www.secrettechnology.com

Tell us about yourself.

Born from the computerless land of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives. Currently he teaches Net Art and Electronic Literature at Griffith University in the Gold Coast's contradictory lands. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around globe in New York, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, Singapore and Brazil, at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, ACM, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. But in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital writing attracts each year.

How did you get started in electronic literature?

I wish there was some defining moment I could point towards. As if words, odd poetic creatures, came to me as I lay on the train tracks, inviting me to rise and create machine texts, to build non-linear/kinetic tales before the train presses me permanent against the rails. Instead it was a strange confluence, a gradual connection between the possibilities of new media technologies and the frustrating limits of the linear page. The playful construction of text on images, sudden navigations for half-written prose, games born from poetry and poetics grown from code.   

Many of my fellow electronic literature writers also tell this accidental arrival story, of how they began creating digital writing before they even knew of the genre. This is one of the brilliant, and dare I say, freeing, elements of e-lit, the notion that there are no concrete rules, no clearly defined roads and no predetermined vehicles to travel them.

Tell us about the range of electronic literature and poetry you create?

With over 30 creations in the past five years, some might call me prolific. Because e-lit is multi-dimensional, multi-media and multi-linear, the creative process can begin with sound, an interface, or a quick succession of head blows from an angry and lost pilot. And because technology changes rapidly, with new codes and possibilities arriving nearly monthly, isometric games, for example, might suddenly be poetic interfaces, where a few months ago they were technically angry and impossibly intensive.

As a result, my works are alarmingly diverse for a writer, certainly in this genre-sticky world. I’ve created a few art/poetry games (game, game, game and again game, Alarmingly These Are Not Lovesick Zombies) using a basic platformer interface or monster shooter and hand-drawn graphics reconfigured into marked-up text and poetic videos on jump and click. Other works (Uncontrollable Semantics or Between Treacherous Objects) rely on screen morphology with mouse-controlled text spinning to sounds and a maze-like grid of sections masquerading as typical stanzas.

What is different about writing for interactive media?

Everything is a text, a language. Words are just an easily accessible, translatable version of language. So as a writer of interactive media, one must see everything as a possible poetic/prose/fiction component. Interface, animation, sound, interactivity, words, generation, video, time and space all become as important as verbs and narrative structure. You are director, scriptwriter, technologist, artist, and discover and obscurer of curious creatures.

 

Why aren’t there more electronic literature writers?

Unfortunately the constraints of learning software or programming, as well as the reliance on electricity and processing, is a hurdle too high for those whose legs are pen bound. And yet grand non-linear narratives, circular poems whose lines pound back and redirect, can be created with chalk and concrete, sticks in the mud. Even the simple task of placing and removing cut up text from a hat can be the birth of an electronic literature masterpiece. Additionally, there is the fact that when something becomes interactive, the author must give away control to the reader, let the user wander and create their own worlds from your textual landscape.

What skills suit such writing?

If there was a job description for electronic literature writers, it might read as follows:

Bored and computer-tied public searching for writers to inspire, confuse and entertain them. Writers must be willing to experiment, to be perfectionists and awkwardly lost. Technical skills or at least the willingness to work with technically proficient others is a must. Additional skills of thinking spatially, seeing poetry as geometry and reading the narrative of images together with a non-linear understanding of world are encouraged. Applicants must also be willing to delete works soon after they are created and be able to moderate epic battles between gypsies, hobos and the occasional Bill Gates.

How do you stay current (professional development, networking)?

Last year I did. This year I haven’t. Next year? You must be willing to leap – to create with a technology until it becomes so dated and unusable that only computer museums can show your work. Then you leap, hurtling yourself, arms and vertebrae battered, into the current, the newest software bits. And yet it is this jumping that is the bane of e-lit. Utilising/playing with the newest of new media doesn’t mean what you create is worth a damn. The wow effect of whirlygigs and fancy gizmos is quickly lost as those techniques become as cliché as Photoshop filters.  

As for networking, I am becoming increasingly convinced that electronic literature, when it works best, circumvents the traditional middle ground of publisher and institution, festival and critic. Over the past year my work has had over eight million hits, with thousands of posts in blogs, forums, magazines, newspapers and aggregator sites from dozens of countries. Not only did I learn how to navigate net conduits, to share my work outside the art gallery and academic realms, but I also began fostering relationships with faceless usernames and email addresses, fans if you will, who spread my work. Having car enthusiasts who’ve maybe never fully read a novel or bought a book of poetry, discuss my strange experimental digital poems on their websites is a powerfully telling sign. The trick now will be to convince funding bodies and arts boards that the potential impact of electronic literature is immense.

Your work is featured in the Electronic Literature Organizations’ Collection, you have works on your own website and have conducted live ‘readings’ of your interactive works. Tell us how you get your work out there?

Despite the possibility of millions of users/readers, e-lit is still relatively unknown. Part of this problem comes from simple classification as new media is a broad term, and largely still mired in the static wires of blogs or video art. And in the literature field there are still those that feel anything beyond words is not writing. Most often my works end up in galleries or gaming sites, or in collections of experimental art, as there are few venues specifically targeting electronic literature. Therefore I must be flexible in how, where and when I share my work as it crosses into many other artistic genres.

One of the amazing and yet strangely disconnected aspects of net distribution is how you can easily and immediately share your work with the rest of the world. This has resulted in winning awards in Europe, North and South America and Asia, but rarely am I ever able to attend the ceremonies. When writers give talks at festivals they get that immediate gratification of applause and audience expression, drinks and questions afterwards. With net distribution you might reach 50,000 people in a day, but aside from emails, your only connection is watching your server statistics rise and the blogosphere.  


 

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