This talk is shrouded in images of and allusions to Berlin, not merely because I first gave it there but also because it serves, I think, as a locale for legitimate wariness about magical transformations. The transformation of the book which I know best involves interactive fiction. Indeed when I first gave this talk earlier this autumn in Berlin I was asked to talk about the state of interactive fiction. To say interactive fiction is what I know best does not necessarily mean that I am he who knows best about it, since he who knows best in fact may be a she, as I am reminded in looking out upon an audience which includes Janet Murray.

But then I am reminded that the margin, whether the edge of the campfire or the hedge which shielded forbidden Irish bards, has been more or less the storytellers place from the first. My friend, Charles Henry, a great librarian and a technological visionary, often recounts his vision of what the earliest story-telling technology. The cave paintings, he reminds us, could only be seen in patches of light from the rudimentary torchlamps-- no more than fire upon a flat stone-- held by our European ancestors of millenia ago. Those, too, were stories disclosed by littles and surely interactively.

So I will talk about what I can see, the edges of things illuminated by a brief fire in my hand. I will console myself with an understanding that prophecy is cheap in this age of supressed memory. The market analyst and the technological guru tell the future by economic quarters but count on having their prognostications forgotten by the time the stock market closes that day. For most technologists the measure of the future is a soundbite, an animated gif, or a mouse click. I have written elsewhere that in our technologies, our cultures, our entertainments and, increasingly, the way we constitute our communities and families we live in an anticipatory state of constant nextness.

In this constant blizzard of the next, we must nonetheless find our way through both our own private histories and the cumulative history of our cultures. Not a history in the old dangerously transcendent sense, but a history of our making and our remembering alike: a history nearer to that which in The Special View of History the poet Charles Olson defines as "the function of any one of us... not a force but... the how of human life".

The hyperfiction novelist Shelley Jackson writes, "history is only a haphazard hopscotch through other present moments. How I got from one to the other is unclear. Though I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete (and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without end, without story. Or with as many stories as I care to put together."

I am aware as I begin to speak to you that this conference attracts many of you because it promises the excitement of speed, the quickness of the present moment, the dizziness (or the Disneyesque) of next. I hope I do not disappoint you with my slowness. Artists tell the future in millenia, a glacial measure which even (or especially) at the beginning of a new one is already haunted by the past, both the past gone and the past yet to be. The future of fiction is its past, though that future, too, is a fiction.

It seems self-evident that multimedia of the sort we see now on the web or CD ROM is not likely to find a general audience. There is astonishing creativity everywhere (and I will point to some specific locales in a survey of interactive fictions at the end of this talk) but there has not as yet emerged any form which promises either widely popular or deeply artistic impact.

Nor is it likely that a haphazardly swirling chaff of java tools and plug-ins will suddenly reach a point of spontaneous combustion and bring forth a new light. The current state of multimedia does not repeat the case of the motorcar where widespread parallel technological developments led to a sufficient shift in sensibilities to make the mass distributed assembly line seem a technological event threshhold. The form of multimedia itself has no obvious audience, nor any obvious longing which it seeks to fulfill.

To be sure there will be electronic television, perhaps even the much vaunted, ubiquitous push technology which is breathlessly championed by pseudo-religious cargo cults, techno-onanist publications, and infotainment empires. Yet push technology is merely radio for the eyes in which infobits flutter across the field of vision like papers falling from a virtual tickertape parade.

There will likewise be an electronic marketplace (perhaps there already is) for it is only an extension of the shoppig mall with its shelves full of branded trademarks, surrounded by the architectural goulash of the gated suburb, and the holy shrines of the ATM card. The electronic marketplace will in this way parallel the course of the videotape rental industry in which an island of catalogues floats upon a sea of porn.

There are three general views about the failure of a true electronic form to yet emerge. Before I discuss them I wish to note that I have been quite intentionally using the term multimedia for the electronic television and electronic marketplace in order to distinguish such multimedia not merely from hypermedia but also from an electronic form yet to emerge but which has occasionally shown itself in almost magical, if incremental, transformations in our consciousness and indeed our sense of the real.

One view of why a true electronic form has yet emerge holds that we are in an age similar to that of the Silent Film and that a rich and powerful art form will emerge synergistically as the result of multiple, individual explorations upon the part of cultural producers coupled with simultaneously rising audience sophistication and expectations.

