About 10 months ago, the electronic feature "Wax or the discovery of television among the bees" (85:00, 1991) was sent out over the mbone (multimedia backbone) of the internet by Vince Bilotta. At that time, John Markoff of the NYTimes wrote a story entitled "Cult Film is a First over the Internet", casting the event as a milestone on the way to the 500 channels. Unfortunately, there were really only about 450 sites at that time able to see the "film", a fact that was a bit strange to point out to the people who wrote asking how they could see "Wax on the Internet." In addition, the article didn't mention that this was not a broadcast, but a multi-cast, meaning anyone who could receive could also send audio or video (or text, of course), so that an individual's reception screen could be filled with little boxes of talkie. Coming out of a media center/public access background, I natively feel much less comfortable with "the 500 channels" metaphor than I do with the idea of 5,000,000 channels of intercommunication. Listening to Pavel Curtis (co-writer of MOO software, and a researcher at Xerox Parc) talk this spring at 3CyberConf helped provide me with a good rhetorical base for a personal argument in favor shifting the metaphor. In describing his research into adding audio and video to the Xerox Parc networkspace, presumably using the same technology that made the Wax net-cast possible, Curtis said that the greatest intercommunicative bang came in the transition from zero to text. On adding audio, the graph's slope flattened significantly towards the horizontal, though there was some improvement. But adding video gave you a flatline... almost no added improvement to the functionality already given by text and audio. I tried this argument on a group of advertising production execs this month, and it certainly upset them... true or not, it's good rhetoric, in these days when new and old media imitate one another. "Waxweb" is an attempt, within some neccessary limits, to re- multicast "Wax" at a bandwidth more appropriate to current Internet. My practical and perhaps counter-intuitive point, (since I am a media-maker) is that currently available networked text is inherently more interesting that the potential for a Surgery Channel or Sock Club... (for some more discussion of this point, see the Long Term section at the end of this letter). Unfortunately one important limit in this type of multicast is that we can't have the whole internet there, in order to preserve the functionality of the MOO as a workspace. So I have to ask you not to repost this info to netsurf lists, or onto the USENET (Yes, there will be a WWW version, see below, which hopefully will solve this problem of access). Background: "Wax", as a film, is what I describe as an image-processed narrative, where both the images and the narrative are processed.... a description that indicates Wax is a heavily associative film, something almost like a punning machine, with each click of its' time-base emitting a variety of pointers across time or space, creating a virtual web of associative connections for which you are the processor. There is no dialogue in Wax... but there is a narrator who delivers much of the story through voiceover. This fact, combined with its' natural resemblance to hypertext, and its' need for audience assembly, makes it a natural candidate for retrofit into a constructive hypertext... i.e. a hypertext that can not only be read, but also written to. "Waxweb" formally began as a hypertext groupware project, in which 25 people net-connected people around the world would use the groupware functionality of Eastgate's Storyspace hypertext software to add counter-writings, counter-structures, imaginary backstory or characters, or simpler things, onto a hypertext "baselayer" which I constructed. This baselayer consists of about 600 nodes, roughly corresponding to the number of spoken lines in the "film's" monologue. Paving the space between spoken words are text descriptions of the film's 2000 shots, roughly padded with what might be called author's commentary. These are connected on a single "script" path, so that reading this path is morphologically similar to watching the film (like hand-bones vs. fin-bones.. .producing a certain type of aesthetic tension). Surrounding this is a simple indexing system, which allows transport around the film. When all the writers get through with the baselayer, it should have lost it's current resemblance to a highway divider, and more resemble the cloud of fog above the road... a textual cloud of unknowledge. The editors of the web are Michael Joyce and Larry McCaffery. Not long after the above project began, Tom Meyer, a grad student in computer science at Brown, decided to open the hypertext-based Hotel MOO, which incorporated an extension he had written that allowed the conversion of "Storyspace" hypertext files into coherent MOO-architecture, as well as modification of "room" creation and construction commands to make building more resemble writing. Through this miracle, it became possible to place the hypertext in a public place, so that anyone with telnet, regardless of their desktop machine, could read and write into the Waxweb. This is the hybrid place I hope you will travel to, and read and write at. Traditional writing, hypertext writing, programming, as well as synchronous and asynchronous text communication are all supported in this environment. ======== What to do So, what do you do? Basically, what you wish. However, I think the base requirement is that you have seen the film... but I expect most of the people who will have make it this far into this letter will already have seen it. Waxweb is a