SMELLS LIKE AVANT-POP:

An Introduction, of Sorts

"Terrorism is a way to health. Health is the lusting for infinity and dying of all variants. Health is not stasis. It is not repression of lusting or dying. It is no bonds. The only desire of any terrorist is NO BONDS though terrorists don't desire. Their flaming jumping passions are infinite, but are not them."
--Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School

"May Road Runner cartoons never vanish from the video waves, is my attitude."
--Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

ELECTRONIC DISPATCHERS

To: reverend_amerika@kafka.central.org
Subject: Avant-Pop & Dada's Doorstep

Cybergreetings Amerika! Listen, I've been totally psyched about this *In Memoriam To Postmodernism* collection we've been working on and wanna open up a short e-mail rap with you about it. Namely, what I'd like to know, is do you really think that the Avant-Pop is that which supersedes pomo, as you've suggested, or is it rather a subset of pomo?

To: freelance@daydream.nation.com
Subject: No Mo Po Mo

Freelance! Great to hear from you! Hey man, please, No Mo Po Mo! I mean there's no question that Avant-Pop grows out of many rhizomatic lineages and traditions including the weird pomo fictioneers like Barthelme, Pynchon, Madeline Gins and Steve Katz (whose _The Exagggerations of Peter Prince_ is *the* Avant-Pop novel par excellence). But somehow the metafictional strategies of postmodernism got totally absorbed by the mainstream media marketeers who took pleasure in rooting out whatever avant-garde spirit may have resided in the best work. This, of course, led to the neutralizing or neutering of pomo's potentially liberating effects. The thing about Avant-Popsters is that we're putting the *avant* back into the equation. Besides, wasn't it you who said the more one reads a pomo text the less pomo it becomes?

To: reverend_amerika@kafka.central.org
Subject: Same Old Same Old?

Absolutely. Remember that first head-jarring ride you took through a book like Acker's _Empire of the Senseless_? All that near-hypertextual aesthetics of trash, the broken-backed sentences, the high-grade anger, the mind-bending exploration of and delight in taboo, the extravagant pla(y)giarism, the lollapalooza lambasting of plot? Only then, when you went back and reread it, you realized that the language somehow seemed more transparent the second time around. The narratological anarchy gave way to the tight tripartite discipline of three sections which explore the different pre- and post-revolutionary universes of a world where gender and identity are fluid and heading toward terminal transformation. Writers like Acker (and Burroughs before her) have taught our generation of writers that we have to wake up in the midst of all this reality-studio dreaming. Let's face it, our society is run by control freaks like Dr. Benway whose reason for being is the manipulation of our addictions. Addictions he and his cronies create *for* us!

To: freelance@daydream.nation.com
Subject: Onwards & Outwards

Yeah, right! So the Avant-Pop, then, becomes a way to turn Benway and his cronies back against themselves so that they self-destruct! Sort of like one of those Jean Tinguely or Survival Research Lab experiments. Use the media to subvert the media. Become subversive *mediums*. This Avant-Pop scene still seems very much in development, which I really like. So many people want the regurgitated soundbite in order to go out and repeat the party-line. Well, there may be an Avant-Pop party going on, but there sure ain't no line! Still, though, we seem to have had a blast tracing it's possible lineage and strategies. This has been mindblower! But let's get to the meat of the matter and put this *Smells Like A-P* spirit on-line! Catch you on the fast loop!

ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES

Even though artists like Richard Brautigan, Andy Warhol, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Rauschenberg, and the Velvet Underground spoke what we would later realize was the language of Avant-Pop, there was still, in our minds, something missing from much of the postmodern work produced in the sixties and seventies, something that didn't quite click with our tele-visual, compu-corder, audio-digitized viewing habits. It wasn't until the eighties, with the emergence of such edge-runners as Kathy Acker, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Sonic Youth, and Mark Leyner, that we really began to recognize texts with which we felt directly connected. The result? The appearance, or the reappearance, or the continuation (depending on your perspective and your sense of aesthetic history) of the Avant-Pop.

"This blurring of the traditional distinctions between 'high' and 'pop' art becomes a central, defining feature of postmodernism itself. Today such distinctions are, if anything, even more difficult to maintain than they were only a quarter of a century ago. Should rock videos by Madonna, Peter Gabriel, or Laurie Anderson be considered mainstream simply because they are enormously popular--even though they employ visual and poetic techniques that twenty-five years ago would certainly have been considered highly experimental? Is William Gibson's 'cyberpunk' novel, Neuromancer, 'avant-garde' since it employs unusual formal techniques (the use of collage, cut-ups, appropriation of other texts, the introduction of bizarre new vocabularies and metaphors)? Or does its publication bythe genre science-fiction industry establish it as pop? Are television shows like Max Headroom, the early Saturday Night Live, or David Lynch's recent Twin Peaks 'underground' works because they utilize so many features associated with postmodern innovation---or 'pop art' because they were, in fact, 'merely' television shows?"
--Larry McCaffery, "The Avant-Pop Phenomenon," in ANQ 5.4 (October 1992): 216.

Similar to cyberpunk, beatnik poetry, Generation X, and every other label you've seen hit the market in the last forty or so years, the Avant-Pop is suddenly appearing everywhere you look, like a new word you've just added to your vocabulary and now see on every page you read, or a new viral strain, one that is the genetically-engineered fusion of these two extremes: 1) the avant-garde's impulse to push the aesthetic envelope, and 2) a specific sensibility's addiction to (and usually ambivalence with) pop culture in all its manifestations--especially electronic realities. Every day, as the boundaries between those extremes blur even further, many artists who've grown up teething on TV, the computer, the camcorder, the CD, and now the hypertext, CD-ROM, and VR, find themselves increasingly exposed to an aesthetically experimental lineage found in the material taught in college courses, on the increasingly accessible databanks converging on the Internet, and through a thriving underground network of zines and performance-happenings that introduce to the always-in-formation cultural nomad a surprisingly rich variety of altered perspectives grooving in pleasure-ridden situations.

That lineage, interestingly and appropriately enough, has its metaphorical origins in the military. The term avant-garde first surfaced at the end of the eighteenth century to designate the elite shock troops of the French army whose mission was to engage with the enemy in small, intense battles so as to pave the way for the main body of fighters. By 1830, it was appropriated by utopian socialists to refer to those people of vision--artists, philosophers, scientists--who would help usher in the new ideal society. And by 1870, it had morphed out of the realm of warriors and pure politics, become commonly used to identify successive movements of writers, musicians, artists, and other performers who, with typical in-your-face elan, were intent on developing their own formal opposition to everything mainstream.

During the next few decades, especially from the beginning of World War I through World War II, the term became readily associated with such revolutionary streams as expressionism, futurism, and constructivism, and, in the late fifties and sixties, as many of the Avant-Popsters were just being born, and such premier postmodernists as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, and Thomas Pynchon were beginning or continuing to mine this radically opulent vein, widespread cultural and political upheavals fueled vanguard-ideas like the Death of The Novel, the Death of the Author, and the Death of the Critic--anything, in other words, that might signal the clarion call of the avant-garde tradition whose calling-card obstructionism ran the risk of stabilizing, neutralizing, petrifying, and devolving under the ever-present pressure of capitalist commodification (cf. Avant-Guard, product-name for that screen protecting you from all those evil rays emanating from your computer; or Avant-Card, the Hallmark-like gift shop in downtown Boulder).

Instead, though, a certain group of artists who never conceived of themselves as a group of artists appropriated, embraced, pla(y)giarized, and subverted that commercial pop thrust, emblem of the extraordinary influence mass media has had over the development of myriad minds in our generation. Growing up . . .

"It won't do, then, for the literary establishment simply to complain that, for instance, young-written characters don't have very interesting dialogues with each other, that young writers' ears seem tinny. Tinny they may be, but the truth is that in younger Americans' experience, people in the same room don't do all that much direct conversing with each other. What most of the people I know do is they all sit and face the same direction and stare at the same thing and then structure commercial-length conversations around the sorts of questions myopic car-crash witnesses might ask each other. . . . So now whose literary aesthetic seems dated?"
--David Foster Wallace, "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (Summer 1993): 168.

"There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument. . . . I do not presume to impose 'story' or 'plot' 'continuity.'"
--William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1959): 221

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."
--William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984): 1.

"In this book you get such a sense of the reality of the main character that he seems to get off the page and sit down with you on the bus."
--Steve Katz, from "Trip," in Moving Parts (Brooklyn: Fiction Collective, 1977): 10

"'But our beauty lies,' explained Metzger, 'in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of a jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I'm a former actor who became a lawyer. They've done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor.'"
--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966): 33.

"Soon signs started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. . . . Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. 'No one sees the barn,' he said finally. A long silence followed. 'Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn. . . . We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. This literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.'"
--Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Viking Penguin, 1985): 12.

"So, starting in around 1974, we the disappointed started getting jobs. Countercultural as all get out at first, to be sure. But eventually it was hard not to see that what we'd also almost inadvertently acquired in the universities--organizational skills, knowledge and capacity for insight--the auto-, techno-, and bureau-crats were willing to pay really a lot of money for."
--Curt White, The Idea of Home (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1992): 146.

"In the distorting mirror of the camcorder everyone was a star."
--Stephen Wright, Going Native (New York: FSG, 1994): 134-5.

