[This year's winner of the trAce/Alt-X New Media Writing competition is
net artist Talan Memmott. Memmott is an artist/writer from San
Francisco, California. He is Vice President of the web development firm
Percepticon and has worked as producer, director, and in various other
capacities on more than 60 client web sites. Since 1998 Memmott has been
active in the web-based hypertext scene, serving as Creative
Director/Editor for Percepticon's award-winning BeeHive Hypertext
Hypermedia Literary Journal. His work has appeared widely on the
internet. Memmott, who comes to new media writing by way of visual art,
has worked in video, installation art, painting, and performance art, as
well as working as a professional Chef. Alt-X Director Mark Amerika
recently interviewed him about his work.]

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Mark Amerika: This year we had trouble labeling our competition. We
settled on the term New Media Writing which is kind of like one of those
generic boxes of cereal you buy in the grocery store, you know, the
white box with black lettering that says "Wheat Flakes" or the cans of
beer that simply say "Beer." Being the neologistic wordsmith that you
are, could you help us out here – i.e., what do you call the kind of
writing you do and does it apply to others too?

Talan Memmott: Nomolectic electrature? Appliterature?

Oh, there are so many terms out there… I think the title "New Media
Writing" is acceptable precisely because it is so generic. If you go
with any of the many terms for this stuff – hypertext, cybertext,
hypermedia, web.art, net.art, etc – you open yourself up to varying,
sometimes highly specific interpretations of the term. I mean one man's
web.art is another man's hypertext. New Media, as "white box" as it is,
at least does not suffer from this. Where some of the more specific
terms leave out or inflate certain aspects of the media/um, the generic
"New Media" does not. It is very difficult to put a tag on a media/um
that is more than one.

For my own work, I have used rich.lit, though I don't stick to this and
I don't make any claim that the term is appropriate across the board.
Really, all the terms generically indicate a creative cultural practice
through applied technology.

MA: What got you interested in experimenting with writing on the web?

TM: A number of things… First, I work in the web-development industry
so I am always online or writing code. You learn a lot about information
architecture and interface design when you develop corporate websites.
So, working with Percepticon developed the skill set. At times, I must
admit – I am a code-aholic. But, I see the code-aholism as part of my
overall writing practice.

There are a couple of levels to what I am doing. There is the
theory/fiction work like "Lexia to Perplexia", the more hypertext
fiction work (which is still at least quasi-theory) like "Lolli's
Apartment", and some regular old experimental fiction. The straight
fiction work is not so much interested in the web beyond distribution,
whereas the other types of work exploit technological aspects in their
formation – from the narrative to the structural.

I started experimenting with creative applications in 1996. I
immediately saw potential in the web at that time and was making little
pieces to build my skill set and explore narrative structures. The
narrative experiments are actually an extension of earlier interests in
writing. As to the web, what I first recognized and wanted to explore
was the complication of FACE and SPACE that the browser window presents.
I was intrigued not so much by technological bells and whistles as by
the window as a space for text and image. There was a lot of carryover
from my earlier experiences making installation art, as I viewed the
space as something like an empty gallery. So, in terms of writing this
presents the complication that you are not writing on a surface, but
writing in a space.

I think what interested me most was how the web brought together a
number of practices for me, and that it was a pretty wide-open venue for
further experiments in narrative construction.

MA: Your work, like so much of the best new work emerging on the net,
puts into play a renegotiation of the image/text relationship. Do you
see yourself coming from a more visual or literary background – or are
these distinctions meant to fall by the wayside?

TM: My definition of text includes images. I have said before that I
kind of stick to the ol' post-structuralist adage – the world is text.
I came to writing through visual art but I always used writing in my
visual art. I've been a painter, performer, created installation and
video, written and directed plays – there was always writing. Writing
is a constant, as any medium forms a kind of writing. In many regards I
am a media nomad.

