![M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 5
lenges the illusion of wholeness found in these archival histories by exposing what has
been excluded. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer-
icas (2003), she argues for the inclusion of live performance genres, for otherwise the
ephemeral knowledge they are based on will be lost and their performers relegated to the
margins of history. Even before the digital era, these limitations in structuralism had
been exposed by Roland Barthes, whose work (as we see in this volume) is frequently
referenced by new media theorists and historians of digital culture. His critique was
most powerful in those works that revealed his own crucial move from structuralist
binaries to open-ended post-structuralist networks. For example, in S/Z (1970; the quo-
tations used here are from the translation by Richard Miller, published in 1974), a theory
of reading that transforms narrative into an open-ended database, he famously claims
that the “text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds. . . . [T]he systems of
meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based
as it is on the infinity of language” (5–6). As the emergent post-structuralist feminists of
the 1970s and 1980s acknowledged, Barthes’s S/Z had thereby redefined the goal of nar-
rative theory: it was no longer focusing (as Teresa de Lauretis succinctly put it) on “estab-
lishing a logic, a grammar, or a formal rhetoric of narrative . . . (its component units
and their relations)” but rather on understanding “the nature of the structuring and
destructuring . . . a production of meaning which involves a subject in a social field”
(105). As soon as Barthes moved the process of inquiry into the social field, all textual
meanings necessarily took on ideological implications—even those posing as neutral
denotations, as if to falsely suggest that language could ever be “innocent.” In S/Z, Bar-
thes seemed to take great delight in introducing precise structuralist binaries (e.g., deno-
tation/connotation, readerly/writerly, sequential narrative/agglomerative database) and
then playfully exploding them with his dialectics (e.g., making “denotation” the last of
the connotations, and performing a writerly reading of the readerly). It was as if he were
underscoring his own movement beyond structuralism into the more complex ideologi-
cal realm of post-structuralism, where gaps in our knowledge are exposed and room is
left for the unknown. It is this insistence on the inevitability of both open-endedness and
ideological meaning that keeps Barthes so crucial to the ongoing debates on medium
specificity and postmedia discourse, particularly as argued in this volume.
This section of our anthology addresses some of the ways these arguments about
medium specificity were voiced at the conference and continued to be revised in the years
that followed, particularly with the emergence of transmedia migration, mobile tech-
nologies, and other digital forms of social networking. Focusing on four pairs of essays,
this introduction stages these texts as a series of interwoven dialogues that give different
narrative accounts of what is at stake in medium specificity historically and ideologically;
which precursors, contemporary theorists, or artists are the main protagonists in this
unfolding discursive drama; and how the interactive frictions and continuities between
old and new forms can be read most productively within their social and historical
contexts.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-28-320.jpg)
![M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 7
convinced that Barthes’s “vision remains rooted in print culture.” Thus, she catalogues his
works along with those other print hypertexts—old encyclopedias and experimental nov-
els whose relationship to electronic hypertext is simulated. Following the same strategy
that she pursued with her typology, she uses this close comparison to uncover a key func-
tional difference: “In positioning text against work, Barthes was among those who helped
initiate semiotic and performative approaches to discourse, arguably one of the most
important developments in literary studies in the past century. But this shift has entailed
loss as well as gain. . . . [I]t also had the effect . . . of eliding differences in media.”
Although Hayles argues that nondigital literary works can only “simulate” computer-
mediated hypertexts and that “we have moved [far] beyond” Barthes, she denies that she
is implying any teleological sense of progress or that literature is doomed. While she
claims that books are “too robust, reliable, long-lived, and versatile to be rendered obsolete
by digital media,” she also acknowledges that books are subject to change, which she
embraces as part of living form. With historical hindsight, we see how the Kindle and iPad
uphold these observations. Undoubtedly used to reassuring her more traditional literary
colleagues that she is still committed to books, Hayles makes her arguments appear less
radical than they actually are. In fact, they appear compatible with the more traditional
tactics of comparative literary analysis: the more similar the works we compare, the more
precise we can make the distinctions between them. This rhetorical strategy of reassur-
ance contrasts sharply with that of Lev Manovich, who frequently emphasizes the sense
of rupture even while arguing for continuities between old and new forms.
Designed as a provocation, an attack on the very concept of media, Manovich’s essay,
“Postmedia Aesthetics,” is not only postconference but also postpublication of The Lan-
guage of New Media (2001), the groundbreaking book that has led him to be perceived by
many as the world’s leading new media theorist and (along with McLuhan, to whom he
is frequently compared) a strong advocate for medium specificity. Always privileging the
new, Manovich presents himself as an avant-garde theorist who is constantly driving the
discourse on computer culture into new conceptual domains. With its teleological posi-
tion signaled by the “post” in its title, the essay implies that those who have not adopted
his most recent “postmedia” vocabulary risk obsolescence or being left far behind. It
attempts to settle this running argument on medium specificity through a bold act of
renaming. However, Manovich was not the first to reach this conclusion. Quoting from
the contributions of Anne Friedberg and Henry Jenkins in his anthology The New Media
Book (2002), Dan Harries claims that
With the growing use of digital video, computer-based editing and special effects, we are
witnessing a convergence of media images. As Anne Friedberg notes, “the movie screen,
the home television screen, and the computer screen retain their separate locations, yet
the types of images you see on each of them are losing their medium-based specificity”. . . .
As Henry Jenkins suggests, “because digital media potentially incorporate all previous
media, it no longer makes sense to think in medium-specific terms.” (171)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-30-320.jpg)
![8 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S
Friedberg, Jenkins, and Harries come to this conclusion from the side of reception,
whereas Manovich converts it into a formalist argument aligned with technological
determinism, for he argues that one of the primary causes of this “postmedia” condition
is “the digital revolution of the 1980s–90s.” This move represents another break from
The Language of New Media, wherein Manovich tried “to avoid using the word digital
because it ambiguously refers to three unrelated concepts” (52). Dubbing our new era a
“postdigital, postnet culture” (the prefix signaling not obsolescence, as in the case of
“postmedia,” but a functional difference or rupture), this essay now substitutes “media”
(and, by implication, its derivatives “transmedia” and “medium-specificity”) for “digital”
as the primary term under attack and erasure.
Although this line of argument would seem to place Manovich in sharp opposition to
Hayles, who claims that medium specificity is more important than ever, it actually
proves to be uncannily similar to hers. He ends up arguing for the specificity of the
computer, privileging it as the technology through which all other prior forms should be
reconceptualized. After presenting a series of compelling arguments for why medium
specificity is no longer significant, Manovich proposes a new postmedia aesthetic that
focuses on a cultural analysis of software and informational behaviors. These two terms
prove very useful, for they can be applied both literally to current practices of computer-
mediated communications and metaphorically to past works from precomputer culture.
Like Hayles, he leads us to address the materiality of texts and the transmission of data
by creating a communications typology (in this case, consisting of six characteristics
rather than her eight) that considers both (to use her terms) their “instantiation in digital
computers . . . and the extent to which [their] effects can be simulated in print.” Yet, to
justify his application of new digital concepts to earlier, predigital forms, Manovich turns
not to an analytical argument for observing the formal process of historical change (as
Hayles did in defending her use of the term “hypertext”), but to one more compatible
with advertising rhetoric, namely consumer appeal. He strives “to make old culture com-
prehensible to new generations that are comfortable with the concepts, metaphors, and
techniques of the computer and network era.”
While those committed to the historical specificity of predigital media might question
this strategy of rethinking old cultural forms through the metaphors of new media (per-
haps fearing some kind of reductionism, say, in describing Giotto and Eisenstein as
“important information designers” who deserve to be compared “alongside” contempo-
rary giants like Allan Kay and Tim Berners-Lee), Manovich claims he is also motivated
by an ethical obligation—to see old and new cultures as one continuum, and to enrich
new culture through the use of the aesthetic techniques of old cultures. By accommodat-
ing young computer-savvy users in this way, one wonders whether Manovich is really
adding a new dimension to an already highly complex figure like Eisenstein or (through
this act of renaming) merely substituting a more reductive way of seeing him, the same
kind of reductionism that was performed by David Bordwell, who stripped Eisenstein of
his dialectics so that his pure poetics could be more comfortably appreciated by Bordwell-](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-31-320.jpg)
![M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 13
of IMAP, the Interdivisional Media + Arts PhD program at the University of Southern
California [USC] School of Cinematic Arts) was one of the co-organizers of the confer-
ence, and Stephen Mamber (documentary film historian and digital media specialist in
the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los
Angeles) was a featured speaker but gave a different paper.
Given that Anderson and Mamber both explore the interplay between theory and
practice, it is not surprising that their arguments are developed through specific case
studies. In contrast to Branigan and Tsivian, their primary examples are contemporary;
yet they refuse to fetishize “newness,” and they find productive continuities between old
and new forms. They use their case studies not as precursors but as concrete illustrations
of what is possible or problematic.
Although Anderson focuses on history and Mamber on documentary, they both exam-
ine the impact of digital technology, databases, and search engines on nonfiction narra-
tive, exploring what new models have been generated. Although nonfiction is their pri-
mary interest, they both see history and fiction as narrative cousins whose commingling
and hybridization can be productive.
Perhaps most important, they both recognize that database structures and archival
histories offer a seductive promise of “total knowledge,” one that reinforces traditional
epistemological assumptions about the stabilizing effects of rational order and progress.
Yet they both claim that this vision of wholeness is an illusion. Instead they call attention
to the inevitable gaps and random combinations in history, which they see as the driving
force of narrative desire. By challenging the illusory nature of any totalizing history, they
open the path for an open-ended narrative experimentation that always leaves room for
the unknown and that exposes the ideological implications of all databases and their
search engines.
In “Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History,” Anderson exam-
ines the impact of digital technologies and their information systems on the writing of
history. He claims that by basing their histories on databases and search engines instead
of on literary tropes, contemporary historians have created two contrasting models of
database histories: “one seeking to articulate a ‘total’ history that is encyclopedic in scope
and rooted in relatively stable conceptions of historical epistemology, and another that
exploits digital technology’s potential for randomization and recombination in order to
accommodate increasingly volatile visions of the past.” Anderson sees both forms of
“database histories” as “collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated within
categories and organized according to predetermined associations.” Like all discourse in
the “post-Foucauldian world” and despite disavowals to the contrary, these categories
and their search engines have ideological implications that shape our vision of human
history.
As his primary example of the encyclopedic model, Anderson uses Steven Spielberg’s
USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Also known as The Survivors Project, it
contains more than one hundred thousand hours of video testimonies from “more than](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-36-320.jpg)
![P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 31
or on screen, the specificity of the medium comes into play as its characteristics are
flaunted, suppressed, subverted, reimagined.
Many critics see the electronic age as heralding the end of books. I think this view is
mistaken. Books are far too robust, reliable, long-lived, and versatile to be rendered obso-
lete by digital media. Rather, digital media have given us an opportunity we have not had
for the past several hundred years: the chance to see print with new eyes, and with it, the
possibility of understanding how deeply literary theory and criticism have been imbued
with assumptions specific to print. As we continue to work toward critical practices and
theories appropriate for electronic literature, we may come to renewed appreciation for
the specificity of print. In the tangled web of medial ecology, change anywhere in the
system stimulates change everywhere in the system. Books are not going the way of the
dinosaur but the way of the human, changing as we change, mutating and evolving in
ways that will continue, as a book lover said long ago, to teach and delight.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Since 1999, when I first began working out the ideas for “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep,” my
thoughts about media-specific analysis have matured considerably. Perhaps the most
important change has been in the way I define “materiality.” As someone who has done
serious work in a scientific field, I am well aware that the physical characteristics any object
may be said to possess are essentially infinite; a computer, for example, could be described
in terms of its power cord or the rare earth metals used in a CRT monitor. Of course, it
almost never is described like this, because these characteristics are not normally of inter-
est (except to manufacturers of power cords, of course). To deal with this challenge, in my
recent book My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, I describe the
materiality of an artistic work as “an emergent property created through dynamic interac-
tions between [the work’s] physical characteristics and signifying strategies” (3). Materiality
differs from physicality, then, in being inextricably linked with meaning. As an emergent
property, it cannot be specified in advance but emerges through interpretation and debate.
Thus conceived, materiality is not only about the “apparatus” but also about the meaning-
making processes in which communities of users/readers/interactors participate.
Writing Machines was an important advance over this essay because it provided the
opportunity to collaborate with Anne Burdick, a media designer, to create the critical
equivalent of an artist’s book. Conceived as a verbal/visual argument, Writing Machines
made similar points about media specificity not only in words but also in its material
form, including ribbed covers, clay-coated slick papers, shadowed pages, and other visual
devices. I returned to the topic yet again in “Translating Media” in My Mother Was a
Computer. This chapter extended and recast the case for media specificity in terms of
editorial practices and received definitions of work, text, and document, arguing
that material differences between different editions or versions of a work should not be
collapsed into a singular object but rather regarded as an assemblage in which similar](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-54-320.jpg)
![[161]
“You’ll take ’em over and see about ’em, Johnny?”
“Glad to.” He put the case in his pocket.
“Have another hot dog, Johnny?”
“Sure will.”
“You got my message? The orange wrapper?”
Johnny nodded.
“He’s been at it again.”
“Who? At what?”
“That big stooped man with a limp. He’s been out here
again, standin’ on the shore close to the city an’ shakin’
his fists an’ cursin’ worse’n a pirate.”
“He has?” Johnny was surprised. “What did you do?”
“Well, I tried to get close to him but a stone rolled
under my foot an’ I guess he heard me. Anyway, he
went lopin’ off like a antelope, an’ that’s all I saw of
him.”
“Queer he’d come back out here,” Johnny mused. Then
of a sudden a thought struck him. Perhaps this man was
not a firebug at all, but a thief. Perhaps this case of
diamonds had not been brought out here in a dump
wagon, but by this strange man. Perhaps he had hidden
it here. Perhaps there were other cases hidden on the
island. He thought of the diamond merchant’s place on
Randolph Street, and of that man Knobs haunting the
same building. What if Knobs and the hooked nose man](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-56-320.jpg)
![[162]
[163]
with the limp were in a partnership of crime? Well, at
least it was something to think about.
“Do you know, Johnny,” said Ben Zook, suddenly
changing the subject, “I’ve got to sort of like this island.
’Tain’t much account as it is, all broken bricks and dust,
but in time grass would grow on it—tall grass that
waves and sort of sighs in the breeze. I’d like it a lot,
then, Johnny.” Ben’s voice grew earnest “I’d like to own
this island; like to have it always to myself.”
“You don’t want this island, Ben,” said Johnny quietly.
“Let me tell you what it’s going to be like, and then I’m
sure you wouldn’t want it all to yourself. Ben, bye-and-
bye all this rough ground is going to be smoothed
down. The island will be broadened and fine rich dirt
will be hauled on. Grass will be sown and pretty soon it
will all be green. Trees will be planted and squirrels will
come to live in them.”
“I’d like that, Johnny.”
“There will probably be a gravel walk winding in and out
among the trees,” Johnny continued. “Tired women with
little children, women from those hot cramped flats you
know of in the heart of the city, will come here with
their children. They’ll sit on the grass and let the cool
lake breeze fan their cheeks while their children go
frolicking away after the squirrels or throw crumbs to
pigeons and sparrows.
“There’ll be a lagoon between this island and the shore,
a lagoon of smooth, deep water. There will be boat
houses and nice clean-hearted boys will bring nice girls
out here to take them riding in the boats.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-57-320.jpg)
![[164]
[165]
“And perhaps on a fine Sunday afternoon there will be a
band concert and thousands will come out to hear it.
But you know, Ben, if you had it all to yourself they
couldn’t do any of these things. You don’t really want it
now, do you, Ben?”
“No, Johnny, I don’t.”
For a time Ben was thoughtful. When at last he spoke
his voice sounded far away.
“I’ve tried never to be selfish, Johnny. Guess mebby if
I’d held on to things more, not given so many fellows
that was down and out a boost, I’d have more of my
own. That’s a fine dream you got for Ben Zook’s island.
I’d be mighty proud of it, Johnny. I shore would.” Again
he was silent for a long time.
“Johnny,” he said at last, “do you see that path of gold
the moon’s a paintin’ on the lake?”
“Yes, Ben.”
“Sort of reminds me of a notion I had when I was a boy
about the path to Heaven. Foolish notion, I guess; sort
of thought when the time come you just walked right up
there.
“Foolish notion; but Johnny, here’s a sort of idea I’ve
worked out settin’ thinkin’ here all by myself. It’s a heap
of fun to live, Johnny. I get a lot out of it; it’s just like
I’d never grown up, like I was just a boy playin’ round.
“And you know, Johnny, when I was a boy there was a
big family of us and we always had a lot to do. I’d be
playin’ with the other boys, and then suddenly my
mother’d call:](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-58-320.jpg)
![[166]
“‘Ben, come here.’
“Just like that. And I’d go, Johnny; always went straight
off, but before I went I’d say:
“‘Well, so long, fellers, I got to go now.’ I’d say it just
like that.
“And you know, Johnny, I’ve been playin’ round most of
my life an’ havin’ a lot of fun, even if other folks do call
it workin’, so when that last call comes from somewhere
way up above I sort of have a feelin’ that it’ll come from
someone a lot bigger an’ wiser than me, just like my
mother was when I was a boy. An’ I hope I’ll be brave
enough to say, just as I used to say then:
“‘Well, good-bye fellers, I got to go now.’ Don’t you
hope so, Johnny?”
“I hope so, Ben,” Johnny’s voice had grown husky.
“An’, Johnny, when my mother called me it wasn’t ever
because she felt contrary and wanted to spoil my fun; it
was always because she had something useful she
wanted me to do for the bunch. I’m sort of hopin’,
Johnny, when that last call comes it’ll be for the same
reason, because the one that’s a lot bigger an’ wiser
than me had got somethin’ useful he wants me to do for
the bunch of us. Do you think it’ll be that way, Johnny?”
“I—I’m sure it will, Ben. But Ben, you’re not very old.
That time’s a long way off.”
“I hope so, Johnny. It’s a grand privilege to live. But you
can’t tell, Johnny; you can’t, can you now?”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-59-320.jpg)
![[167]
For a long time after that they sat there in silence.
Johnny was slowly beginning to realize that he liked this
strange little Ben Zook with his heart of gold.
“Look, Johnny!” Ben exclaimed. “A fire!”
“What! Another?” cried Johnny.
“Down there by the water front.”
Johnny followed his gaze to the south where there was
a great blaze against the sky.
“It’s queer,” he said after ten seconds of watching. “It
doesn’t really seem to be on the shore. Looks as if it
were on the far end of this island.”
“The island, Johnny? What could burn like that out
here? Look at her leap toward the sky!”
“All the same, it is. Come on, Ben. We may learn
something. Arm yourself, Ben. It may mean a fight.”
As he said this Johnny picked up a scrap of gas pipe two
feet long. “I’ve not forgotten what you said about
striking first and arguing after,” he chuckled.
“I’ll take the hand grenades,” said Ben, loading an arm
with half bricks.
Thus armed, they hurried away over a rough path that
ran the length of the island.
They had not covered half the distance to the end when
the flare of light began to die down. It vanished with
surprising rapidity. Scarcely had they gone a dozen
paces, after it began to wane, when the place where it](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-60-320.jpg)
![[168]
[169]
had been, for lack of that brilliant illumination, appeared
darker than the rest of the island.
“What about that?” Ben Zook stopped short in his
tracks.
“Come on! Come fast!” exclaimed Johnny, determined to
arrive at the scene of this strange spectacle before the
last glowing spark had blinked out.
As he rushed along pell-mell, stumbling over a brick
here, leaping a mound of clay there, quite heedless of
any danger that might surround him, he might have
proven a fair target for a shot from ambush.
No shot came, and in time he came to a comparatively
level spot of sand in the center of which there glowed a
few coals.
After bending over these for an instant he scraped away
the last remaining sparks with his bit of gas pipe, then
stood there silently waiting for the thing to cool.
“What was it?” Ben asked as he came up.
“Don’t know.”
Johnny drew a flashlight from his pocket and threw its
circle of light on the spot.
“Listen!” whispered Ben, pulling at Johnny’s coat sleeve
and pointing toward the lagoon. Faintly, yet quite
distinctly, Johnny heard the creak of oar locks.
“A boat,” he whispered back.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-61-320.jpg)
![[170]
“Yes, Johnny, they was somebody out here. And I bet
you it was—that man!”
“The limping man?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what do you suppose was the reason for the
bonfire?” Johnny bent over to pick up a fragment of
black cardboard heavily coated with black paint. This
was curved about, forming the segment of a circle. The
inside of the circle was black and charred like the inside
of a giant firecracker that has been exploded.
Immediately Johnny’s mind was rife with solutions for
this fresh mystery. The men were thieves. They had
come to this deserted spot at night to divide their loot
and to burn any damaging evidence, such as papers,
wrappers and whatever else might be connected with it.
They were smugglers. The flare of light was a signal to
some craft lying far out on the lake, telling them that all
was clear and that they might run in. Other possible
solutions came to him, but not one of them seemed at
all certain. So, in the end, having pocketed the one bit
of evidence, he walked back with Ben to his shack.
There he promised Ben to return soon to sit out a watch
with him on the island; then going down to his boat, he
pushed her off.
An hour later he was in his own bed fast asleep, with
Ben Zook’s diamonds safe under his pillows.
His last waking thought had been that if those were real
diamonds there would be a reward for their return, and
that the reward should go to Ben Zook. It would at least
be a start toward the purchase of his long-dreamed-of
poultry ranch in the country.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-62-320.jpg)
![[171]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-63-320.jpg)
![[172]
CHAPTER XVI
THE STRANGE BLACK CYLINDERS
The forenoon was all but gone when Johnny stirred in
his bed, then sat up abruptly to stare about him. He had
been dreaming, and woven into the web of his dreams
was the face and figure of his one time fellow
adventurer, Panther Eye, known familiarly as “Pant.” He
had dreamed of seeing the dark fights and narrow
escapes, and had dreamed of seeing red lights against a
night sky, and blinding white flares. In his dreams he
had again fought a mountain feud. All this with Pant at
his side.