Yet the form of multimedia does not lead naturally from the marriage of eye and memory which film promised. Contemporary life leaves little time for those domestic and public mysteries of life lived in common which feed drama. Nor does multimedia provide the shadowbox for the psychoanalytic model of detached personality as does television. Multimedia neither extends the page into some inevitable dream of technicolor longing to which its surface previously aspired, nor does it endow the unruly moving image with the staid conventionality of the page.

The second view about the failure of a true electronic form to yet emerge holds that authorship will turn from the creation of distinctly marked, individual stories to the creation of potentiated storyworlds, maintained and extended communally or by software agents which poll communal tastes, In such worlds individual audience members assume identities, spawn transitory narratives, and populate communities according to the logic of the storyworld, the accidental encounters of their inhabitants, and the story generation algorithyms of software agents alike. The dream of the software agent and the storyworld is the dream of Sheherezade's mother, a longed for happily-ever-after which is both outside the womb and yet no longer in the world. That dream doomed Berlin once before, before this rebuilding, the dream of a history outside history, a history at history's end. I think we all must be wary that dreams without ends do not summon the Reich of Virtual Reality, do not awaken the Avatar fuhrer.

The third view is perhaps an extension of the second. It holds that language slides inevitably toward image. From Jaron Lanier's 60's hippy, utopian view of unmediated, grokking communication through Virtual Reality to the network executives (of either the broadcast or inter networks) who see the web as packaging for a particular kind of targeted entertainment, not unlike the wrapper on a frozen egg roll, a Victoria's Secret brassiere, or the picture-in-picture headshots of interchangeable experts who appear over the shoulder of interchangeable infotainment news show hosts.

Total belief in the unmediated image is the behavior of cults. The Heavens' Gate cult knew what it saw beyond Hale Bop. Total belief in the unmediated image is denial of the mortality of the body. Yet outside the occult we live in a patchwork of self and place, image and word, body and mind. "Suppose we thought of representation," the philosopher and literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell suggests in his book Picture Theory. "not as a homogeneous field or grid of relationships governed by a single principle, but as a multidimensional and heterogeneous terrain, a collage or patchwork quilt assembled over time out of fragments."

The new electronic literature will distinguish itself by its clarity. It will seem right. I say literature because any literacy, even a visual or transitory one, expresses itself in a literature. Nor do I mean the kind of clarity that media purveyors speak about in terms of better authoring tools or more intuitive interfaces. I mean a new human clarity.

In the recent and important special issue of Visible Language regarding New Media Poetry and guest edited by Eduardo Kac, the French electronic poet and theorist Phillipe Bootz quotes Jean-Pierre Balpe's assertion that because computer authors "do not question at all the notion of literature [but] on the contrary claim they belong to it and feed on it., the fact that they bring us to reconsider its nature and consequently its evolution seems unquestionable."

The strengths of interactive fiction as a literary form increasingly seem to reside, quite curiously for me, in its realism, how truly it lets us render the shifting consciousness and shimmering coherences and transitory closures of the day-to-day beauty of the world around us. Hyperfiction seems equal to the complexity and sweetness of living in a world populated by other, equally uncertain, human beings, their dreams, and their memories.

Hyperfiction isn't a matter of branches but rather of the different textures of experience into which language (and image) leads us. Hyperfiction is like sitting in a restaurant in the murmur of stories, some fully known, some only half-heard, among people with whom you share only the briefest span of life and the certainty of death.

To be sure interactive fictions are an intermediate step to something else, but what that something might be is a question fit for philosophy. All our steps are intermediate. This one seems to be veering toward television, god help us, perhaps even television imprinted on your eyeballs. I put my trust in words. Media seers may talk about how we won't need stories since we will have new, virtual worlds, but soon those new worlds, too, will have their own stories and we will long for new words to put them into.

The new electronic literature will seem self-evident, as if we have always seen it and, paradoxically, as if we have never seen it before.

Berlin at this moment seems the ideal figure of what moments ago I called the astonishing creativity of an emerging electronic literature, a Berlin in which the cranes crosshatch a sky whose color, rather than being William Gibson's color of television, is not yet known, a sky whose expanse promises a new clarity (eine neue Klarheit).