When I think of the term hypertext I take an open view. Hyper, of
course, means "to excess"; in regards to text, I read it as something
like: every medium leaves a mark, every cultural practice produces a
form of writing. It is a question of application – in relation to the
written word, hypermedia techniques allow for extended functionality
that increase the narrative value of an image, lifting it from its
previous illustrative state. The alphabetic can be made animate, ideo-
or diagrammatic as well. The interface itself can appear as ideogram
with huge narrative potential.

As far as distinctions between the literary and the visual – they can
remain, can be ignored, they can fade. As a writer/artist they are
borders to be played at, walls to graffiti, climb, or tumble.

MA: Does the distributed network of web artists whose work is readily
available to you influence your own practice? It seems to me that all
serious web artists are, first of all, serious web surfers, no?

TM: I would doubt anyone is creating work that is not influenced by the
work of others. There is a lot of great work out there from all over the
world. Great publications, organizations, lists … trAce is evidence of
how writing on the web is a global phenomenon. What is most amazing to
me is the diversity of work and I think this is one of the reasons it is
so difficult to give the media/um a name. Every writer/artist deals with
the technology differently, creating not so much a personal style but an
individuated form. So, even within specific genres of creative web-based
works you have many voices.

I think it is not only natural to be influenced by the work of others,
but also that we are all (any/every "user") influenced by the
vicissitudes of technology, the environment and general economy of the
network. I think "Lexia to Perpexia" is evidence of my own attachment…

MA: How does one get from Lexia to Perplexia? Or, to put it another way,
why this work and why now?

TM: On the surface the title is a statement concerning a move from
"hypertext" to "hypermedia" – the complicating of literary models. But
the arguments of the piece are more complex and diverse than that – to
some extent it is a piece about ontological complications that occur by
way of attachment to the Internet.

When I began work on "Lexia to Perplexia" in November of 1999 DHTML was
starting to appear on the web. The ability to overlap text, image, any
object on the page alters the concept of the document on the web, and
with some additional JavaScript, the sheet – the imagine sheet that is
the screen – is puncturated rather than punctuated. I saw a lot of
potential here in complicating the literary page/screen argument. Part
of the perplexion of Lexia to Perplexia is in the stratification of the
content, that the narrative experience of the piece is distributed
between the text and image, and extended to the User/Reader in the form
of an "application" that is operated rather than consumed. In that
regard, it is interesting to note that much of the content is in
reference to the process of attachment to the application – a
tangential description of the action of the user.

With a document that is acted upon, unfolded, revealed, opened rather
than read, full of holes to elsewhere, hiding secret inScriptions,
filled with links like mines and traps and triggers – we are no longer
talking page or screen, but appliance. Navigating the Lexia of "Lexia to
Perplexia" is kind of like getting a new device and trying to figure out
how the heck it works … Perhaps the "Lexia to Perplexia" User Manual
is the content of the work itself – encrypted, only partially
translated like some of the instructions from IKEA, only inter-
hyperactive. There is a confusion of ontological, literary and technical
application – perplexia.

MA: At one point in "Lexia," the writing goes:

"I, User, exit this for that –
sorted, compartmentalized,
archived. RE:organized –
stacked, a body with organs
elsewhere. The de:parted body
rests, no longer active/ onBlur;
0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.0 (the flat
line string thread woven into
linen wrapped 'round) The User
is laid flat and dried into
bands of jerky – isolated,
while A.exe indexes and
pre.pares the packets."

….wherein you once again take the language of code and turn it into
degenerative prose. The User almost sounds like a drug addict except
here she is maybe a code-addict? Or: to put it another way, Do Androids
Dream of Arbitrarily Corrupted Sim.Stem Folders?

