Signal to Noise & Opening Sources: Ian Hatcher
Title: Signal to Noise
URL: http://clearblock.net/stn
Title: Opening Sources
URL: http://clearblock.net/local
I propose a 30-minute reading/demonstration/performance. It would contain a 10-minute reading from Signal to Noise, the networked hypertext story I presented at ELO 2008, a 10-minute presentation/lecture on adaptive and realtime networked literary systems, and conclude with a 10-minute reading from Opening Sources, a new project I have been developing over the past few months.
Signal to Noise (http://clearblock.net/stn) is an electronic short story written for multiple simultaneous readers. Concurrent readings are tracked by a central engine; the navigations of users intertwine and subtly affect one another. While participants in simultaneous readings are unable to directly communicate with one another in the virtual environment, textual ripples are left on the surface of the story with each selected link. These ripples, fragmented yet occasionally intelligible words and phrases, are visible not only to the reader whose decisions created them, but to all the other readers online. Within moments, the lines of scattered, shared ephemera (subtext, echoes, commentary, context) subside and disappear.
I would need to read from STN in a space equipped with internet access. Ideally the audience would also have access to the internet, via wifi, and have been advised in advance to bring laptops to the reading. The audience would be invited to open the story and read from their own screens silently while I read aloud from a projected monitor. My own reading would include the aforementioned "ripples" collectively created by all readers present, which would continuously inform our interconnected parallel navigations through the story.
While I could still read from Signal to Noise even if a wireless connection is unavailable (as was the case in Vancouver), the concluding presentation of Opening Sources would absolutely require that members of the audience have access to the internet. Opening Sources is a framework I've built for realtime collective writing, rewriting, and overwriting: it is a page which permits word-by-word edits by anyone at any time. These edits appear instantly on all other computers viewing the same page.
Since April I have read publicly from Opening Sources three times. The largest reading was last month in Chicago before an audience of approximately 100 people. About 25 of them, along with an unknown number of remote internet participants, simultaneously edited a text of less than 70 words while I cyclically read it into a microphone. It was a blizzard of changes, with loops of semantic feedback triggered by my own amplified interpretive reading of the text--- a text wildly unstable yet grounded in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of writing decisions made by actual people while the reading was underway.
It is my deep regret that this event was not documented due to technical problems with a camera. A version of the interactive page may still be viewed online, however, at http://clearblock.net/local. (It is still open to changes. I cannot guarantee what you might find on that page should you open it.)
If the Opening Sources would be problematic to present, I could just do the initial reading and talk, cutting the final ten minutes. But the reason I propose these two readings together, rather than just one, is that I consider them diametrical ends of a spectrum of realtime interactivity and adaptive text that I have been mapping out over the past two years. Opening Sources is, in a sense, the polar opposite of Signal to Noise. While STN deliberately does not allow its readers any real agency in communicating with one another (and this inability is, on a certain level, what the story is about), OS accepts any external content whatsoever that does not break its technical structure. I'd like to spend the 10-minute interim in my presentation discussing the problems and potential for realtime reader input into networked multiuser literary work, linking both readings and, I hope, inspiring others to explore the possibilities of realtime connectivity and adaptivity in electronic writing.