"I mean, you don't bitch about Madonna or Rambo or all those awful sexist violent/racist television shows, you colorize 'em, re-narratize em, give 'em a new sound track, you supply a new non-sexist, -racist ending that won't offend you. You sample the parts you like, you lay down a drumtrack! (literal narrative), you become your own conductor! The technology's out there if people will only learn to start using their own imaginations rather than relying on other people's."
--Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi, "Graffiti's Rainbow," in Science Fiction Eye 12 (Summer 1993): 49.

a) our culture seems limitless;
b) our culture seems doomed;
c) our culture seems unchanged;
d) our culture seems on the brink of something dazzling;
e) our culture seems more alive than ever;
f) our culture seems to be thriving;
g) our culture seems to be idling;
h) our culture seems rooted in psychasthenia;
i) our culture seems to be going nowhere fast;
j) our culture seems desperate for libidinal synchronicity;
ok) our culture seems . . . our culture seems . . .

FIFTY-SEVEN CHANNELS AND NOTHIN' ON

FRICTION = (F) (ICTION) + (C) (RI) (T) ICISM

FICTION = "I" + F (A) C T.

THE P WORD

a) a menu
b) dispersal
c) mutant forms of play
d) decenterment
e) polymorphous metanarratives full of themselves
f) clever misreadings
g) demystification of the self (whose Identity became plural and perverse)

VIRTUAL GHETTO

Generation-Xsters have accepted their fate in this world, and at least one niche community within this emerging generation of artists is seeking ways to metamorphose this virtual ghetto called The Present, turning to Avant-Pop strategies as both a refuge and a resource of provocation. Even someone as dead-set on becoming a commercial success as Mark [A fan calls 1-900-T-LEYNER and--using a touch-tone phone, of course, dials "1" to hear an excerpt from your upcoming book, "2" for your most intimate thoughts about weightlifting, "3" for dating advice, "4" for an upclose-and-personal tidbit from Arleen, and "5" for a cute anecdote about Carmella. --Mark Leyner, Et Tu, Babe (New York: Harmony Books, 1992): 75.] Leyner employs many of the devices we used, not too long ago, to think of as being in the domain of the avant-garde. His sound-bite imagery and speed-metal rhythms, emblematic of much Avant-Pop writing, are constantly sampling the fictioneers, artists, and performers of the avant-garde, not to mention the rest of Western culture's dreck-machine. By doing so, his work enacts the great Creeley-Olson dictum--that form is never more than an extension of content. In this case, "content" is what the media-conglemerates deliver into one's home via the TV screen and form is the ability to level out or flatten the meaning of all things.

"Do you know the commercial where the heavily mustached old woman in a black shroud drinks strawberry Nestle's Quik and turns into this buxom bombshell in pasties and g-string, and she squats down for a second in a mud puddle, and when she gets up, her buttocks are covered with leeches, and Jesus appears holding a Barbie, and two beams of sparkling particles shoot from the eyes of the Barbie and vaporize the leeches, and the bombshell gets on her motorcycle, and pink florets of exhaust spurt from its tailpipe spelling out the words 'Be All That You Can Be'?"
--Mark Leyner, Et Tu, Babe (New York: Harmony Books, 1992): 69.

"In case you're thinking, Well, Avital, fuck her, she just lives inside her own head, this work reveals a growing concern over the finite figures that comprise our shared experience. As long as there is something like experience, it is not entirely mine."
--Avital Ronell, Infinitude's Score: Essays For the End of the Millennium (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 1994): xi

"Our embodied imaginations of ourselves and others are increasingly vulnerable to being ritually relayed or mechanically pre-processed through complex networks of bio-technological feedback, video-loops, stereophonic sound- systems, Sony Walkmans, and talking cars. All within a solid liquidity of CAPITAL, a fast thick ocean of white noise."
--Stephen Pfohl, Death at the Parasite Café (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992): 43

ROUTING OUT

Or do we, in retrospect, come to understand how aesthetically naive and historically shortsighted it would be, in the standard manifesto two-step, to claim the Avant Pop, a term first appropriated from a Lester Bowie jazz album by Ronald Sukenick and Larry McCaffery in 1992, is something radically new? Does it not, from a certain perspective, grow out of the postmodern? Does it form a subset of the postmodern in the same way metafiction, surfiction, cyberpunk, magical realism, and minimalism do? Does it have less to do with a rupture in history than with a state of mind that can be found throughout the ages, and has perhaps only come to the fore in the eighties and nineties of this schizoid century (thanks, alas, to the Big Digital Wink)? Haven't we, from a certain perspective, simply rediscovered the antinarratological wheel? Or is it none of the above?

To test your ability to think through this yourself, especially in light of all the info we've given you up to this point, we'd like the navigator to please take part in the following Avant-Pop Quiz! [SPECIAL PRIZES AWAIT THE PERSON WHO CAN CORRECTLY ANSWER ALL THE QUESTIONS!]:

Avant-Pop Quiz

2. Avant-Pop will never die because

3. Avant-Pop, which claims itself to be The Real Thing(TM), is actually

THE A&P MANIFESTO (REMIX)

A. Whereas it's true that certain strains of modernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, surrealism, dadaism, futurism, capitalism and even marxism pervade the Avant-Pop sensibility, the major difference is that the artists who create Avant-Pop art are the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents, who have much less influence over them). Many of the early practitioners of postmodernism, from Beckett to Vargas Ilosa, Borges to Silko, Davenport to Lessing, Gaddis to Garcia Marquez, who came into active adult consciousness and textual production in the forties, fifties, sixties and early seventies, tried desperately to keep themselves away from the forefront of the newly powerful Mediagenic Reality that was rapidly becoming the space where most of our social exchange was taking place. Despite its early insistence on remaining caught up in the academic and elitist art world's presuppositions of self institutionalization and incest, early postmodernism found itself overtaken by the popular media engine; out of such extremely diverse writers as Abish, Ballard, Barthelme, Burroughs, Coover, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and even Nabokov, whose Lolita is one of the first fictional Avant-Popsters, the A&P began its move toward increasing recognition.

B. Avant-Pop artists have had to resist the avant-garde sensibility that stubbornly denies the existence of a popular media culture and its dominant influence over the way we use our imaginations to process experience. At the same time, A&P artists have had to work hard not to become so enamored by the false consciousness of the mass media itself that they lose sight of their creative directives, the single most important one of which is to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite would, sucking out all the bad blood that lies between the mainstream and the margin. Avant-Popsters thus turn into Mutant Fictioneers, it's true, but our goal is and always has been to face up to our monster deformation and to find wild and adventurous ways to love it for what it is. We have acquired immunity from the Terminal Death dysfunctionalism of a Pop Culture gone awry and are now ready to offer our own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease that infects the core of our collective life.

C. Whereas Avant-Popsters are fully aware of their need to maintain a crucial avant-sensibility as it drives the creative processing of their work, and attaches itself to the avant-garde lineage from which they spring, they are also quick to acknowledge the need to develop more open-minded strategies that will allow them to attract attention within the popularized forms of representation that fill the contemporary Mediascape. Our collective mission is to radically alter Pop Culture's focus by channeling a more popularized kind of dark, sexy, surreal, and subtly ironic gesture that grows out of the work of many twentieth-century artists like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Lenny Bruce, the two Davids (Cronenberg and Lynch); movements like fluxus, situationism, lettrism and neo-hoodooism; and scores of rock bands including the Sex Pistols, Pere Ubu, Bongwater, Slint, L7, Pavement, Stereolab, Meccanormal {this list of bands constantly changes everytime the manifesto is read aloud}...

The emerging wave of Avant-Pop artists now arriving on the scene find themselves caught in this struggle to rapidly transform our sick, commodity-infested workaday culture into a more sensual, trippy, exotic and networked experience. One way to achieve this goal is to create and expand virtual niche communities, many of which already exist through the zine scene and Internet. By actively engaging themselves in the continuous exchange and proliferation of collectively generated electronic publications, individually designed creative works, manifestos, live on-line readings, multi-media interactive hypertexts, conferences, and so forth, Avant-Popsters and the alternative networks they are part of will eat away at the conventional relics of a bygone era where the individual artist-author creates her/his beautifully-crafted, original works consumed primarily by the elitist art world and their business cronies who pass judgment on what is appropriate and what is not.

Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. Avant-Pop artists wear each other's experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with writing.

D. Avant-Popsters welcome the new Electronic Age with open arms because we know that this will vastly increase our chances of finding an audience of like-minded individuals with whom we can communicate and collaborate. The future of writing is moving away from the lone creator sitting behind a keyboard cranking out magical, mystical verse so that one day he or she may find an editor or agent or publisher who will hype her or his work to those interested in commercial literary culture. Instead, the future of writing will feature more multi-media collaborative authoring that will make itself available to hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of potential associates around the world actively internetworking in their own niche communities. Our audience will be both immediate and global, and our identities will remain forever in flux as we develop self-designed nodes of operation from which to distribute our multi-media litware. As Hakim Bey, author of the ontologically-anarchic book of guerrilla aesthetics, Temporary Autonomous Zones, recently said in the magazine Dreamtime Talkingmail, we're exploring "the possibility of an art which is by no means 'sensible' in the Civilizational sense of the word, but which is nevertheless devoted with PASSIONATE INTENSITY to COMMUNICATION, and thus to a certain kind of situational clarity and accessibility" ("Anarcho-Aesthetics and The Problem of Clarity," Dreamtime Talkingmail [Winter 1994]:12.)

Can you imagine what The Futurists would have done with an Information Superhighway?