TM: Yes, that text is from the section titled "Ka Space: encryption book
of the dead". There is a fundamental pun here … Osiris of Egyptian
mythology is more accurately named Ausere. In a simple, frivolous
manipulation of the name you come up with "A User". On top of this we
have an attempt at constructing something akin to the "Body Without
Organs" of Delueze and Guattari misread through an attachment to the
Egyptian funerary text, which is the theme of the section. A.exe is
simply Anubis. The "Body" that is constructed here, as stated in the
cited text, is not exactly like Delueze and Guattari's – it is "a body
with organs elsewhere," in reference to attachment to the Internet
apparatus and the distribution of "being" across it – as data, as
pixels, as energy…

I suppose this text could be read in the context you propose at both the
Deluezean level and as applied to User attachment to the Internet. If we
replace desire with addiction, the term "packets" is variable. The "Body
Without Organs" as written by Delueze and Guattari in "The Body Without
Organs," makes direct reference to drug addiction, as the section of "A
Thousand Plateaus" is primarily dedicated to Antonin Artuad.

MA: This year's trAce/Alt-X judge, Shelley Jackson, says of your award-
winning work "the reader's first pleasure will probably be a visual one.
This is a gorgeous piece. But the visuals though beautiful are not only
decorative but syntactical. Some of Memmott's most elegant arguments are
made visually, through the logic of layout and the grammar of the link."
That's actually a wonderful way of putting it – and I'm now wondering
if you would elaborate a little bit on your digital rhetoric, that is,
the way you use the screenal interface to create visual metaphors that
syntactically make your critifictional case?

TM: I am not surprised Shelley Jackson recognizes these attributes as
her own work is super-smart and an inspiration. But I am always happy
when some of the formal intent gets through.

As far as a digital rhetoric goes – I am not sure I can elaborate too
much. I could get into all the little theoretical tidbits but it would
clog up the server or I'd bore everyone off this page. But I think the
recognition that images and interaction are used in a syntactical sense
is significant. As I mentioned earlier, the interest in the window as a
narrative space, neither screen nor page, is what drew me into making
work.

In "Lexia to Perplexia" there is an apparent integration between the
interface concepts and the subjects of the content that forms something
that is truly an application. I have tried to extract just the text from
"Lexia to Perplexia", and it suffers from the lack of diagrammatic and
dynamic attributes of the "content application" as "mise en scene". The
hypermedia work succeeds, I think, because of the way its formation was
integrated with the writing process. Much of the functionality arises
out of early notes and was developed alongside the writing, so early on
there was a sort of branching – this sort of diversification develops
into the environment of the final application.

MA: I know part of your background is as a musician in a punk rock band
and part of it is in obsessing over contemporary theory. This reminds me
of the work of another writer, the late Kathy Acker, although in Acker's
work the punk influences are more apparent, that is, she appropriates
the punk attitude and remixes it into her narrative architecture so that
it's right in your face – whereas with your work the theory seems to
take prominence, and I'm wondering where is the punk in your work?

TM: My punk days were early on. I played in punk bands from '79 to '82
– I was a teenage punk. I did recently try to relive those days by
forming a band called YOINK but that was short-lived. But, I've played
in bands all my life – Short Order Cooks, Sloppy Kafka, Peabody, Jack
the Ant …. Anyway…

I studied with Kathy Acker in the early nineties. She convinced me to
take my writing seriously. I don't see the punk coming out in my writing
in the same way as it does in her work. And, you are correct in
recognizing that theory is in the foreground of my work. There is, I
think, in my work a similar pirate intent. The heavy neologistic play
and abstraction of context, plus the infusion of theory leads to a
nearly unreadable text that is quasi-academic, yet outside the academy.
Of course, the unreadability extends in all directions, and is further
complicated through hypermedia … The text is subversive by subverting
itself. There is perhaps something punk in that. Maybe web-smart rather
than street-smart? I think it is a little more jazz than punk for me.

