[ISEA97] Panel: Noah Wardrip-Fruin (chair) – Panel Intro Re-forming Narrative: Performance, Collaboration, Play

Panel Statement

Six panelists — artists, writers, and researchers — discuss forms of narrative made possible by computing technologies and approaches that emphasize performance, collaboration, and play.

  1.  Athomas Goldberg, at the NYU Media Research Laboratory, is creating systems for “story games” — ways that artists can use the fundamentals of games, storytelling, and improvisational theater to create dramatic experiences in which the user or participant occupies the central role.
  2.  Carolyn Guyer uses Storyspace and the Web to create narrative from apparently unrelated parts, examine the problem of quality in its intercultural and intracultural dimensions, and approach interactive narrative design from the perspective of the reader or audience.
  3.  Nina Sobell and Emily Hartzell, through their live Web performances and Park8ench kiosk project, use video, computers, telerobotics, and the Internet to create installations that bridge physical and cyber space—highlighting the role of collaboration in their work, the impact of mediation on experience, and dynamics of access, control, and expression.
  4.  Adrianne Wortzel uses the Web, live internet broadcasting, and interactive robotic installations to explore the mixing and layering of programmed performance and improvisa-tion, boolean possibilities in plot construction, the roles of remote participants, and methods of developing elements of scripting, mapping, and characterization.
  5.  Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the panel organizer, uses multiscale interfaces and the Web to create writing networks in which themes of impermanence and constraint are at play.
  • Noah Wardrip-Fruin (U.S.A.), chair. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s new media art/writing will be  pre­sented this year at ACM Siggraph, ACM Hypertext, the MIT List Center, the Sandra Gering Gallery, La Mama, and on the Web. For the past several years he has been at New York University, working with the Center for Advanced Technology and the Taub Urban Research Center, and teaching at the Graduate Film and Television Program and 1996 he was an Edward Albee Foundation Fellow.
  • Adrianne Wortzel (U.S.A.) is an artist, author of The Electronic Chronicles and other webworks, creator of robotic installa­tions, and producer/director of Theoricon Globe Theater, an online amphitheater for artists. Her writings have been published in Leonardo, intelligent Agent, Cyberstage Magazine, and Atlas Mapping. She is a co-host of Art Dirt, a weekly broadcast on the web. Born, lives and works in New York City. She teaches art and telecommunications at The School of Visual Arts MFA Photography Department and in both the Art and the Engineering Schools at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
  • Nina Sobell (U.S.A.) received her MFA in Sculpture and Video from Cornell University in 1971, where she was a pioneer of video and interactive art. Since 1994, she has worked col­laboratively with artist Emily Hartzell. As artists-in-resi­dence at NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology, they have created innovative uses of the Web in ParkBench, a design for public-access Web kiosks for the City of New York; ArTisTheater, the Web’s first live video art performance space; and VirtuAlice, a mobile telepresence video installa­tion.They have presented the work at Interfaces ’97 in Montpellier, CHI 97 (Computer-Human Interaction Conference), SIGGRAPH96, and in recent lectures at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, St. Martin’s School of Art in London, and Columbia University.Their work has been exhibited at Ricca/Maresca Gallery, Sandra Gering Gallery, and in PORT, at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and featured in Art in America, International Design Magazine, TalkBack, and the Village Voice. Sobell presented the installations Interactive Encephalographic Brainwave Drawing (1974-97) and Videophone Voyeur (1977) at Joseph Beuys’ Free International University at Documenta 6. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the and video art have been shown throughout the U.S., Europe, and Japan.
  • Emily Hartzell (U.S.A.) graduated in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University and received her MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts in 1995. Since 1994, she has collaborated with artist with Nina Sobell. As artists-in-residence at NYU’s Center for Advanced Technology, they have created innovative uses of the Web in ParkBench, a design for public-access Web kiosks for the City of New York;’ArTisTheater,’ the Web’s first live video art performance space; and VirtuAlice, a mobile telepresence video installation.They have presented the work at Interfaces ’97 in Montpellier, CHI 97 (Computer-Human Interaction Conference), SIGGRAPH96, and in recent lec­tures at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, St. Martin’s School of Art in London, and Columbia University.Their work has been exhibited at Ricco/Maresca Gallery, Sandra Gering Gallery, and in PORT, at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, and featured in Art in America, International Design Magazine, TalkBack, and the Village Voice. Hartzell is a multimedia artist and independent curator, whose work and exhibitions have been reviewed in publications includ­ing The New Yorker, Print Collector’s Newsletter,
    and Arts Magazine.
  • Carolyn Guyer (U.S.A.) Among the first wave of writers to create hypertext fiction, Carolyn Guyer is the author of Quibbling. Her other hyper­texts include the first published collaborative fiction, lime Pass, with co-author Martha Petry. Forthcoming is Sister Stories, with co-authors Rosemary Joyce and Michael Joyce. Guyer is the Hypertext Contributing Editor for FEED Magazine, a web publication, and during recent years she has been a keynote or featured speaker at the 6th International IFIP-Conference in Bonn; Interface 3 in Hamburg; the Mid-Atlantic Computers and Writing Conference in Fairfax, Virginia; and the TINAC Seminar in Baltimore. She was the founder and coordinator of HiPitched Voices, a women’s hypertext collective which was best known for helping to launch the Hypertext Hote1M00, located at Brown University. Guyer is currently undertaking an intercultural project using the web to explore how dif­ference constitutes both separation and connection.The project, entitled Mother Millennia, will link 2,000 or more stories and works from all over the world on the subject of Mother. In addition to her work in electronic media, G uyer is a visual artist in raku, fiber, and mixed media. Samples of her essays and fiction are available at her personal website.                                                                      dichtung-digital.org/Autoren/Wingert/24-Dez-99/Wingert_Quibbling.doc
  • Athomas Goldberg (U.S.A.) is an Associate Research Scientist at New York University’s Media Research Laboratory and senior researcher on IMPROV, a project focused on develop­ing authoring tools for behavior-based interactive 3D envi­ronments.This work has been presented at SIGGRAPH 94­97, Lifelike Computer Characters 94-96, Virtual Humans 97, AAAI’s Symposium on Interactive Story Systems and the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s Roundtable on Creating Personalities for Synthetic Actors. Before coming to the Media Research Lab, Athomas spent several years designing for film and theater, after studying film production at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.