E. The distribution formula will radically change from: Author --> Agent --> Editor/Publisher --> Printer --> Distributor --> Retailer --> Consumer to a more simplified and direct:

Author (Sender) --> Interactive Participant (Receiver)

Avant-Popsters and their pirate signals promoting wild station identifications are ready to expand into your home right now, just log on, click around and find them. For example, check out Mark Amerika's electronic publishing enterprise, Alternative-X on the World Wide Web.

F. One of the main tenets of postmodernism is: I, whoever that is, will put together these bits of data and form a Text, while you, whoever that is, will produce your own meaning based on what you bring to the Text. One of the main tenets of Avant-Pop writing is: I, whoever that is, am always interacting with data created by the Collective You, whoever that is, and by interacting with and supplementing the Collective You, will find meaning.

In a Data Age where we all risk suffering from Information Sickness, one cure is a highly potent, creatively filtered tonic of (yes) textual (or multi-media) residue spilled from the depths of our spiritual unconscious. Creating a work of art will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data he or she has at her or his disposal. We all know originality is dead and that our contaminated virtual realities are always already readymade and ready for consumption!

G. The future of the book is happening now. True, the idea that books as hard or paperbound products coming back from the printer so that they can then go to the distributor who will try and convince retailers that their consumers will want to buy them is not in danger of becoming obsolete any time soon.

Nor is the lone author, cranking out her or his writing wares at home only to send them off to distant agents/editors/publishers so that his/her work can then take part in this Author-->Agent-->Publisher--> Printer-->Distributor-->Retailer-->Consumer formula. Books will remain books and bookstores will continue to sell them. Writers will continue to get single-digit royalties and the distributors and bookstores will continue to reap most of the profit. The Best-Sellers list and the New York establishment will continue to maintain their rockhard hegemony.

BUT: now there's more to communication, more to language, more to text production, than the book. There are all manner of videos, graphic novels, dissident comix, CD-ROMS, computer hypertexts, earplays, and, soon, in a universally-accessible location near you, a small black box that will sit on top of your reconstructed soon-to-be-a-computer TV that will bring into your private space all kinds of fireworks created by (yep, it's true) writers. Electronic writers. Which, it ends up, most of us already are.

H. Technology is becoming more accessible and software is getting better. Soon we can start thinking seriously of publishing ourselves in our home offices, virtual brain centers--without being accused of vanity, thanks to the growing Do It Yourself ethic that's grown out of the underground scene. Soon we'll be able to create and send multi-media non-linear narrative over the wires and into computers all around the world. And, yes, it's true, many artists will continue to depend on the institutionalized system to nurture them through their careers. The comfort of the old system will keep a lot of artists happy with things the way they are. We can hear them already saying something like "but I'm a writer, I don't have time for all this other stuff." To which we'll respond: "You can't afford NOT to find the time . . .

"Reading through a hypertext, one senses that just under the surface of the screen is a vast reservoir of story waiting to be found."
--Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1993: 1.

I. The Avant-Popster is a nomadic voyager, a cultural terrorist, whose identity is constantly in flux. He/she secretly "becomes" something like Woman or the open-endedness of feminine imagination, reclaiming the terrain vis-a-vis the enactment of subliminal postures/gestures that sabotage the system's rigidity. Our strategy is to deterritorialize the institutional effects so as to generate a new level playing-field where the action of bees and bodies buzzing can once again ignite the language of our spiritual unconscious.

Our dilemma then becomes how to make the Electric real while simultaneously making the desert of our souls virtually inhabitable.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

Nonetheless, it's a start, a sketch, the delineation of a relatively uncharted space to begin to explore for those coming to this subject for the first time; those wishing to test their opinions of what's Avant-Pop and what's not against ours; teachers out to design courses about this rough new beast; libraries checking up on their stocks of the current.

Kathy Acker. Empire of the Senseless (1988). The most cyberpunkish text (parts of which are actually pla[y]giarized from Gibson's Neuromancer) by the dominatrix of the Anglo-American A&P. No discussion of the A&P can begin without a brief genuflection in her direction. If Acker captures your imagination, you should also check out her brilliant Blood and Guts in High School (1978), Don Quixote (1985), and In Memoriam to Identity (1990).

Alternative-X. An online publishing network created by Mark Amerika that features many of the fictions, manifestos, essays, and on-line culture columns by many of the writers mentioned herein. Located at http://www.altx.com

Mark Amerika. The Kafka Chronicles (1993). Less novel than formalistic and theoretical pyrotechnic exploring the instability of selfhood in an electronic culture by one of the editors of Black Ice Books, editor of Black Ice magazine, and Director of the GRAMMATRON project, a multi-media writing-machine soon to be installed at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Donald Barthelme. Sixty Stories (1982). One of the original pop cultural linguistically brilliant dreck-machines, his stories are little works of big genius. If you're interested in something longer, try The Dead Father (1975), more about killing off the aesthetic past than about moribund parents.

Richard Brautigan. The Abortion (1970). The simplicity of life becomes more than surfictional as Brautigan's use of language begins to unravel the cacophony of countercultural voices that invade his hyperreality. Also see Trout Fishing In America.

William S. Burroughs. Naked Lunch (1959). Short, perhaps, of Pynchon, no one writer has wielded more influence on post-war avant-garde writing both here and in Europe that WB. NL is a cut-up text that probes various addictions, from opiates to media, control, and sex. A pivotal work.

Robert Coover. Pricksongs & Descants (1969). Prototypic A&P, particularly the dazzling tele-visual, hypertextual story "The Babysitter," by one of the most significant post-war stylists.

Douglas Coupland. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). A first-novel A&P cult-classic chronicle of the McLives of the McGeneration by an original voice for the nineties.

Ricardo Cortez Cruz. Straight Outta Compton (1993). McCaffery says: "As we move into the nineties, rap music's slice-and-dice (and then bring-the-noize) approach has been this country's most effective and original strategy for providing outsiders with a sense of the urgency, anger, and sheer exhilaration produced by the collisions of sounds, sights, and people in our urban jungles. Now, in Straight Outta Compton, Ricardo Cruz has succeeded in writing the first major rap novel."

Don DeLillo. White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991). Two of the most important novels of the last decade by one of the masters of contemporary fiction, these books explore the Baudrillardian infusion into our lives of media and other information technologies.

Eurudice. f/32 (1990). Funny, energetic, schizoid text that begins when a woman's vagina decides to run away from home. How does one write beyond Kathy Acker at the fin de millennium? Read this and find out.

Lauren Fairbanks. Sister Carrie (1993). This one reads as if Dreiser said 'I love you' but didn't mean it and went to bed with Donald Barthelme and William Burroughs. The payoff is an aesthetics of rotting zoobies, hair-tearingly funny samples on sex and the city, the art of commerce and the commerce of art.

Raymond Federman. The Twofold Vibration (1982) and Take It Or Leave It (1975). Founder of the Surfiction movement, he has been a major influence on the young avant-set for years. Both his fiction and hypertextual theory are widely translated for a growing international audience.

William Gibson. Neuromancer (1984). The white-hot prosed, gritty-futureworld cyberpunk classic. Also check out Gibson's collaboration with the abstract expressionist painter Dennis Ashbaugh, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) (1992), an amazingly expensive nostalgic electronic prose poem about Gibson's childhood and the development of several key technologies that self-destructs after one reading--available on the Net newsgroup alt.cyberpunk.

Harold Jaffe. Eros Anti-Eros (1990). Extreme experimental f(r)ictions about a media-manipulated society by one of the most significant and underrated fringe writers in the United States. See also his upcoming Straight Razor (Black Ice Books) with illustrations by Norman Conquest.

Darius James. Negrophobia (1992). A wild novel written in screenplay form, where James uses hyperreal racial stereotypes as the best logical weapon to do away with those same stereotypes. Part Ishmael Reed, Terry Southern and Richard Pryor, this one will make you look in the mirror.

Michael Joyce. Afternoon (1987). The granddaddy of hypertext fiction about a man who may have just seen his ex-wife and son die in a car crash, but is too scared to find out. Interesting fusion of traditional psychologically motivated plot and cutting-edge form.

Steve Katz. The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968). Katz's first novel is everything you wanted in an Avant-Pop novel and more. There are enough innovative narrative devices here to spawn numerous generations of Avant-Pop progeny. One can only wonder what would have happened if hypertext-pioneer Ted Nelson had gotten together with Katz back in the late Sixties and started formulating the future of multi-media texts. See also his wild and wonderful Creamy & Delicious.

Mark Leyner. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990). Short, hilarious, cyberdelic linguistic explosions that formed an instant A&P classic. Followed by Et Tu, Babe (1992), a "novel" about a Warholesque writer who becomes a living god through media hype.

Larry McCaffery, ed. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993). The first A&P anthology, featuring work from many of the key players, including Kathy Acker, Ricardo Cortez Cruz, Eurudice, Harold Jaffe, Mark Leyner, Stephen Wright, and others. Followed in 1995 by a large version from Viking. Both are excellent introductions and overviews of the fiction.

Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi. "Graffiti's Rainbow: Towards the Theoretical Frontiers of 'Fiction': From Metafiction and Cyberpunk through Avant-Pop." In Science Fiction Eye 12 (Summer 1993): 43-49. Fine introduction to the A&P phenomenon by two of the best critics of the contemporary.

John McDaid. Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1992). A hypertext whose premise is that the narrator visits his dead uncle's house and begins rifling through his things. The result is a multi-media extravaganza about the shifting nature of selfhood.

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen (1986). The mother of all graphic novels, pure A&P with a healthy dose of cyberpunk, set in a near-future world without heroes.