deliberate cross-disciplinary project, so hopefully everyone can find someplace interesting to stand or start. Do what you will, be it false backstory, or simple linkages between places with interstice boxes that explain ordinary obsessions. You can make a random structure of odd small stories, or a counterstructure of formal mechanism or anti-story. You can write an essay or anti-essay or faux-essay in linked little boxes. You can do word counts, or use external software tools (e.g. from natural language processing) to prove hyperbole. Or create new paths that intersect the story in horrible ways. You can learn the MOO software. You can talk to other people. Please note that this is a DRAFT version of the base-layer of Waxweb... certainly, my own writing will be unpolished in places. But, isn't it obvious that, being a collaboration, this is a work in progress? It is possible that I will be able to find a way to easily integrate parts of what is written at the MOO into the WWW and disk-distributed Waxweb. So I just have to caveat here that everyone writing agrees to duplication of their writing, in whole or part, whether in net form, such as a WWW doc, or in distributable physical media, such as floppy or CDROM. Please understand that there is no way I can afford to monetarily reimburse anyone for this subsequent republishing. If this makes you uncomfortable, don't write, just read. Feel free to write me at artist1@rdrc.rpi.edu. I've got a bit of tendinitis these months, so may not be as verbal as you hope... but I am at your service. I hope you enjoy the baselayer, and most certainly hope you enjoy writing here! Best, David Blair artist1@rdrc.rpi.edu ========== How to connect: FIRST OFF, PLEASE REMEMBER THAT "WAXWEB: IS A GUEST ON THIS MOO. I URGE YOU NOT TO REPOST THIS INFORMATION TO "NETSURF" LISTS... A RELATIVE AMOUNT OF PEACE AND QUIET IS NECESSARY FOR EVERYONE WHO WANTS TO DO SERIOUS WORK HERE. PLEASE TREAT OTHERS THAT YOU MEET ON THIS MOO WITH RESPECT... AND READ THE MANUAL!!!!! Proprietor of HotelMOO, the Hypertext Hotel, is: Tom Meyer twm@cs.brown.edu To connect to the Hypertext Hotel, type: >From a Unix system: telnet count.cs.brown.edu 8888 >From VMS: telnet count.cs.brown.edu /port=8888 Once there, you can type: connect <character name> <password> Or if you don't have your own character yet, type: connect guest You'll notice that there are several projects here, for instance HOTEL, which is a long-standing collaborative hypertext that's been in-progress on Brown software/networks for years. Also Hi-Pitched Voices, a collaborative woman's hypertext project run by the hypertext author Carolyn Guyer. Please feel free to visit these projects. And you will also see : type * "WAX" to node: "WELCOME", traveled by [x] people. Type Wax, and you'll be at the intro. An introductory document to the hypertextual features of the MOO is available by anonymous ftp from count.cs.brown.edu, in /pub/hypertext/docs.txt. =========================== =========================== =========================== =========================== Long term: Personal long-term goals here: "Waxweb" is a practical and aesthetic experiment in multiple media integrated narrative. I consider it a laboratory for my next "feature", investigating how artists can produce multiple media integrated narrative out of a single data set, using hybrid tools to affordably create a multitude of hybrid forms which all constitute a single narrative. Focusing on text, we can see that most text tools have collapsed into the integrated text amplifier... or computer, allowing us to do anything we want to do with words, in any order we want, on the way to composition. Concomitantly, we have gained the ability to project these functionalities across any distance, allowing us to not only to write or read, but to do a lot of hybrid things which are neither exactly one nor the other. The continuing collapse of general media tools into the integrated media amplifier.... or networked media workstation... where hypertext, image processing and synthesis, editing, and a variety of in-between functionalities can allow anything to happen in any order, on the way to composition, collaboration, presentation, and things in between, will not only increase the number of hybrid media-production forms, but the number of hybrid, multiplexed works, which are unitary, yet take multiple forms... where a single, variegated chunk of proto-narrative, proto-image, proto-anything data can, and often will, take many different forms, which will all have the esthetic tension of being morphologically similar, though in different media. Therefore text as the already strongly established base element in the coming, polymathic/polymorphic, self-organizing (in any order at all) electron networks and narratives and artworks to be. Short-term practicalities: A third version of the baselayer will also be made possible in the coming months through the availability of a Storyspace to HTML conversion utility from Eastgate, which will make it possible to publish the baselayer on the World Wide Web. I intend also to add stills and audio to both in the near term. Thanks for your attention to this long letter. DB ================================================================= WAXWEB mail: thebees@phantom.com [don't forget to ID your message!] Editors: Michael Joyce, Larry McCaffery .... and, in random order: Ross Harley, Scott Bukatman, Carolyn Guyer, John McDaid, Stuart Moulthrop, Jane Douglas, Barbara Page, Heinz Fenkl, Arnold Dreyblatt, Florence Ormezzano, Nora Ligorano/Marshall Reese, Bobby Rabyd, Mark Amerika, Takayuki Tatsumi, Reiko Tochigi, Erkki Hutamo, Jalal Toufic, Kathryn Cramer, Simon Penny, Thecla Schiphorst