Despite the earnest impulses of government bureaucracies and the imperial appetites of transnational conglomerate capital all of the busyness of the Berlin skyline- while not purposeless- is nonetheless to no purpose. This is good. We need to move beyond purpose, to what the monk and poet Thomas Merton calls the "freedom which responsibilities and transient cares make us forget." We need to be free of technology to be free in technology. Like the overarching apparatus of our technologies, the scaffolding which criss-crosses Berlin is bandaged air. Beneath it lies the promise of new clarity, indeed even the unthinkable possibility of a Kristall Tag, an inversion of history, in which our world refroms itself as a globe of glass in which the fractures of the darkest nights are never again forgotten but rather where these healed over fractures form a prism for a new light to shine through in all its differences. Through such a new prism the wounds of a world torn apart would both flow like tears and crystalize like roses at intervals in the way that the hearts of martyrs do under glass reliquaries in a cathedral.

The new electronic literature will seem old, as old as any human story, in its newness as old as birth.

The new Berlin heals over itself and in the process becomes itself differentiated by its own perception of gathering forms. The way in which a thing is both still itself and yet no longer itself is what Sanford Kwinter identifies as the singularity of catastophe theory in which "a point suddenly fails to map onto itself" (58) and a new thing is born. This is, of course, the genius of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag in which the thing seen is not the thing wrapped and yet evokes and insists upon it, and meanwhile the thing unwrapped is no longer the thing which was wrapped and yet promises to be what it was then.

The new electronic literature will restore the circle as it always was and, paradoxically, as it never was before.

I suggested earlier that we live in constant nextness. Thomas Merton speaks of the nextness of "Computer Karma in American Civilization" in which

What can be done has to be done. The burden of possibilities has to be fulfilled, possibilities which demand so imperatively to be fulfilled that everything else is sacrificed to their fulfillment (25)

The new electronic literature will bear the burden of possibilities in the way the earth bears the air.

Steven Johnson, the editor of the webzine FEED, recalls the passage in Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," where "Benjamin talks rhapsodically about the cultural effects of slow-motion film" as an instance of how difficult it is "to predict the broader sociological effects of new technologies" .

"I've always liked this passage, "Johnson says, "because it seems so foreign to us now, reading Benjamin fifty years later. If you imagine all the extraordinary changes wrought by the rise of moving pictures, slow-motion seems more like a side-effect, a footnote or a curiosity-piece."

Confronted by Johnson's observation I wondered instead whether Benjamin was right and we have missed the point of the technology. Perhaps we are all watching too fast. In his book of interviews Wim Wenders quotes Cezanne, "Things are disappearing. If you want to see anything you have to hurry." Yet in another place Wenders says, "Films are congruent time sequences, not congruent ideas...In every scene my biggest problem is how to end it and go on to the next one. Ideally I would show the time in between as well. But sometimes you have to leave it out, it simply takes too long..."

The new electronic literature will show the time in between, which is nothing less than the space which links us through our differences.

And so, as I turn finally in the last part of this talk to the brief survey of interactive fiction which I promised earlier, I hope you will forgive me if I turn a critical eye toward the paradoxical lack of any obvious sense of what links us in these fictions. It is this lack of the betweenus, to use the word which Helene Cixoux coined, more than any technical lack, which momentarily stops us short of a mass electronic medium or a lasting artform. Nor do I exempt myself from this criticism. Although my hyperfictions are sincere attempts to negotiate whatever clarity I could find in link and multiplicity of voices, I have as yet found nothing truly self-evident to show you. No new clarity, no new city of text beneath the cranes and scaffolds, no promised land, not even a wire frame Frankenstein awaiting the flesh of textural space.

I also hope as I begin this survey that you will recall the modest intention with which I began this talk, that is to say what edges I think I can glimpse of forms of future. On the campus of the media lab this kind of modesty doesn't have to be forced. I'm not pointing here to the sea changes which the lab and other habe made their business but rather to the ripples upon a surface which distinguish art from business.

Despite this doubled claim for modesty (which, like double negatives, doesn't not say I make no claim to see) let me say something briefly about my most recent work, the web fiction, Twelve Blue, which is available on the server here and at Eastgate.