Lance Olsen. Tonguing the Zeitgeist (1994). Info-dense imaginative fire set in a rock'n'roll near-future world that investigates the commodification of the arts at the end of the millennium by the critic-fictioneer who wrote the first full-length study of William Gibson.

Lance Olsen, ed. Surfing Tomorrow: Essays on the Future of American Fiction (1994). Overview of the current and future states of American fiction, with contributions from Janice Eidus, Brooks Landon, Larry McCaffery, Lewis Shiner, Alan Wilde, and many other important writers and critics.

Derek Pell. Assassination Rhapsody (1988). One of the aces of the collage-text deconstructs the Warren Commission Report's investigation into the assassination of J.F.K. through the use of pastiche, quotation, and (re)appropriation.

Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow (1973). The most crucial post-war novel, period. Pynchon exerts more influence over the new generation of innovative writers than anyone else except, perhaps, William S. Burroughs.

Doug Rice, ed. Nobodaddies. An A-P zine whose first issue reads like a who's who on the scene, with work by Eurudice, George Chambers, Raymond Federman, Mark Amerika, Rob Hardin, Michael Hemmingson, Derek Pell, Steven Shaviro, Curt White, and many significant others. Three other zines with an A-P twist are Jasmine Sailing's wild Cyber-Psycho's A.O.D, Brian Clark's ultra-kewl Puck and, of course, Black Ice, which has continuously published many of the emerging A-P writers.

John Shirley. New Noir (1993). A wealth of sick pomo Poeian fictions like "Jodi and Annie on TV," about two teens who'll do anything to appear on the six o'clock news.

Art Spiegelman. Maus I and II (1986, 1992). Just when Jewish fiction went comatose, content doing paler and paler imitations of itself (Bellow, Wiesel, the late Malamud, et al.), along came this A&P graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Jews are portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats, and everything is dynamically possible again.

Neal Stephenson. Snow Crash (1992). Cyberpunk with a sense of humor, A&P with a sense of electronic media, here's a novel that believes there are four things the U.S. does better than anyone else: music, movies, software, and high-speed pizza delivery.

Ronald Sukenick. Doggy Bag (1994). An answer to modernist Eliot's The Waste Land by one of the father's of A-P, prolific surfictional co-founder of the Fiction Collective and publisher of American Book Review. This book confirms Sukenick's uncanny ability to transcend generational differences and keep his underground finger on the pulse of American culture. See also his earlier novels Out, Up and especially Blown Away.

Gerald Vizenor. Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987). A "novel" by the most disruptively experimental Native American on the writing scene.

Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five (1968). Time-tripping, anyone? Hybrid genres, new vocabularies, metacommentary, and a political edge that clearly marks the terrain for more formally assaultive A-P texts to tread and move beyond.

David Foster Wallace. The Broom of the System (1987). A great comic A&P narrative worthy of Pynchon which begins when Lenore Beadsman's grandmother and twenty-five other residents mysteriously disappear from their nursing home in Ohio. Full of brain-buring style and intelligence.

Bruce Wagner. Wild Palms (1993). Cyberdelic graphic novel with so much pop-will-eat-itself-referentiality that you might miss the avant buzz that drives it. Originally published in the mainstreeam magazine, Details, and eventually produced by Oliver Stone for a TV mini-series, great for the intellectually stoned. Illustrated by Julian Allen.

Stephen Wright. Going Native (1994). Superb A-P novel in which the protagonist one evening just walks out of a suburban cookout, away from his family, and begins a long, dark, vampiric drift across a drug-stunned America; and yet, as in the algebra of subatomic physics, almost all we ever see of him is his effect on others.

as one of the inventors of avant-pop I think I have certain privileges as to defining what it means to say that it means using mass market modes against the mass market in a kind of update of the Lettriste ploy of detournement is correct as far as it goes--but it doesn't go far enough--actually what we have here is a reversal of the old consumerist tactic of "co-optation", i.e., if some rebel-rousing movement comes along, de-fang it, package it and sell it, absorb it into the mass market, render it harmless--avant-pop, on the other hand, co-opts mass market schlock, twists it and tortures it till it becomes dangerous and injects it back into the market as a virus that destroys its host from within, rotting it like ice on a lake in the spring to free up a more fluent and various relation between art producer and art consumer--where monolithic mass market was, many mini-markets there shall be, making clear the difference between consumerism's "free market," and a democratic market which offers the consumer a wide spectrum of choice

writers know that writing on writing is like an essay on the unkown--there are no rules--but one of them is that few people are cursed with the gift of the assayist, of knowing ore from earth--and in this case, though it's the slick ore that sells, it's the crude gritty earth we want--you can't keep people from going for the gold, and in going for it even the clever are going to go for the glitz, the cool, the hype, the hip, the stylish, the smart--it takes a certain kind of stupidity to resist--i'm sorry if this sounds elitist but if it's elite it's an elite of the obscure and powerless--so the question is, how do people detect the difference between the truly avant-pop and mass market poop, between the real thing and its slick consumerized version?

other day i was driving along the road and passed a huge consumer mall parkinglot--in the middle of which stood a small prefab looking structure that said, JOE'S: NEIGHBORHOOD BAR-- looked around for a neighborhood, but all i saw was acres and acres of parkinglot--that's why Joe's had to say it was A NEIGHBORHOOD BAR--because otherwise how would you have known it, i.e., the more something declares itself in the free market, the less it's actually there--corollary: the less it's there the better it sells--it's the pet rock ploy, promotion is expensive but production is minimal--it's the theory of vacuum marketing: worked content is an impediment to promotion, vacuity appeals to the broadest possible spectrum of tastes--and i'm not talking about the poised emptiness of a Mallarme or the meditative emptiness of a monk, i'm talking about the packaged emptiness of the shopping mall

so how do you figure the real thing from the hollywood version-- avant-pop doesn't make these distinctions clear and is liable to lead us back into the shopping mall--without further qualification--which is why we can't do without the idea of hyperfiction

hyperfiction is the successor to surfiction--where surfiction was inventive, hyperfiction is interventive, hyperfiction like hypertext is interactive--hyperfiction projects itself into the world by, to put it crudely, making something happen, making somebody react and act on others, not simply adding to reality as with surfiction, but changing reality, hyperfiction is activist fiction--it is not concerned with marketing--it assumes that it is better to get three people to do the right thing than to entertain three thousand, three hundred thousand, and is therefore not aimed at the mass market but the appropriate market for its intervention--and one's faith is that the payoff could be ultimately more significant with the three than the three thou, with three thou than with three hundred thou, & etc.--that is, quantity is not the main issue--and attention! interventive fiction is not propaganda because propaganda is deceptive and manipulative where interventiveness is based on open communication among free spirits

and how do you know what the right thing is you're trying to get people to do to change things interventively? well, that's another question--one i have to leave to you

1

The Crash of High Modernism--The Single-Aesthetic Bullet Theory.

Pop. n. 1. a sudden, short, light, explosive sound. 2. shot with a revolver. WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY

"The spectacle originates in the loss of the unity of the world, and the gigantic expansion of the modern spectacle expresses the totality of this loss . . . " --Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

It turns out, though, that such widely-circulated reports of the death of serious writing and art in America were greatly exaggerated. Even as apologists for the PO-MOD-SQUAD's Program of absence, disappearance, skepticism and loss were issuing one obituary notice after another, a new breed of media-savvy American writers and artists were busy down in their basement laboratories mixing up some new kinds of aesthetic medicine, specifically designed to revitalize artists suffering from info-overload, psychic fragmentation, loss of affect, reality decay, daydream drift and other debilitating symptoms of life in post-apocalypse America...

2

It is an utterly quiet landscape. When the black raven passes you overhead--all 25 inches of it--you can follow the whoosh of its wings for several lovely seconds. But the serenity is misleading. It may feel as if you're in a world that only transforms by tens of thousands of years, but the valley that Borrego lies in is in fact the most active area for earthquakes in California. Since 1899, it has had 14 quakes of magnitude greater than 6.0; we have over 10,000 mini-rumbles per year which means for the Borrego citizen rock and roll is a way of life.

3

"Tonight as we make final preparations to launch a literary assault which we hope will begin the long process of recapturing our homelands of creativity, we should all recognize... I don't have to remind you that the narrative and aesthetic terrain... You are going to be appalled at the desolation you will find; during the years of enemy occupation, they have transformed an area once known for creative abundance into a parched desert incapable of sustaining... Moreover, it's not just the prospect of facing a well-armed... It's daunting but you are likely to be shocked by the condition of the ordinary citizens you encounter and the hostile and bewildered reactions of ordinary readers... Finally, I'm sure every writer participating in this Avant-Pop mission recalls the sense of outrage, anger, and humiliation at being forced to witness the shocking spectacle of the hideously disfigured corpse of the Avant-Garde being dragged through the dusty airways of the Desert of the Real by an unruly mob of media executives, advertisers, and... In retrospect, these images, painful as they are even today, perhaps may have served a useful purpose, for they provided final proof that reports of the death of this courageous and venerated figure who had presided over so many earlier campaigns against the forces of banality and conformity had not been, as we had hoped, greatly exaggerated at all..."

4

The whole point of the avant garde was that you had this "movement" that would lead the way into "enemy" (bourgeoisie) territory, plant some bombs, blow people's mind, and prepare the way for a later mass assault in which serious liberating art would eventually be victorious. The avant garde was based on 19th century notions--as a movement it relied on bi-nary principles (us versus them), linear, top-down organization, and Darwinian evolutionary principles (survival of the fittest), and so on.