“I wish he were here!” Johnny exclaimed as he threw
back the covers and leaped from his bed. “He’d put the
thing together letter by letter, word by word, like a
cross-word puzzle, and somehow make a whole of it.
The fire at the school; the pink-eyed stranger; the more
terrible fire that endangered Mazie’s life; the big
stooping man with a limp; the fire at the Zoo; my
experience at Ben Zook’s island and at the marsh; for
him all these would fit together somehow. But to me
they are little more than fragments of the sort of stuff](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-64-320.jpg)
![[173]
life’s made of. Where’s the affair to end? I’d like to know
that.”
Seizing a pen, he wrote a telegram to Pant. Pant, as you
will remember from reading that other book, “The
Hidden Trail,” had remained behind to finish a task he
had begun in the Cumberland Mountains.
“No,” Johnny said to himself after reading the telegram,
“he wouldn’t come,” and he tore the paper in four
pieces and threw it in the waste basket.
Drawing the fragment of a black cylinder from his
pocket, he studied it carefully.
“That ought to mean something to me,” he mumbled,
“but it doesn’t; not a thing in the world.”
From a box in the corner he dragged a desk telephone,
the one he had salvaged from the Zoo.
“This,” he said, “would tell a story if only it could talk.
And why can’t you?” He shook his fist at the instrument.
“What’s a telephone for if not for talking?”
Since the instrument did not respond, for the twentieth
time Johnny unwound its wires and sat there staring at
them. There was the usual pair of rather heavily
insulated wires and a second pair of lighter ones, about
twenty feet long.
“I ought to know what those second wires are for,” he
said again, “but I don’t. I told the Chief of Detectives
about it, and he laughed at me and said: ‘Do you think
there’s someone with a tongue hot enough to set fire to
a house just by talking over the telephone? There’s
some hot ones, but not as hot as that!’ He laughed at](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-65-320.jpg)
![[174]
[175]
his own joke, then saw me politely out of the room,
thinking all the time, I don’t doubt, that I was a young
nut with a cracked head. So, old telephone, if your
secret is to be revealed you’ll have to tell it, or I’ll be
obliged to discover it.”
Putting the telephone back in the box, he took the jewel
case from beneath his pillow. As he saw the jewels in
the light of day he was more sure than ever that they
were genuine.
“I fancy,” he mused, “that the Chief of Detectives will be
a trifle more interested in this than in my telephone,
though in my estimation it’s not half as important. But
of course there’s sure to be a reward. I mustn’t forget
that. It’s to be for Ben Zook.”
The Chief of Detectives was interested, both interested
and surprised. He set his best clerk working on the
record of stolen diamonds. In less than five minutes the
clerk had the record before him.
“These diamonds,” he said, looking hard at Johnny,
“were stolen from Barker’s on Madison Street two weeks
ago last night. The value is four thousand dollars.”
“And the reward?” said Johnny calmly.
“Eh, what?”
“How much reward?”
“Nothing’s been said about a reward.”
“All right. Good-bye.” Calmly pocketing the case, Johnny
started from the door.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-66-320.jpg)
![[176]
“Here! Here! Stop that young fool!” stormed the Chief of
Detectives.
“Well,” said Johnny defiantly, “what sort of cheap piker
is this man Barker? It’s not for myself, but for a friend
who needs it.”
“Tell me about it,” said the detective, bending over and
beckoning him close.
Johnny told the story so well that the Chief got Barker
on the wire and pried an even five hundred dollars out
of that tight fisted merchant before he would promise
the return of the diamonds.
“That’ll set your friend Zook up in business,” smiled the
Chief of Detectives as a half hour later he handed
Johnny a valuable yellow slip. “And say, weren’t you in
here a day or two ago with some story about a
telephone and a firebug?”
“Yes sir.”
“Didn’t take much stock in it, did I?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“You bring that back and tell me about it again. I
thought you were a fresh kid and a bit addled, but by
Jove, you’ve got a head on your shoulders and it ain’t
stuffed with excelsior above the ears, either.”
“I’ll do what you say,” said Johnny, “but first I’d like to
run down another hunch if you don’t object.”
“No objections. Run down as many as you care to. Bring
’em all in. Mebby I can help you, and more’n likely you](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-67-320.jpg)
![[177]
[178]
can help me.”
Johnny left the place with a jubilant heart. He had
enough money now to buy Ben Zook a small ranch. He
knew the very place, a half acre, ten miles from the city
limits, a sloping bank with oak trees on it and a cabin at
its edge, and a touch of green pasture land with a brook
at the bottom. Wouldn’t Ben Zook revel in it? And
wouldn’t his salvaged poultry thrive there?
He wanted to row right out and tell Ben about it at
once. Had he been able to read the future he would
most assuredly have done so, but since he could only
see one step ahead, and had planned to revisit the
marsh and have a look at that black shack at its edge,
in the end he cashed the check for five hundred and
deposited it in a savings account for safe keeping. After
that he took a train for the marsh.
An hour later, with a feeling of dread that was not far
from fear, and was closely connected with his startling
and mysterious experiences on two other occasions, he
found himself approaching the black shack.
Since this shack was built on the side of the marsh
nearest to the lake, it was flanked by low, rolling sand-
dunes. This made it easy for Johnny to approach the
shack without being seen by anyone who might be
inside.
After crawling to within fifty feet of it he lay down
behind a low clump of willows, determined to watch the
place for awhile. After an hour of patient watching, his
patience deserted him. Gripping something firmly in his
hand, he advanced boldly forward until he was within
arm’s reach of the building.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-68-320.jpg)
![[179]
There for a time he stood listening. His footsteps on the
sand made no sound. If there were people in the shack
they could not be aware of his approach.
Nerving himself for quick action and possible attack, he
stepped round the corner to look quickly in at the
window.
Then he laughed softly to himself. There had been no
need for all this precaution. Inside the shack was but a
single room. In that room there was one person, and
that person lay stretched full length upon a couch with
his face turned toward the wall. To all appearances he
was sound asleep.
Seeing this, Johnny proceeded to make a calm survey of
the room. In one corner stood a table and chair. On the
table were dirty dishes, an empty can, and a loaf of
bread.
In a back corner stood a rifle, and across from that
some strange looking black cylinders. It was the
cylinders that interested Johnny. But realizing that he
could get a better look at them from the only other
window of the place, he contented himself, for the
moment, with a careful look at the man. The face could
not be seen, but there was about the large, heavy
frame and rounded shoulders something vaguely
familiar. Still, after all was said and done, Johnny could
not be sure that he had ever seen the fellow before,
and certainly he did not feel disposed to waken him to
find out.
He passed around to the other window and for a full
five minutes studied those black cylinders. They were
strange affairs, about four inches in diameter and two](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-69-320.jpg)
![[180]
[181]
feet in length. They resembled huge firecrackers coated
black. Instead of fuse, however, each one had on its
end two small shiny screws such as are found at the top
of a dry battery.
“Probably what they are,” was Johnny’s mental
comment, “just big dry batteries.”
Yet he could not quite convince himself that this was
true. In the end, however, he concluded that was the
nearest he could come to it at a guess, and since a
guess was all he was to get that day, he moved away
from the cabin and was soon lost in the sand dunes.
“Never saw any batteries half that big,” he grumbled to
himself as he trudged along, “and besides, what would
he be doing with them out here?”
Again he trudged forward for a half mile in silence.
Then, of a sudden he came to a dead stop, turned
about, made as if to retrace his steps, then appearing to
think better of it, stood there for a moment in deep
meditation.
“It might be true,” he murmured to himself. “It don’t
seem possible, yet it might be, and if it is, then the
fellow could be miles away when the thing happens.
And if it is true, then that solves it.”
“But then,” he added thoughtfully as he resumed his
march toward the station, “it seems altogether too
fanciful.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-70-320.jpg)
![[182]
CHAPTER XVII
THE UNANSWERED CALL
Since there were no new clues to be followed out, and
because he had grown tired of haunting the central fire
station with its incessant clatter of telegraph
instruments and its eternal flashes of light, at ten
o’clock that night Johnny went again to the river and
taking his old friend’s boat from its place of concealment
rowed slowly toward Ben Zook’s island. The lake was
calm as a millpond and there was no reason for
strenuous rowing. Then, too, he wished to think as he
rowed. Johnny was one of those fellows who thought
best in action.
His thoughts that night were long, long thoughts, long
and tangled. It was as if he had a half dozen skeins of
yarn all tangled together and was trying to find the ends
of each and to disentangle it from the others.
His mind was still working upon those black cylinders
out in the black shack. He had a feeling that the man he
had seen asleep out there was none other than the one
who had twice gone gunning for him out there in the
marsh. If that were true and if he were the man who
had been at the Simons Building fire and at the Zoo and](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-71-320.jpg)
![[183]
later on Ben Zook’s island, then those black cylinders
must have some significance.
He smiled at this complicated chain of circumstances.
“Fat chance!” he murmured to himself. “And yet that
might be true, and if it is there’s some connection
between the telephone with double wiring and that
scrap of black pasteboard we found on the island after
that blaze.
“Black pasteboard!” he exclaimed suddenly. “That’s it!
The piece we found is part of one of those cylinders!”
“But if it is,” he said more soberly a moment later, “then
why would they burn it out here on Ben’s island? Lot’s
of sense to that!”
So in the end he got nowhere in his thought unravelling
process. However, his arms were working mechanically
all the time and he was nearing the island. As he
thought of this he suddenly sat straight up and, as if
eager to reach his goal, began to row with all his power.
He was eager, too, for he suddenly recalled that he was
bound on a very pleasant mission. Was he not to tell
Ben Zook that at any time he wished he might leave the
island for a place of trees, green grass, flowing water
and a real cabin of fair dimensions? Small wonder that
he hurried.
As he neared the shore his heart warmed at thought of
the smile that would come to the face of the kindly,
cheerful, little old man.
“Surely,” he thought to himself, “in spite of the fact that
he’s a bit strange and uncouth, he’s a real gentleman](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-72-320.jpg)
![[184]
[185]
after all and deserves a great deal more than is coming
to him.”
He smiled as he thought of the little chicken coop Ben
Zook had showed him. A low-roofed affair with a roost
of bars about three feet long; five chickens on the roost,
blinking at the light; a single goose in a corner with his
head under his wing; this was Ben’s poultry house and
his brood. There’d be more to it now—a real chicken
house and perhaps a hundred fine fowls. It would be a
Paradise for Ben Zook.
As he mused happily on these things his boat touched
the shore. Springing out nimbly, he dragged the boat up
the beach and turned his face toward Ben’s house.
At that moment, as a cloud passing over the moon sent
a chill down his spine, something seemed to whisper to
him that all was not well. That he might dispel this dark
foreboding, he lifted up his voice in a cheery shout:
“Ben Zook! Oh, Ben Zook, I’m coming.”
The distant skyscrapers, like some mountainside, caught
his words and flung them back to him, seeming at the
same time to change his “Oh” to “old.”
“Ben Zook! Old Ben Zook!”
Again and again, more faintly, and yet more faintly:
“Ben Zook! Old Ben Zook. Ben Zook—Zook.”
As the echo trailed away in the distance, a foreboding
came over Johnny. There had come no answering call.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-73-320.jpg)
![[186]
Still he tried to cheer himself. “He’s asleep,” Johnny told
himself. “Little wonder, too. I was out here till near
morning.”
After that he trudged in silence over the piles of broken
brick, sand and clay.
As he came at last within sight of Ben’s place he was
cheered by the sight of red coals on the grate.
“It’s not been long since he was here, anyway,” he said.
Yet his feeling that Ben was not in his house proved
true. The place was empty.
“Probably gone for a stroll down the beach,” was his
mental comment as he dropped down in Ben’s big arm
chair.
The chair was a comfortable one. The fire, with a chill
breeze blowing off the lake, was cheering too, yet there
was no comfort for Johnny. He had not been seated two
minutes when he was again upon his feet.
“I don’t like it,” he muttered.
The next moment he was chiding himself for a fool.
“He’ll be here in a moment and I’ll tell him about the
reward.” Johnny smiled at the thought.
Walking to the tiny poultry house, he opened the door
and, flicking on his flashlight, looked within. The calm
assurance of chickens on their roost, of the single goose
who did not so much as take his head from beneath his
wing, did much to allay his fears.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-74-320.jpg)
![[187]
[188]
“Just look about a bit, anyway,” he mused. “May find
another case of diamonds,” he added with a forced
chuckle.
As he stepped over the first mound of clay he thought
he detected a sound behind him. Stopping dead in his
tracks, while little tufts of hair appeared to rise at the
back of his neck, he said in a low, steady tone:
“Ben. Ben Zook.”
There came no answer, no other sound.
He crossed another mound, and yet another. Then again
there came a sound as of a brick loosened from a pile.
“Ben. Ben Zook,” he called softly. Once more no answer.
Then, just as he was about to go forward again, having
thrown his light ten feet before him, he started back in
horror. There at his feet lay a dead man!
Trembling in every limb, feeling sick as if about to fall in
a faint, yet battling it back, he stood still in his tracks for
such a space of time as it might take to count one
hundred.
Then, finding he could once more trust his wobbly
knees, he moved forward three paces, threw his light at
his feet, took one good steady look, put out a hand and
picked something up, held it for ten seconds, bent low
for a better look, then like one who had seen a ghost he
went racing and staggering across the piles toward the
shore and his boat.
Fear lent him wings. Nor did he stop at the shore. With
one motion he shoved the boat into the water; with](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-75-320.jpg)
![[189]
[190]
another, regardless of wet feet, he sprang aboard and
before he could think twice found himself well out into
the lake.
There at last he dropped his oars to sit staring back at
the island and to at last slump down in his seat.
His mind, first in a whirl and next in a dead calm, was
trying to tell his senses something that seemed
impossible.
At last, raising his face to the sky, he said solemnly:
“Ben Zook is dead! Poor, harmless, golden hearted Ben
Zook! Someone killed him. I’m going after the police
boat now. The police will do what they can to find the
man. But, by all that’s good, I will find the murderer and
he will pay the price for his cowardly crime.”
Having thus made his vow, he found that strength, hope
and courage came ebbing back. Seizing his oars he
rowed rapidly toward the city.
From that time until the end Johnny conducted his
search with such reckless daring that it could bring but
one of two things: A crown of triumph or a quiet six feet
of sod in a church-yard.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-76-320.jpg)
![[191]
CHAPTER XVIII
THE RETURN OF PANTHER EYE
After accompanying the police boat to the island and
having watched in silence the investigation made by the
police, which was followed by a short search for the
man who had visited the island with such tragic results,
Johnny returned at once to the city and there made
straight toward the river bridge.
Imagine his surprise when, upon setting foot on the
bridge, he discovered light shining through the crack left
by the closed shutters of his window.
“Waiting for me,” he muttered. “Wonder which of them
it is? Well, let them wait,” he added fiercely, “I’m not so
defenseless as I might seem.” He put a hand to his side
pocket. A friendly policeman, finding Johnny unarmed
as they searched the island, had pressed a small
automatic upon him and had forgotten to take it back.
Johnny was now thankful for the oversight.
Without a second’s hesitation, but keeping a sharp
lookout that he might not be ambushed by some guard
stationed outside, he crossed the bridge, dodged down](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-77-320.jpg)
![[192]
a narrow alley and having reached the ground floor
door that led to the back stairs, paused to listen.
Having heard no sound, he pushed open the door,
closed it noiselessly behind him, then went tip-toeing
softly up the steps. At the second landing he paused to
listen, yet he heard no sound.
“That’s queer,” he whispered as he resumed his upward
climb.
As he reached his own door he recalled an old copy-
book axiom: “Delays are dangerous.” So, gripping his
automatic with one hand, he turned the knob with the
other and threw the door wide open.
Imagine his surprise at seeing a single figure slumped
down in a chair, apparently fast asleep.
The person had his back to him. There was something
vaguely familiar about that back. Slowly a smile of
pleasant anticipation spread over Johnny’s face.
“If it only were,” he whispered.
Tip-toeing to a position which gave him a side view of
the still motionless figure, he stared for a second, then
there came upon his face an unmistakable smile as he
exclaimed:
“Pant! You old trump you!”
It was indeed Pant, the Panther Eye you have known for
some time, that strange boy who had accomplished so
many seemingly impossible things through his power to
see in the night and to perform other magical tricks.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-78-320.jpg)
![[193]
[194]
“Why, it’s you!” said Pant, waking up and dragging off
his heavy glasses to have a good look at Johnny. “I
figured you’d be back sooner or later.”
“Pant,” said Johnny, lowering himself unsteadily into a
chair, “there was never a time in all my checkered
career when I was so glad to see you.”
“You must be in pretty deep,” grinned Pant, “‘powerful
deep,’ they’d say in the mountains.”
“But Pant, what happened?” asked Johnny. “How does it
come you left the mountains so soon?”
Pant put on a sad face. “Those mountain people are
superstitious, Johnny, terribly superstitious.”
“Are they?”
“Are they? Why look, Johnny, we were having a school
election down there, regular kind. Everybody wanted his
sister or his cousin or his daughter in as teacher. We
were about evenly divided and were fighting it out fair
enough with the great American institution, the ballot,
when an argument came up in which Harrison Crider,
their clerk of election, knocked Cal Nolon out of his
chair. Right there is where things began to start. There
were fifteen or twenty on a side, all armed and all
packed in one room twenty feet square. You can see
what it was going to be like, Johnny.” Pant paused to go
through the motion of mopping his brow.
“They were all standing there loaded and charged, like
bits of steel on the end of a magnet, when a strange
thing happened.” He paused to stare at the wall.
“What happened?” asked Johnny.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-79-320.jpg)
![[195]
“Well, sir, it was one of those queer things, ‘plumb
quare,’ they’d call it down in the mountains, one of
those things you can’t explain—at least most people
can’t.”
“But what did happen?” Johnny demanded.
“That’s what I’m coming to,” drawled Pant. “Well, sir,
believe me or not, there came such a brilliant flash of
light as was never before seen on sea or land (at least
that’s what they all say. I didn’t see it; had my eyes shut
tight all the time). And after that, so they say, there was
darkness, a darkness so black you couldn’t see your
hand. ‘Egyptian darkness,’ that’s what they called it,
Johnny. You’ve heard of that. It tells about it in the
Bible, the plague of darkness.
“It only lasted three minutes; but would you believe it,
Johnny, when the three minutes were up there wasn’t a
bit of fight left in them? No sir, limp as rags, every man
of ’em. And the election after that was as calm and
sedate as a Quaker sewing society.
“But, Johnny,” Pant’s face took on a sad expression,
“would you believe it? After it was all over those
superstitious people accused me of the whole affair;
said I was a witch and that I produced that darkness by
incantation. Now Johnny, I leave it to you, was that fair?
Would you think that of me?”
“No, Pant,” said Johnny with a grin, “I wouldn’t. I know
you’re no witch, and I know any incantation you might
indulge in wouldn’t get you a thing. But as for creating
that darkness, I’d say it was a slight trick compared with
others I’ve seen you do.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-80-320.jpg)
![[196]
[197]
“Ah, Johnny,” sighed Pant, “I can see the whole world’s
against me.”
“But Johnny!” he exclaimed, changing suddenly from his
attitude of mock gloom to one of alert interest, “what’s
the lay? To tell the honest truth, I’ve been bored to
death down there. I knew if I could find you I’d be able
to mix in with something active. So here I am. What
have you to offer?”
“Plenty!” said Johnny. “And, thank God, you’re here to
take a hand.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-81-320.jpg)
![[198]
CHAPTER XIX
A DEN OF THE UNDERWORLD
After dragging the Zoo telephone from its box and
taking the scrap of black cardboard from a shelf, Johnny
sat down to tell his story. He told it, too, from beginning
to end; from the school fire to the discovery of Ben
Zook, dead upon his island.
When the story had ended Pant sat for a long time
slumped down in his chair. From his motionless attitude
and his staring eyes, one might have thought him in a
trance.
He came out of this with a start and at once began to
reel off to Johnny the story he had just been told; only
now there was association, connection, and a proper
sequence to it all. He had put the puzzle together, piece
by piece. No, it was more than that. The fires were one
puzzle; Johnny’s affairs at the island another; and those
at the marsh still another. After solving each of these
separately and putting each small part in its place, Pant
had joined them all in one three-fold puzzle board that
was complete to the last letter.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-82-320.jpg)
![[199]
“Sounds great!” said Johnny breathlessly as Pant
concluded. “If all that is true we have only to find the
man.”
“Find that man!” said Pant in a tone that carried
conviction.
Twelve o’clock the following night found Johnny and
Pant in a strange place. Standing with their backs
against the unpainted and decaying side of a frame
building, they were watching a door.
The frame building formed one wall to an alley which
was in reality more path than an alley; a path of hard-
beaten mud that ran between two buildings. Although
the path ran through from street to street, the hard
beaten part of the path ended before the door which
the two boys were watching.
“Here comes another,” Pant whispered, drawing Johnny
back into the shadows.
“And another,” Johnny whispered back.
Two shadow-like creatures, appearing to hug the
darkness, came flitting down the hard-trodden path. As
each reached the end of the path the door opened
slightly, the shadows flitted in, and again the door went
dark.
“Like shades of evil ones entering their last, dark
abode,” whispered Johnny with a shudder.
They were watching that door because they had seen a
certain man enter it—a tall, stooping, slouching figure of
a man who walked with a decided limp. They had
picked up his trail in a more prosperous neighborhood](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-83-320.jpg)
![[200]
[201]
and had followed him at a distance through less and
less desirable neighborhoods, down dark streets and
rubbish strewn alleys, past barking dogs and beggars
sleeping beneath doorsteps, until of a sudden he had
turned up this path and entered this door.
