association

Jichen Zhu explores narrative using artificial intelligence to explore subjective fluid aspects of human emotional experience. Her research is informed by cognitive science research into analogy (extending foundations associated with Michael Mateas, Noah Warddrip-Fruin & Fox Harrell).

Jichen's aim is to explore the expressive potential of algorithms as aids to the constructions of narrative; in her view, algorithms do not necessarily replace human writers, but augment expressivity. She is working toward the possibility of AI narrative engines which develop stories unique to the architecture of computation. This provocative possibility is not easily implemented, yet operates as a lure, instigating research into modes of creativity inherently different from human authorial intent.

(Source: David Jhave Johnston)

The story of hypermedia, in which the Web is a recent chapter, begins with a vision of transforming the brain's associative connections into media - media that can be infinitely duplicated and easily shared - creating pathways of thought in a form that will not fade with memory. In recent years, hypermedia has begun to permeate our lives. But it is not as we dreamed: constantly growing, with nothing lost, only showing what we wish to see. Instead we find 'Not Found' a nearly daily message.

The story of software agents begins with the idea of a 'soft robot' - capable of carrying out tasks toward a goal, while requesting and receiving advice in human terms. In recent years, a much narrower marketing fantasy of the agent has emerged (with a relationship to actual agent technologies as tenuous as Robbie the Robot's relationship to factory robots) and it grows despite failures such as Microsoft Bob. Now we often see agents as anthropomorphized, self-customizing virtual servants designed for a single task: to be a pleasing interface to a world of information that does not please us.

The Web disappoints us with its too-perfect reflection of our ambivalent relationships with impermanence and openness: dynamic and unstable, diverse and overwhelming. In response, some Web businesses are marketing fantasies of agents that will find for us only the information we desire, sheltering us from chance encounters with unpleasant content and broken links. The Impermanence Agent is a different response.

The Impermanence Agent, developed over the last year, interacts with users as a web browser window. The Agent is a storyteller, telling a personal story, a story of impermanence. The Agent is meant to be experienced peripherally, over time - not 'visited.' It tracks the user's web browsing, makes copies of the texts and images the user views, and then customizes its story by incorporating this material into it. The Agent customizes until none of its original story is left.

Hypertext (the non-sequential linking of text(s) and images) was first envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in its prehistory as an associational, archival storage system suitable for classifying and sorting vast quantities of information. But where library databases, technical manuals and other knowledge-based hypertexts still fulfill this function, literary hypertext overturns this proposed usage, celebrating both information overload and forgetfulness as the desired end of a reading. Promoting disassociation and an awareness of the spatio-temporal dimensions of its environment, hypertext fiction uses the aesthetics of its three-dimensional interface and structure to frustrate memory and to engender a sensory and emotional response in the reader. Focusing on M.D. Coverley's multimedia hypertext Califia, I will investigate how the aesthetics of the hypertext form become an engine of forgetfulness that drives her text through its explorations of lost memories, including the ravages of Alzheimer's, unofficial histories, secrets, missing pieces and the quest for hidden treasure.

An archive is born of forgetfulness (Derrida 11) and Coverley's feminist hypertext is an archival system that embraces contradictions, defining emotional and sensory information as the most important 'knowledge' to be stored. Since hypertext works with association, it is a mnemonic form, but, as an inclusive archival space, it also allows just such a proliferation of contradictions. And being rooted in short term memory as it is, hypertext is therefore by extension also rooted in memory loss. Without a hierarchy, a reader must decide what is important in a text and, working with an associational structure, she is bound to forget details. However, in literary hypertext the real information is encoded, not in the text as such, but in its structure. Dispersing information into the three-dimensional plot architecture, hypertext plays with memory loss as an asset (not a bug) by using a reader's memory against herself, by making the recall of specifics in a text difficult. Through a refusal of traditional plot devices, Coverley's fiction privileges the immersive, sensual experience of reading. Plot still exists, but because it is abstract and spatial--being the very structure and interface of the work--it is difficult to recreate in the mind except as an emotional and sensory response.

Coverley takes literary hypertext's innate associational abilities and incorporates the side effects of information overload into the aesthetics of her fiction, functioning both as plot elements and as the structure of her text. Other authors have used forgetfulness and memory as an aspect of their hypertext works (and I will use Michael Joyce's _Twilight, A Symphony_ as a counterpoint in passing), but never before has the cognitive process of memory loss been transformed into such a joyous sense of exploration as in Califia. This hypertext privileges forgetting and the rediscovery of what has been forgotten, but does not make disconnection or avoidance possible, returning readers to sites of lost memories and old traumas until the text's parameters have been mapped and its treasures recovered.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

Fugues, a project of the NT2 Laboratory at the Université du Québec à Montréal, is both an hypermedia adaptation of the poem Piano published 2001 by Quebec author René Lapierre and a literary critical analysis of that same poem. The Fugues Project originally came about when Bertrand Gervais asked NT2 Lab students to think about how to read and to analyze a paper-published poem through hypermedia. Instead of writing a dissertation as one usually does when reading a text in a literature classroom, participants were asked to adapt Piano through hypermedia. The goal was to think about new ways of reading printed text using electronic tools. The participants came up with an associative way of exploring this particular poem. This experimental project was designed not only to build an audience for new media literary works and writing by just presenting existing hypermedia works, but also to ask these literary scholars to think how they would go about writing a paper about a poem in a non-textbook manner. The idea behind this was to put theory into practice. Or rather: to create a hypermedia work allows for a literary audience not only to read new media literary works but it also allows practices in writing new media and thus, familiarizing the literature class to hypermedia and how students can now add associative audio, video and graphics interpretations to their written text-analysis.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)