Even so let me say something briefly about my current work, the web fiction, Twelve Blue, which is available on the server here and at Eastgate I have often been critical of the way the web impoverishes hypertext The web is a pretty difficult space in which to create an expressive surface for text. It seems to me that the web is all edges and without much depth and for a writer that is trouble. You want to induce depth, to have the surface give way to reverie and a sense of a shared shaping of the experience of reading and writing. Instead everything turns to branches.

The drawing came first, the threads creating a kind of score in the sense of John Cage, a continuity of the various parallel narratives. When the threads veer nearer to each other-- or in at least one instance cross-- so do their narratives. The twelve lines became months but also characters or pairings of them as well (that is, sometimes a character has her own line and another line she shares with someone paired to her, although not necessarily within the narratives threads). The twelve threads do not start with January at the top but rather November, the year of my year. I then made eight different cuts across the Y axis, though in my mind they were more fabric strips or something like William Burrough's compositional cuts.

Within these eight longitudinal strips the various stories take place and intermingle. Obviously however since narrative goes forward horizontally and time here is represented vertically, there is something of a displacement in which events along a single thread in fact violate the larger time of the characters sensibilities. Thus the drowning deaf boy of the story floats across various threads through different seasons until his body surfaces at the end. Beyond this I gave myself some other simple constraints, for instance the already mentioned one of only one text link per frame and another of having every screen contain the word blue.

Meanwhile I have barely begun another webfiction which takes place on an island inhabited by several historical characters (St Francis, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, and the engraver and book illustrator Bernard Picart). It is a novel about the relationhips between word and image and the slippages as each lapse into each other. Parts of it are in a local pidgen of the island, whose name we never quite get, although the locals call it Banyan (or Yamland in some parts). In the words of the fiction pidgen also enters through occasional typos, which themselves enter the pidgen, since typos are thought to be sacred in this place, i.e., divine inspiration, the devolution of the word, logo into imago, or so I think at present.

A moment ago I invoked Frankenstein and so let me begin my survey of interactive fiction with Shelley Jackson's extraordinary disk-based hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl or A Modern Monster, a work attributed to Mary/Shelley and Herself. This hyperfiction seems to oscillate in its voices among these three attributed authors and at least once engages in a dialogue with Derrida. It is a fiction of continuous dissection, in which both Mary Shelley's monster and Frank Baum's girl of Oz are successively cut and repatched in the way of Xeno's paradox. This is a getting nowhere which gets somewhere. "I align myself as I read with the flow of blood," says Shelly Jackson's triple narrator:

that as it cycles keeps moist and living what without it stiffens into a fibrous cell. What happens to the cells I don't visit? I think maybe they harden over time without the blood visitation, enclosures of wrought letters fused together with rust, iron cages like ancient elevators with no functioning parts. Whereas the read words are lubricated and mobile, rub familiarly against one another in the buttery medium of my regard, rearrange themselves in my peripheral vision to suggest alternatives. If I should linger in a spot, the blood pools; an appealing heaviness comes over my limbs and oxygen-rich malleability my thoughts. The letters come alive like tiny antelopes and run in packs and patterns; the furniture softens and molds itself to me.

What I leave alone is skeletal and dry. ('Blood')

Dissection and Frankensteinian cyborgization also informs the very provocative collaborative web work of Noah Wardrip-Fruin and others, titled Gray Matters, itself a brilliant unbinding of book and body and the link each represents between creation and reception.

On the web I am currently very much taken by the work of Tim McLaughlin whose language constantly meditates in the presence of image and mediates the nature of image. McLaughlin's work with the architects , Thomas Bessai, Maria Denegri, and Bruce Haden for the Canadian biennale pavilion, Light Assemblage is an extraordinary exploration of how word makes place and place enables language. His 25 Ways to Close a Photograph perhaps most nearly approaches the self-evident quality which I have demanded of electronic literature, exploiting rather than working within the constraints of the web.

Although not strictly a fiction, I am very fond of Memory Arena and Who's Who in Central & East Europe 1933 done by Arnold Dreyblatt in collaboration with the Kulturinformatik, Dept. of the University of L¸neburg which Heiko Idensen first introduced me to. As Jeffrey Wallen notes in his introduction, this work takes "the ordinary and the bureaucratic ...to a further extreme through their own logic of fragmentation, listing, juxtaposition, and leveling" giving us "a haunting glimpse of an absence."

