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An interview with Talan Memmott, page 4
Q. The W/Readers Knock on the Wall: MDC: In addition to the structure, we are curious about the material of construction and the details of the fine joining. We suspect the articulation between texts might have been the most time-consuming element of the piece—getting the language to work in the random compiler. For example, one recombinant sentence reads: "Art school was a waste of time for a free-spirit like Matisse, so he dropped out and moved to Paris where he met Blake, Cindy Sherman, and Jasper Johns." It's funny—but this does not LOOK random at all. We don't have a sense of randomness, we have rather a sense that the controlling consciousness is there all the time, shaping the irony, making the fun even more fun. Now, that level of fine-grained execution is very difficult to simulate, language being what it is. What strategies did you use to create the seamless quality of the prose? TM: It would have been much easier to make the text appear random, I can tell you that. Before even approaching the interface, or the development of the application, I went through a period that combined research on the lives of the selected artists and what I call a pre-mediation phase. Collecting information on the artists was not a difficult task, as all of them are quite well known and securely written into art history. What to do with the collected material is another matter. As I said earlier, there is something rather formulaic to artist biographies. As I was doing my research this became absolutely clear and when I set out to write the individual biographies I started by working with a formula based on what I had discovered. This simplified the process a tiny bit, as each of the biographies contained certain fairly consistent elements. I could then begin dividing these up into segments of a sentence or two for each artist and be assured that artist works would be mentioned, or political affiliation, or place of birth, what have you . . .. Once I had the texts divided into these segments, I could begin establishing arrays with each of the text segments as a separate variable. This led to the initial combinations, and from there I went through a rather rigorous period of editing the texts when recombined in certain ways, and looking for opportunities to further undermine context by way of additional variable arrays. When you see Cindy Sherman, or Jasper Johns (along with a number of other artists) appearing alongside any of the initial twelve artists, these names are pulled from one of the secondary or extended arrays. Q. The W/Readers Look at other houses on the Block: What might we compare it to? MDC: Clutched tightly in the W/R's fistful of memories are experiences from Talan Memmott's pieces over the past six years. One tentatively recalls the bounded window of Bread Crumbs (1998), the lexia-and-link text of Jilt; a Romance (1998), the crisp, no-nonsense, red-and-blackness of Reasoned Metagoria (1999). But six years is a long time, and not only has the field evolved, so, too, have Memmott creations. Each piece ratcheted the sophistication quotient with either subtle or not-so-subtle innovations in the kinesthetic language of electronic literature/art. We/R may think we see a continuum of sorts—a movement from discovery to discovery. Is this consistent with your experience? And do you have an innovative practice, the discovery of which particularly delighted you during these years? TM: I completely agree. I think that the most interesting things about working in electronic literature, and web-based literary hypermedia, are discovery and invention. That being said, some of the ratcheting up of sophistication has to do with evolution in what the technologies will allow. In fairly early pieces like Bread Crumbs or Jilt; a Romance there was not yet support for DHTML layers in any of the available browsers, so the method in these works is much more classically hypertext. As the technology evolved, the document itself becomes a much more complicated arena with a lot of depth. This opens up other modes of signification and much of my work over the past couple of years has been involved in exploring this potential in a hands-on, code-based manner. I am still very much interested in examining, using and misusing emergent technologies—so, the discovery process is ongoing, perhaps neverending . . .. Q. The W/Readers Examine the Houses Next Door: What is its relationship to previous works? MDC: Many of us are familiar with your work through two, relatively recent pieces—Lexia to Perplexia and The Birth of V.ness (which makes its home this month at TIRWeb, as well). Both of these pieces tend to have a recognizable "Memmott" signature in an elegance of design and a complexity of interface. Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)] is similarly an interesting piece to look at and explore, but the central complexities of the construction are more obscured—the interface seems almost straightforward in comparison to your previous work. Instead, we have a piece in which the coding/technology that manipulates the language, while hidden, is at the center of the work. This suggests to me that you are continually challenging yourself to invent new forms. Do you think of your work this way? TM: Certainly, there is something apparently subtler in the approach to Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]. The interface is deliberately straightforward. If I had approached this work from a hyper(active)media angle, I am not so sure that the subversion of context would be successful. There had to be a certain level of austere seduction going on with this particular work so that it could almost be taken as serious art history. Still, as you note, the technology is central to the work—to its operations, to its content. I think that, yes, I do try to challenge myself as much as I can one work to the next. But, a lot of the challenges emerge out of the material and media that I am working with—against. I suppose one of the biggest challenges to practitioners of literary hypermedia is the integration of material and media, to fuse and confuse one with the other. Q. The W/Readers Return to the Beginning: Ah! So! MDC: Having walked around and through Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)], and having followed a guided tour/discussion, we have a sense of the marked differences between a conventional linear text and many e-literature works. In genre it is neither fiction nor criticism nor commentary. The content is not delivered through the act of straightforward reading, rather it is revealed as the user explores the object itself—its structure, coding, arrangement, imagery, interface, and text. Like other Memmott creations, Self Portrait(s) encourages a specific kind of attention—an attention that demands more "reading" than one usually gives to an art object and more "looking" than one usually gives to the act of reading. Our W/Readers often retire to quiet contemplation before revisiting Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]. .................................... Afterword: "But then Luca, after finishing these works, made a reckoning of how much he had earned, and how much time he had spent on them, and then realized that he had gained hardly anything despite his great efforts. So he resolved to abandon marble and bronze, [and], having considered that clay could be worked easily and that all that was wanting was a way by which the works made in clay could be preserved, he let his imagination loose so successfully that he found a way to protect it against the ravages of time. From the Biographical sketch of Luca Della Robbia
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