AP--and the paradigm it grows out of--carries with it a good news/bad news message. The bad news is that Yeats' predictions about some rough beast heading our ways have come true: in fact, the apocalypse has already arrived, the old world is gone, and the "bad guys" (mass culture) have prevailed.

The good news is that the bad news is good news! . And the bad guys aren't even bad. What AP writers recognize is that more is better--the massive expansion of mass culture (the pop culture represented and celebrated by Warhol, et al., has been replaced by AVANT POP CULTURE, which is not uniform and banal but highly individualized, and at least potentially interactive) isn't something to be gotten rid of (replaced, presumably by "high art") or conquered but used, incorporated, interacted with, etc.

5

The modern man receives ten times as much stimulation today as he did 100 years ago. --Fernand Leger, 1914.

6

Why Ask "Why Avant Pop"?

7

The highest art will be the one which in its conscious content presents the thousand fold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect it limbs after yesterday's crash. . . . Hatred of the press, hatred of advertising, hatred of SENSATIONS are typical of people who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street. Life appears as a simultaneous muddle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms, which is taken unmodified with all the sensations, screams and fevers of its reckless everyday psyche and with all its brutal reality. --1918 Berlin Dada Manifesto

THE BEAST IS LOOSE

"The Blank mumble blat/Babble song babble song/Foaming at the mouth/Won ton soupie . . . The Beast is Loose" --Bucky Wunderlick, "Pee-Pee-Maw-Maw" (in Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street).

When they put the silence on you, there is no recovery. You are turned into a media buffoon or worse. --Stephen Wright, "Light"

This world comes to an end, for which we are grateful. The Chosen Ones rejoice at this prospect of the apocalypse, for it is the sign of our future reign in a millennial kingdom elsewhere in the universe." --Craig Baldwin, "Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America"

The problem for serious art, then, has been to learn how to survive in these new conditions, for just about everything in this culture of mass media has conspired against the ways in which art had been previously created and received. Jameson's point about the expansion of culture is the crucial issue here: how does writing, or art of any kind, adapt within a landscape whose surface was already comprised of the kinds of signs and replications that had once been available from art? In fact, this landscape has increasingly become less a literal territory than a multi-dimensional hyperreality of television lands, media "jungles" and information "highways," a place where the real is now a "desert" "rained on" by a ceaseless "downpour" of information and data, "flooded by" a "torrent" of disposable consumer goods, narratives, images, ads, signs, and electronically-generated "stimuli," and "peopled by" media figures whose lives and stories seem at once more vivid, more familiar, and more real than anything the artist might create.

8

b) There is no single no single set of aesthetic impulses or thematic concerns that define this type of art, but central to all Avant-Pop Art is the desire to create works which interact with and reconstitute present disruptive, often blasphemous, and hopefully liberating alternatives to the mind-numbing flood of images, values, slogans, archetypes that have inundated peoples' lives and imaginations during the prodigious rise of the Media (or Culture) Industry during the past 40 years.

c) Avant-Pop first emerged as a coherent tendency during the repressive Reagan era of the 1980s--the period when the logic of hyperconsumption began. This is not to say, however, that there weren't earlier Avant-Popsters. For example, William Burroughs and Phillip K. Dick, authors working on the margins of SF (with its own focus on the implications of technological change) and the radical literary underground. Among those contributing to the Avant-Pop core of aesthetic strategies and themes are an eclectic array of artists and theorists ranging from Sade, Rimbaud, the Dadaists and Surrealists (Marcel Duchamp's influence is pervasive), Walter Benjamin, Warhol, Marshall McLuhan, The French Situationists, punk, and the cyberpunks.

9

e) More examples of AP from earlier times: Woody Allen's WHAT'S UP TIGER LILLY and THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO; PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (THE SINGING DETECTIVE, Donald Barthelme's SNOW WHITE, Bob Coover's...)

f) The "Pop" portion of the term points to its connections with the Pop Art movement that appeared in England in the mid 1950s and that was to have such a dominant impact on American art when it appeared there a few years later. Indeed, Avant-Pop represents the most recent stage in the dialectical process occurring within the realm of artistic production and the culture at large which gave rise to both the avant-garde and Pop Art. THEREFORE BEFORE ONE CAN HOPE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT AVANT POP IS, ONE MUST FIRST DEVELOP SOME CLEAR AND SPECIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF THE GOALS AND TRADITIONS OF THESE EARLIER MOVEMENTS...

10

11

"Another feature of our preparation involved gathering and disseminating information among ourselves concerning the history of our struggles. These studies included readings in the historical background of popular culture in the days before the rise of mass production and the vital role it has always played in societies. We read historical studies describing the great variety of forms which popular culture has assumed in different culture--and of the vital (and universal) role that it plays in organizing a society's deepest fears, questions, and desires--as well as more mundane concerns--into the narrative of stories, myths, games and public events which literalize these features and allow them to be circulated. We paid particular attention to the ways popular culture had allowed societal fears and desires to be literalized, imaginatively inhabited, the ways that nearly all cultures had wisely created public holidays and festivals which allowed citizens--guided by a shaman or religious leader--to be given access to the 'underworld'...

"Once we had been provided with a firm grounding in the sociological and historical significance of popular culture, we studied the rise of industrialism in the 19th century...we saw what happened when popular culture gave way to pop or mass culture...we saw the dangers involved in mass culture's ability to disseminate the sacred, dreadful urges to kill and procreate garish products of rock-videos and excess-tv--how this process not only trivialized and desacredized these mysteries and terrors but reifed them, thus bringing people into contact with aspects of themselves which should occur under the guidance of holymen, mediums, people who were trained in...we learned about the analogous process that was occurring with drugs--we learned that it was equally as ludicrous for a society to ban drugs and transform them into something evil as it was for citizens who didn't respect their power and who used them not as a means of contacting other worlds and thus expanding their minds and spirits but in a foolish effort to escape this world...

"After these preliminary studies, we began to examine the circumstances surrounding our own ancestry--the birth of our venerable forefather, the Avant Garde, the complex, interlocking web of economic, philosophical, military, political, and legal forces that had arisen since the French Revolution that gave rise to the revolutionary movement that bears his name, the rationale behind the strategies he devised to counter the growing power and influence of this system. Because of the nature and scope of this system, we read widely through fiction, art history, philosophy, treatises on economics and anarchy--everything from Nietzsche and Norman O. Brown (which we read while listening to The Doors), to Kant, Hegel, Marx, Wittgenstein, Bertram Russell, Charles Dickens, Mao's Red Book, Tolstoy, Freud, Marcuse. What gradually became clear was first of all a clear pattern of connections and interactions among the various systems that had given rise to the Industrialism and urbanization...

"Our readings in fiction, poetry, art history soon brought us in contact with an entire lineage of artists and thinkers who had opposed the rationalist/capitalist system in various ways (Mallarme, Rimbaud, the Dadaists and Surrealists, Genet, Patti Smith, Duchamp, Cage, Pollack, Poe, Baudelaire, Wilde, Lautremont)..."

12

Like a cell or the person, it [the bee hive] behaves as a unitary whole, maintaining its identity in space, resisting dissolution . . . neither a thing nor a concept, but a continual flux or process. --William Morton Wheeler, Journal of Morphology

More is different. --Kevin Kelly, Out of Control.

Until recently, artists have rarely been interested in portraying such scenes in their work. Even assuming you were willing to abandon the comfort of your armchair, what were you supposed to do in this scene of pandemonium? What you would find would be so vulgar, chaotic--so ordinary --while art is so precious, beautiful, meaningful, unique. It wasn't until our own century that a few artists, applying Rimbaud's theory of illumination as a means of taking a fresh look at art and life, began to recognize that this scene was actually a kind of perpetual meaning-generator. It would never occur to such people that larger patterns of meaning and structure could emerge from such a system because clearly no one, either inside or outside it, was controlling or planning its operations. How could larger patterns of order emerge out of what is so obviously chaotic interactions at the micro level?

As it turns out, however, there are two ways to structure "moreness," as Kevin Kelly explains in his fascinating recent study of emergent complexity, Out of Control: "At one extreme, you can construct a system as a long string of sequential operations, such as we do in a meandering factory assembly line. . . . At the other extreme, we find many systems ordered as a patchwork of parallel operations, very much as in the neural network of a brain or a colony of ants. . . . What emerges from the collective is not a series of critical individual actions but a multitude of simultaneous actions whose collective pattern is far more important. This is the swarm model" (Kelly, 21). Although neither the Dadaists nor (as far as I know) the A-Poppers ever conceived it in these terms, this scene which fascinated them so much with its spontaneity, vibrancy, sheer energy, and above all, its power to subvert traditional aesthetic norms was a swarm system. This swarm system was called mass culture during the Dada period; later, in the years just after WWII when consumer culture began achieving exponential growth in American, Lawrence Alloway coined a new word for it: "Pop." At any rate, the Dadaists, A-P and a surprising few other early Modernists (e.g.. Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Stella and Stuart Davis) found the "simultaneous muddle of noises, colors and spiritual rhythms" appealing both aesthetically and because they sensed its "sensation screams and fever" represented a kind of collective unconscious of the society's "reckless everyday psyche."

13

Stay tuned.

1 Disneyland

An interesting and vital part of navigation in immersive enviroments is the effect of sudden mode change.... often, turning a corner, you are instantly in another enviroment, as if you had just passed through the spatial equivilent of a soft-edged wipe. What is shocking is that these mode changes can often take you to an enviroment which contradicts the one you just came from, both in appearance, and in meaning and use... like turning a smooth corner at the base of the Matterhorn at Disneyland, and ending up at the end of a row of urinals.