“Come on,” Johnny whispered impatiently, “it’s only a
cheap eating place. I heard the dishes rattle and caught
the aroma of coffee. They’ll pay no attention to us.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” Pant grumbled. “Looks like
something else to me. But—all right, come on. Only,” he
continued, “take a table near the door.”
The place did prove to be some sort of eating place.
There were small round tables and steel framed chairs
placed about the room. Around some of these tables
men and women were seated, playing cards. Openly
roaring at good fortune or cursing an evil turn of the
deck, they paid no attention whatever to the
newcomers.
The card players were for the most part situated in the
back of the room. Tables at the front were covered with
dishes. Men and women, engaged in eating, smoking
and talking, swarmed about these tables.
Indeed, the place was so crowded that for a time
Johnny and Pant were at great difficulty to find chairs.
At last, as they were backing to a place against the wall,
a small animated being, a slender girl with dark,
vivacious eyes, rose and beckoned them to her table.
She had been sitting there alone sipping dark coffee.
Bowing his thanks, Johnny accepted a chair and
motioned Pant to another. The table was not as near the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-84-320.jpg)
![[202]
door as he might have liked, but “beggars cannot be
choosers.”
A waiter appeared.
“Coffee and something hot in a bowl,” said Johnny. “You
know the kind, red Mex. with plenty of pepper.”
“Make it the same,” said Pant.
“And waiter,” Johnny put out a hand, “something nice
for her,” he nodded his head toward the girl. “Anything
she’d like.”
“The gentlemen are kind,” said the girl in a foreign
accent, “but I have no need. I will have none.”
Since their new-found friend did not accept of their
hospitality and did not start a conversation, the two
boys sat silently staring about them.
It was a strange and motley throng that was gathered
there. Dark Italians and Greeks; a few Irish faces; some
Americans; two Mexicans in broad sombreros; three
mulatto girls at a table by themselves and a great
number of men and women of uncertain nationality.
“There! There he is,” whispered Johnny, casting his eyes
at the far corner. “And there, by all that’s good, is
Knobs, the New York firebug! They’re at the same table.
See! I can’t be mistaken. There’s the same hooked
nose, the identical stoop to his shoulders.”
“Together!” exclaimed Pant. “That changes my
conclusions a little.”](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-85-320.jpg)
![[203]
“Don’t appear to see them,” whispered Johnny. “What
are we to do?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps a police raid. But not yet; I want
to study them.”
Their bowls of steaming red Mulligan had arrived. They
had paid their checks and had begun to sip the fiery
stuff, when of a sudden there came cries of “Jensie!
Jensie!” and every eye was turned in their direction.
Johnny felt his face suddenly grow hot. Had he been
recognized? This beyond doubt was a den of the
underworld. Was this a cry which was but a signal for a
“Rush the bulls”?
Since he could not tell, and since everyone remained in
his seat, he did not move.
“If the gentlemen will please hold their bowls,” said the
girl, smiling as she handed each his bowl.
What did this mean? They were soon to see. Stepping
with a fairy-like lightness from floor to chair, and chair to
table, the girl made a low bow and then as a piano in a
corner struck up a lively air she began a dance on the
table top.
It was such a wild, whirling dance as neither of the boys
had seen before. It seemed incredible that the whole
affair could be performed upon so small a table top.
Indeed, at one time Johnny did feel a slight pat upon
his knee and realized in a vague sort of way that the
velvet slippered foot of this little enchantress had rested
there for an instant.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-86-320.jpg)
![[204]
[205]
No greater misfortune could have befallen the two boys
than this being seated by the dancer’s table. It focussed
all eyes upon them. Their detection was inevitable. They
expected it. But, coming sooner than they could dream,
it caught them unawares. With a suddenness that was
terrible, at the end of the applause that followed the
girl’s performance, there came a death-like pause,
broken by a single hissed-out word.
The next instant a huge man with a great knife
gleaming in his hand launched himself at Pant.
Taken entirely unawares, the boy must have been
stabbed through and through had it not been for a
curious interference. The man’s arm, struck by a sudden
weight, shot downward to drive the knife into the floor.
The next instant, as a tremendous uproar began, there
came a sudden and terrible flash of light followed by
darkness black as ink.
Johnny, having struggled to his feet, was groping blindly
about him when a hand gripped his shoulder and a
voice whispered:
“This way out.”
At the same moment he felt a tug at the back of his
coat.
Moving forward slowly, led by Pant and being tugged at
from behind, he at last came to the door and ten
seconds later found himself in the outer semi-darkness
of the street.
Feeling the tug at his coat lessening, he turned about to
see Jensie, the dancing girl.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-87-320.jpg)
![[206]
“Do you know that she saved your life?” he whispered
to Pant. “She leaped squarely upon that big villain’s
arm.”
“Rode it like I might a mule,” laughed the girl. “And you,
Mister,” she turned to Pant, “you are a Devil. You make
a terrible light, you then make terrible night. You are a
wonderful Devil!” and with a flash of her white teeth she
was gone.
“Now what?” asked Johnny.
“We cannot do better than to follow. They will be out at
us like a pack of rats in another minute.”
“How about a police raid?”
“Not to-night. It wouldn’t do any good. The birds have
flown.”
At this Pant led the way rapidly out of the narrow alley
into more frequented and safer ways.
Little did Johnny dream as he crept beneath the covers
that night that the following night would see the end of
all this little drama in which he had been playing a part.
Yet so it was to be.
As for Pant, who slept upon a cot in one corner of
Johnny’s room, he was dreaming of a slender figure and
of big, dark, Gypsy eyes. He was indulging in romantic
thoughts—the first of his life. That Gypsy-like girl of the
underworld den had somehow taken possession of his
thoughts. Many times before had he barely escaped
death, but never before had his life been saved by a
girl.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-88-320.jpg)
![[207]
[208]
“She’s a Gypsy,” he whispered to himself, “only a Gypsy
girl. But me; who am I? Who knows? Perhaps I am
Gypsy myself.”
Through his mind there passed a wish that was more
than half prayer: “May the time come when I can repay
her.” This wish was to be granted, far sooner than he
knew.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-89-320.jpg)
![[209]
CHAPTER XX
JOHNNY STRIKES FIRST
At a quarter of six next evening, at the request of the
Fire Chief, Johnny was lurking in the shadows back of
the building on Randolph Street that housed such a
strange collection of commodities: chemicals, diamonds,
juvenile books, novelties and Knobs, the suspected
firebug.
Earlier that day a phone call had tipped off the Chief.
According to the call, Knobs Whittaker would bear a
little extra watching that night. While putting little faith
in this tip, the Chief had no desire to neglect the least
clue which might assist in bringing to an end the series
of disastrous fires which were reflecting great discredit
upon his department. Acting upon the tip he had
stationed men at every point which Knobs had been
seen to frequent.
Johnny’s station was this building. He had come around
behind to have a look at possible exits there. Having
satisfied his mind in this matter, he was about to make
his way back along the wall to the street when he was
halted by the sudden sound of a truck entering the
alley.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5278420-250621220422-135c8e16/85/Transmedia-Frictions-The-Digital-The-Arts-And-The-Humanities-Marsha-Kinder-90-320.jpg)
Transmedia Frictions The Digital The Arts And The Humanities Marsha Kinder
- 1. Transmedia Frictions The Digital The Arts And The Humanities Marsha Kinder download https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-frictions-the-digital- the-arts-and-the-humanities-marsha-kinder-10556840 Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com
- 2. Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be interested in. You can click the link to download. Transmedia Frictions The Digital The Arts And The Humanities Marsha Kinder Editor Tara Mcpherson Editor https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-frictions-the-digital-the- arts-and-the-humanities-marsha-kinder-editor-tara-mcpherson- editor-51824134 Transmedia Archaeology Storytelling In The Borderlines Of Science Fiction Comics And Pulp Magazines Carlos A Scolari https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-archaeology-storytelling-in- the-borderlines-of-science-fiction-comics-and-pulp-magazines-carlos-a- scolari-5380556 Fantastic Transmedia Narrative Play And Memory Across Science Fiction And Fantasy Storyworlds Colin B Harvey Auth https://ebookbell.com/product/fantastic-transmedia-narrative-play-and- memory-across-science-fiction-and-fantasy-storyworlds-colin-b-harvey- auth-5376098 Science Fiction Fantasy And Politics Transmedia Worldbuilding Beyond Capitalism 1st Edition Dan Hasslerfores https://ebookbell.com/product/science-fiction-fantasy-and-politics- transmedia-worldbuilding-beyond-capitalism-1st-edition-dan- hasslerfores-12204414
- 3. Transmediagenre Rethinking Genre In A Multiplatform Culture Matthew Freeman https://ebookbell.com/product/transmediagenre-rethinking-genre-in-a- multiplatform-culture-matthew-freeman-49112774 Transmedia Character Studies Tobias Kunz Lukas Ra Wilde https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-character-studies-tobias- kunz-lukas-ra-wilde-49422264 Transmedia Change Pedagogy And Practice For Sociallyconcerned Transmedia Stories 1st Edition Kevin Moloney Ed https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-change-pedagogy-and-practice- for-sociallyconcerned-transmedia-stories-1st-edition-kevin-moloney- ed-50095610 Transmedia Directors Artistry Industry And New Audiovisual Aesthetics Carol Vernallis Holly Rogers Lisa Perrott https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-directors-artistry-industry- and-new-audiovisual-aesthetics-carol-vernallis-holly-rogers-lisa- perrott-50228688 Transmedia Television New Trends In Network Serial Production M J Clarke https://ebookbell.com/product/transmedia-television-new-trends-in- network-serial-production-m-j-clarke-50667244
- 5. TRANSMEDIA FRICTIONS The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities EDITED BY Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
- 8. TRANSMEDIA FRICTIONS The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities EDITED BY Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
- 9. University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, CA © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Cataloguing-in-Publication Data on file at the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-520-28185-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-520-95769-5 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper). Cover image: From Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O'Neill (2002). Image courtesy of Pat O'Neill and The Labyrinth Project.
- 10. We dedicate this volume to all those who have created new demands by working at the pressure point between theory and practice—not only those historic filmmakers like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Deren whose experimentation we are still mining for theoretical implications, but also those contemporary theorists who have generated transmedia frictions by venturing into the realm of production.
- 11. One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. WALTER BENJAMIN
- 12. Acknowledgments • xi Preface: Origins, Agents, and Alternative Archaeologies • xiii PART I. MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND PRODUCTIVE PRECURSORS Medium Specificity and Productive Precursors: An Introduction • 3 Marsha Kinder Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis • 20 N. Katherine Hayles Postmedia Aesthetics • 34 Lev Manovich If–Then–Else: Memory and the Path Not Taken • 45 Edward Branigan Cyberspace and Its Precursors: Lintsbach,Warburg, Eisenstein • 80 Yuri Tsivian PastIndiscretions:DigitalArchivesandRecombinantHistory • 100 Steve Anderson Films Beget Digital Media • 115 Stephen Mamber CONTENTS
- 13. viii • C O N T E N T S Navigating the Ocean of Streams of Story • 126 Grahame Weinbren IsThis Not a Screen? Notes on the Mobile Phone and Cinema • 147 Caroline Bassett PART II. DIGITAL POSSIBILITIES AND THE REIMAGINING OF POLITICS, PLACE, AND THE SELF Digital Possibilities and the Reimagining of Politics, Place, and the Self: An Introduction • 161 Tara McPherson Transnational/National Digital Imaginaries • 180 John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann Is (Cyber) Space the Place? • 198 Herman Gray Linkages: Political Topography and Networked Topology • 211 David Wade Crane The Database City: The Digital Possessive and Hollywood Boulevard • 236 Eric Gordon Cuba, Cyberculture, and the Exile Discourse • 259 Cristina Venegas Thinking Digitally/Acting Locally: Interactive Narrative, Neighborhood Soil, and La Cosecha Nuestra Community • 272 John T. Caldwell Video Installation Art as Uncanny Shock, or How Bruce Nauman’s Corridors Expand Sensory Life • 291 Mark B.N. Hansen Braingirls and Fleshmonsters • 316 Holly Willis Tech-illa Sunrise (.txt con Sangrita) • 330 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña Works Cited • 339 Index • 373
- 14. ix STEVE ANDERSON University of Southern California (USC) Los Angeles, California CAROLINE BASSETT University of Sussex Brighton, United Kingdom EDWARD BRANIGAN University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) Santa Barbara, California JOHN T. CALDWELL University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Los Angeles, California DAVID WADE CRANE Independent Scholar San Francisco, California GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA Artist San Francisco, California ERIC GORDON Emerson College Boston, Massachusetts HERMAN GRAY University of California at Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, California MARK B. N. HANSEN Duke University Durham, North Carolina N. KATHERINE HAYLES Duke University Durham, North Carolina CONTRIBUTORS
- 15. x • C O N T R I B U T O R S JOHN HESS Coeditor of Jump Cut Oakland, California MARSHA KINDER University of Southern California (USC) Los Angeles, California RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER Artist Montréal, Québec, Canada STEPHEN MAMBER University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Los Angeles, California LEV MANOVICH City University of New York New York, New York TARA MCPHERSON University of Southern Califronia (USC) Los Angeles, California YURI TSIVIAN University of Chicago Chicago, Illinois CRISTINA VENEGAS University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) Santa Barbara, California GRAHAME WEINBREN School of Visual Ats New York, New York HOLLY WILLIS University of Southeren California (USC) Los Angeles, California PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN Ithaca College Ithaca, New York
- 16. xi We thank all the scholars who helped make the original Interactive Frictions conference at the University of Southern California (USC) in June 1999 such a transformative event—not only for those who attended and participated in the program, but also more generally for the field. We are especially grateful to Alison Trope, who cohosted the con- ference; Holly Willis, who cocurated the exhibition at USC’s Fisher Gallery; and Steve Anderson, who produced the written program that detailed all of the papers and perfor- mances. Doctoral students in cinema at the time, all three subsequently emerged as innovative media scholars working at the cutting edge of experimentation and expanding the boundaries of the field. We acknowledge the crucial contributions of those who collaborated with us on the pioneering projects that grew out of the conference and enabled us to enhance the inter- play between theory and practice: Rosemary Comella, Kristy H.A. Kang, and Scott Mahoy at The Labyrinth Project (a research initiative on database narrative and the digital humanities); Steve Anderson, Craig Dietrich, Erik Loyer, Raegan Kelly, and numerous others at Vectors (a born-digital online journal that enables humanities scholars to create truly transmedia publications); and Anderson, Dietrich, Loyer, Micha Cardenas, and Alexei Taylor and many others at Scalar (a free, open-source authoring and publishing platform that makes it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online). We especially thank all the authors who contributed essays to this volume, most of which were originally presented at the conference. They have been extraordinarily patient ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- 17. xii • A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S and loyal to this project, willing to look back at their earlier work with hindsight and see how it helped shape their later writings. At the University of California Press, we are especially grateful to Mary Francis, who not only has been committed to the project over the years but has also been open to changes in how it has been framed. She never lost faith in us or our project. At the press we were also fortunate to be working with Kate Hoffman as project editor and Kim Hoge- land and Aimee Goggins. We also want to thank our superb copy editor Richard Earles and excellent indexer J. Naomi Linzer for their thoroughness and attention to detail. And at USC we are grateful, as ever, to Carolyn Tanner for her patience and efficiency. Most of all, we want to acknowledge the crucial contribution of our talented editorial assistant Andy Myers, who proved invaluable in helping us prepare the manuscript.
- 18. xiii PREFACE Origins, Agents, and Alternative Archaeologies Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson Sparks. Heat. Conflict. This is what friction generates. Using friction as a catalyst, our event features work produced at the pressure point between theory and practice. It brings together artists and scholars from different realms, at different stages of their careers, working both individually and in collaboration to spark an array of transmedia frictions. “PERFORMING INTERACTIVE FRICTIONS,” CONFERENCE PROGRAM, 1999 A familiar tale now circulates as an origin story for the emerging field of the digital humanities. In its Wikipedia entry, the story goes like this: Digital humanities descends from the field of humanities computing . . . whose origins reach back to the late 1940s in the pioneering work of Roberto Busa. The Text Encoding Initiative, born from the desire to create a standard encoding scheme for humanities electronic texts, is the outstanding achievement of early humanities com- puting. The project was launched in 1987 and published the first full version of the TEI Guidelines in May 1994. In the nineties, major digital text and image archives emerged at centers of humanities computing in the U.S. (e.g. the Women Writers Project, the Rossetti Archive, and The William Blake Archive), which demonstrated the sophistication and robustness of text-encoding for literature. The term “digital humanities” is widely attributed to the editors of the 2004 volume A Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth). That work, like the Wikipedia excerpt, frames the digital humanities in a direct lineage from the compu- tational humanities and “half a century of textually focused computing.” (It also includes a preface by Father Busa which functions rather like a benediction for the field.) The book’s introduction goes on to note that “especially since the 1990s . . . advances in tech- nology have made it . . . possible . . . to embrace the full range of multimedia,” and the
- 19. xiv • P R E F A C E expansive volume includes entries on multimedia, film, music, and the performing arts. Nonetheless, across the various stories we tell and are told about the digital humanities, certain aspects of “textually focused computing” such as TEI remain quite central. In the Companion, the 1990s may add new media to the mix, but computationally processed text is still where it all began. Transmedia Frictions seeks to expand these familiar tales and offer up other, parallel histories for the origins of the digital humanities. These alternative archaeologies include film and digital media studies, narrative studies, the visual arts, design, and visual studies. While work in the encoding and marking up of text is undoubtedly important for the digital humanities, broadening the precursors for the field opens up new possibilities for engaging the richly mediated and deeply visual culture in which computation came of age. During the same time frame in which the computational humanities were taking root, scholars, technologists, and artists were exploring the potential of computers for many modes of expression and narrative, in spaces ranging from the collaborative arts group E.A.T. to SIGGRAPH to early efforts in electronic literature.1 These experiments, in turn, drew upon long traditions in film and media culture, linking the arts, the humanities, and the digital in powerful ways. A broadened understanding of the origins of the digital humanities will be necessary if we are to have any hope of mining the com- plexity of our contemporary moment. Text is certainly important to computation today, but so too are still and moving images and audio, as the seventy-two hours of video uploaded every minute to YouTube’s servers underscore. Imagining the digital humani- ties as descending from E.A.T. collaborator John Cage as much as from Father Busa also helps to route aesthetics and politics back into the origin stories. Transmedia Frictions had its own origins in a three-day event in June 1999 on the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. Sponsored by The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communica- tion, Interactive Frictions comprised plenary sessions, juried papers, a digital salon, and an art exhibition at the Fisher Gallery that explored interactive narrative at the pressure points between theory and practice. It brought cutting-edge artists and media practition- ers together with cultural historians, traditional narrative theorists, and the then emer- gent voices of digital media theory. The energy generated across that weekend was pal- pable, and the discussions mapped the contours of this new field of digital media studies in ways that continue to resonate today in areas such as the digital humanities, software studies, database narrative, media archaeology, and new media arts. This volume argues for the value of tracking earlier media and the discourse that helped define their functional differences from what is new, encompassing text but also other media forms. The emphasis, then as now, was on dialectics—on the frictions pro- duced by productive juxtapositions between past and future, history and fiction, theory and practice, change and continuity, text and image, visuals and sounds, narrative and database. Another such friction is that between various origin stories for the digital humanities. We see these frictions as generative and positive.
