A slowly-developing collection of documentation.

About this page

My projects combine writing and digital media, each engaging deeply with the specifics of a particular media configuration (e.g., the late-90s web, or the immersive virtual reality Cave). Given the rapid changes in digital media, pieces only a few years old are now primarily accessible as documentation. (For thoughts on issues of preservability and writing for digital media, please see Acid-Free Bits, which Nick Montfort and I co-authored for the Electronic Literature Organization.)

The Impermanence Agent, 1998-2002

(with Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, and Duane Whitehurst)

A web agent that tells a story of impermanence, which is "customized" by drawing material from other websites visited by the reader. Eventually the original story remains mostly as structure, its original texts and images repeatedly overwritten with material from the reader's browsing. This piece engages the network as more than a delivery mechanism, while critiquing visions of agent-driven customization and lossless preservation. An inverted version, The Agent's Story, replaced the logic of customization with that of surveillance. Presented in technology art shows (Omnizone @ Plexus, New York Digital Salon 1999, SIGGRAPH 2000) and by museums (the Whitney Museum's Artport, Guggenheim Museum's Brave New Word, and the Z Media Lounge of the New Museum of Contemporary Art). Shortlisted for the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 award. Discussed in books (Information Arts, Digital Art) and periodicals (The New York Times, Wired News, The Iowa Review Web, Technology Review).

Screen, 2003

(with Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain)

Screen combines familiar game mechanics with virtual reality technology to create an experience of bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that doesn't settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. While the discussion of the relationship between games and literary forms is longstanding, Screen uses text as play material in a way that this discussion has not previously explored. Presented at Boston Cyberarts Festival 2003, ACM SIGGRAPH 2003, and Alt+Ctrl: A Festival of Alternative and Independent Games, as well as in readings in the Hammer Museum's HyperText series, at ACM Hypertext 2004, and in other venues. Documentation featured in The Iowa Review Web, Chaise Magazine, and Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art.

Regime Change and News Reader, 2004

(with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich)

These two "textual instruments" were commissioned by Turbulence. They, for the first time, use the statistics of n-grams to create playable texts (rather than to enable batch-mode operations). Regime Change begins with an April 2003 story from the Armed Forces Press service, citing George W. Bush's statement that "eyewitness" intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein was killed in the first wave of U.S. bombing. Playing this text brings forth alternative texts generated from the report of the Warren Commission. News Reader provides a similar opportunity for play, but its starting texts are the current "top stories" on Yahoo! News and its alteration corpus is drawn from current alternative news stories. Early reviews in Net Art News and neural.it.

Talking Cure, 2002

(with Camille Utterback, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin)

An installation that includes live video processing, speech recognition, and a dynamically composed sound environment. It engages seeing, writing, and speaking — word pictures, the gaze, and cure. It works with the story of Anna O, the patient of Joseph Breuer's who gave to him and Freud the concept of the "talking cure" as well as the word pictures to substantiate it. The reader sees her own image in a textual mirror composed of Breuer's words, Anna's words, and mine. Anna's snake hallucinations are reconsidered in terms of the Gorgon Medusa and the analytic gaze. First presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization symposium, documentation featured in Cauldron and Net.

Gray Matters, 1996-97

(with Chris Spain, Kirstin Allio, and Michael Crumpton)

A multiscale fiction embedded in a patchwork human body constructed from fragments of Gray's Anatomy. A new method of zooming interaction was developed for the project, which was later taken up by a number of ZUI projects in art and research contexts. The exhibition of Gray Matters at the Sandra Gering Gallery in 1996 (as part of blast5drama) was the first time a zooming interface was made available for public interaction (in this case, Pad++). The project was also presented at ACM Hypertext 97, ACM SIGGRAPH 97, and in the Guggenheim Museum's Brave New Word. A limited edition artists book of Gray Matters, published in 2001 by Artformfunction (Miami Beach, Florida), is now owned by a number of private collectors and the Boston Public Library.