My obsession with theory started in art school. Like I said, I come to
writing through fine art. Thinking about it now, one of the first things
that made me move from visual art toward writing was in fact Kathy
Acker's essay in "Art After Modernism." That text made me start to
consider the theory/fiction hybrid in visual terms as it was made up of
textual descriptions of paintings. But, I got hooked on Derrida, Delueze
and Guattari, all that stuff at a time when I was primarily painting and
doing installation work. I think of my own work as informed by these
authors but not in any real rigorous sense. I call my work
theory/fiction, or in the case of LUX – ficto-critical art history,
because the practice is generally creative rather than exclusively
critical.

MA: I keep waiting for more sonic fictions to scream across the network.
What role do you think sound will play in net art development and, for
that matter, how will net artists of the narrative persuasion bring
their work into live performance spaces?

TM: Sound is starting to catch on, though not so much in a hypermediated
sense. I see/hear a lot of audio readings, but there is not too much in
regards to sound in a narrative sense. I know the visual poet Jim
Andrews has been working on something called VisMu, in which the User
interacts with objects to play and manipulate, different scat riffs. I
think this work offers an interesting audio narrative experience for the
User.

As far as performance space, we can think of it in terms of cinema,
theater, and installation … or, lecture. I think "Lexia to Perplexia"
could only have been performed as a lecture at Incubation. The content
was ripe for chalkboard talk … Some possibilities for theater could be
plays performed simultaneously in various locations, which share
characters from remote casts; or, plays in which the dialogue is
submitted from users attached to an application that has nothing to do
with play – the dialogue could be read from monitors set up like
teleprompters. Just some thoughts, but I have been thinking about
theater lately.

MA: One of the many rich terms that come up in "Lexia" is bi.narrative.
What is bi.narrative? A yes/no undecidability that challenges the
interactive Other? A story that goes both ways?

TM: Basically the term is used to indicate the dual conductivity between
local and remote agencies.

In the appendix to "Lexia to Perplexia" ("Delimited Meshings," from the
forthcoming "Cauldron and Net") I make the claim that the success of the
Internet mythos is based on the rejection (dis-play) of the projection
(exe.tension). I refer to that snippet here because I think it
represents something of what I mean by bi.narrative. I think I have used
the term in "Lexia" to represent a degree of reciprocity in the
conductivity between agents. A certain, intertimate consensus … It
refers as well to the hidden narrative, the odyssey of our encoded
[Secret(ed)] agents through the Internet apparatus – allowing a sort of
formal protagonist for the projective/rejective (there and back) mythos
that defines, and is a seductive force of the Internet. I diagram this
in some of my other pieces by doubling the Lacanian interpentrating
triangle diagram from the seminars – placing the gaze on both sides. In
"Lexia" I think I insinuate this by the heavy horizontal of the
interface – plus, there are a few direct diagrammatic references to the
Lacanian diagram.

MA: In your web-rich textuality, you tend to blur the distinction
between hypermediation and hypermeditation. The reader is asked to be
patient, to resist the click-happy mentality that we now associate with
web-surfing. One can't help but wonder if this isn't part of some
political strategy – but then again, maybe it's pure formal play? An
investigation into the potentialities of a new cyberpoetics?

TM: I think in "Lexia" there is a conscious attempt to represent the
"click" or any cursor action as a complication of the text. There is
quite a bit of writing in "Lexia to Perplexia," but it is often
prematurely obfuscated by User interaction. This is a fundamental formal
aspect of the piece. I agree with the term hypermeditation – there are
only 10 pages in the work, yet each page is excessively layered. So, one
dwells on a page – unfolds and unpacks the screen, opens and occupies a
space – rather than being relocated by the click=link association.
There is potential here for poetics and narrative, as well as critical
applications.

MA: How is coding your web-critifiction similar to constructing an
artificial intelligence? At one point in "Lexia" you say
"<HEAD>{FACE}<BODY>,<BODY>FACE</BODY>" and attribute the encrypted data
to a certain "Sign.mud Fraud" – it's as if language in web.space has
become totally liquefied, burnt-out, and overprocessed. The binary remix
of DJ Metastrophe from his latest release "Cig.Monde Fried"?