- 20. P R E F A C E • xv This anthology serves at once as documentation and expansion of the original sym- posium, providing a record of the conversations begun in 1999 while also tracking their unfolding across a variety of disciplines for more than a decade. The intervening years have been a generative time for digital media, both as a set of cultural and industrial practices and as a subject of critical reflection and theory. From mobile phones to video games, from social networks to iPads, electronic platforms and proliferating devices are a ubiquitous aspect of daily life in industrialized society and, increasingly, in developing nations, transforming our concepts of political activism and revolution. In ways we couldn’t have precisely predicted in 1999 (even as we somehow knew that they were coming), “interactive frictions” now seem thoroughly woven into the texture of everyday living. The very ubiquity of digital media forms only reinforces the need to develop critical vocabularies to evaluate and ideologically interrogate this world we now inhabit. The original participants at our 1999 event were pioneering agents in honing these very vocabularies, and most are still leaders in the study of the digital. From N. Katherine Hayles to Lev Manovich and Wendy Chun, from Yuri Tsivian to Edward Branigan and Mark Hansen, from Margaret Morse to Anne-Marie Duguet and Pat Mellencamp, from Henry Jenkins to Justine Cassell and Yasmin Kafai, from John Caldwell to Cristina Ven- egas and Hamid Naficy, from Lisa Parks to Anna Everett and Alison Trope, from Vivian Sobchack to Janet Murray and George Landow, from Ellen Seiter to Randal Packer and Eric Freedman, from Ian Bogost to Steve Anderson and Holly Willis, from Steve Mamber to Peter Lunenfeld and Richard Weinberg, these scholars who joined us in 1999 con- tinue to define and shape the study of the digital today. Collectively, they have published numerous books and articles, produced new models of digital publishing and interactive scholarship, launched innovative new graduate programs, revamped undergraduate cur- ricula, influenced national policy debates, initiated various subfields, and shaped the agenda at national foundations. Other contributors to the symposium included interna- tional artists and industry leaders: Rebecca Allen, Mark Amerika, Cindy Bernard, Sawad Brooks, Nancy Buchanan, Rosemary Comella, Vilsoni Hereniko, Fran Ilich, Adriene Jenik, Isaac Julien, Glenn Kaino, Kristy Kang, Brenda Laurel, George Legrady, Erik Loyer, Laird Malamed, Pedro Meyer, Michael Nash, Pat O’Neill, Christine Panushka, Sara Rob- erts, Vibeke Sorensen, Beth Stryker, Bill Viola, Femke Wolting, Norman Yonemoto, Jody Zellen, and Eric Zimmerman, to name just a few. Most importantly, these groups— scholars, artists, entrepreneurs—interacted in fruitful and productive ways. Across the weekend and as the conversation percolated and flowed, it was often hard to tell the artist from the scholar—particularly with figures like Michele Citron, Allison DeFren, Mary Flanagan, Norman Klein, Marcos Novak, Sandy Stone, James Tobias, and Fabian Wagmister. We were very much operating in the zone between theory and prac- tice, honing a shared language at the interstices. The original participants as well as the authors and artists gathered together in this volume continue to mine this fertile terrain. The move from the 1999 Interactive Frictions conference to this anthology published fifteen years later is marked by a significant change in title. We replaced “Interactive”
- 21. xvi • P R E F A C E (a concept now taken for granted with digital media) with “Transmedia.” Introduced in 1991 in Marsha Kinder’s book Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games, this term proved central to arguments about medium specificity, both then and now. To maintain the line of continuity between conference and anthology, we retained the word “Frictions,” which still evokes not only the vigorous debates being generated by the conver- gence of rival material forms rubbing up against each other but also (through rhyming consonance) a productive vacillation between fictions and histories, the virtual and the real. Paradoxically, even within our current era of postmedia pronouncements, one of the most vibrant transmedia frictions is the debate over medium specificity—whether it’s still meaningful or now obsolete. Given the increasingly rapid emergence and conver- gence of new media forms, it is possible to argue that a discourse on medium specificity enables us to explore the social and aesthetic potential of each and thereby recuperate unique possibilities that otherwise might be lost. As N. Katherine Hayles puts it most succinctly, precisely because of the accelerating speed of these combinations, “clarity about the functionalities of different media is now more crucial than ever.” Or to state it another way, transmedia networks share similar dynamics with transnational studies; movement beyond the boundaries of any specific medium or nation does not render those entities or their borders meaningless, but rather requires us to look more closely at the cultural and historical specificity of the particular combination. Otherwise, “trans- media” and “transnational” would become meaningless buzzwords like “global.” As Alan Liu and others have argued, such debates are also deeply relevant to what fields like the digital humanities and digital media studies will become.2 This volume gave some of the symposium participants a chance to reflect on a decade of changes in the field—not only in their own creative and scholarly work, but also in the new breed of students they are mentoring and the new programs they helped generate, both in and outside of the academy. In the past fifteen years, many of the symposium participants moved from theory to hands-on production, if they were not already combin- ing both at the time of the conference. So this volume also enables us to gauge the grow- ing interplay between theory and practice that has been central to fields like the digital humanities, software studies, and digital media studies. More specifically, it gives us a chance to assess the practices that grew out of the conference, the various models of digital scholarship, interactive narrative, database documentary, born-digital disserta- tions, and social networks that have helped define the study of digital media across the university. Across their range and scope, these projects and partnerships model new modes of collaborative practice, emergent forms of research and scholarship, and exciting models of community and connection. Such work also makes tangible our original call to exper- iment with narrative forms and immersive pleasures. Excerpts from many of these projects are included on the website (http://scalar.usc.edu/works/transmediafrictions) that accompanies this volume, allowing them to be experienced in a format that better respects their interactive, temporal, sensory, and affective dimensions.
- 22. P R E F A C E • xvii This volume’s essays are divided into two sections. The first focuses on medium spe- cificity and transmedia precursors, which includes many of the key arguments from the conference between formalists and cultural historians and extends them to other, more recent cultural forms, including mobile phones. The second looks forward to digital pos- sibilities and to the “rewiring” of politics, place, and the self, with an emphasis on the kinds of cultural debates and discursive frictions these changes, both real and imagined, have generated. Yet in both sections the essays interweave issues of form, cultural con- text, and ideology—the division is primarily a matter of emphasis. Of particular value is the sense of historical scope the volume as a whole provides, serving as a robust document of the relations between digital theory and practice. Many of the essays represent work originally presented at the conference, some deliberately retaining the flavor of those earlier discursive frictions. Other essays have been added to supplement the original material. Although we gave all contributors an opportunity to revise their essays with historical hindsight and to add a brief “update” commenting on this process, not everyone thought it was necessary. Others built the update into their revisions. What has been added is a website with interactive notes, excerpts, and illustra- tions that help make the essays come alive. The website helps fulfill our original call for generating new productive frictions across a wide range of cultural forms, including database narrative and archival cultural history. Together, the book and website map alternate archaeologies for the study of the digital within the arts and humanities that push beyond the computational manipulation of text. Across this conversation, all narra- tive texts—including history, theory, and artistic practice—must remain open. Our origin stories should be broad, catalytic, and expansive. Or, as Grahame Weinbren puts it in this latest version of his essay, “When we enter the realm of the digital, change will always be an option.” NOTES 1. E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) was a nonprofit collaborative established to foster connections between artists and engineers. It was formally launched in 1967 by engi- neers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer and the artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whit- man. The group was closely affiliated with Bell Labs and produced a broad array of work. Similar efforts were also underway on the U.S. West Coast, especially the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, also begun in 1967. These endeavors, as well as early work in electronic literature, music, and animation, offer rich origin stories for today’s digital humanities that push far beyond the domain of TEI. 2. Debates around the role of cultural theory and ideology within the digital humanities have recently been picking up steam. See, for instance, the collection Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, as well as online discussion on the HASTAC Scholars’ site, at http://transformdh.org, and at http://dhpoco.org. Forthcoming special issues of Differ- ences and of American Literature also take up these debates.
- 24. PART I MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND PRODUCTIVE PRECURSORS
- 26. 3 In this era of transmedia discourse and postmedia pronouncements, we might question whether it is still productive to talk about medium specificity. Yet, given that new media forms are replacing each other so rapidly—usually before we have time to fully explore their social and aesthetic potential—perhaps a discourse on medium specificity might enable us to recuperate unique possibilities that otherwise would have been lost. In 1999 at the Interactive Frictions conference, one could still hear echoes of Marshall McLuhan’s famous refrain that fetishized medium specificity for the fifties—“the medium is the message!” Adopting this idea from turn-of-the-century modernism, McLuhan applied it to the emerging new medium of television as it began displacing cinema as the reigning mass medium worldwide (129). But by 1999, at the end of the millennium, this utopian refrain was being repurposed for computers, the Internet, digital media, and the database documents they spawned. This refrain was challenged at the conference by even stronger echoes of Raymond Williams’s influential critique of “technological determinism,” which, he claimed, was based on a medium specificity that ignored the way old power struggles were inevitably remapped onto newly emergent forms (Television 5). In the late 1970s and 1980s, this critique sharpened the ideological edge of British cultural studies and its “thick” descrip- tions of reception, a cluster of politically engaged methodologies that privileged active readings by a diverse range of historically situated spectators over technological or aes- thetic mastery by any single artist in any specific medium. Still, the analysis of medium specificity survived these cultural debates, for even Williams recognized the value of MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND PRODUCTIVE PRECURSORS An Introduction Marsha Kinder
- 27. 4 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S defining the formal specificity of television—its unique combination of segmentation and endless flow. By the end of the 1990s, medium specificity had regained considerable force within the emerging discourse on digital media yet was still frequently accompanied by some form of defensiveness. For example, in Visual Digital Culture (2000), British new media theorist Andrew Darley felt compelled to vigorously defend his interest in the formal aesthetics and medium specificity of popular visual entertainment genres (such as spec- tacle cinema, computer animation, music video, simulation rides, and computer games) because he knew such discussions would be read as deviations from the ideological rig- ors of British cultural studies (1–8). Despite the assumed postmodernist erasure of the distinction between high and low culture, he realized that such aesthetic concerns would be deemed more appropriate to the elite “marginal practices” of avant-garde computer art (his usual object of study) than to the “low” forms of popular entertainment he was now discussing (which typically fell under the scrutiny of cultural studies). To bolster his case, Darley turned to Susan Sontag and David Bordwell (odd bedfellows), whose Against Interpretation and Planet Hong Kong used phenomenology and neoformalism, respec- tively (in different decades and with different ideological goals) to legitimize the aesthet- ics of medium specificity both for popular and for experimental forms. These later digital versions of medium specificity opened a space for a revival of struc- turalism, generating a new mode of discourse that I call “cyberstructuralism.” These emergent objects of study seemed to arouse a desire for clear-cut distinctions between old and new media, showing (as Williams had warned) that technological determinism dies hard. Cyberstructuralist dynamics are especially apparent in Lev Manovich’s pio- neering book The Language of New Media (2001). The reemergence of medium specificity as a driving force is an idea that is not only implicit in his title but also explicitly defended against potential charges of naive obsolescence: In fact, regardless of how often we repeat in public that the modernist notion of medium specificity (“every medium should develop its own unique language”) is obsolete, we do expect computer narratives to showcase new aesthetic possibilities that did not exist before digital computers. In short, we want them to be new media specific. (237) While satisfying this desire for medium-specific distinctions, cyberstructuralism fre- quently performs three other collateral moves that prove problematic: it privileges for- malism while ignoring the ideological implications of structural choices; it treats narra- tive as a rigid formal structure defined by a chain of causality and a set of binary oppositions, while minimizing its cognitive, affective, and social functions; and it fosters an illusion of wholeness without leaving room for the unknown. Many contemporary media theorists have called attention to these limitations, includ- ing Diana Taylor, who sees computer-based archival histories not as neutral repositories of data but as forms of knowledge-production with dire ideological effects.1 Taylor chal-
- 28. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 5 lenges the illusion of wholeness found in these archival histories by exposing what has been excluded. In The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Amer- icas (2003), she argues for the inclusion of live performance genres, for otherwise the ephemeral knowledge they are based on will be lost and their performers relegated to the margins of history. Even before the digital era, these limitations in structuralism had been exposed by Roland Barthes, whose work (as we see in this volume) is frequently referenced by new media theorists and historians of digital culture. His critique was most powerful in those works that revealed his own crucial move from structuralist binaries to open-ended post-structuralist networks. For example, in S/Z (1970; the quo- tations used here are from the translation by Richard Miller, published in 1974), a theory of reading that transforms narrative into an open-ended database, he famously claims that the “text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds. . . . [T]he systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language” (5–6). As the emergent post-structuralist feminists of the 1970s and 1980s acknowledged, Barthes’s S/Z had thereby redefined the goal of nar- rative theory: it was no longer focusing (as Teresa de Lauretis succinctly put it) on “estab- lishing a logic, a grammar, or a formal rhetoric of narrative . . . (its component units and their relations)” but rather on understanding “the nature of the structuring and destructuring . . . a production of meaning which involves a subject in a social field” (105). As soon as Barthes moved the process of inquiry into the social field, all textual meanings necessarily took on ideological implications—even those posing as neutral denotations, as if to falsely suggest that language could ever be “innocent.” In S/Z, Bar- thes seemed to take great delight in introducing precise structuralist binaries (e.g., deno- tation/connotation, readerly/writerly, sequential narrative/agglomerative database) and then playfully exploding them with his dialectics (e.g., making “denotation” the last of the connotations, and performing a writerly reading of the readerly). It was as if he were underscoring his own movement beyond structuralism into the more complex ideologi- cal realm of post-structuralism, where gaps in our knowledge are exposed and room is left for the unknown. It is this insistence on the inevitability of both open-endedness and ideological meaning that keeps Barthes so crucial to the ongoing debates on medium specificity and postmedia discourse, particularly as argued in this volume. This section of our anthology addresses some of the ways these arguments about medium specificity were voiced at the conference and continued to be revised in the years that followed, particularly with the emergence of transmedia migration, mobile tech- nologies, and other digital forms of social networking. Focusing on four pairs of essays, this introduction stages these texts as a series of interwoven dialogues that give different narrative accounts of what is at stake in medium specificity historically and ideologically; which precursors, contemporary theorists, or artists are the main protagonists in this unfolding discursive drama; and how the interactive frictions and continuities between old and new forms can be read most productively within their social and historical contexts.
- 29. 6 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S HAYLES AND MANOVICH ON MEDIUM SPECIFICITY The first pair of essays are by N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich, who were then (and have remained) two of the most rigorous and influential new media theorists in the field. Although she hails from literary studies and he comes from cinema, they both engage medium specificity from a cyberstructuralist perspective, even though Manovich explicitly acknowledges the “severe limitations” of structuralism. Despite their dedication to considering new media’s relations with earlier forms, their primary contributions lie in their ability to identify formal and material differences with great clarity and precision. Hayles’s contribution to this volume is the original paper she delivered at the confer- ence, “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Although she would later publish several major books, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), Writing Machines (2002), My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), her distinction between flat print and deep code still lies at the heart of her work on medium specificity. As she puts it in her “Afterthoughts,” this distinction is “the beginning of a trajectory that continues to spin out its implications in my work and thought.” With her signature lucidity and elegance in structuring a line of argument and her astuteness in selecting a rich assortment of persuasive concrete exam- ples, this essay presents a coherent case on behalf of a medium-specific analysis that addresses both the particularity of the form and one medium’s citations and imitations of another. In this way, it attends to what she calls “simulation and instantiation” rather than merely “similarity and difference.” Thus, she strategically insists that the term “hypertext” be applied to print as well as to digital media—to traditional encyclopedias and brilliant experimental novels like Dictionary of the Khazars as well as to electronic CD-ROMs and websites. Otherwise we would lose a valuable opportunity “to understand how a literary genre mutates and transforms when it is instantiated in different media.” Although she frames these mutating movements from one medium to another as a historical process that forces us to deal with the materiality of literary texts, she does not address how these formal changes relate to larger social or cultural histories. The rest of her essay is concerned with defining “what distinguishes hypertext instan- tiated in a computer from hypertext in book form.” Listing eight concrete characteristics, she creates a useful typology that considers both the medium itself (their instantiation in digital computers) and the extent to which their effects can be simulated in print. Like a mathematical problem of subtraction, this two-step calculation repeatedly yields a sin- gular functional difference: “print is flat, code is deep.” Like most of the writers within this section of the anthology, Hayles designates Barthes as a crucial precursor of hypertext, particularly because he was singled out so convincingly by George Landow (also a keynote speaker at the conference) in his groundbreaking book Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Focusing on Barthes’s essay, “From Work to Text,” Hayles begins by agreeing with Landow (and David Bolter) that Barthes “uncannily anticipates electronic hypertext.” Yet she is equally
- 30. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 7 convinced that Barthes’s “vision remains rooted in print culture.” Thus, she catalogues his works along with those other print hypertexts—old encyclopedias and experimental nov- els whose relationship to electronic hypertext is simulated. Following the same strategy that she pursued with her typology, she uses this close comparison to uncover a key func- tional difference: “In positioning text against work, Barthes was among those who helped initiate semiotic and performative approaches to discourse, arguably one of the most important developments in literary studies in the past century. But this shift has entailed loss as well as gain. . . . [I]t also had the effect . . . of eliding differences in media.” Although Hayles argues that nondigital literary works can only “simulate” computer- mediated hypertexts and that “we have moved [far] beyond” Barthes, she denies that she is implying any teleological sense of progress or that literature is doomed. While she claims that books are “too robust, reliable, long-lived, and versatile to be rendered obsolete by digital media,” she also acknowledges that books are subject to change, which she embraces as part of living form. With historical hindsight, we see how the Kindle and iPad uphold these observations. Undoubtedly used to reassuring her more traditional literary colleagues that she is still committed to books, Hayles makes her arguments appear less radical than they actually are. In fact, they appear compatible with the more traditional tactics of comparative literary analysis: the more similar the works we compare, the more precise we can make the distinctions between them. This rhetorical strategy of reassur- ance contrasts sharply with that of Lev Manovich, who frequently emphasizes the sense of rupture even while arguing for continuities between old and new forms. Designed as a provocation, an attack on the very concept of media, Manovich’s essay, “Postmedia Aesthetics,” is not only postconference but also postpublication of The Lan- guage of New Media (2001), the groundbreaking book that has led him to be perceived by many as the world’s leading new media theorist and (along with McLuhan, to whom he is frequently compared) a strong advocate for medium specificity. Always privileging the new, Manovich presents himself as an avant-garde theorist who is constantly driving the discourse on computer culture into new conceptual domains. With its teleological posi- tion signaled by the “post” in its title, the essay implies that those who have not adopted his most recent “postmedia” vocabulary risk obsolescence or being left far behind. It attempts to settle this running argument on medium specificity through a bold act of renaming. However, Manovich was not the first to reach this conclusion. Quoting from the contributions of Anne Friedberg and Henry Jenkins in his anthology The New Media Book (2002), Dan Harries claims that With the growing use of digital video, computer-based editing and special effects, we are witnessing a convergence of media images. As Anne Friedberg notes, “the movie screen, the home television screen, and the computer screen retain their separate locations, yet the types of images you see on each of them are losing their medium-based specificity”. . . . As Henry Jenkins suggests, “because digital media potentially incorporate all previous media, it no longer makes sense to think in medium-specific terms.” (171)
- 31. 8 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S Friedberg, Jenkins, and Harries come to this conclusion from the side of reception, whereas Manovich converts it into a formalist argument aligned with technological determinism, for he argues that one of the primary causes of this “postmedia” condition is “the digital revolution of the 1980s–90s.” This move represents another break from The Language of New Media, wherein Manovich tried “to avoid using the word digital because it ambiguously refers to three unrelated concepts” (52). Dubbing our new era a “postdigital, postnet culture” (the prefix signaling not obsolescence, as in the case of “postmedia,” but a functional difference or rupture), this essay now substitutes “media” (and, by implication, its derivatives “transmedia” and “medium-specificity”) for “digital” as the primary term under attack and erasure. Although this line of argument would seem to place Manovich in sharp opposition to Hayles, who claims that medium specificity is more important than ever, it actually proves to be uncannily similar to hers. He ends up arguing for the specificity of the computer, privileging it as the technology through which all other prior forms should be reconceptualized. After presenting a series of compelling arguments for why medium specificity is no longer significant, Manovich proposes a new postmedia aesthetic that focuses on a cultural analysis of software and informational behaviors. These two terms prove very useful, for they can be applied both literally to current practices of computer- mediated communications and metaphorically to past works from precomputer culture. Like Hayles, he leads us to address the materiality of texts and the transmission of data by creating a communications typology (in this case, consisting of six characteristics rather than her eight) that considers both (to use her terms) their “instantiation in digital computers . . . and the extent to which [their] effects can be simulated in print.” Yet, to justify his application of new digital concepts to earlier, predigital forms, Manovich turns not to an analytical argument for observing the formal process of historical change (as Hayles did in defending her use of the term “hypertext”), but to one more compatible with advertising rhetoric, namely consumer appeal. He strives “to make old culture com- prehensible to new generations that are comfortable with the concepts, metaphors, and techniques of the computer and network era.” While those committed to the historical specificity of predigital media might question this strategy of rethinking old cultural forms through the metaphors of new media (per- haps fearing some kind of reductionism, say, in describing Giotto and Eisenstein as “important information designers” who deserve to be compared “alongside” contempo- rary giants like Allan Kay and Tim Berners-Lee), Manovich claims he is also motivated by an ethical obligation—to see old and new cultures as one continuum, and to enrich new culture through the use of the aesthetic techniques of old cultures. By accommodat- ing young computer-savvy users in this way, one wonders whether Manovich is really adding a new dimension to an already highly complex figure like Eisenstein or (through this act of renaming) merely substituting a more reductive way of seeing him, the same kind of reductionism that was performed by David Bordwell, who stripped Eisenstein of his dialectics so that his pure poetics could be more comfortably appreciated by Bordwell-
- 32. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 9 ian neoformalists (Cinema 114, 137). Unlike Hayles, Manovich wastes no time trying to convince us that he is avoiding a teleological notion of progress. In the essay’s final paragraphs, Manovich acknowledges a blind spot in his informa- tional aesthetic: Its privileging of cognition prevents it from dealing with affect. Although this issue is becoming increasingly important, as empirical work in neuroscience turns in this direction,2 Manovich minimizes this lack by putting himself in the company of other influential structuralists. He claims that affect has been neglected in cultural the- ory since the late 1950s “when, influenced by the mathematical theory of communica- tion, Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and others began treating cultural communication solely as a matter of encoding and decoding messages.” Like Hayles, he emphasizes the earlier Barthes, without observing that his elision of differ- ences in media (which she saw as a loss) could have been used to bolster Manovich’s own postmedia argument. More tellingly for this discussion of affect, Manovich omits the post-structuralist Barthes and his theorization of connotation and the pleasures of the text. He also omits the psychoanalytic wing of post-structuralism, including feminists and queer theorists who have been occupied with issues of pleasure and desire. Manovich attempts to fill these theoretical gaps with allusions to music—by referring to DJs and their art of sampling as “information behavior,” by noting the reliance on data processing for the “bodily experience of clubbing,” and by citing the common practice of listening to music while working on a computer. Yet such references to what he calls “affective data” might not convince us that we should give up the language of pleasure and pain, or that informational aesthetics is updating the dynamics of desire. BRANIGAN AND TSIVIAN ON PIONEERING PRECURSORS In contrast to these two cyberstructuralist arguments concerning medium specificity, narrative theorist Edward Branigan and early-cinema scholar Yuri Tsivian present essays that focus on nondigital precursors of interactive narratives and database structures from earlier periods and forms. They claim that these precursors are productive because they can potentially expand not only the creative possibilities of new media for the future but also our understanding of the past. By deepening our potential database of precursors, they further complicate the matter of defining the unique dimensions of digital hypertexts and interactive narratives. Since they are addressing works from earlier eras, perhaps it is not surprising that the papers published here are the ones presented at the conference—although both have been extensively strengthened and expanded, by new examples, extended lines of argument, and supporting notes in the case of Branigan, and by expanded visual illustrations in the case of Tsivian. Both of these essays build on the groundbreaking work of Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New, which helped deflate the utopian claims of theorists who fetishized the “newness” of digital media. Yet while her detailed cultural history demonstrated how earlier nineteenth-century technologies—like the light bulb, the telegraph, and the
