cave writing

In the spirit of engaging Robert Coover's contributions to the electronic literature field (one of the conference aims) and simultaneously looking at the cutting edge of our field, this panel will discuss the groundbreaking Cave Writing project that Coover has initiated at Brown. It will feature the two primary faculty the project has had over the last eight years (Coover and Cayley), two of the students who have been involved in organizing the project and creating work (Wardrip-Fruin and Gorman), and one of the critics who has looked at this work most seriously (Raley). Topics will include the history of the literary work done in the Brown Cave, the unexpected power of two dimensional typography in three dimensional space, experiences of embodied interaction and spectatorship in combination and tension with literary reading, the role of non-textual images, animation, and sound in the Brown Cave experiments, and others.

Ideally, this panel discussion will articulate with two efforts. First, if possible, it would be ideal to collect the videos that have been used to share Brown's literary Cave work with those who have not visited the Cave, and perhaps shoot new video, then use it to construct a visual history of the work at Brown that can be shown at the panel, distributed, and archived. Second, again if possible, it would be good to combine this panel with some method for those attending the ELO AI conference to have tours of the Cave at which some of the standout works will be shown. Perhaps the only way this can avoid conflict with the main conference program (given the small size of Cave audiences) would be to schedule them as a series of reservation-requiring tours immediately before and/or after the main conference, encouraging interested people to take this into account when planning travel.

The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop founded by Robert Coover, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word. From 2002 onward writers have explored the possibilities of spatial hypertext in an immersive environment. What this paper proposes is an exploration of the history of the twin currents of hypertext and virtual reality that merged to create this particular form of expression, going back to the early hypertext systems developed at Brown University in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson/van Dam/et al and work in immersive virtual reality at University of Illinois’ CAVE in the early 1990s.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

In experimental hypertext fiction workshops at Brown University, undergraduate writers work with programmers to create interactive literary experiences in immersive virtual reality. To involve the writer more directly in the process of implementation, we have created CaveWriting: spatial hypertext authoring system. Authors can manipulate a graphical front-end to position text, multimedia, and 3D models within virtual space, apply special effects, and create hyperlinks which initiate theatrical events. The result can be previewed at any time inside a desktop window. This talk will cover the past and present of cavewriting at Brown and its future at UIUC, UCSD, and beyond.

When we address ourselves to digitally mediated writings practices, it is clear that the properties and methods of the surface of inscription are at issue. The inscriptional surfaces of digital media are complex, even when manifest as relatively passive 'screens' that emulate paper-like media. At the very least, these surfaces bear properties that reinforce the necessity for 'media-specific analyses,' as Katherine Hayles puts it. Related and corresponding complexities are demonstrable in what we may describe as the 'atoms' of inscriptional practice in digital media, the programmable differance-engines that leave their traces on just such complex surfaces. These features are, literally, 'spectacularly' in evidence when applied to writing for 3D immersive environments such as the three-wall Cave at Brown University, where new engagements with writing have been practiced experimentally and pedagogically since 2002. This presentation will report on recent writing and literary art practice in Brown's Cave with some reference to the critical and theoretical context that the author has been seeking to provide for this variety of writing digital media. In particular, I will attempt to address the use of text-as-surface in 3D space -- text as, itself, a potential surface of inscription; text as a space for writing; and text as a prime delineator, a generative engine of 'virtual' (artificial, culturally-structured) space.