TM: What you see there, the {FACE},FACE is the result of some thick
premediation of an appropriated fragment from Freud's "Civilization and
its Discontents". The placement of the face as between the head and
body, and between the body and the end of the body is first a sort of
lateral Cartesian pun. As well, faciality is intentially mis-, or
displaced – alternative zeroes, terminals of subjectivity – variables.
Which falls in line with the parsed signature of Sign.mud.Fraud…

The encoding is multi-layered. There is the code-base of the
application, which certainly participates in the narrative construction
of the work through interactive functionality. The code-base also
bubbles through to the surface, to the superficial narrative – the
readable text – by what you have called "overprocessing." A source like
this may be parsed, which is a sort of subjective encoding, edited, and
re-written 10, 15 times before completion.

The notion of the text being "remixed" in not that far off from the
actual process, as the appropriated text is reduced to something akin to
a "sample" … Hmm, and my own definition of my own term Metastrophe - -
a doubling of a doubling that produces a single coupling in dual local
spaces – produces a sort of noise in the text that could be mistaken
for "scratching". Of course we're all "hard-disc" jockeys…

MA: Is "readability" an issue to you?

TM: I think readability for me is mostly based upon how I feel about the
hypermedia object's relationship to my intent. By all means there are
cryptic elements in my theory/fiction work, but I think there is a level
of coherency in the language construction – by this I mean the neology
may be baroque but it is not completely frivolous. So much of the
content occurs through interaction – text is revealed, objects are
manipulated – that it seems to be more a question of inferability than
readability – tracing the outlines through insi(g)nuation and
simulation.

MA: Besides being a net.artist, you also edit BeeHive, a major online
hypermedia publication, which is a part of the Percepticon group, a
successful web strategy and design company out of San Francisco. How do
all of these roles, artist/editor/entrepreneur, play off of each other?
Does it all melt into one pseudo-utopian writing practice, or must one
make clear time-management decisions by constantly re-prioritizing
projects to get all the work done?

TM: There are times where it can be somewhat utopian. Most of the time
it is a constant juggling of time committments. BeeHive is quite a bit
of work. Many design hours, the editorial, the curatorial, production,
promotion … I love it. I am honored to be publishing the work.
Luckily, BeeHive is part of Percepticon or I am not sure it could be
produced. The company is heavily committed to the idea of quality
content on the web and I think BeeHive has done well for the sort of
publication it is. Lately I have been able to delegate the poetry
curating/editing to Ted Warnell, who joined the BeeHive crew at the
beginning of volume three. Not only did this free up some time for
myself, but I think it added a new flavor to the poetry content in
BeeHive.

Percepticon is always busy. It's a glorious rat-race. Then there's my
own work … Since BeeHive publishes regularly and I can't very well
negotiate deadlines with corporate clients based upon my writing
deadlines, my own work is where the most rescheduling occurs. I work on
a lot of stuff simultaneously. Right now, I am working on three or four
things but they all have variable end dates. Its kind of like a horse
race where each horse has a different finish line and the competition is
not to see who finishes first, but to finish in the proper sequence.

The good thing is, if you don't know San Francisco, there is a thing
here called "Peets" – aged Sumatra! Coltrane, a cup of Peets, and I'm
ready to write.

MA: How does one run (away from) an Exe.tension?

TM: I suppose this is where I am asked to define the method that
produced the term. Simply, the use of "exe" as a prefix rather than a
file extension makes the term readable in a literary sense. This does
not mean it is defined by its homophonic similar – extension. The "exe"
prefix differs from "ex" (out) by its reference to an executable, an
application. Tension as an executable. When applied to extermination,
producing exe.termination, the context shifts from an end to a
continuation, toward something I call in "Lexia to Perplexia," "terminal
hopscotch".