- 33. 10 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S telephone—were subject to discursive debates and power struggles that are very similar to those now being waged around computers and the Internet, these two essays focus on ideas and conceptions that were formulated in those earlier eras but that can now be more readily realized through newer digital technologies. Yet unlike André Bazin’s idealist argument in his essay “The Myth of Total Cinema,” a drive he traces back to the timeless myth of Icarus, both Branigan and Tsivian (like Marvin) are responsive to the contexts of cultural and his- torical specificity and to the materiality of the medium. They both subscribe to the following argument by Walter Benjamin, which Branigan cites at the beginning of his essay: One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed tech- nical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. . . . Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. (“The Work of Art” 237) Branigan’s essay, “If–Then–Else: Memory and the Path Not Taken,” demonstrates how cognitive models from earlier eras can enrich our understanding of new media. He chooses to focus on “interactivity” (one of those terms that Manovich avoids both in his book and his essay here) because, according to Branigan, “new forms of interactive media may be useful as tools for thinking about thinking.” Thus, he sets new media in a historical context, giving what he calls “a drastically abbreviated account of how human memory has been conceived with respect to the artifacts that were designed to serve it,” thereby demonstrating what is at stake historically and philosophically in the choice of specific concrete metaphors for the mind and its mental processes. In this way, he gives greater historical weight to projects like Manovich’s that are bent on changing conceptual terms and tropes. Despite his allusions to history, Branigan deliberately rejects chrono- logical order in presenting his models and any evaluative system of ranking them, for he wants to avoid any teleological implication of progress. Yet his footnotes suggest how these mental models have influenced other latter-day theorists from Metz to Minsky. Branigan describes four models for theorizing memory, based on five specific con- crete metaphors: Plato’s wax block, Freud’s mystic writing-pad, Descartes’s sealing wax, and Plato’s aviary and Wittgenstein’s language-game (which he sees as two variants of the same model). In discussing their implications, he demonstrates how these four mod- els can be used as a basis for rethinking medium specificity, claiming that “any theory about the nature of a medium must be founded on its interactivity with present thought, and with the memory of other thoughts” and that “an art medium, whether old or new, elicits responses from us as it intermixes with memory systems.” Although such argu- ments might imply an objective basis for medium specificity, he avoids technological determinism by remaining attentive to the specific historical and cultural contexts in which it operates. What he is most interested in tracing is how “these responses, col- lectively, become part of the historical memory that will shape the next version of a
- 34. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 11 medium”—the very process that Hayles is also interested in observing. Though Branigan does not address the power struggles that become intermixed with this interaction between a material medium and the forms of human memory it comes to represent, he does leave space where such ideological negotiations can be inserted. For he sees these four theories of memory as attempts to explain how the mind is able to retain impres- sions and later adapt and mobilize them for social and physical interactions with other persons within a historically defined public sphere. These metaphoric models of human memory described by Branigan are precisely the kind that Manovich would later attack in The Language of New Media, in which he rejects “this modern desire to externalize the mind” because, he claims, “the objectification of internal, private mental processes, and their equation with external visual forms” under- mine the uniqueness and privacy of subjective experience and thereby make it easier to manipulate. Or as Manovich also puts it, “What before had been a mental process, a uniquely individual state, now became part of the public sphere” (60). This movement of mental models into the public sphere is precisely what Branigan values, for it creates a historical record of how humans have used their own tools to think about thinking and thereby provides persuasive documentation for the continuing significance of the kind of medium specificity that Manovich’s essay rejects. Thus, it is important to see how Brani- gan’s essay fits into his larger theoretical project of exploring the capacity for mental modeling in earlier narrative forms, a goal he pursued in two influential books, Point of View in the Cinema (1984) and Narrative Comprehension and Film (1992), and pushed much further in Projecting a Camera: Language-Games in Film Theory (2006). One way of possibly accounting for this difference between their respective arguments would be to consider the respective cultural influences on both theorists: that is, to see how Manovi- ch’s Russian background may have made him more concerned with the dangers of sur- veillance, political censorship, and ideological manipulation than with the expressive pos- sibilities of individual subjectivity, whereas Branigan’s early training as a Bordwellian neoformalist may have helped lead him to emphasize the importance of cognitive models. In “Cybertext and Its Precursors: Lintsbach, Warburg, Eisenstein,” Yuri Tsivian also focuses on the conceptual prefiguring of hypertext and multimedia, but he zeroes in with greater historical specificity on European modernism of the teens and twenties. Still, his chosen precursors come from diverse fields and cultures. From Tsivian’s native Latvia, “theory-minded” filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein proposes a multilinear spherical book, one of his many visionary designs that are consistent with his modernist experimentation (yet one that strengthens Manovich’s argument for seeing him as an “important informa- tion designer”). From Germany, “revolutionary art historian” Aby Warburg presents black velvet screens that function as an atlas of memory with overlapping images. And from Estonia, “visionary” linguist and mathematician Jakov Lintsbach invents a universal multimedia language. In contrast to Branigan’s precursors, these three visionaries are more interested in expanding our tangible means of writing and recording than in merely modeling the
- 35. 12 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S human mind and its mental processes through figurative language. While Branigan’s precursors offer metaphors for understanding memory, concepts that retain their status as virtual images and as tools of thinking, they remain embedded in verbal language. By contrast, the communicative modes proposed by Tsivian’s precursors are all concrete models for interfaces that they intended to produce as material objects, if only they had the time and means. The realization of this goal is now made easier by the existence of computers, which Tsivian demonstrates in the case of Lintsbach (see examples on the anthology website). Thus, in some ways, Branigan’s quotation from Benjamin is more aptly suited to Tsivian’s essay than to his own. Pointing to the pun that lies in the term “precursor,” Tsivian urges us to think of his three visionaries simply as “people who happened to be living before the age of the cursor, and whose once impossible projects look more possible nowadays.” Arguing that this form of prefiguring is not so rare as some new media theorists might make us assume, he emphasizes that it is commonplace for such ideas to precede their concrete realization. For example, though Tsivian never specifically mentions the writings of Barthes, he finds precedents for concepts like “lexia” and the “networking of texts” that later became crucial in Barthes’s theory of reading published in S/Z, a book that Landow (and other new media theorists) may have inadvertently fetishized as a singular precursor of hypertexts. Rather than merely presenting his three precursors as objects of arcane historical interest, Tsivian demonstrates the productive appeal of interactive comparisons, for just as new media enable us to see old works in new ways (his own primary goal), so do these fascinating examples enable us to design new interfaces. Tsivian has personally demon- strated this process in his own scholarly hypertext, Immaterial Bodies: Cultural Anatomy of Early Russian Films, which won the 2001 British Academy Award for best interactive learning project. Although he modestly calls himself “a poor cyber-user” dabbling in multimedia production as an amateur, Tsivian has actually done pioneering work in designing electronic scholarly hypertexts. He was a crucial collaborator in The Laby- rinth’s Project’s online constructivist courseware project, Russian Modernism and Its Inter- national Dimensions3 which demonstrates the historical roots of many aesthetic concepts (such as dialectic montage, intertextuality, and constructivism) that are now crucial to digital aesthetics. He also founded a website for film historians called Cinemetrics,4 which provides an online tool for charting the shot lengths for specific films and creates a cyber- community for scholars interested in studying the implications of such measurements. It is not difficult to see the connections between this pioneering project and the works by Lintsbach, Warburg, and Eisenstein discussed in his essay. ANDERSON AND MAMBER ON DATABASE DOCUMENTARY AND ARCHIVAL CULTURAL HISTORY Though neither of these papers was presented at the conference, both of their authors attended: Steve Anderson (coeditor of the online journal Vectors and founding director
- 36. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 13 of IMAP, the Interdivisional Media + Arts PhD program at the University of Southern California [USC] School of Cinematic Arts) was one of the co-organizers of the confer- ence, and Stephen Mamber (documentary film historian and digital media specialist in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles) was a featured speaker but gave a different paper. Given that Anderson and Mamber both explore the interplay between theory and practice, it is not surprising that their arguments are developed through specific case studies. In contrast to Branigan and Tsivian, their primary examples are contemporary; yet they refuse to fetishize “newness,” and they find productive continuities between old and new forms. They use their case studies not as precursors but as concrete illustrations of what is possible or problematic. Although Anderson focuses on history and Mamber on documentary, they both exam- ine the impact of digital technology, databases, and search engines on nonfiction narra- tive, exploring what new models have been generated. Although nonfiction is their pri- mary interest, they both see history and fiction as narrative cousins whose commingling and hybridization can be productive. Perhaps most important, they both recognize that database structures and archival histories offer a seductive promise of “total knowledge,” one that reinforces traditional epistemological assumptions about the stabilizing effects of rational order and progress. Yet they both claim that this vision of wholeness is an illusion. Instead they call attention to the inevitable gaps and random combinations in history, which they see as the driving force of narrative desire. By challenging the illusory nature of any totalizing history, they open the path for an open-ended narrative experimentation that always leaves room for the unknown and that exposes the ideological implications of all databases and their search engines. In “Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History,” Anderson exam- ines the impact of digital technologies and their information systems on the writing of history. He claims that by basing their histories on databases and search engines instead of on literary tropes, contemporary historians have created two contrasting models of database histories: “one seeking to articulate a ‘total’ history that is encyclopedic in scope and rooted in relatively stable conceptions of historical epistemology, and another that exploits digital technology’s potential for randomization and recombination in order to accommodate increasingly volatile visions of the past.” Anderson sees both forms of “database histories” as “collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated within categories and organized according to predetermined associations.” Like all discourse in the “post-Foucauldian world” and despite disavowals to the contrary, these categories and their search engines have ideological implications that shape our vision of human history. As his primary example of the encyclopedic model, Anderson uses Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Also known as The Survivors Project, it contains more than one hundred thousand hours of video testimonies from “more than
- 37. 14 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S fifty thousand Holocaust survivors from fifty-seven countries, conducted in thirty-two languages,” with “an index of approximately eighteen thousand keywords identified within the spoken testimonies.” The temporal urgency of the collection process— gathering these testimonies while the survivors are still alive—speaks to the project’s heroic high seriousness in preserving memory and history, and challenging death and oblivion. Yet, according to Anderson, there is little attention to assessing the veracity of any individual account or to drawing meaningful generalizations from the data. These limits, he claims, have already been addressed in earlier, nondigital works, both docu- mentary and fiction—in Marcel Ophüls’s documentary films on the Holocaust, including The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), and in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Funes the Memo- rious” (in which a man with perfect recall is driven mad by these rare powers and their uselessness). Although the sheer size of Spielberg’s collection may be its primary value, Anderson claims that this vastness makes its historical contents inseparable from its system of access and thereby reduces them to functioning merely as a resource for future historical narratives. Paradoxically, this vastness undermines the collection’s claims to wholeness or even to its status as history. As the ironic counterexample for the recombinant model, Anderson cites Terminal Time by the Recombinant History Project, which he describes as “an artificial intelligence apparatus” that is capable of constructing infinitely variable historical documentaries based on audience biases and beliefs. As performed by a group of artists, filmmakers, and computer scientists, this project generates historical documentaries on the fly, cover- ing the past thousand years of human history while interweaving conflicting responses from the audience (who are periodically encouraged to lie). Though he finds both projects problematic, Anderson seems more comfortable with the parodic Terminal Time (illus- trated on our anthology website) since it has no claims to truth and blatantly undermines the boundaries between fact and fiction. Giving its users the history they “deserve,” it ironically demonstrates the futility of such totalizing enterprises and challenges any lin- gering utopian assumptions about archival cultural history. Instead of examining how new digital media can transform a traditional form like history, in “Films Beget Digital Media” Stephen Mamber explores how an “old” medium like cinema can conceptually expand the narrative capacities of new digital formats. Like Anderson, he identifies two different strands in this form of nonfiction, which bridge the move from cinema to digital media: the compilation film and the autobiographical mem- oir. Less cautionary and more celebratory than Anderson, Mamber selects as his primary examples two works by well-known European filmmakers he admires: Immemory, a CD- ROM by French filmmaker Chris Marker, and The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, an immersive multiscreen museum installation coauthored by Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács and The Labyrinth Project (the research initiative and art col- lective that hosted the Interactive Frictions conference and that I have directed at USC since 1997). This installation debuted at the Getty Center in Los Angeles in 2001 and has been traveling worldwide ever since.
- 38. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 15 Given the fragmentary nature of their assets and the obvious gaps in their respective narratives, both works blatantly reject any claim to a “totalizing history.” Yet, ironically, these two choices still resonate with the two works selected by Anderson. Like the Survi- vors Project, The Danube Exodus deals with the Holocaust, but it focuses only on two specific episodes: in 1939, a Hungarian river captain transported hundreds of Jews flee- ing the Third Reich to the Black Sea, where they boarded a ship that took them to Pales- tine; the following year, the same captain transported hundreds of German farmers from Bessarabia (now Romania) back to Germany once the Soviets annexed their land. Both journeys were documented on film by the same amateur filmmaker, the Hungarian captain who transported them into history. Like Terminal Time, Immemory is an ironic compilation film composed of images from Marker’s personal collection, including a profusion of intriguing narrative fragments from many different cultures, periods, and categories, which bombard users and challenge them to make sense out of this richly diverse material. Perhaps both of these works chosen by Mamber are the kinds of idio- syncratic historical narratives that (according to Anderson) can be spun out of encyclo- pedic “total histories” like the Survivors Project. Mamber claims he chose these two works because they expand on narrative tenden- cies that were already apparent in the respective nondigital works of these filmmakers and also because they present “enlightening alternatives” for how digital media can be presented and experienced. Marker’s earlier, nondigital films already had a fragmented database structure, and “Forgács was already making beautiful, tragic collages out of found home movies.” Thus, he claims that each filmmaker brings a body of narrative experimentation that can help expand the digital media and their database structures, which is one of the reasons why The Labyrinth Project chose to collaborate with Forgács in the first place. Like Anderson, Mamber admires any attempt to acknowledge and leverage the limita- tions of the medium. Thus, he praises the way both works expose the “pastness” of the photographic images and low-res footage that are used in these pieces. Instead of reas- suring viewers that the conversion to new media will enhance their visual quality and preserve these historical fragments for all time, both works acknowledge the fragility of all media forms, including the digital. As Mamber puts it, they remind us that “new media will someday be old media.” While in Immemory this sometimes results in (what Mamber calls) a “charmingly clunky” imagery and interface, in The Danube Exodus we actually see material signs of decay on the amateur home movie footage. Another potential “limit” that Mamber leverages is the present lack of standards for displaying digital art as a museum installation, a stand-alone CD-ROM, or part of a web- site or online social network. Instead he sees this lack as an advantage because it enables artists to customize the display for the ideological goals and aesthetic pleasures of the specific project—whether for the intimacy of the CD-ROM that suits Marker’s essayist tendencies and personal tone, or the large-scale multiple screens of the museum instal- lation that convey Forgács’s belief in the epic importance of home movies.
- 39. 16 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S WEINBREN AND BASSETT ON TRANSMEDIA ENCOUNTERS WITH CINEMA The final pair of essays are by authors who did not attend the conference: Grahame Weinbren, a New York–based artist who has been experimenting with interactive cinema since the early 1980s; and Caroline Bassett, a British-based digital media theorist who extends the dialogic comparison with cinema to mobile media and issues of realism and ideological potential. As if elaborating on Mamber’s argument, both are concerned with the kinds of aesthetic and communicative pleasures these hybridized forms can deliver and the kinds of interactive experience and agency they make available to users. Weinbren’s essay, “Navigating the Ocean of Streams of Story,” was originally pub- lished in Millenium Film Journal in 1995 and was revised for this anthology in light of his own subsequent experimentation with interactive cinema (260–271).5 Like Immemory and Terminal Time, it is an open-ended project that can never be completed, especially as new versions continually appear in new anthologies. Like Mamber, he moves fluidly from literature to cinema and to interactive installations, showing how a network of early nar- rative media can enrich and shape those to come. In this way, he demonstrates that open-ended storytelling is not an oxymoron, as some theorists have argued, but a gram- mar that lies at the heart of narrative networks and predates Barthes’s S/Z. Positioning cinema between literature and new digital forms, Weinbren’s essay opens with a marvelous epigraph from Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, a writer (like Chris Marker) with an amazing Shandean capacity for spinning a complex network of interwoven tales. Rushdie’s alleged religious sacrilege (in the case of his Satanic Verses, 1988) has imbued all his writings with a deep association with death; the mortal sentence imposed on him (and later rescinded) by the Ayatollah has marked him as one of the few contemporary writers for whom the act of storytelling is literally a matter of life and death. Like a postmodernist, postcolonial Scheherazade or like Borges (whose stories each present an interface for an intriguing database narrative), Rushdie has become the ultimate metanarrative icon in both the East and the West, one who embodies the dangers of subjecting any act of writing to a closed reading within a restric- tive cultural context or frozen moment of history. Instead of pursuing these political implications, Weinbren focuses on Rushdie’s text as an influence on his own work—a pathway to his own experiences of reception. Structured around the ocean as a trope for generating and interweaving abundant streams of stories, this quoted passage from Rushdie projects not an ironic historical machine (as in Terminal Time) but an ideal “story space” for interactive fiction regardless of medium, a story space Weinbren used as a model for his own experimental narratives. In describing some of his own interactive fictions from the 1980s and ‘90s (The Erl King, 1983–86; Sonata, 1991–93; and Frames, 1999), Weinbren claims they were driven by two pairs of forces associated with medium specificity—Cinema and Cybernetics, and the Projector and the Computer. Although, like Manovich, he denies that the computer is a medium or tool, he calls it “a device that controls and presents existent media,” and
- 40. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 17 he formulates two driving questions that are directly tied to medium specificity: How does cinema change when its apparatus is linked to a computer, and what kinds of story and grammar will suit this altered cinematic medium? To answer these questions, unlike Manovich, he turns not to contemporary tropes of computer culture but, like Branigan, to Freud’s earlier modeling of mental processes, yet he uses them to address issues of pleasure and desire in reception. Specifically, he focuses on Freud’s methods of dream interpretation and on the coded nonlinear gram- mar of his dreamwork theory, particularly the concept of “condensation.” Weinbren sub- jects these theoretical models to the same kind of adaptive process that is now transform- ing the medium of cinema, rewriting them in light of the problems raised by computer-related interactive forms. As his privileged metanarrative model of interactive storytelling, Weinbren chooses Freud’s case study of The Wolf Man (1914–15), the same text used by Peter Brooks in his brilliant work of narrative theory, Reading for the Plot (1984) (264–286).6 Although Brooks focuses on literary narrative rather than cinema or computer-related forms, his theory is ideally suited to conceptualizing a narrative field that is resistant to closure and receptive to story variations. For Brooks reads all stories as obituaries designed to fore- stall a premature death and posits an expansive middle motored by desire. That’s why, he explains, the greatest narratives are usually so long (think of the work of Proust, Melville, Joyce, Scheherazade, and—one could add—Rushdie), and why, as we move through their expansive middles, we experience them as “force fields of desire.” Instead of using the story of Oedipus as his master narrative, Brooks props his theory on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (which offers him Eros and Thanatos as primary engines of narrative drive) and on the The Wolf Man (an open-ended network of interwoven stories that uses transference and dialogue as models of interactive exchange). Weinbren applies The Wolf Man directly to interactive narrative, yet uses it to address some of the same issues that were raised by Brooks: to design a new narrative grammar capable of deliver- ing pleasure and sustaining desire. Caroline Bassett’s essay, “Is This Not a Screen? Notes on the Mobile Phone and Cin- ema,” addresses some of the same issues of medium specificity dealt with in earlier essays, but with reference to a new medium that was not addressed at the conference nor previously addressed in this volume—mobile phones. Resisting the rhetoric of conver- gence and the kind of ontology for mobile phones that might be imposed by cyberstruc- turalists, she claims that such strategies would lock this emergent technology into a fixed, formal conception of medium specificity. Instead, she focuses on the new questions it raises about the relationship between representation and action. Exploring mobile phones as a new form of “intimate screen,” she makes intriguing observations about the exciting possibilities this new medium has opened—from texts to thumbnails, fireflies to flash mobs, and Happy Slapping to calligrams. Just as Mamber argued for retaining the variability of the image, size, and mode of projection in museum installations, Bas- sett insists on preserving an ongoing mobility for mobile phones—one that addresses its
- 41. 18 • M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S historical connections with traditional telephony and photography and includes an open range of possible relations with cinema and visual culture. In contrast to Bazin’s argu- ments for “the myth of total cinema,” Bassett claims that “mobile cinema never will be invented.” Yet, unlike Weinbren and Mamber, Bassett seems unwilling to grant the mobility she reserves for mobile phones to other forms of digital media, particularly in the case of other interactive formats—CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, and museum installations. For, according to Bassett, the prized connectivity and “good enough” aesthetic that are found on the Internet (as well as on mobile phones) have totally prevailed over the lush visual simulations provided by interactive discs—like those produced by Weinbren, Marker, Forgács, and The Labyrinth Project. Bassett assumes that this struggle is over, leaving no wiggle room whatsoever for rival digital technologies, not even for the immersive visuals of lucrative electronic games. She assumes that the drive for “pure connection” has pre- vailed. Yet she wonders whether this drive is merely a “compensating ideology” that has risen “in response to the difficulty of finding and forging community.” Although she is willing to question whether the “good enough” aesthetic is good enough for politics, she accepts it as a fait accompli for artistic and social practice. Despite this decisive reading of one endgame, Bassett shares Weinbren’s belief in the resilience of cinema, yet like Manovich she resists its capacity to absorb and redefine other media, particularly through its alleged capacity for realism. Still, she grants contin- gency to cinema, particularly in her marvelously detailed description of one particular moment of exchange—a wonderful dialogue between the silver screen and the “firefly” text messages sent by teenage flashmobs in the audience of a multiplex movie theater on an Orange Wednesday in Brighton, England. Sponsored by Orange, one of the UK’s larg- est mobile phone companies, these Wednesday promotional events provide free movie tickets to moviegoers, who can claim them simply by sending a text message. In the process of describing this transmedia encounter and its cultural and historical reverberations, Bassett redefines medium specificity not as a fixed set of formal proper- ties but as an open-ended set of social practices that grapple with and mediate everyday reality, a perspective supported by the latest proliferation of mobile devices. Though she does not fully address the ideological implications of such social practices, this line of argument sets the stage for the “digital possibilities” addressed in Part II of this volume, which helps us reimagine “politics, place, and the self.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Marsha Kinder began her career as a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature before moving to the study of transmedial relations among narrative forms. In 1980 she joined USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she taught international cinema, narrative theory, children’s media culture, and digital culture. Having published over one hundred essays and ten monographs and anthologies, she is best known for her work on Spanish
- 42. M E D I U M S P E C I F I C I T Y A N D P R O D U C T I V E P R E C U R S O R S • 19 media culture, including Blood Cinema (1993, with a companion CD-ROM, the first interactive scholarly work in English-language film studies), Refiguring Spain (1997), and Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1998); and on children’s media culture, including Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games (1991), and Kids’ Media Culture (1999). She was founding editor of innovative journals, such as Dreamworks (1980–87), winner of a Pushcart Award, and The Spectator (1982–present), and since 1977 has served on the editorial board of Film Quarterly. In 1995, she received the USC Asso- ciates Award for Creativity in Scholarship, and in 2001 was named a University Professor for her innovative transdisciplinary research. In 1997, she founded The Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on database narra- tive (a concept she introduced), producing database documentaries, archival cultural histories, and other new models of digital scholarship in the humanities. In collaboration with media artists Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang, and Scott Mahoy, and with filmmak- ers, scholars, scientists, and cultural institutions, Labyrinth combined cultural history and theory with the sensory language of cinema. Presented as transmedia networks (websites, museum installations, DVD-ROMs, and digital archives), these award-winning works have been featured at museums, film and new media festivals, and conferences worldwide and have been supported by grants from the Annenberg, Casden, Ford, Getty, Haas, Irvine, NEH, Righteous Persons, Rockefeller, and Skirball Foundations and from AHRQ (The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality). In collaboration with docu- mentary filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris and Scott Mahoy, she recently launched a video-based website called Interacting with Autism, and she is writing a book called The Discreet Charms of Database Narrative: Tales of Neurodiversity in the Light of Neuroscience. NOTES 1. I addressed similar issues in my essay “Designing a Database Cinema” in the 2003 Future Cinema anthology. 2. I am thinking of works by Antonio Damasio, including Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994), The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (2003), and Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010). 3. www.russianmodernism.org 4. www.cinemetrics.lv/tsivian.php 5. Other versions also appeared as “Another Dip into the Ocean of Streams of Stories” in Shaw and Weibel, and as “Ocean, Database, Recut” in Vesna, Database Aesthetics. 6. See Brooks, chapter 10, “Fictions of the Wolf Man: Freud and Narrative Understanding.”