I know that this conference has previously been graced by Mark Amerika, whose overly earnest but nonetheless likeable Grammatron is weighed down by a quasi-theoretical agenda, a perplexing nostalgia for cyberpunk, and the already discussed impossibility of multimedia.

A similarly likeable brilliance, but without the nervousness of multimedia, suffuses the work of both Marjorie Luesebrink and Adrianne Wortzel with a serenity of surface if not yet a fully new clarity. Luesbrink's Lacemaker webfiction (written as M.D. Coverley at http://gnv.fdt.net/~christys/elys_1.html) inside the also very compelling Madame de Lafayette site of Christy Sheffield Sanford is a variation upon Cinderella. Wortzel's Ah, Need turns the inevitable probing of surface which multimedia elicits to something more of an experience of liguistic surface.

Finally I am especially fond of Flygirls, the web fiction of the webwench, Jane Loader of Atomic Cafe fame. Its dusty rose to khaki trim retro look, its elegiac quality, and most of all its rich expanse and compelling writing are smart in the double sense of intelligence and style. This site seems an actual aerodrome but with the narrative spine of the race stretching over the rose-lit space, the links like lavender vertebrae.

An extraordinarly exciting international collaboration involves the Dublin based but Derry born writer, Terence MacNamee , the electronic artist and programmer, Eoin O'Sullivan in Derry, an American hyperfiction writer, Noah Pivnick and his colleague and co-producer, Rachel Buswell (info at http://www.ulst.ac.uk/hyperfiction/Welcome.html). This group is in the midst of creating a fiction in the form of the Derry city walls, utilizing the Quake game engine as a locale for what they call networked co-readings. This story, which the authors describe as hypertext in architectural space, includes progressively disclosed texts, ambient sounds, and multiply inhabited story spaces which subvert the mythic war engine of Quake toward a literally dynamic consideration of the possibility of reconciliation. The fictional space invites the reader to explore walls and the link they represent between insider and outsider, reader and writer. Their fiction thus takes its place rather than takes place within a naturalized electronic space, not unlike how Judy Malloy in the early stages of Brown House Kitchen would set up space inside a room at Lambda MOO and begin to tell her stories, ignoring the protests, until the story made its own space.

Of my experiences of virtual reality thusfar, I remember only one with a visceral excitement and longing: the experience of moving in and out of planetary spaces of text within a 2D rendering of 3D typographic space which I experienced in the work of the late Muriel Cooper together with David Small, , and Suguru Ishizaki at MIT's Visible Language Workshop. "Imagine swooping into a typographic landscape: hovering above a headline, zooming toward a paragraph in the distance, spinning around and seeing it from behind, then diving deep into a map," Wendy Richmond described it perfectly in WIRED, "A virtual reality that has type and cartography and numbers, rather than objects - it's like no landscape you've ever traveled before, yet you feel completely at home."

Making space through and in and of language distinguishes the kinetic poets featured in Visible Language whose work seems to me very much in the spirit of Muriel Cooper and her group. This includes Eduardo Kac's holopoem's, John Cayley's cybertexts, E. M de Melo e Castro's videopoemography, Philippe Bootz's work on a functional model of texte-a-voir, and most importantly Jim Rosenberg's extraordinary body of theory and poetry leading toward an "externalization of of syntax analogous to the externalization of the nervous system manifested in computer networks(115)."

This is a call for a language outside itself, a language which goes out into the world. In his chapter "Walking in the City" in The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau spies this externalization in the figure of the wanderer who looks beyond "the absence of what has passed by" to "the act itself of passing by." (97) The act of passing by is Olson history as the "how of human life." It takes place and makes place alike in the city of text..

There is a city of text and it, too, mutates and thrives beneath an umbrella of construction cranes and a crenellated skin of scaffolding, beneath SGML, XTML, VRML, and HTML, inside the plug-in, the data stream, the web crawler, the game engine, the photoshop filter, and so on. As with Berlin what matters most is not what life goes on beneath but what life emerges and in what light we come to see each other in the act of passing by.

WORKS CITED

Balpe, Jean-Pierre. L'Imaginaire Informatique de la Litterature (1991, 27).