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ARCHIVES

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____________________
ILLUSTRATION BY
WILLIAM DUKE

CLICKING FOR GODOT
[PART THREE: I'LL TELL YOU MY STORY IF YOU TELL ME YOURS]

Interactive art existed long before computers. The Homeric bard remixed his orally-transmitted epic for each new audience; the medieval mystery play provided a role for everyone in the village; the Victorian family gathered in the living room to play new chamber-music pieces. Every age has had participatory art forms that blurred the line between artist and audience. It's our late 20th-century society --with its dominant model of broadcasting enforcing an unprecedentedly passive approach to the consumption of art -- that's an anomaly.

There's a burgeoning movement in the small world of technological art today that aims to reverse that passivity. Most critics of the couch-potato culture of TV have tended to be technophobic. But this cadre of performers and teachers embraces digital tools, hoping to use them to level the old distinctions between the creator and the crowd -- and make good on the radical artist Joseph Beuys' battle cry, "Everyone's an artist!"

You can find the epicenter of this artistic movement -- call it digital populism -- at the annual Digital Storytelling Festival, where "Waiting for Godot.com" was presented. Hosted for three years now by performance artist Dana Atchley (and long sponsored by Apple Computer), the Digital Storytelling fest has always been less an industry conference than a small gathering of like-minded artists, educators and technologists. The roster has included hypertext authors, interactive filmmakers and other experimental souls, but most of the work presented each year is by artists who, whatever their medium, tell traditional stories -- with a beginning, middle and end. They use technology -- Premiere and Photoshop, e-mail and the Web -- not to deconstruct a narrative but to distribute it more widely and let the audience talk back.

One model for this movement can be found on the Web, at sites -- like Abbe Don's Bubbe's Back Porch and Derek Powazek's The Fray -- that serve at once as showcases for writers' personal stories and bulletin boards for readers to respond. Don's site began as a skein of tales about her own great-grandmother; Powazek's is more of an open mike for true-life stories (usually, for some reason, with a depressing bent). Both sites are open-ended and invite visitors to add their own yarns to the mix.

Another model is the workshops run by Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen of the San Francisco Digital Media Center. These weekend-long "digital boot camps" take participants who've often had little or no experience with computers and teach them how to turn personal artifacts -- photos, clippings, heirlooms and hand-me-down tales -- into five-minute Quicktime movies. The work that emerges -- love stories, memorials to dead relatives, ghost tales, road sagas -- is rarely revolutionary and often unpolished. But it is consistently surprising and frequently moving. And even with the pieces that are a mess, you can feel the fledgling filmmakers' pleasure and freedom.

At these Web sites and classes, the emphasis is on using technology to create something forthright -- and to speak in an authentic personal voice. Computers are viewed less as a radically new medium that suspends existing artistic traditions than as a new distribution device and expressive tool for artists who are doing essentially what they've always done.

The radicalism here isn't aesthetic but social. This version of interactivity doesn't decree that authors abandon their traditional job of shaping a story; it simply asks artists to share their stage -- to invite their audience into the creative process. Taking turns as storyteller: The idea is straight out of kindergarten, but that doesn't make it any less subversive.

The standard complaint about interactivity from accomplished novelists and filmmakers is, "Why should I let you finish my story? I'm the one who knows how to make it a good story -- that's what I get paid for." The taking-turns approach lets the pros have their chance to do their thing -- and still leaves room for self-expression on the part of the erstwhile audience.

Now, as any actor will tell you, sharing the stage has its ups and downs. In a situation like "Godot.com," interruptions tend to steal the show. It's easier to set rules for sharing the stage on a Web site than in a chat room or a live performance. But at least we know where to start. If we understand interactivity to mean interaction between people -- in a world where technology allows more people than ever before to create their own art and share it -- then all art gradually becomes interactive, and technology becomes as transparent as the pens and books we take for granted today.

That's one possible future. There's another, older vision of interactivity that's also still with us, and will probably never disappear. It's hard to give up the Frankenstein dream of imaginary worlds that exist entirely inside the machine -- of stories that run on their own digital steam.