- 43. 20 Lulled into somnolence by five hundred years of print, literary studies has been slow to wake up to the importance of media-specific analysis.1 Literary criticism and theory are shot through with unrecognized assumptions specific to print. Only now, as the new medium of electronic textuality vibrantly asserts its presence, are these assumptions clearly coming into view. Consider, for example, Roland Barthes’s influential essay “From Work to Text.” Rereading it, I am struck both by its prescience and by how far we have moved beyond it. As Jay David Bolter and George Landow have pointed out, Barthes’s description of “text,” with its dispersion, multiple authorship, and rhizomatic structure, uncannily anticipates electronic hypertext. “The metaphor of the Text is that of the net- work,” Barthes writes (“From Work to Text” 61). Yet at the same time he can also assert that “the text must not be understood as a computable object,” “computable” here mean- ing to be limited, finite, bound, able to be reckoned (57). Written twenty years before the advent of the microcomputer, his essay stands in the ironic position of anticipating what it cannot anticipate. It calls for a movement away from works to texts, a movement so successful that the ubiquitous “text” has all but driven out the media-specific term “book.” Yet Barthes’s vision remains rooted in print culture, for he defines “text” through its dif- ferences from books, not through its similarities with electronic textuality. In positioning text against work, Barthes was among those who helped initiate semiotic and performa- tive approaches to discourse, arguably one of the most important developments in literary studies in the past century. But this shift has entailed loss as well as gain. Useful as the vocabulary of “text” was in expanding textuality beyond the printed page, it also had the PRINT IS FLAT, CODE IS DEEP The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis N. Katherine Hayles
- 44. P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 21 effect, in treating everything from fashion to fascism as a semiotic system, of eliding differences in media. Perhaps now, after the linguistic turn has yielded so many important insights, it is time to turn again to a careful consideration of what difference the specific- ity of the form makes.2 In calling for medium-specific analysis, I do not mean to advocate that media should be considered in isolation from one another. Quite the contrary. As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin have shown in Remediation, media constantly engage in a recursive dynamic of imitating each other, incorporating aspects of competing media into them- selves while simultaneously flaunting the advantages their own forms of mediation offer. Voyager’s now-defunct line of “Expanded Books,” for example, went to the extreme of offering readers the opportunity to dog-ear electronic pages. Another option inserted a paper clip on the screenic page, which itself was programmed to look as much as pos- sible like print. On the other side of the screen, many print texts are now imitating elec- tronic hypertexts. These range from DeLillo’s Underworld to Bolter and Grusin’s Reme- diation, which self-consciously pushes toward hypertext through arrows that serve as visual indications of hypertextual links. Media-specific analysis (MSA) attends both to the specificity of the form—the fact that the Voyager paper clip is an image rather than a piece of bent metal—and to citations and imitations of one medium in another. Attuned not so much to similarity and difference as to simulation and instantiation, MSA moves from the language of “text” to a more precise vocabulary of screen and page, digital pro- gram and analog interface, code and ink, mutable image and durably inscribed mark, texton and scripton, computer and book. One area where MSA can pay especially rich dividends is literary hypertext. Some theorists working in the area of electronic literature argue that hypertext ought to be reserved for electronic texts instantiated in digital media. In my view, this is a mistake. When Vannevar Bush, widely credited with the invention of hypertext, imagined a hyper- textual system, it was not electronic but mechanical. His pioneering article testifies that it is possible to implement hypertext in a wide variety of ways, not only through the “go to” commands that constitute the hypertext link in digital computers. If we restrict the term “hypertext” to digital media, we lose the opportunity to understand how a literary genre mutates and transforms when it is instantiated in different media. The power of MSA comes from holding one term constant across media—in this case, the genre of literary hypertext—and then varying the media to explore how medium-specific con- straints and possibilities shape texts. Understanding literature as the interplay between form and medium, MSA insists that “texts” must always be embodied to exist in the world. The materiality of those embodiments interacts dynamically with linguistic, rhe- torical, and literary practices to create the effects we call “literature.” In attending to the materiality of the medium, MSA explicitly refutes the concept of the literary work that emerged from eighteenth-century debates over copyright and that has held considerable sway since then, although not without contestations. As Mark Rose has shown in his important book Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, legal
- 45. 22 • P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P theorists such as Blackstone defined a literary work as consisting solely of its “style and sentiment.” “These alone constitute its identity,” Blackstone wrote. “The paper and print are merely accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance” (quoted in M. Rose, 89). Subsequent commentators realized that it was not practical to copyright “sentiment,” for some ideas are so general they cannot be attributed to any single author: that men are mortal, for example. Rather, it was not ideas in them- selves but the ways in which ideas were expressed that could be secured as literary prop- erty and, hence, copyrighted. This judicial history, played out in a contentious environ- ment where conflicting economic, political, and class interests fought for priority, had important consequences for literature that went beyond purely legal considerations, for it helped to solidify the literary author as a man (the author’s assumed gender in these discourses was invariably male) of original genius who created literary property by mix- ing his intellectual labor with the materials afforded him by nature, much as Locke had argued that men created private property by mixing their labor with the land.3 Consist- ently in these discourses, material and economic considerations, although they had force in the real world, were elided or erased in favor of an emphasis on literary property as an intellectual construction that owed nothing to the medium in which it was embodied. Although this conclusion was repeatedly challenged in court and in such literary move- ments as futurism and imagism (“No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams declared), the long reign of print made it easy for literary criticism to ignore the specifici- ties of the codex book when discussing literary texts. With significant exceptions, print literature was widely regarded as not having a body, only a speaking mind.4 Hypertext, understood as a genre that can be implemented both in print and in digital media, offers an ideal opportunity to bring the materiality of the medium again to the fore. MSA aims to electrify the neocortex of literary criticism into recognizing that strands which have traditionally emphasized materiality (such as criticism on the illumi- nated manuscript, on writers like Blake for whom embodiment is everything, on the rich tradition of artists’ books) are not exceptions but instances of media-specific analyses. Literature has a body, or rather many bodies, and it always matters what the natures of those bodies are, even when the text—no, make that codex book or stitched pamphlet or CD-ROM or website—does not foreground its materiality as such.5 What kind of bodies, then, does hypertext have? To pursue this question, let me sug- gest a working definition. Following Jane Yellowlees Douglas and others, I propose that hypertext has, at a minimum, the following characteristics: multiple reading paths, some kind of linking mechanism, and chunked text.6 In proposing these characteristics, my intent is not to draw a hard-and-fast line that will distinguish between hypertext and everything else. Rather, the boundary is to be regarded as heuristic, operating not as a rigid barrier but a borderland inviting playful forays that test the limits of the form and work to modify, enlarge, or transform them. From the definition, it will be immediately apparent that hypertext can be instantiated in print as well as electronic media. A print encyclopedia, for example, qualifies as a hypertext because it has multiple reading paths,
- 46. P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 23 a system of cross-references that serve as linking mechanisms, and chunked text in entries separated typographically from one another. These hypertextual characteristics of the encyclopedia can form the basis for a print literary hypertext, as Milorad Pavic has brilliantly demonstrated in Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel. Other examples of print hypertexts include Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, in which the audiotapes afford multiple ways to access the multimedia text; Paul Zimmerman’s artist’s book High Tension, in which a multiplicity of reading paths is created through an unusual physical form that allows the reader to fold over diagonally cut leaves to obtain various juxtaposi- tions of text and image; and Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” a short story that pushes toward hypertext by juxtaposing contradictory and nonsequential events which suggest many simultaneously existing time lines and narrative unfoldings. If we grant that hypertext can exist in either print or digital media, what distinguishes hypertext instantiated in a computer from hypertext in book form? To gain purchase on this question in the spirit of MSA, I propose the following game. Using the characteris- tics of the digital computer, what is it possible to say about electronic hypertext as a liter- ary medium? The point of this game is to derive these characteristics from the medium itself, using the content and strategies of electronic hypertexts to illustrate how these characteristics serve as resources that writers can mobilize in specific ways. That is to say, restricting ourselves to the medium alone, how far is it possible to go? This kind of analysis is artificial in that it forbids itself access to the full repertoire of literary reading strategies, but it may nevertheless prove illuminating about what difference the medium makes. To clarify the medium’s specificity, I will also offer examples of how these char- acteristics of digital media can be simulated in print texts. The point here is to explore what Bolter and Grusin call “reverse remediation,” the simulation of medium-specific effects in another medium, as when Expanded Books simulated turning down page corners and marking passages with paper clips. My technique, then, amounts to con- structing a typology of electronic hypertext by considering both the medium in itself (its instantiation in digital computers) and the extent to which its effects can be simulated in print (the reverse remediation that blurs the boundary between electronic media and print). As I suggested earlier, MSA operates not so much through a simple binary of similarity and difference as through media-specific considerations of instantiation and simulation. Following these rules, I am able to score eight points, discussed in detail in the rest of this chapter: 1. Electronic Hypertexts Are Dynamic Images 2. Electronic Hypertexts Include Both Analog Resemblance and Digital Coding 3. Electronic Hypertexts Are Generated through Fragmentation and Recombination 4. Electronic Hypertexts Have Depth and Operate in Three Dimensions 5. Electronic Hypertexts Are Mutable and Transformable
- 47. 24 • P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P 6. Electronic Hypertexts Are Spaces to Navigate 7. Electronic Hypertexts Are Written and Read in Distributed Cognitive Environments 8. Electronic Hypertexts Initiate and Demand Cyborg Reading Practices POINT 1: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS ARE DYNAMIC IMAGES In the computer, the signifier exists not as a durably inscribed flat mark but as a screenic image produced by layers of code precisely correlated through correspondence rules. Even when electronic hypertexts simulate the appearance of durably inscribed marks, they are transitory images that must be constantly refreshed to give the illusion of stable endur- ance through time. This aspect of electronic hypertext can be mobilized through such innovations as dynamic typography, whereby words function both as verbal signifiers and as visual images whose kinetic qualities also convey meaning. In William Crandall’s poem “On River Side,” for example, words appear and disappear as the cursor clicks over the black screen, evocatively linking up with phrases already visible and sometimes changing them. Similar effects are achieved in a different way in Alan Dunning’s artist’s book Greenhouse, which creates a multilayered reading experience by overlaying translucent vellum pages onto opaque pages. Significantly, the five lines of text on the opaque pages are taken from five of Dunning’s favorite works of literary criticism, each line set in dif- ferent typography and written by a different author. As the vellum pages are overlaid onto these, traditional literary criticism, already interleaved with other critical texts to form a kind of hypertext, is further modified by the visual play set up by the image and Dunning’s words printed on the vellum pages. An important difference between print and electronic hypertext is the accessibility of print pages compared, for example, to the words revealed by the cursor’s click in Cran- dall’s electronic hypertext. Whereas all the words and images in the print text are imme- diately accessible to view, the linked words in Crandall’s poem become visible to the user only when they appear through the cursor’s action. Code always has some layers that remain invisible and inaccessible to most users. From this we arrive at an obvious but nevertheless central maxim: Print is flat, code is deep. POINT 2: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS INCLUDE BOTH ANALOG RESEMBLANCE AND DIGITAL CODING The digital computer is not, strictly speaking, entirely digital. At the most basic level of the computer are electronic polarities, which are related to the bit stream through the analog correspondence of morphological resemblance. Higher levels of code use digital correspondence, for example in the rules that correlate the compiler language with a programming language like C++ or Lisp. Analog resemblance typically reappears at the top level of the screenic image, for example in the desktop icon of a trash barrel. Thus,
- 48. P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 25 digital computers have an Oreo-like structure with an analog bottom, a frothy digital middle, and an analog top.7 Although we are accustomed to thinking of digital in terms of binary digits, digital has a more general meaning of discrete versus continuous flow of information. Digital computers do not necessarily have to operate with binary code; in the early days of computing, computers were constructed using base ten code.8 Analog computers, in contrast to digital ones, represent numbers as a continuously varying volt- age. In analog computers and analog technologies in general, a morphological resem- blance connects one level of code with another. In this sense, iconographic writing is analog because it bears a morphological resemblance to its referent (albeit in highly conventionalized ways), whereas alphabetic writing is digital, consisting of a few elements that can be combined to make many words precisely because the relation between mark and referent is arbitrary.9 By contrast, iconographic writing requires a much larger sym- bol set because its elements tend to be almost as multiform as the concepts for which they stand. Print books and digital computers both use digital and analog modes of representa- tion, but they mobilize the two modes differently. An example of a print book that makes conspicuous use of a digital algorithm is Emmett Williams’s VoyAge, in which all the words are three letters long (to accommodate this restriction, Williams often resorts to creative spelling). Williams imposed the further requirement that spacing between the words increases as the page numbers go up. On page 1, the three-letter words are sepa- rated by one space; on page 2 by two spaces; and so on. The book ends when the number of spaces that must intervene before another word can appear is greater than the spaces available on the page. This example makes clear that the difference between print and electronic hypertext consists not in the presence or absence of digital and analog modal- ities but rather in the ways these two modes are mobilized as resources in the two media. In VoyAge, the effect of using a digital algorithm is to create visual patterns through the placement of words on the page, so that the words function simultaneously as analog image and digital code. When the spacing brings all the words into a single column, for example, the narrator remarks, “NOW/WEE/GET/OUR/POE/EMM/ALL/INN/ONE/ ROW. Typically, the computer employs a digital mode at deeper coding levels, whereas in print, analog continuity and digital coding both operate on the flat surface of the page. POINT 3: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS ARE GENERATED THROUGH FRAGMENTATION AND RECOMBINATION As a result of the frothy digital middle of the computer’s structure, fragmentation and recombination are intrinsic to the medium. These textual strategies can also be used in print texts, for example in Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a book in which each page is cut into several strips corresponding to the lines of a poem. By juxta- posing the cut strip on one page with strips from other pages, many combinations are possible, as indicated by Queneau’s title. Another example is Dick Higgins’s book Buster
- 49. 26 • P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P Keaton Enters into Paradise. To generate this text, Higgins played thirteen games of Scrabble, each of which started with the words “Buster Keaton” orthogonally arranged. He then used the words that turned up in the Scrabble games to create thirteen skits, each corresponding to one of the games. Here fragmentation was achieved using the Scrabble letters, a technique that emphasizes the digital nature of alphabetic writing; recombination is mobilized through the aleatory combinations that make words and Higgins’s subsequent use of these game words in the skits. With digital texts, the fragmentation is deeper, more pervasive, and more extreme than with the alphanumeric characters of print. Moreover, much of the fragmentation takes place on levels inaccessible to most users. This aspect of digital storage and retrieval can be mobilized as an artistic resource, reappearing at the level of the user interface. Stuart Moulthrop’s “Reagan Library,” for example, uses an algorithm that places pre- scripted phrases on the screen in random order. As the user revisits a screen, the text on that screen gradually becomes more coherent, stabilizing into its final order on a fourth visit, whereupon it does not change further. As if to emphasize that noise is not merely interference but is itself a form of information, Moulthrop has designed the piece so that one level of the text moves in the opposite direction from this trajectory. The screens in “Notes,” which offer explanatory commentary, actually lose text as the user revisits, becoming more cryptic and enigmatic the more they are read. POINT 4: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS HAVE DEPTH AND OPERATE IN THREE DIMENSIONS Digital coding and analog resemblance each have specific advantages and are deployed so as to make the most of these advantages. Analog resemblance allows information to be translated between two differently embodied material instantiations, as when a sound wave is translated into the motion of a vibrating diaphragm of a microphone. Whenever two material entities interact, analog resemblance is likely to come into play because it allows one form of continuously varying information to be translated into a similarly shaped informational pattern in another medium. Once this translation has taken place, digital coding is used to transform the continuity of morphological form into numbers (or other discrete codes). Intrinsic to this process is the transformation of a continuous shape into a series of code elements. In contrast to the continuity of analog pattern, the discreteness of code enables information to be rapidly manipulated and transmitted. Human readers, with sensory capabilities evolved through eons of interacting with three-dimensional environments, are much better at perceiving patterns in analog shapes than performing rapid calculations with code elements. When presented with code, humans tend to push toward perceiving it as analog pattern. Although most of us learned to read using the digital method of sounding out each letter, for example, we soon began to recognize the shapes of words and phrases, thus modulating the discrete- ness of alphabetic writing with the analog continuity of pattern recognition. The inter-
- 50. P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 27 play between analog and digital takes place in a different way with screenic text than with print, and these differences turn out to be important for human perception. With present-day screens, reading speed on screen is typically about one-sixth of that with print. Although the factors that cause this difference are not well understood, they undoubtedly have something to do with the dynamic nature of screen images. Text on screen is produced through complex internal processes that make every word also a dynamic image, every discrete letter a continuous process. To distinguish between the image the user sees and the strings as they exist in the text, Espen Aarseth has proposed the terminology “texton” and “scripton.” In a digital computer, “texton” can refer to voltages, strings of binary code, or programming code, depending on who the “reader” is taken to be. Scriptons always include the screen image but can also include any code visible to a user who is able to access different layers of program. Textons can appear in print as well as electronic media. Stipple engraving, although it is normally perceived by the reader as a continuous image, operates through the binary digital distinction of ink dot/no ink dot; here the scripton is the image and the ink dots are the textons.10 In electronic media, textons and scriptons operate in a vertical hierarchy rather than through the flat microscale/macroscale play of stipple engraving. With electronic texts there is a clear distinction between scriptons that appear on screen and the textons of underlying code, which normally remain invisible to the casual user. The flat page of print remains visually and kinesthetically accessible to the user, whereas the textons of electronic texts can be brought into view only by using special techniques and software. In reverse remediation, some books play with this generalization by making print pages inaccessible also. David Stairs has created a round artist’s book entitled Boundless with spiral binding all around, so that it cannot be opened. A similar strategy is used by Maurizio Nannucci in Universum, a book bound on both vertical edges so that it cannot be opened. Ann Tyler also plays with the assumption that pages are visually and kines- thetically accessible to users in Lubb Dup, an artist’s book in which several pages are double-faced, so that one can see the inside only by peering through a small circle in the middle or prying the two pages apart enough to peek down through the top. These plays on accessibility do not negate the generalization that the flat page is accessible to users, however, for their effect is precisely to make us conscious of the normative rule. POINT 5: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS ARE MUTABLE AND TRANSFORMABLE The multiple coding levels of electronic textons allow small changes at one level of code to be quickly magnified into large changes at another level. The layered coding levels thus act like linguistic levers, giving a single keystroke the power to change the entire appear- ance of a textual image. An intrinsic component of this leveraging power is the ability of digital code to be fragmented and recombined. Although the text appears as a stable image
- 51. 28 • P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P on screen, it achieves its dynamic power of mutation and transformation through the very rapid fragmentation and recombination of binary code. In addition, the rapid processing of digital code allows programs to create the illusion of depth in screenic images, for example in the three-dimensional landscapes of the video game Myst or the layered windows of Microsoft Word.11 In these cases, both scriptons and textons are perceived as having depth, with textons operating digitally through coding levels and scriptons operating analogically through screenic representation of three-dimensional spaces. Print books can simulate the mutability of electronic texts through a variety of strate- gies, from semitransparent pages that overlay onto other pages to more elaborate strate- gies. In Michael Snow’s visual narrative Cover to Cover, the sequence begins with a real- istic image of a door, with the next image showing a man opening the door to go into a rather ordinary room. With each successive image, the previous representation is revealed as a posted photograph, for example by including the photographer in the pic- ture. As one approaches the center of the book the images begin shifting angles, and at the midpoint the reader must turn the book upside down to see the remaining images in proper perspective. At the end of the book the images reverse order, so that the reader then goes backward through the book to the front, a direction that is then implicitly defined as forward. To facilitate this shift in perspective, the book is bound on both sides so that either cover can function as “front.” Thus, such fundamental aspects of the book as forward and backward, up and down, become mutable characteristics that change in the course of reading. Similar strategies are employed in Karen Chance’s Parallax, wherein cutouts and reverse ordering are used to create two narratives, one seen from the point of view of a straight man who sees gay men as unwanted intrusions in his life, the other from the point of the view of a gay man who sees his life threatened by straight people who refuse to acknowledge his existence. A different approach is taken by Tom Phillips in A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. Phillips took William Mallock’s obscure Victorian novel, A Human Document, and “treated” each page by creating images that left only a few words on each page untouched. These words typically are connected by pathways created by surrounding the word paths with colored backgrounds and images. As the word pathways meander down the page, they are often arranged in ways that allow multiple reading paths. Other hypertextual effects emerge from the interplay of the words in the pathways, other “treated” text that remains partially visible, and the striking, diverse images that the treated pages display. Through such manipulations, Mallock’s text is made to mutate into an entirely new narrative. Phillips writes, “I took a forgotten Victorian novel found by chance. I plundered, mined, and undermined it to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents, and surreal catastrophes which seemed to link with its wall of words” (quoted on the dust- cover). Although this book is not dynamic in the same sense as Java script, the hypertex- tual effects it achieves through mutation and transformation are complex and dynami- cally interactive.