The first effect of this spatial mode change, I believe, is that one becomes more susceptible to association. In other words, free navigation in an immersive enviroment leads to mode changes, and mode changes lead to an increase in association. .. sometimes internal, and sometimes external. The latter we call coincidence.

Back in the early 1970's, I learned a lot from surreal audio theatre pieces put out by the group "Firesign Theatre". I hadn't listened to them for almost twenty years until I bought them as used records, in preparation for a trip to SIGGRAPH '93. Off the plane under the memorial statue at the John Wayne Airport in Orange County, in an enormous surrounding glass abuttment that was the symmetric center of a high imperial Post-Modern building so obviously built first in the computer that regular holes had been designed in the mold of the parking garage's poured roof to allow what started as elephant feet underground to turn into a grid of optimistic palm trees above... I realized I'd better go to Disneyland before I got too busy. Four hours later, it was closing time at Disneyland, and I was emerging from the bathroom across from the Matterhorn. I'd just bought my first Walkman the month before, and wasn't used to the dual alienation and audio overlay effect you get from a Walkman,so I put the headphones on again with self-conscious semi-reluctance, and went back to "We're all Bozo's on this Bus" (Firesign Theatre, 1971), written at the beginning of the age of Video as an imagination of what goverment-inflicted simulation might really be like. Putting the story briefly, a bus comes to town, and Clem gets on board. It turns out that the bus is actually a seamless VR enviroment, that may or may not take Clem to a future amusement park very similar to what I imagine is Ross Perot's vision of the Data Superhighway. While meeting the audioanimatronic President on the White House Ride, Clem reveals himself as a quasi-revolutionary hacker, who conversationally forces the robot president into maintanence mode, in order to talk to Dr. Memory, the real program running the simulation. Clem is in inside the machine and inside the program, calling out to Dr. Memory: "Read me, Dr, Memory! Read -me- Dr. Memory!". There's a full moon out, the Matterhorn is white, and the gondola cables are dark and visible against the sky. Suddenly, there's an additional voice and space on the tape, which it takes about ten seconds to identify as coming from the entire southern slope of the Matterhorn, which has begun to speak in the sublime voice of a woman on a microphone saying: "Shutting Down System A. Shutting Down System A. Check. Shutting Down System B. Check." A male voice conversationally replies to the technical woman from another set of speakers across the way. In the meantime, Clem, who had already succeeded in breaking the President, has just shut down the entire Future Fair.

The effect of modal change and association, whether the latter takes place in the imagination, or in the world as coincidence, is that you end up with at a sort of spatial fiction, what Jay Bolter in his book on electronic writing called a topical, or topographic fiction... a fiction of aphorisms and situations, spread in front of you as a field of places that can change one to the other in a variety of ways. Traveling through the fiction is like navigating through an immersive enviroment, and vice cersa.

2 haptic dimensions

Metafictions have been described as fictions that examine the creation of systems, especially themselves and other fictions, with particular attention to the ways in which these systems transform and filter reality. There is an assumption in this sort of fiction-making that we are locked in a world we have created, a fictional world shaped by narrative and subjective forms developed to generate meaning and stabilize our perceptions. Metafictions don't operate on aesthetic assumptions of verisimilitude, but exult in their own ficticiousness. They assume that there are no true descriptions in fiction, only constructions, which may not have any relation to the world.

Navigation in virtual worlds tends to disrupt the ordinary balance that exists between our exterior senses and our interpretive subjectivity. It is no accident that VR has been compared with hallucinogens. LSD, as well as alcohol, fatigue, and lucid dreaming, have already provided us with many examples of this disruption, all tending to reveal what I would call the haptic dimensions of thought... a sudden intuition of the material nature of thought, of how thought is received from the enviroment, and at the same time transforms the enviroment. Acid trips, as example, are famous for their mode changes, sudden and powerful associations, and constant commentary upon themselves, a unified meta-fictional expereince that often leave the user with the powerful impression that thought is literally another and different physical sense.

Of course, the same effect is common to exhaustion in immersive enviroments. After the Matterhorn spoke through speakers, I made the very long walk back to my hotel across the famous and vast parking lot, past the gate and down a long street with a new sidewalk which changed side of street every block, and width more often. Four hours off the plane, with miniature golf to one side, the Charismatic Convention Center to the other, and naked power pylons above, I was waiting for the next epiphany, as I could barely tell the difference between Disneyland and California. I received my epiphany as the appearance of a small rectangular concrete cover embedded in, and same color as the sidewalk. On the molded top there was indented the word "telephone", which in the tunnel of my exhaustion made me think too clearly about the lines invisible under the over-lit night street, about my telephone at home, barely lit and unseen by my wife, who was certainly asleep in another room; about the last phone I used to call her, a payphone back at Disneyland... in general, about both the limits of my knowledge, and the connectiveness of words, my thoughts, and the world... and how, in making those connections, my thoughts had acted like a strange sense, seeing things so far away, or impossible to see.

I believe this is related to something the mathematician Poincare said when describing his theory of conventionalism, the main purpose of which was to assert that the space described by the convention of Euclid's theorems did not rule out other spaces with their own self-consistent sets of rules. In certain descriptions of space, he said, there could also be haptic dimensions... where every muscle was a dimension. This thought fascinated people at the turn of the century, and was related by them to the notion that the 4th dimension was an alternate spatial dimension, at right angles to everything we know. In many ways, these enthusiasms were parts of an attempt to deal with subjectivity as a dimension and as a sense.. an n-dimensional sense, since with so many possible descriptions, there was no point in stopping the count.

Nowadays, with human/computer interface technology, we have come to a literalization of the idea of haptic dimensions. Now, the world can be mapped to muscles, so that a small hand gesture inside a Dataglove can be used to navigate, or even to increase the amount of space available in a virtual world.

Speaking about the human/computer interface in his book "VIrtual Reality", Howard Rheingold says:

"We build models of the world inside our head, using the data from sense organs and the information processing capacity of our brian.... We habitually think of the world we see as out there, but what we are really seeing is a mental model, a perceptual simulaton that only exists in the brain. That simulation capabilty is where human minds and digital computers share a potential for synergy."

I find it fascinating that Rheingold is not just a great popularizer of VR... he is also a popularizer of lucid dreaming technologies.... which allow a dreamer literally paralyzed by sleep to communicate information from a parallel, artificial and autonomous world out to sleep researchers, using a morse code of eye-wiggles. I take it as a clue that our equivilent of the turn of the century fascination with haptic and higher dimensions can nowadays be found in the theme of potentially autonomous alternate worlds, that exist in machines as virtual reality and artificial life, or in our world, as Jurassic Park, and which share among themselves the qualities of metafiction.

3 meta JP

Navigation is an important theme within the film. Richard Attenborough, famous film director in our world, stars as the concept and money-man behind Jurassic Park, a world within our world where dinosaurs live again. He transports our main characters to the island in the bellies of helicopters, to see and approve the mystery of his creation. First stop, after a brief witnessing of this creation, is the island's museum movie theatre. There everyone is treated to a film within the film, in which Attenborough clones himself to introduce us to the idea of reproduction without sex. Suddenly the movie theatre becomes a theme park ride. Restraining bars come down over the seat-bound, a wall opens, and, diaroma-style, a living laboratory behind a plate glass wall begin to scroll past the riders; dinosaur-reproduction workers are visible inside the laboratory. The lawyer-character whispers to Richard Attenborough: how marvelous, it's all so realistic... are those auto-erotica? Attenborough replies: no, we have no animatronics here. They're real! It is at this moment that the three scientist characters, so taken by this completely immersive enviroment... there is no question of real or unreal for them!... decide that they have to navigate. Communally, they force up the restraining bars, and exit the ride... cybernetic sailors on this narrative's oceanic pond!

If you've ever seen Blazing Saddles by Mel Brooks, you'll remember the famous horse chase, whose climax is a sudden modal change, where the chase crashes through a painted landscape backdrop, and finds itself backstage... with no loss of momentum, the riders continue on to the next set, where they disrupt a Busby Berkeley style movie in mid-production. That's how I tend to view the scientist's jump off the ride, as well as the famous scene when the autonomous and artificial Tyranosaurus Rex crashes through the Park's unelectric fence at the beginning of the film's recorded disaster.

Of course, by that point in Jurassic Park, the associative process is already in overdrive. For instance, what are the dinosaurs? Before seeing them, most people already know that they are this age's miracle of computer-generated psuedo-autonomous entertainment reality. In the film, we also learn they are earth-buried bone that can be made visible aboveground in the middle of the Badlands of South Dakota through the use of shock waves generated by elephant-gun shells, which create echoes that can be written to computer screens as image-processed pictures. They are DNA held invisible within mosquitos doubly hidden within miraculous transparent amber buried deep in the earth, which yet can be dug up, extracted, and revealed as equivilent to the wall to wall scrolling alphabetic texture that covers the cinema screen in the movie within the movie at the Jurassic Park Museum... DNA letters actually generated during the dinosaur's fateful afterdeath mating with frogs that can change their own sex. I can't even begin to go into the number of descriptive associations this film can generate... to my mind, it is one of the great associative narratives, a truly atemporal, or should I say spatialized film.

