An Interview with Stuart Moulthrop by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
[conducted while "Pax" was in process]
Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Talk with me about the idea of an "instrumental text"...
Stuart Moulthrop: It's an idea I first heard mentioned by John Cayley at the 2000 Digital Arts and Culture conference, when I think it was relatively new for him. What I'm particularly taken with is the notion of a middle space between literary texts and ludic texts—between interactive fiction, or hypertext fiction, and games. You have, with instruments, a text with behavior and temporal dimensions that in some ways maps onto the temporal experience and interactive possibilities in game design. The idea of an instrumental text is part of my continuing movement away from node-link and disjunctive hypertext.
Besides Cayley the other person who has very much influenced my thinking in this area is Jim Rosenberg, who around 1995 first opened my eyes to the notion that link structure could be something less constrained than in the early Storyspace applications—things like afternoon and Victory Garden as distinct from later work by folks like Carolyn Guyer that did more with the possibilities of the structure map.
It was Jim who first said to me, "Not 'this or that' but 'and and and.'" You can still do something that is definably hypertextual but has more of a sense of simultaneity and plentiful possibility. Jim's work is about conjunctive possibility, rather than disjunctive possibility, and this has been particularly important to me as I've begun to pursue more graphic work—with more of a sense of environment and built space.
NWF: Can you give an example of "conjunctiveness" in your work?
SM: I think Reagan Library represents the turn toward conjunctive work, especially because the thing that preceded it was Hegirascope,which is mercilessly disjunctive. (Or diabolically disjunctive, in that it has a 30-second timer that will not allow you to stay on a node any longer than that.) Reagan Library has a series of 3D graphic environments that function as an index to the work, and you are meant to explore that space so that it's more of a continuous process. There still are recognizable nodes within that scheme, but contiguity is important. It's perhaps not as important as it could be, and I've been trying to come up with other solutions in which contiguity and physical relationship, spatial relationship, are more important. While there have been interesting experiments, to my mind we haven't yet found a fully successful way to marry page space and exploratory space.
NWF: It seems to me that space has been one of the ongoing concerns in your work. The map in Victory Garden is a famous example from more than a decade ago.
SM: I wanted to include a graphical map in Victory Garden,even though it's a ridiculously truncated excuse for one—cut up into three pieces because they don't all fit at once—it's a kludge.
NWF: It's a zoom.
SM: Actually, it does have a zoom aspect to it. And more generally, yes, space has always important to me. Even with Hegirascope, which is not a particularly spatial work, I started with a spatial idea. I began with a remark of Michael Joyce's—or my own misreading of that remark: "In this the adolescence of our technological age, it is hard to go too far." I took from that sentence the notion of going someplace, metaphorically or virtually, and I started Hegirascope as a meditation on what space meant on the Internet, what space meant on the Web.
Notions of space are also filtered, for me, through that particular type of spatial narrative you find in comics. I'm fond of Lev Manovich's observation, in The Language of New Media, that comics are an inferior form, a cadet form in our literary culture because we're not attuned to spatial narrative. We're aligned with the opposite—temporalized, sequential, assembly-line narrative—which goes back to Fordism. What's so interesting to me about the space of the comics page is that it undoes all that mental circuitry that's built up by cinema. Although, curiously enough, it's also undone each time we open the morning newspaper, as Coover says in The Public Burning.
Scott McCloud's work has also been very important for me, particularly his insight about the gutter between frames of a comic—the complicity you have as a reader in completing the action as your eye passes across the gutters. You're drawn into that pattern matching. It resonates with me because, having done hypertext for a decade by the time I read Scott's work, it seemed like link following—though not quite in that disjunctive sense. Which brings us back to Jim's notion that links can be conjunctive. >>