D I G I T A L S T O R Y T E L L I N G F E S T I V A L
Days two and three, Sept. 19-20 1997
Any attempt to draw vast generalizations about the work we've seen here over the past three days is going to stray quickly into oversimplification. And any effort to organize it or categorize it is likely to be dull taxonomic labor. Instead, let me offer these observations -- nothing like a complete record of the festival, but at least some moments of note, organized in what I hope will be provocative ways.
Talking about antennas
As part of his show "Next Exit," Dana Atchley tells a story about his father, a ham radio buff. He'd go to enormous lengths to tune in transmissions from halfway around the globe. But once he was communicating with the other operators, all he'd be interested in discussing was the size of their antennas.
Later in life, Atchley asked his father why this was. "You care about entertainment," said Atchely pere -- "I care about antennas."
Most here at the festival seem to feel the answer is "yes," but Meredith Flynn-Ripley -- who heads US West's DiveIn network of city-guide Web sites -- is not nearly so sure.
"Storytelling can only really happen when there's a community present . . . and in a safe environment," she said. "People don't like to raise their hands."
The success of sites like Geocities -- where people build their own Web pages for free but are then assigned hard-to-find "block numbers" as addresses -- suggests to Flynn-Ripley that some people may not want their stories to reach beyond immediate family and friends: "Some of the stories people tell don't need to reach a wide audience, but are very powerful within their own small communities."
Though some festival participants suggested that technological barriers are all that's preventing people from telling their own stories, Flynn-Ripley argued that there is also a sociological barrier; she said research shows that the large numbers of people just arriving in the online world want to continue to play the kind of passive role to which television has accustomed them.
Who does the labor of narrative?
In the course of showing her CD-ROM "I Am A Singer," about an amnesiac Australian pop star trying to regain her identity, Megan Heyward explained that, though she's fascinated with experiments in non-linear narrative, she's uncomfortable with the term "interactive." "I don't want people to go in and change the ending," she said.
After her demo, she received a thanks from one festival-goer for "just telling the story and not making us work for it" -- as happens in more game-based narratives like Myst.
Peter Bergman, describing his experiences designing the Myst parody "Pyst," said that interactive stories often "give the user too much power" over the story: "I don't want to give people that power and they don't want it in the first place."
In his talk on "Personal Brand-Building," Michael Moon cited demographic information from the "American Lives" study dividing the U.S. population into three primary "value groups."
"Traditionalists," making up 30 percent of the population, focus on survival and support the maintenance of strong families and social rules.
"Progressives," driven by a self-interested quest for money, prestige and power, make up 35 to 40 percent of Americans.
Finally, there are "Cultural Creatives" -- a mere 25 percent of the U.S. -- who embrace alternative culture and environmental and spiritual causes and place great weight on the acknowledgment and expression of emotional truth.
Moon suggested that festival attendees and digital artists -- who not surprisingly fall into the "cultural creative" group -- should be aware that members of the other groups may find the stories they tell "fundamentally antagonistic" to them.
Talk back
At his site The Fray, Derek Powazek presents personal stories that people submit to him over the Net -- and ends each story with a question, aimed squarely at "you," the reader. "By the time you get to the end of the story," says Powazek, "you and everyone else have one thing in common -- you've read the story." A simple form on his site allows readers to post their own answers to these questions -- and form at least a rudimentary kind of community.
Powazek said that, far from being shy or passive, "People are just waiting for a chance to talk back."
At one point, Atchley described the Web as "this wonderful new distribution medium" -- and some artists here seem to view the Net primarily as a way to reach an audience. To be sure, the Net-based transformation of Coach House Books is no small thing. As Coach House's Victor Coleman explained it, Coach House decided to "reinvent the notion of small-press publishing -- because it's not working." Though the company is still trying to sell "the fetish object formerly known as 'book'," it is now posting the full texts of the experimental fiction and poetry it publishes at its Web site.
But other artists see the Web less as a new distribution medium than as a place to experiment with new relationships between artist and audience -- like Abbe Don, whose Bubbe's Back Porch site is both a showcase for her own stories about her great-grandmother and an open forum for readers to add their own grandmother tales.
Fun to do
Much interactive art today is designed for a one-on-one relationship between "user" and machine. So brief demos on screen in front of a crowded theater may not show the work at its best.
As Jonathan Delacour presented the interactive film "Les Mysteres du Chateau de D...," he got into a frantic rhythm of clicking as he tried to offer a brief illustration of the film's design. "I don't know what this is like to look at," he said, "but it's incredibly tense to have to do."
After the evening performance of "Waiting For Godot.com" -- an abridged presentation of Beckett's classic drama as performed by avatars in a chat-room of The Palace -- performer Lisa Brenneis offered a variation on that theme: "I don't know what it's like to watch -- but it's great fun to do."
Scott Rosenberg is senior editor at Salon. You can email him at scottros@well.com.