- 52. P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 29 POINT 6: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS ARE SPACES TO NAVIGATE Electronic hypertexts are navigable in at least two senses. They present to the user a visual interface which must be navigated through choices the user makes to progress through the hypertext; and they are encoded on multiple levels that the user can access using the appropriate software, for example by viewing the source code of a network browser as well as the surface text. As a result of its construction as a navigable space, electronic hypertext is intrinsically more involved with issues of mapping and navigation than most print texts. When navigation does become an issue in a print text, the effect is usually to trans- form linear sequence into hypertextual multiplicity. Susan E. King’s book Treading the Maze is spiral-bound on both lateral edges. The binding on the left side holds pages that display images on vellum; the binding on the right side holds opaque blue pages of verbal text. Different narrative orders are created by intermixing opaque and translucent pages. The author writes (on a page that most readers will not find until halfway through the book) that the most complete reading is achieved by turning back all the pages on both sides so that the back cover is exposed, then interleaving one opaque page with one translucent page until one arrives at the front. In this reading the last two pages are suc- cessive translucent images that overlay a labyrinth onto a woman’s body, so that the maze the reader has traversed is imaged at once as a female body, an exploration of the laby- rinth as a visual and conceptual form, and the body of the book experienced as a maze through which many paths may be traced. POINT 7: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS ARE WRITTEN AND READ IN DISTRIBUTED COGNITIVE ENVIRONMENTS Modern-day computers perform cognitively sophisticated acts when they collaborate with human users to create electronic hypertexts. These frequently include acts of interpreta- tion, as when the computer decides how to display text in a browser, independent of choices the user makes. It is no longer a question of whether computers are intelligent. Any cognizer that can perform the acts of evaluation, judgment, synthesis, and analysis exhibited by expert systems and autonomous-agent software programs should, prima facie, be considered intelligent. Books also create rich cognitive environments, but they passively embody the cognitions of writer, reader, and book designer rather than actively participating in cognition themselves. To say that the computer is an active cognizer does not necessarily mean that it is superior to the book as a writing technology. Keeping the book as a passive device for external memory storage and retrieval has striking advantages, for it allows the book to possess a robustness and reliability beyond the wildest dreams of a software designer. While computers struggle to remain viable for a decade, books maintain backward compatibility for hundreds of years. The issue is not the technologi- cal superiority of either medium but rather the specific conditions a medium instantiates and enacts. When we read electronic hypertexts, we do so in environments that include
- 53. 30 • P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P the computer as an active cognizer performing sophisticated acts of interpretation and representation. Thus, cognition is distributed not only between writer, reader, and designer (who may or may not be separate people) but also between humans and machines (which may or may not be regarded as separate entities). Print books can also be structured in ways that create and emphasize distributed cognition. Examples are telegraph codebooks, which matched phrases and words used frequently in telegrams with code groups that were shorter and thus more economical to transmit. The more sophisticated of these codebooks included “mutilation tables,” which enabled a user to reverse-engineer a garbled message to figure out what code ele- ment ought to have been there instead of the incorrect element.12 In this way the distrib- uted nature of the cognition became evident, for part of the cognition resided in the sender, part in the telegraph operator, part in the codebook, part in the mutilation table, and part in the receiver. At any point along this transmission chain, errors could be introduced, making clear that comprehension depended on all the parts working together correctly in this distributed cognitive system. POINT 8: ELECTRONIC HYPERTEXTS INITIATE AND DEMAND CYBORG READING PRACTICES Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is, inevitably, in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity. This subject position may also be evoked through the content of print texts (e.g., William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Pat Cadigan’s Synners), but electronic hypertexts necessarily enact it through the specificity of the medium. Of the eight points, this is the most difficult to simulate in book technology, which for all of its sophistication in content and production remains remarkably simple to use. Book lovers frequently evoke this quality of print, emphasizing that they enjoy books precisely because books do not interpolate them into the speed, obsolescence, and constant breakdown of elec- tronic culture. This distinction between print and electronic forms is becoming more problematic, however, with the introduction of electronic books that look like print but have electronic hardware embedded in the spine that enables the pixels of the electronic “page” to be polarized in different patterns, so that one page can be any page. Hybrid forms like the electronic book show reverse remediation in action: as books become more like computers, computers become more like books. In articulating these eight points, I hope it is clear that I do not mean to argue for the superiority of electronic media. Rather, I have been concerned to delineate characteristics of digital environments that writers and readers can use as resources in creating elec- tronic literature and responding to it in sophisticated, playful ways. I have also shown how similar—but not identical—effects can be achieved in print books. Whether in print
- 54. P R I N T I S F L A T , C O D E I S D E E P • 31 or on screen, the specificity of the medium comes into play as its characteristics are flaunted, suppressed, subverted, reimagined. Many critics see the electronic age as heralding the end of books. I think this view is mistaken. Books are far too robust, reliable, long-lived, and versatile to be rendered obso- lete by digital media. Rather, digital media have given us an opportunity we have not had for the past several hundred years: the chance to see print with new eyes, and with it, the possibility of understanding how deeply literary theory and criticism have been imbued with assumptions specific to print. As we continue to work toward critical practices and theories appropriate for electronic literature, we may come to renewed appreciation for the specificity of print. In the tangled web of medial ecology, change anywhere in the system stimulates change everywhere in the system. Books are not going the way of the dinosaur but the way of the human, changing as we change, mutating and evolving in ways that will continue, as a book lover said long ago, to teach and delight. AFTERTHOUGHTS Since 1999, when I first began working out the ideas for “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep,” my thoughts about media-specific analysis have matured considerably. Perhaps the most important change has been in the way I define “materiality.” As someone who has done serious work in a scientific field, I am well aware that the physical characteristics any object may be said to possess are essentially infinite; a computer, for example, could be described in terms of its power cord or the rare earth metals used in a CRT monitor. Of course, it almost never is described like this, because these characteristics are not normally of inter- est (except to manufacturers of power cords, of course). To deal with this challenge, in my recent book My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, I describe the materiality of an artistic work as “an emergent property created through dynamic interac- tions between [the work’s] physical characteristics and signifying strategies” (3). Materiality differs from physicality, then, in being inextricably linked with meaning. As an emergent property, it cannot be specified in advance but emerges through interpretation and debate. Thus conceived, materiality is not only about the “apparatus” but also about the meaning- making processes in which communities of users/readers/interactors participate. Writing Machines was an important advance over this essay because it provided the opportunity to collaborate with Anne Burdick, a media designer, to create the critical equivalent of an artist’s book. Conceived as a verbal/visual argument, Writing Machines made similar points about media specificity not only in words but also in its material form, including ribbed covers, clay-coated slick papers, shadowed pages, and other visual devices. I returned to the topic yet again in “Translating Media” in My Mother Was a Computer. This chapter extended and recast the case for media specificity in terms of editorial practices and received definitions of work, text, and document, arguing that material differences between different editions or versions of a work should not be collapsed into a singular object but rather regarded as an assemblage in which similar
- 55. Other documents randomly have different content
- 56. [161] “You’ll take ’em over and see about ’em, Johnny?” “Glad to.” He put the case in his pocket. “Have another hot dog, Johnny?” “Sure will.” “You got my message? The orange wrapper?” Johnny nodded. “He’s been at it again.” “Who? At what?” “That big stooped man with a limp. He’s been out here again, standin’ on the shore close to the city an’ shakin’ his fists an’ cursin’ worse’n a pirate.” “He has?” Johnny was surprised. “What did you do?” “Well, I tried to get close to him but a stone rolled under my foot an’ I guess he heard me. Anyway, he went lopin’ off like a antelope, an’ that’s all I saw of him.” “Queer he’d come back out here,” Johnny mused. Then of a sudden a thought struck him. Perhaps this man was not a firebug at all, but a thief. Perhaps this case of diamonds had not been brought out here in a dump wagon, but by this strange man. Perhaps he had hidden it here. Perhaps there were other cases hidden on the island. He thought of the diamond merchant’s place on Randolph Street, and of that man Knobs haunting the same building. What if Knobs and the hooked nose man
- 57. [162] [163] with the limp were in a partnership of crime? Well, at least it was something to think about. “Do you know, Johnny,” said Ben Zook, suddenly changing the subject, “I’ve got to sort of like this island. ’Tain’t much account as it is, all broken bricks and dust, but in time grass would grow on it—tall grass that waves and sort of sighs in the breeze. I’d like it a lot, then, Johnny.” Ben’s voice grew earnest “I’d like to own this island; like to have it always to myself.” “You don’t want this island, Ben,” said Johnny quietly. “Let me tell you what it’s going to be like, and then I’m sure you wouldn’t want it all to yourself. Ben, bye-and- bye all this rough ground is going to be smoothed down. The island will be broadened and fine rich dirt will be hauled on. Grass will be sown and pretty soon it will all be green. Trees will be planted and squirrels will come to live in them.” “I’d like that, Johnny.” “There will probably be a gravel walk winding in and out among the trees,” Johnny continued. “Tired women with little children, women from those hot cramped flats you know of in the heart of the city, will come here with their children. They’ll sit on the grass and let the cool lake breeze fan their cheeks while their children go frolicking away after the squirrels or throw crumbs to pigeons and sparrows. “There’ll be a lagoon between this island and the shore, a lagoon of smooth, deep water. There will be boat houses and nice clean-hearted boys will bring nice girls out here to take them riding in the boats.
- 58. [164] [165] “And perhaps on a fine Sunday afternoon there will be a band concert and thousands will come out to hear it. But you know, Ben, if you had it all to yourself they couldn’t do any of these things. You don’t really want it now, do you, Ben?” “No, Johnny, I don’t.” For a time Ben was thoughtful. When at last he spoke his voice sounded far away. “I’ve tried never to be selfish, Johnny. Guess mebby if I’d held on to things more, not given so many fellows that was down and out a boost, I’d have more of my own. That’s a fine dream you got for Ben Zook’s island. I’d be mighty proud of it, Johnny. I shore would.” Again he was silent for a long time. “Johnny,” he said at last, “do you see that path of gold the moon’s a paintin’ on the lake?” “Yes, Ben.” “Sort of reminds me of a notion I had when I was a boy about the path to Heaven. Foolish notion, I guess; sort of thought when the time come you just walked right up there. “Foolish notion; but Johnny, here’s a sort of idea I’ve worked out settin’ thinkin’ here all by myself. It’s a heap of fun to live, Johnny. I get a lot out of it; it’s just like I’d never grown up, like I was just a boy playin’ round. “And you know, Johnny, when I was a boy there was a big family of us and we always had a lot to do. I’d be playin’ with the other boys, and then suddenly my mother’d call:
- 59. [166] “‘Ben, come here.’ “Just like that. And I’d go, Johnny; always went straight off, but before I went I’d say: “‘Well, so long, fellers, I got to go now.’ I’d say it just like that. “And you know, Johnny, I’ve been playin’ round most of my life an’ havin’ a lot of fun, even if other folks do call it workin’, so when that last call comes from somewhere way up above I sort of have a feelin’ that it’ll come from someone a lot bigger an’ wiser than me, just like my mother was when I was a boy. An’ I hope I’ll be brave enough to say, just as I used to say then: “‘Well, good-bye fellers, I got to go now.’ Don’t you hope so, Johnny?” “I hope so, Ben,” Johnny’s voice had grown husky. “An’, Johnny, when my mother called me it wasn’t ever because she felt contrary and wanted to spoil my fun; it was always because she had something useful she wanted me to do for the bunch. I’m sort of hopin’, Johnny, when that last call comes it’ll be for the same reason, because the one that’s a lot bigger an’ wiser than me had got somethin’ useful he wants me to do for the bunch of us. Do you think it’ll be that way, Johnny?” “I—I’m sure it will, Ben. But Ben, you’re not very old. That time’s a long way off.” “I hope so, Johnny. It’s a grand privilege to live. But you can’t tell, Johnny; you can’t, can you now?”
- 60. [167] For a long time after that they sat there in silence. Johnny was slowly beginning to realize that he liked this strange little Ben Zook with his heart of gold. “Look, Johnny!” Ben exclaimed. “A fire!” “What! Another?” cried Johnny. “Down there by the water front.” Johnny followed his gaze to the south where there was a great blaze against the sky. “It’s queer,” he said after ten seconds of watching. “It doesn’t really seem to be on the shore. Looks as if it were on the far end of this island.” “The island, Johnny? What could burn like that out here? Look at her leap toward the sky!” “All the same, it is. Come on, Ben. We may learn something. Arm yourself, Ben. It may mean a fight.” As he said this Johnny picked up a scrap of gas pipe two feet long. “I’ve not forgotten what you said about striking first and arguing after,” he chuckled. “I’ll take the hand grenades,” said Ben, loading an arm with half bricks. Thus armed, they hurried away over a rough path that ran the length of the island. They had not covered half the distance to the end when the flare of light began to die down. It vanished with surprising rapidity. Scarcely had they gone a dozen paces, after it began to wane, when the place where it
- 61. [168] [169] had been, for lack of that brilliant illumination, appeared darker than the rest of the island. “What about that?” Ben Zook stopped short in his tracks. “Come on! Come fast!” exclaimed Johnny, determined to arrive at the scene of this strange spectacle before the last glowing spark had blinked out. As he rushed along pell-mell, stumbling over a brick here, leaping a mound of clay there, quite heedless of any danger that might surround him, he might have proven a fair target for a shot from ambush. No shot came, and in time he came to a comparatively level spot of sand in the center of which there glowed a few coals. After bending over these for an instant he scraped away the last remaining sparks with his bit of gas pipe, then stood there silently waiting for the thing to cool. “What was it?” Ben asked as he came up. “Don’t know.” Johnny drew a flashlight from his pocket and threw its circle of light on the spot. “Listen!” whispered Ben, pulling at Johnny’s coat sleeve and pointing toward the lagoon. Faintly, yet quite distinctly, Johnny heard the creak of oar locks. “A boat,” he whispered back.
- 62. [170] “Yes, Johnny, they was somebody out here. And I bet you it was—that man!” “The limping man?” “Yes.” “Well, what do you suppose was the reason for the bonfire?” Johnny bent over to pick up a fragment of black cardboard heavily coated with black paint. This was curved about, forming the segment of a circle. The inside of the circle was black and charred like the inside of a giant firecracker that has been exploded. Immediately Johnny’s mind was rife with solutions for this fresh mystery. The men were thieves. They had come to this deserted spot at night to divide their loot and to burn any damaging evidence, such as papers, wrappers and whatever else might be connected with it. They were smugglers. The flare of light was a signal to some craft lying far out on the lake, telling them that all was clear and that they might run in. Other possible solutions came to him, but not one of them seemed at all certain. So, in the end, having pocketed the one bit of evidence, he walked back with Ben to his shack. There he promised Ben to return soon to sit out a watch with him on the island; then going down to his boat, he pushed her off. An hour later he was in his own bed fast asleep, with Ben Zook’s diamonds safe under his pillows. His last waking thought had been that if those were real diamonds there would be a reward for their return, and that the reward should go to Ben Zook. It would at least be a start toward the purchase of his long-dreamed-of poultry ranch in the country.
- 63. [171]
- 64. [172] CHAPTER XVI THE STRANGE BLACK CYLINDERS The forenoon was all but gone when Johnny stirred in his bed, then sat up abruptly to stare about him. He had been dreaming, and woven into the web of his dreams was the face and figure of his one time fellow adventurer, Panther Eye, known familiarly as “Pant.” He had dreamed of seeing the dark fights and narrow escapes, and had dreamed of seeing red lights against a night sky, and blinding white flares. In his dreams he had again fought a mountain feud. All this with Pant at his side. “I wish he were here!” Johnny exclaimed as he threw back the covers and leaped from his bed. “He’d put the thing together letter by letter, word by word, like a cross-word puzzle, and somehow make a whole of it. The fire at the school; the pink-eyed stranger; the more terrible fire that endangered Mazie’s life; the big stooping man with a limp; the fire at the Zoo; my experience at Ben Zook’s island and at the marsh; for him all these would fit together somehow. But to me they are little more than fragments of the sort of stuff
- 65. [173] life’s made of. Where’s the affair to end? I’d like to know that.” Seizing a pen, he wrote a telegram to Pant. Pant, as you will remember from reading that other book, “The Hidden Trail,” had remained behind to finish a task he had begun in the Cumberland Mountains. “No,” Johnny said to himself after reading the telegram, “he wouldn’t come,” and he tore the paper in four pieces and threw it in the waste basket. Drawing the fragment of a black cylinder from his pocket, he studied it carefully. “That ought to mean something to me,” he mumbled, “but it doesn’t; not a thing in the world.” From a box in the corner he dragged a desk telephone, the one he had salvaged from the Zoo. “This,” he said, “would tell a story if only it could talk. And why can’t you?” He shook his fist at the instrument. “What’s a telephone for if not for talking?” Since the instrument did not respond, for the twentieth time Johnny unwound its wires and sat there staring at them. There was the usual pair of rather heavily insulated wires and a second pair of lighter ones, about twenty feet long. “I ought to know what those second wires are for,” he said again, “but I don’t. I told the Chief of Detectives about it, and he laughed at me and said: ‘Do you think there’s someone with a tongue hot enough to set fire to a house just by talking over the telephone? There’s some hot ones, but not as hot as that!’ He laughed at
- 66. [174] [175] his own joke, then saw me politely out of the room, thinking all the time, I don’t doubt, that I was a young nut with a cracked head. So, old telephone, if your secret is to be revealed you’ll have to tell it, or I’ll be obliged to discover it.” Putting the telephone back in the box, he took the jewel case from beneath his pillow. As he saw the jewels in the light of day he was more sure than ever that they were genuine. “I fancy,” he mused, “that the Chief of Detectives will be a trifle more interested in this than in my telephone, though in my estimation it’s not half as important. But of course there’s sure to be a reward. I mustn’t forget that. It’s to be for Ben Zook.” The Chief of Detectives was interested, both interested and surprised. He set his best clerk working on the record of stolen diamonds. In less than five minutes the clerk had the record before him. “These diamonds,” he said, looking hard at Johnny, “were stolen from Barker’s on Madison Street two weeks ago last night. The value is four thousand dollars.” “And the reward?” said Johnny calmly. “Eh, what?” “How much reward?” “Nothing’s been said about a reward.” “All right. Good-bye.” Calmly pocketing the case, Johnny started from the door.
- 67. [176] “Here! Here! Stop that young fool!” stormed the Chief of Detectives. “Well,” said Johnny defiantly, “what sort of cheap piker is this man Barker? It’s not for myself, but for a friend who needs it.” “Tell me about it,” said the detective, bending over and beckoning him close. Johnny told the story so well that the Chief got Barker on the wire and pried an even five hundred dollars out of that tight fisted merchant before he would promise the return of the diamonds. “That’ll set your friend Zook up in business,” smiled the Chief of Detectives as a half hour later he handed Johnny a valuable yellow slip. “And say, weren’t you in here a day or two ago with some story about a telephone and a firebug?” “Yes sir.” “Didn’t take much stock in it, did I?” “No, you didn’t.” “You bring that back and tell me about it again. I thought you were a fresh kid and a bit addled, but by Jove, you’ve got a head on your shoulders and it ain’t stuffed with excelsior above the ears, either.” “I’ll do what you say,” said Johnny, “but first I’d like to run down another hunch if you don’t object.” “No objections. Run down as many as you care to. Bring ’em all in. Mebby I can help you, and more’n likely you
- 68. [177] [178] can help me.” Johnny left the place with a jubilant heart. He had enough money now to buy Ben Zook a small ranch. He knew the very place, a half acre, ten miles from the city limits, a sloping bank with oak trees on it and a cabin at its edge, and a touch of green pasture land with a brook at the bottom. Wouldn’t Ben Zook revel in it? And wouldn’t his salvaged poultry thrive there? He wanted to row right out and tell Ben about it at once. Had he been able to read the future he would most assuredly have done so, but since he could only see one step ahead, and had planned to revisit the marsh and have a look at that black shack at its edge, in the end he cashed the check for five hundred and deposited it in a savings account for safe keeping. After that he took a train for the marsh. An hour later, with a feeling of dread that was not far from fear, and was closely connected with his startling and mysterious experiences on two other occasions, he found himself approaching the black shack. Since this shack was built on the side of the marsh nearest to the lake, it was flanked by low, rolling sand- dunes. This made it easy for Johnny to approach the shack without being seen by anyone who might be inside. After crawling to within fifty feet of it he lay down behind a low clump of willows, determined to watch the place for awhile. After an hour of patient watching, his patience deserted him. Gripping something firmly in his hand, he advanced boldly forward until he was within arm’s reach of the building.