4 SGI

If I remember correctly... at the beginning of the film, we're in the Badlands with the main scientists, digging fossils. The shotgun shell has gone off, revealing the subterranean velociraptor skeleton on their outdoor but not particularly mobile computer screen. In the midst of a violently imaginative fleshing out of the dinosaur bones' previous body and behavior, the scientist says "You'll never look at birds the same way again". This phrase, stranger than it seems, and well aware of it's effect, echoes through the film in hundreds of ways... becoming, as if by default, a main theme. Moments after the fatal pronouncement, Richard Attenborough arrives by helicopter to take them to Jurassic Park, where it is their job to judge whether this high entertainment concept can fit in our world. The park implodes, the dinosaurs riot, and the scientists barely escape... but they do, in the belly of a helicopter. At the film's wordless end, the main scientist looks through the clear window, or dead eye, of his artificial bird, and finds what appears to be the sublime in the image of a pelican winding its wings over the ocean beneath him, which, except for an exterior shot of the helicopter in flight, is pretty much the last shot in the film. Despite all the emotion on his face and in the sound track, I have to say that I really don't know what it is the scientist sees, but it certainly is a bird.

At SIGGRAPH, the day before I actually did find my way to SGI's "Discovery Park", I was standing two halls away in line at The Virtual Reality Laboratory, part of a VR museum ride created for an exhibit called "Imaging, the Tools of Science" to be installed at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. The visual interface was the Fakespace Boom 2C, a boom-suspended periscope-style cube with a high resolution stereoscopic display inside... more vividly, something like a large, swivelable , realtime Viewmaster at the end of a very fancy articulating lamp-stand. Virtual Reality Lab was essentially a fly-ride through several surreal and constructed worlds. First you found yourself in a bare, circular room, with your pre-grabbed portrait on the wall, and a polgonally crude Fakespace Boom 2C recursively in front of you. Back in the real world, with the real boom, you could swivel around and look at the room, all the while inexorably advancing toward your portrait, which, at a certainly distance, shivered into fragments that flocked together and flew through the hole left by their disassembly. You had to follow them, through the hole, to find yourself floating in the clouds. The birds that were you departed ahead and above. To the side was a girder-thick red wireframe cow, a sort of surrogate cloud, and directly ahead was a structure that once again you were inexorably heading towards and then through, a sort of open ended floating skyhouse made of 4 circuit boards in extreme perspective, and a fifth right ahead. The moment before colliding with the fatal frontal board, you could see the image of a flower, and by the miracle of modal change, you found that you had passed through to emerge out of a patch of flowers in the center of a park, main natural space in a Potemkin city made of texture-map flats.

This, seen from the particular angle chosen by the FakeSpace user, was all projected on a video screen behind the person standing with his head up to the swiveling box. I didn't actually get to put my head up to the box that day, as the line was quite long. Time is always a consideration at SIGGRAPH, and since I didn't have a watch, I turned around to ask the fellow behind me what time it was. Before he started to speak I could see he didn't have a watch, and so I stopped in mid sentance, just as he started to say something that I couldn't hear. Being polite, I said "What?" and he said "Right now", so I said "What?" and he said, "You asked me what time it was, and I said it's right now". I agreed.

Twenty six hours later, just before finally getting to Silicon Graphics' "Discovery World", I found myself waiting in line to pay for my lunch at the International Food Court. Again I needed to know what time it was, so I turned around and asked the person behind me. I recognized it was the same fellow just before he inevitably said "I said, it's right now, don't you remember?", surprising both of us, as it had been estimated there were 10,000 other people with us in the Anaheim convention center. So, to be polite, as we obviously had something in common, I read his tee-shirt, which said "The Virtual Museum", and asked "What's the Virtual Museum?". He didn't really want to answer, and I didn't really find out until the next day, when I came across the actual Virtual Museum, back in Machine Culture, as the art show was known during this SIGGRAPH year. The Virtual Museum being sort of a common interface for inexpensive, individually created virtual worlds, a sort of museum atrium through which one could enter, under arches, any compatible virtual world module you might pick up from the Internet, or a floppy disk. The Virtual Museum describes itself as therefore allowing anyone to explore ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian Peru, and Atlantis. None of this information being offered by my space-time companion at the International Food Court, I decided to push the situation, so I read his convention badge, which always has name and job function printed on it at SIGGRAPH... apparently he worked for a company called Earth. So I asked, "What's Earth?", and he said "That's where I live".

After that and lunch, I was off to "Discovery Park", where the line was too long, so I talked my way in the back door. "Discovery Park is an Interactive Entertainment and Virtual Reality Experience!" was written on the brochure, and inside, there were birds.

First was a pterodactyl-shaped, user-mountable ride, where a canyon enviroment appeared on 3 large hi-definition screens ahead of the person who steered the flying machine from it's virtual back, with wing tips and pterodactyl-head visible ocassionally . Everyone in the room could see the screens, and there was a bit of ambiguity whether or not the rider was actually the bird having an out-of-body experience, with the annoyed bird-body continuously attempting to catch the eye of the floating oversoul. Networked to this was the private, 2 million pixel Fakespace Boom 3C, which apparently allowed you to look around while the pterodactyl-person did the steering through the inevitably progressing air. Noone else could see what the person at the Fakespace boom saw. Third node on the network was yet another viewpoint, embodied in a high resolution and also resolutely private head-mounted display from Kaiser Electro-Optics.

People were also looking at birds differently in the Evans and Sutherland booth, which had SIGGRAPH's other user-mountable flying demo ride, a sort of Sports Simulation Gym where your body was a hang-glider space ship in an extraordinarily complex and enclosed high-definition city space. In the Reagan/Bush years, we would have immediately thought of the military as the buyer or maker of such flying rides, as well as flying things, and uncontrollable carnivores. But now is the time when we instead remember that Link, inventor of the flight simulator, came to that device from his work designing rides for amusement parks.

Link's flight simulator took the rollercoaster off the ground using pneumatic motion, making the rider into a bird in a box. Before computer graphics could match the realism of that motion, miniature landscapes were built, reconstructions of appropriate countrysides, which the flight-simulator pilot could see through a motion-controlled camera that floated on a grid above the model board. In this time before computer graphics, many people identified visual simulation with such physical miniatures, so that there it was no great associative leap from the model board to Disneyland. Of course, at that time, one of the logical associative paths leading out of Disneyland was the idea of goverment-inflicted simulation, presented "In Technical Stimulation", as the Firesign Theatre put it. And certainly, visiting Anaheim's ancient Disneyland, it is very easy to arrive at an idea of the intimate linkage of entertainment and death, especially in New Orleans Square, where Pirates of the Carribean begins, after establishing the cave, with skeletal pirates guarding gold, then proceeds through torture and rape to end with a ecstatically drunken pistol duel held in a gunpowder storage cellar.

In Jurassic Park, the one skeptical scientist hears Richard Attenborourgh say that a mechanized tour of Jurassic Park is as safe as any amusement park ride, and in repsonse volunteers: "But on the Pirates of the Carribean, if the Pirates get loose, they don't eat the tourists". So what should we see when we look at birds flying free as a tyranosaurous rex through the air?

In "WAX or the discovery of television among the bees", Jacob Maker works on a simple, local network of flight simulators, a 1983 precursor to what in 1986 or so became SIMNET, a wide area simulation networking scheme that allowed a group of pilots in sitting in flight simulators somewhere in Tennessee to train with people driving tank simulators in California, all together in the same limited, synthetic enviroment. This sort of networked simulation prepared the way for the raid on Libya, the invasion of Panama, and ultimately for the Gulf War. The proposed successor to Simnet is called DSI, or the Distributed Simulation Internet, if I have the correct acronym, which combines broader bandwidth with new graphics and networking standards, literally allowing an army of linked individuals, spread across the globe, to join each other in that military amusement park. Not formally different from what some people propose for interactive, navigable, immersive cable-tv games. Of course, what does program content mean in the context of this DIS?

Or what is history? One of the first implementations of the DSI was a minute by minute, foot by foot reconstruction of a Gulf War skirmish known as the Battle of 73 Easting. As you might expect, it plays the battle forward and backwards, and allows you to view it from any angle. It also allows you to create alternate battles from this reality base. Considering how much history has already been prepared in cyberspace, it is truly meta-fictional that 73 Easting was presented to the Senate as the first example of virtual history.

Unfortunately, this is a normal theme in the history of the history of technology. Television is an excellent example. According to evidence presented in Steven Spielberg's earlier "Raiders of the Lost Ark", it was possibly the God of Israel who invented both television and virtual reality. But according to the Nazi's and some others, it was Paul Nipkow who discovered it in Berlin in the 1880's. His fascinating electro-mechanical telephone for the eyes coupled unique spinning-disk spiral scanners, known as image dissectors, with magnetically-controlled crystals that occultly served as light-valves.

Nipkow worked for city railroad company during the electrification and transportification (which is a deliberate rhyme with fortification) of Berlin, designing a street-car semaphore signal system. It is a not so odd fact that his television system mainly resembled the axles and wheels of a railroad car... 2 spinning disk scanners sychronized by an fixed axle between.

By the1890's, apparently the signal system was in place, the job had probably settled down, and in his private inventing life, Nipkow had moved on, bypassing further development on the television to focus on his new next obsession, the invention of a working helicopter.

More than thirty years later in Weimer Berlin, contruction began on the Funkturm, the the Eiffel Tower of Radio, defining what became the communications heart of Berlin, an area so important that it later was given the name of Adolf Hitler Platz. Nipkowwas an old man, and practical, low-resolution mechanical television systems based on his scanning scheme had come into existence in Germany, the UK, the US, and elsewhere. This was television with less than 40 lines, but it was a commercial television, with regular scheduled broadcasts from the Funkturm by 1929. At that moment, it became clear that the real challenge for television engineers lay in high resolution television; breakthroughs in high frequency research promised broadcast systems and receiver sets with over 400 image-lines.