- 69. [179] There for a time he stood listening. His footsteps on the sand made no sound. If there were people in the shack they could not be aware of his approach. Nerving himself for quick action and possible attack, he stepped round the corner to look quickly in at the window. Then he laughed softly to himself. There had been no need for all this precaution. Inside the shack was but a single room. In that room there was one person, and that person lay stretched full length upon a couch with his face turned toward the wall. To all appearances he was sound asleep. Seeing this, Johnny proceeded to make a calm survey of the room. In one corner stood a table and chair. On the table were dirty dishes, an empty can, and a loaf of bread. In a back corner stood a rifle, and across from that some strange looking black cylinders. It was the cylinders that interested Johnny. But realizing that he could get a better look at them from the only other window of the place, he contented himself, for the moment, with a careful look at the man. The face could not be seen, but there was about the large, heavy frame and rounded shoulders something vaguely familiar. Still, after all was said and done, Johnny could not be sure that he had ever seen the fellow before, and certainly he did not feel disposed to waken him to find out. He passed around to the other window and for a full five minutes studied those black cylinders. They were strange affairs, about four inches in diameter and two
- 70. [180] [181] feet in length. They resembled huge firecrackers coated black. Instead of fuse, however, each one had on its end two small shiny screws such as are found at the top of a dry battery. “Probably what they are,” was Johnny’s mental comment, “just big dry batteries.” Yet he could not quite convince himself that this was true. In the end, however, he concluded that was the nearest he could come to it at a guess, and since a guess was all he was to get that day, he moved away from the cabin and was soon lost in the sand dunes. “Never saw any batteries half that big,” he grumbled to himself as he trudged along, “and besides, what would he be doing with them out here?” Again he trudged forward for a half mile in silence. Then, of a sudden he came to a dead stop, turned about, made as if to retrace his steps, then appearing to think better of it, stood there for a moment in deep meditation. “It might be true,” he murmured to himself. “It don’t seem possible, yet it might be, and if it is, then the fellow could be miles away when the thing happens. And if it is true, then that solves it.” “But then,” he added thoughtfully as he resumed his march toward the station, “it seems altogether too fanciful.”
- 71. [182] CHAPTER XVII THE UNANSWERED CALL Since there were no new clues to be followed out, and because he had grown tired of haunting the central fire station with its incessant clatter of telegraph instruments and its eternal flashes of light, at ten o’clock that night Johnny went again to the river and taking his old friend’s boat from its place of concealment rowed slowly toward Ben Zook’s island. The lake was calm as a millpond and there was no reason for strenuous rowing. Then, too, he wished to think as he rowed. Johnny was one of those fellows who thought best in action. His thoughts that night were long, long thoughts, long and tangled. It was as if he had a half dozen skeins of yarn all tangled together and was trying to find the ends of each and to disentangle it from the others. His mind was still working upon those black cylinders out in the black shack. He had a feeling that the man he had seen asleep out there was none other than the one who had twice gone gunning for him out there in the marsh. If that were true and if he were the man who had been at the Simons Building fire and at the Zoo and
- 72. [183] later on Ben Zook’s island, then those black cylinders must have some significance. He smiled at this complicated chain of circumstances. “Fat chance!” he murmured to himself. “And yet that might be true, and if it is there’s some connection between the telephone with double wiring and that scrap of black pasteboard we found on the island after that blaze. “Black pasteboard!” he exclaimed suddenly. “That’s it! The piece we found is part of one of those cylinders!” “But if it is,” he said more soberly a moment later, “then why would they burn it out here on Ben’s island? Lot’s of sense to that!” So in the end he got nowhere in his thought unravelling process. However, his arms were working mechanically all the time and he was nearing the island. As he thought of this he suddenly sat straight up and, as if eager to reach his goal, began to row with all his power. He was eager, too, for he suddenly recalled that he was bound on a very pleasant mission. Was he not to tell Ben Zook that at any time he wished he might leave the island for a place of trees, green grass, flowing water and a real cabin of fair dimensions? Small wonder that he hurried. As he neared the shore his heart warmed at thought of the smile that would come to the face of the kindly, cheerful, little old man. “Surely,” he thought to himself, “in spite of the fact that he’s a bit strange and uncouth, he’s a real gentleman
- 73. [184] [185] after all and deserves a great deal more than is coming to him.” He smiled as he thought of the little chicken coop Ben Zook had showed him. A low-roofed affair with a roost of bars about three feet long; five chickens on the roost, blinking at the light; a single goose in a corner with his head under his wing; this was Ben’s poultry house and his brood. There’d be more to it now—a real chicken house and perhaps a hundred fine fowls. It would be a Paradise for Ben Zook. As he mused happily on these things his boat touched the shore. Springing out nimbly, he dragged the boat up the beach and turned his face toward Ben’s house. At that moment, as a cloud passing over the moon sent a chill down his spine, something seemed to whisper to him that all was not well. That he might dispel this dark foreboding, he lifted up his voice in a cheery shout: “Ben Zook! Oh, Ben Zook, I’m coming.” The distant skyscrapers, like some mountainside, caught his words and flung them back to him, seeming at the same time to change his “Oh” to “old.” “Ben Zook! Old Ben Zook!” Again and again, more faintly, and yet more faintly: “Ben Zook! Old Ben Zook. Ben Zook—Zook.” As the echo trailed away in the distance, a foreboding came over Johnny. There had come no answering call.
- 74. [186] Still he tried to cheer himself. “He’s asleep,” Johnny told himself. “Little wonder, too. I was out here till near morning.” After that he trudged in silence over the piles of broken brick, sand and clay. As he came at last within sight of Ben’s place he was cheered by the sight of red coals on the grate. “It’s not been long since he was here, anyway,” he said. Yet his feeling that Ben was not in his house proved true. The place was empty. “Probably gone for a stroll down the beach,” was his mental comment as he dropped down in Ben’s big arm chair. The chair was a comfortable one. The fire, with a chill breeze blowing off the lake, was cheering too, yet there was no comfort for Johnny. He had not been seated two minutes when he was again upon his feet. “I don’t like it,” he muttered. The next moment he was chiding himself for a fool. “He’ll be here in a moment and I’ll tell him about the reward.” Johnny smiled at the thought. Walking to the tiny poultry house, he opened the door and, flicking on his flashlight, looked within. The calm assurance of chickens on their roost, of the single goose who did not so much as take his head from beneath his wing, did much to allay his fears.
- 75. [187] [188] “Just look about a bit, anyway,” he mused. “May find another case of diamonds,” he added with a forced chuckle. As he stepped over the first mound of clay he thought he detected a sound behind him. Stopping dead in his tracks, while little tufts of hair appeared to rise at the back of his neck, he said in a low, steady tone: “Ben. Ben Zook.” There came no answer, no other sound. He crossed another mound, and yet another. Then again there came a sound as of a brick loosened from a pile. “Ben. Ben Zook,” he called softly. Once more no answer. Then, just as he was about to go forward again, having thrown his light ten feet before him, he started back in horror. There at his feet lay a dead man! Trembling in every limb, feeling sick as if about to fall in a faint, yet battling it back, he stood still in his tracks for such a space of time as it might take to count one hundred. Then, finding he could once more trust his wobbly knees, he moved forward three paces, threw his light at his feet, took one good steady look, put out a hand and picked something up, held it for ten seconds, bent low for a better look, then like one who had seen a ghost he went racing and staggering across the piles toward the shore and his boat. Fear lent him wings. Nor did he stop at the shore. With one motion he shoved the boat into the water; with
- 76. [189] [190] another, regardless of wet feet, he sprang aboard and before he could think twice found himself well out into the lake. There at last he dropped his oars to sit staring back at the island and to at last slump down in his seat. His mind, first in a whirl and next in a dead calm, was trying to tell his senses something that seemed impossible. At last, raising his face to the sky, he said solemnly: “Ben Zook is dead! Poor, harmless, golden hearted Ben Zook! Someone killed him. I’m going after the police boat now. The police will do what they can to find the man. But, by all that’s good, I will find the murderer and he will pay the price for his cowardly crime.” Having thus made his vow, he found that strength, hope and courage came ebbing back. Seizing his oars he rowed rapidly toward the city. From that time until the end Johnny conducted his search with such reckless daring that it could bring but one of two things: A crown of triumph or a quiet six feet of sod in a church-yard.
- 77. [191] CHAPTER XVIII THE RETURN OF PANTHER EYE After accompanying the police boat to the island and having watched in silence the investigation made by the police, which was followed by a short search for the man who had visited the island with such tragic results, Johnny returned at once to the city and there made straight toward the river bridge. Imagine his surprise when, upon setting foot on the bridge, he discovered light shining through the crack left by the closed shutters of his window. “Waiting for me,” he muttered. “Wonder which of them it is? Well, let them wait,” he added fiercely, “I’m not so defenseless as I might seem.” He put a hand to his side pocket. A friendly policeman, finding Johnny unarmed as they searched the island, had pressed a small automatic upon him and had forgotten to take it back. Johnny was now thankful for the oversight. Without a second’s hesitation, but keeping a sharp lookout that he might not be ambushed by some guard stationed outside, he crossed the bridge, dodged down
- 78. [192] a narrow alley and having reached the ground floor door that led to the back stairs, paused to listen. Having heard no sound, he pushed open the door, closed it noiselessly behind him, then went tip-toeing softly up the steps. At the second landing he paused to listen, yet he heard no sound. “That’s queer,” he whispered as he resumed his upward climb. As he reached his own door he recalled an old copy- book axiom: “Delays are dangerous.” So, gripping his automatic with one hand, he turned the knob with the other and threw the door wide open. Imagine his surprise at seeing a single figure slumped down in a chair, apparently fast asleep. The person had his back to him. There was something vaguely familiar about that back. Slowly a smile of pleasant anticipation spread over Johnny’s face. “If it only were,” he whispered. Tip-toeing to a position which gave him a side view of the still motionless figure, he stared for a second, then there came upon his face an unmistakable smile as he exclaimed: “Pant! You old trump you!” It was indeed Pant, the Panther Eye you have known for some time, that strange boy who had accomplished so many seemingly impossible things through his power to see in the night and to perform other magical tricks.
- 79. [193] [194] “Why, it’s you!” said Pant, waking up and dragging off his heavy glasses to have a good look at Johnny. “I figured you’d be back sooner or later.” “Pant,” said Johnny, lowering himself unsteadily into a chair, “there was never a time in all my checkered career when I was so glad to see you.” “You must be in pretty deep,” grinned Pant, “‘powerful deep,’ they’d say in the mountains.” “But Pant, what happened?” asked Johnny. “How does it come you left the mountains so soon?” Pant put on a sad face. “Those mountain people are superstitious, Johnny, terribly superstitious.” “Are they?” “Are they? Why look, Johnny, we were having a school election down there, regular kind. Everybody wanted his sister or his cousin or his daughter in as teacher. We were about evenly divided and were fighting it out fair enough with the great American institution, the ballot, when an argument came up in which Harrison Crider, their clerk of election, knocked Cal Nolon out of his chair. Right there is where things began to start. There were fifteen or twenty on a side, all armed and all packed in one room twenty feet square. You can see what it was going to be like, Johnny.” Pant paused to go through the motion of mopping his brow. “They were all standing there loaded and charged, like bits of steel on the end of a magnet, when a strange thing happened.” He paused to stare at the wall. “What happened?” asked Johnny.
- 80. [195] “Well, sir, it was one of those queer things, ‘plumb quare,’ they’d call it down in the mountains, one of those things you can’t explain—at least most people can’t.” “But what did happen?” Johnny demanded. “That’s what I’m coming to,” drawled Pant. “Well, sir, believe me or not, there came such a brilliant flash of light as was never before seen on sea or land (at least that’s what they all say. I didn’t see it; had my eyes shut tight all the time). And after that, so they say, there was darkness, a darkness so black you couldn’t see your hand. ‘Egyptian darkness,’ that’s what they called it, Johnny. You’ve heard of that. It tells about it in the Bible, the plague of darkness. “It only lasted three minutes; but would you believe it, Johnny, when the three minutes were up there wasn’t a bit of fight left in them? No sir, limp as rags, every man of ’em. And the election after that was as calm and sedate as a Quaker sewing society. “But, Johnny,” Pant’s face took on a sad expression, “would you believe it? After it was all over those superstitious people accused me of the whole affair; said I was a witch and that I produced that darkness by incantation. Now Johnny, I leave it to you, was that fair? Would you think that of me?” “No, Pant,” said Johnny with a grin, “I wouldn’t. I know you’re no witch, and I know any incantation you might indulge in wouldn’t get you a thing. But as for creating that darkness, I’d say it was a slight trick compared with others I’ve seen you do.”
- 81. [196] [197] “Ah, Johnny,” sighed Pant, “I can see the whole world’s against me.” “But Johnny!” he exclaimed, changing suddenly from his attitude of mock gloom to one of alert interest, “what’s the lay? To tell the honest truth, I’ve been bored to death down there. I knew if I could find you I’d be able to mix in with something active. So here I am. What have you to offer?” “Plenty!” said Johnny. “And, thank God, you’re here to take a hand.”
- 82. [198] CHAPTER XIX A DEN OF THE UNDERWORLD After dragging the Zoo telephone from its box and taking the scrap of black cardboard from a shelf, Johnny sat down to tell his story. He told it, too, from beginning to end; from the school fire to the discovery of Ben Zook, dead upon his island. When the story had ended Pant sat for a long time slumped down in his chair. From his motionless attitude and his staring eyes, one might have thought him in a trance. He came out of this with a start and at once began to reel off to Johnny the story he had just been told; only now there was association, connection, and a proper sequence to it all. He had put the puzzle together, piece by piece. No, it was more than that. The fires were one puzzle; Johnny’s affairs at the island another; and those at the marsh still another. After solving each of these separately and putting each small part in its place, Pant had joined them all in one three-fold puzzle board that was complete to the last letter.
- 83. [199] “Sounds great!” said Johnny breathlessly as Pant concluded. “If all that is true we have only to find the man.” “Find that man!” said Pant in a tone that carried conviction. Twelve o’clock the following night found Johnny and Pant in a strange place. Standing with their backs against the unpainted and decaying side of a frame building, they were watching a door. The frame building formed one wall to an alley which was in reality more path than an alley; a path of hard- beaten mud that ran between two buildings. Although the path ran through from street to street, the hard beaten part of the path ended before the door which the two boys were watching. “Here comes another,” Pant whispered, drawing Johnny back into the shadows. “And another,” Johnny whispered back. Two shadow-like creatures, appearing to hug the darkness, came flitting down the hard-trodden path. As each reached the end of the path the door opened slightly, the shadows flitted in, and again the door went dark. “Like shades of evil ones entering their last, dark abode,” whispered Johnny with a shudder. They were watching that door because they had seen a certain man enter it—a tall, stooping, slouching figure of a man who walked with a decided limp. They had picked up his trail in a more prosperous neighborhood
- 84. [200] [201] and had followed him at a distance through less and less desirable neighborhoods, down dark streets and rubbish strewn alleys, past barking dogs and beggars sleeping beneath doorsteps, until of a sudden he had turned up this path and entered this door. “Come on,” Johnny whispered impatiently, “it’s only a cheap eating place. I heard the dishes rattle and caught the aroma of coffee. They’ll pay no attention to us.” “I’m not so sure of that,” Pant grumbled. “Looks like something else to me. But—all right, come on. Only,” he continued, “take a table near the door.” The place did prove to be some sort of eating place. There were small round tables and steel framed chairs placed about the room. Around some of these tables men and women were seated, playing cards. Openly roaring at good fortune or cursing an evil turn of the deck, they paid no attention whatever to the newcomers. The card players were for the most part situated in the back of the room. Tables at the front were covered with dishes. Men and women, engaged in eating, smoking and talking, swarmed about these tables. Indeed, the place was so crowded that for a time Johnny and Pant were at great difficulty to find chairs. At last, as they were backing to a place against the wall, a small animated being, a slender girl with dark, vivacious eyes, rose and beckoned them to her table. She had been sitting there alone sipping dark coffee. Bowing his thanks, Johnny accepted a chair and motioned Pant to another. The table was not as near the
- 85. [202] door as he might have liked, but “beggars cannot be choosers.” A waiter appeared. “Coffee and something hot in a bowl,” said Johnny. “You know the kind, red Mex. with plenty of pepper.” “Make it the same,” said Pant. “And waiter,” Johnny put out a hand, “something nice for her,” he nodded his head toward the girl. “Anything she’d like.” “The gentlemen are kind,” said the girl in a foreign accent, “but I have no need. I will have none.” Since their new-found friend did not accept of their hospitality and did not start a conversation, the two boys sat silently staring about them. It was a strange and motley throng that was gathered there. Dark Italians and Greeks; a few Irish faces; some Americans; two Mexicans in broad sombreros; three mulatto girls at a table by themselves and a great number of men and women of uncertain nationality. “There! There he is,” whispered Johnny, casting his eyes at the far corner. “And there, by all that’s good, is Knobs, the New York firebug! They’re at the same table. See! I can’t be mistaken. There’s the same hooked nose, the identical stoop to his shoulders.” “Together!” exclaimed Pant. “That changes my conclusions a little.”
- 86. [203] “Don’t appear to see them,” whispered Johnny. “What are we to do?” “I don’t know. Perhaps a police raid. But not yet; I want to study them.” Their bowls of steaming red Mulligan had arrived. They had paid their checks and had begun to sip the fiery stuff, when of a sudden there came cries of “Jensie! Jensie!” and every eye was turned in their direction. Johnny felt his face suddenly grow hot. Had he been recognized? This beyond doubt was a den of the underworld. Was this a cry which was but a signal for a “Rush the bulls”? Since he could not tell, and since everyone remained in his seat, he did not move. “If the gentlemen will please hold their bowls,” said the girl, smiling as she handed each his bowl. What did this mean? They were soon to see. Stepping with a fairy-like lightness from floor to chair, and chair to table, the girl made a low bow and then as a piano in a corner struck up a lively air she began a dance on the table top. It was such a wild, whirling dance as neither of the boys had seen before. It seemed incredible that the whole affair could be performed upon so small a table top. Indeed, at one time Johnny did feel a slight pat upon his knee and realized in a vague sort of way that the velvet slippered foot of this little enchantress had rested there for an instant.
- 87. [204] [205] No greater misfortune could have befallen the two boys than this being seated by the dancer’s table. It focussed all eyes upon them. Their detection was inevitable. They expected it. But, coming sooner than they could dream, it caught them unawares. With a suddenness that was terrible, at the end of the applause that followed the girl’s performance, there came a death-like pause, broken by a single hissed-out word. The next instant a huge man with a great knife gleaming in his hand launched himself at Pant. Taken entirely unawares, the boy must have been stabbed through and through had it not been for a curious interference. The man’s arm, struck by a sudden weight, shot downward to drive the knife into the floor. The next instant, as a tremendous uproar began, there came a sudden and terrible flash of light followed by darkness black as ink. Johnny, having struggled to his feet, was groping blindly about him when a hand gripped his shoulder and a voice whispered: “This way out.” At the same moment he felt a tug at the back of his coat. Moving forward slowly, led by Pant and being tugged at from behind, he at last came to the door and ten seconds later found himself in the outer semi-darkness of the street. Feeling the tug at his coat lessening, he turned about to see Jensie, the dancing girl.
- 88. [206] “Do you know that she saved your life?” he whispered to Pant. “She leaped squarely upon that big villain’s arm.” “Rode it like I might a mule,” laughed the girl. “And you, Mister,” she turned to Pant, “you are a Devil. You make a terrible light, you then make terrible night. You are a wonderful Devil!” and with a flash of her white teeth she was gone. “Now what?” asked Johnny. “We cannot do better than to follow. They will be out at us like a pack of rats in another minute.” “How about a police raid?” “Not to-night. It wouldn’t do any good. The birds have flown.” At this Pant led the way rapidly out of the narrow alley into more frequented and safer ways. Little did Johnny dream as he crept beneath the covers that night that the following night would see the end of all this little drama in which he had been playing a part. Yet so it was to be. As for Pant, who slept upon a cot in one corner of Johnny’s room, he was dreaming of a slender figure and of big, dark, Gypsy eyes. He was indulging in romantic thoughts—the first of his life. That Gypsy-like girl of the underworld den had somehow taken possession of his thoughts. Many times before had he barely escaped death, but never before had his life been saved by a girl.
- 89. [207] [208] “She’s a Gypsy,” he whispered to himself, “only a Gypsy girl. But me; who am I? Who knows? Perhaps I am Gypsy myself.” Through his mind there passed a wish that was more than half prayer: “May the time come when I can repay her.” This wish was to be granted, far sooner than he knew.
- 90. [209] CHAPTER XX JOHNNY STRIKES FIRST At a quarter of six next evening, at the request of the Fire Chief, Johnny was lurking in the shadows back of the building on Randolph Street that housed such a strange collection of commodities: chemicals, diamonds, juvenile books, novelties and Knobs, the suspected firebug. Earlier that day a phone call had tipped off the Chief. According to the call, Knobs Whittaker would bear a little extra watching that night. While putting little faith in this tip, the Chief had no desire to neglect the least clue which might assist in bringing to an end the series of disastrous fires which were reflecting great discredit upon his department. Acting upon the tip he had stationed men at every point which Knobs had been seen to frequent. Johnny’s station was this building. He had come around behind to have a look at possible exits there. Having satisfied his mind in this matter, he was about to make his way back along the wall to the street when he was halted by the sudden sound of a truck entering the alley.
- 91. Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world, offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth. That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to self-development guides and children's books. More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading. Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and personal growth every day! ebookbell.com