Certain people knew that this same technology would also make possible a practical system of radio-wave based detection and ranging of distant flying objects... what we know as radar. As a result, as mechanical television died a natural death, due in part to the worsening financial situation world-wide, a decision was made in the 3 main tv countries to promote the creation of a popular, entertainment-oriented high-definition television system; the goal, never publically stated, was to create both the industrial and human resource base neccessary to design and manufacture a practical air defense system.

Which created a peculiar situation. Germany provides the best example. First, Hitler declared all German television research a state secret. Then the public search began for facts that would establish German priority in television research... historical priority. Paul Nipkow was snatched from obscurity to become a new national hero... the Father of Television. England replied... or maybe they started it all with the Edisonification of John Logie Baird, who became the Other Father of Television.

In every country, television history, like television itself, was discovered, or invented. Books were written, and in other places, factories were built. In 1941, not long after the radar machines were switched on in England, Holland, Germany, and elsewhere, Paul Nipkow died, which triggered his greatest honor... Paul Nipkow's funeral was broadcast live on Fernsehsender Paul Nipkow, the Nazi high definition tv station named after him and broadcasting from atop the Funkturm in Berlin.

5 Par.Worlds

So, again, what should we see when we look at birds? Maybe, metafictionally, they could remind us of a navigational ethics... since the ride is so many different possible things, and since on occassion we are on the other side of the ride, go ahead and go where you are going, in whatever way you wish to travel, just try to remember you are responsible if you kill when you get there. Unfortunately, our usual sad situation is very much like that of the religious soul told to remember something after death, who, on arrival in the other world, only remembered once having had a conversation with someone, but not what was said.

Several months ago, at the Cyberspace Conference in Austin, a fellow came up to me and said, "Congratulations, I work at Hughes Aircraft, and I used to have the same job as that guy in your film". In "WAX", a narrative metafiction, Jacob Maker works on the Intergrated Air Battle Mission Simulator, writing the code that controls the acquisition of target information. It is up to him to make sure that the gunsight displays work, that what the pilot sees, whether by radar, infrared, or simple sight, does coordinate with his use of weapons. By congratulations, the fellow from Hughes meant that he used to be Jacob. After 12 to 16 hours in a completely immersive, photorealistic flying enviroment, it was time to go outdoors, and as he told me: "I'd go outdoors, just out onto the street, and I'd wonder.... am I supposed to kill now? And what was really strange, you know," he said, "was that after a while, I started seeing these lines, they were just floating in the air, like the marks your guy was seeing in the film." The fellow from Hughes was much happier now, as he had gotten himself transferred out to a part of the company that was trying to find a way to convert flight simulators into personal amusement park pods.

Unfortunately, in either entertainment or war, navigation isn't usually free... it's closer to semi-autonomous. Often, in both, you can go where you want, but only as long as you make sure you kill and spend disposable income. Grotesque narrative dealt with this particular difficulty of navigational ethics in immersive enviroments long ago, by transferring autonomy to the artificial world... by stripping the creator of an artificial world of all free will, and passing a parody of that on to his or her creations. Such fictions are invariably metafictions, as there is always a rather smooth continuum from the created and autonomous world to the narrative itself, which, being also a creation, is implicitly also autonomous. This is half-way to recursion, the creation of endless mirrors, or other interfoldings of space and light, which in metafiction have always lead to worlds within worlds, just around the corner from us but burdened with other space-time rules... not just alternate histories, but parallel universes.

When the Jurassic scientist, embedded in the belly of the anonymously piloted helicopter, looks out through the metal bird's window-eye at the free-floating pelican, it is easy for me to make the associative jump to the artificial life scientists, who watch freely navigating autonomous graphic agents on computer machines, and see life. They claim that automatism, of the kind once given rhetorically in grotesque fictions to describe an ethical dilemna, has now become practical. With this, metafiction becomes perhaps experimentally verifiable. Windows open onto other worlds that might be really be there.

The Game of Life is a computer program, a virtual, time-based machine that floats as distributed, changing patterns inside many popular mind amplifiers. This program consists of a small set of rules, a tiny grammar that controls an on/off graphic display of dots clustered together as gridded pixels on the 2D screen you see from outside the machine. The rules turn the pixel dots on and off, and make the dots interact with each other in order to determine the order of this flashing. Some of the patterns resulting from this interaction have the ability to grow and maintain themselves in complicated shapes, which can move through 2-D screen space, and even reproduce. Writers and players of the game claim that these dot-group pattern behaviors are mimetic of life itself. They then on ocassion argue that anything that so clearly imitated life must be alive itself, potentially with it's own point of view, as part of a limited but autonomous alternate world embedded within our own.

The Game of Life is an example of cellular automata in action. Cellular automata have also been practically applied to image processing. The pictures to be processed in this manner have often been machine gathered and transmitted to us through great noise from places not part of our normal point of view; for instance, the point of view of someone from can read the constituant parts of your blood; or the point of view of a tv camera on the top of a rocket plummeting out of control towards the moon.

Pictures to be processed are divided into pixels; the grammars go to work on these pixels, forcing them to interact, forcing the picture to become more visible to us. Potentially living, or at least potentially autonomous pixel groups self-organize into potentially autonomous, substantial, though still changable image-shapes, leaving us with pictures that have more visible information than before the process started.

As cinema collapses into the computer, where it will meet virtual reality, science, and many other residents of our cultural world, we approach a situation where all the film production data, gathered from places beyond our ordinary point of view, is passed into a unitary workstation... the maker, sitting in front of the workstation screen works on this data like cellular automata on pixels, forcing various pieces of meaning to interact so that pictures will become more visible to us. However, simultaneously, the maker will also encounter real automata inside the machine....

The maker slowly navigates through the real-time, proto-narrative space of the production data, applying any of a variety of processes to that data, in any sequence desired, controlling composition within frames and between frames interactively, occassionally mixing real-world images with synthetic objects or character elements... all the time composing literal and associative meaning. All processes, from the manipulation of synthetic geometries to the collation of associations, have been partially mechanized, so that the narrative building proceeds with a partial autonomy that allows the workstation screen to look back. The mind amplifier has become a mirror, and at a rhetorical and virtual distance behind the mirror, anti-eyes connected to a anti-body in an alternate universe embedded in ours watch back with a glimmer of narrative intelligence, ready to play you back all the histories of that 73 Easting patch of desert, including the many possible alternate flight paths of semi-autonomous weapons over that part of virtual Iraq... misguided missiles that are willing to stop and assist you with both spell checking and story building, if that's what the story requires.

In many Japanese newspaper offices, there are old and giant composition typewriters with hundreds of keys for the thousands of pictographic kanji characters. Each key has 21 shifts... the Roman alphabet almost hides in a single key. Writers, however, now use personal word processors with the same number of typewriter keys we are used to, that hold both the miniature , alternate Japanese phonetic alphabet, along with the Roman. As you type, the computer collates your pseudo-phonetic strokes, compares them with a built-in kanji chart, and offers you choices of alternate kanji-pictures in a menu at the bottom of the page... a spell checker in reverse, an inadvertant poetry machine mechanizing the processes of association. In cinema, as it slowly collapses into personal computers, kanji are replaced by images and sound, and the semi-phonetic alphabet by your descriptions of your images... the computer offering fill-in-the-blanks association opportunities (or, in less delicate software, spell-checking neccessities), to help you get that story into reasonable communicative shape.

Give names to pictures in a semi-intelligent picture processor, and the machine begins to sort the pictures into proto-sequences. The maker looks at these, choses the clumpings that are pleasing, perhaps adjusts them a bit, then turns back to the machine, which reapplies its' ultimately mutational rules of travel and association, adding organization in several possible ways, which are then again choosen from. Navigation through choices made by the machine soon becomes a primary form of story-construction for the maker, who travels through machine-offered potential worlds, chosing the ones that become virtual worlds... leaving a trail of partial and rejected universes behind the maker, who has become a sort of aesthetic eugenicist.

The maker is still on a flat-bottomed boat in Pirates of the Carribean at Disneyland, traveling inevitably forward, though in this case building rather than viewing. Whether traveling through alternate worlds, traveling through immersive enviroments that force the creation of association, or traveling through mechanized association in order to create immersive enviroments... navigational ethics remain a priority. In the future, when you can go anywhere you want, cinema, by whatever name, will become a grotesquerie without grotesques.... a metafiction where information wants to be free, and stories possessing senses, skills, and resources stutter in and out ofexistence in digital space-time, on earth and in other worlds. With immersive enviroments now even embedded within one another, with modal changes available at any moment, and association almost a style of knowledge, it's good to remember.... though it may be difficult to remember what it is you are supposed to remember.

I personally work in the area of cinema that I call image-processed narrative: a type of narrative where both the images and the narrative are processed by both myself and machines, and where, in the process, navigational ethics are attempted. So I personally welcome this, our new proto-future, where the past imitates the future, where metafiction is potentially experimentally verifiable; where, as in the book I read last week, wrinkles in the universal background cosmic microwave radiation lead an enviably optimistic popular cosmologist to the conclusion that the universe is alive, that it reproduces, and that as a result that are infinite connected or embedded universes probably related, struggling through the impractical difficulties of evolution in action. A proto-future wor