MOO was there. It was there.
- st.ein among the bovines.
When I chose the title for this presentation, I was feeling fairly despondent about my
subject matter. I had decided that this would be the last stop on my MOO crusade. After all,
despite the fact that social, academic and pedagogic activities in MOOs are on the rise, the
initial excitement over literary applications of MOOs which gave birth to such endeavours as
Robert Coover’s Hypertext Hotel, and John Cayley’s myour darkness, and Cybele's Multiverse
(Miekal And) has all but died, leaving dead links and MOOs as silent as ghost towns standing
as testimony to what might have been.
Gimme one reason to stay here, and I'll turn right back around.
Yet, as I surveyed the current state of affairs of digital poetries, the focus of my despondence
shifted. There is some strong work going on out there. But in the past year, I found more
exciting digital poetry outside its recognized borders than within. And I still remain more
excited by the potential of what MOO poetry might be. And so, in contrast to Mark Anthony, I
come not to bury the MOO but to praise it.
Why do MOOs languish in literary obscurity? To answer this question, one need not
look much further than the MUD. Role-playing MUDs, the ancestors of MOOs, are narrative
spaces, rigidly bound by conventions such as representation, naturalism, linear narrative,
consistency in story line and character development. Many MOOs are still haunted by MUD
references: administrators bear the title of “wizard,” participants are “players,” etc. MOO, in
fact, stands for MUD, Multi-User Dungeon, Object Oriented. (The alternate title, "Multi-User
Domain" fools nobody.) Now, I have a certain affection for the MOOs geeky origins, and I do
not think it possible nor advisable to abandon the ludic nature of MOO interaction.
Nevertheless, critics, literary or otherwise, tend to speak of MOOs and MUDs interchangeably.
Espen Aarseth's chapter on MUDs in Cybertext barely acknowledges the distinction, and only
considers how narrative MUDs might be thought of as literary. Because the programming
language in MOOs works by a model of inheritance, it contains called "change parents." (this
command always had great appeal for my highschool students.) If the literary potential of
MOOs is going to be realized in any respect, then it is time for the MOO to change parents.
This paper proposes to resituate MOOs as one logical end of the search for a new location of
poetic practice in the hopes of drawing the gaze of contemporary new media poets to these
rich grounds of literal play.
My purpose, here, therefore, is in some sense, to redefine MOOs. Rather than
dispense with a brief explanation of the environment at the beginning of this talk that would
probably generate more confusion than clarity, this definition will accompany exposition
throughout my presentation. To some degree this is an impossible task. You have to live here
to get it. Consider this a tourism brochure.
The MOO Object
A MOO, by definition, is an object- oriented programming environment, and much of
the linguistic activity involves the creation and naming of objects.
[demo]
@create $thing named table.
If we take for our basic unit of poetry the word- then the basic unit of MOO poetry is
the object- and a room in a moo could be conceived in Gombringer's terms- "a constellation,
an arrangement, a play-area of fixed dimensions... ordered by the poet, (who) determines the
play-area, the field or force and suggests its possibilities. the reader, the new reader, grasps
the idea of play, and joins in."
Most commonly, MOO authors set the terms for participation in this play as the
suspension of disbelief needed to sustain the consensual hallucination of a VR environment.
This is an ekphrastic project where verbal power is used to induce the visual. The goal, as
Bolter describes, is that “the sign should dissolve and leave the reader in the presence of the
thing itself.” (265) Such a reading, however, is not essential to the MOO's operations. The
MOO, in fact, encourages in its readers a perpetual oscillation between what Lanham, Perloff
and others have called a native transparency and a radical artifice. For, although an object in
a MOO, such as a table, may have as its referent a physical table beyond the screen, this
external signified is not only arbitrarily connected to the MOO object- it would appear to be
utterly redundant. The word "table" need not refer outside itself to a material signified object.
The very word is the signified object- it seems that in a MOO, the signifier and the signified
are one. Here, the word as such takes on tangible significance.
Indeed, it is difficult to sustain an ekphrastic reading of the MOO for long, because the
method by which one reads the MOO is not by looking through it, but by looking at it. Of
course, this is the way one reads any text. But in the MOO, in order to display the description
of any object- the room one inhabits, the objects in that room, another player- one must use
the command “look.” Following from the writings of the Toronto Research Group,
one might
say that there is a point at which LOOK an insistence on the physical LOOK activity of the
reader becomes LOOK an obstacle into the LOOK entry of the MOO fiction. (nichol & McCaffery
73) The MOO continually reminds the reader of the shifting dynamics of her gaze:
there is notation. there is no tation. The word erases itself. No it doesn’t. well yes it
does but only if i read it that way. And that’s not real. except, of course, that it is real.
i can literally point to it- no tation. So i’m pointing to something which is erasing itself
even as i point to it. (nichol 80)
In the flickering signification of MOOspace, the relationship between signifier and
signified is mutable. The MOO object can be referenced by its linguistic name, yet it is
identified by its unique object number. Different objects may have the same name.
An object’s name may be changed and remain in all other aspects unchanged. As Magritte
noted, "An object is not so attached to its name that one cannot be found that suits it better."
The code that once generated a tree is now renamed and so reconstituted as a piece of fluff.
The piece of fluff may remain a piece of fluff, but have its original code exchanged for that of
another object- its lexical identity remaining intact while its procedural identity shifts
dramatically. And here, it's important to remember that these flickering signifiers are
generated by at least two additional levels of code- the MOO programming language, and
machine code beneath that.
Recognizing that the Lacanian model of floating signification cannot account for the
complexity of signification in digital media, N. Katherine Hayles calls this complicated semiotic
relationship flickering signification: "In informatics, the signifier can no longer be understood
as a single marker, for example an ink mark on a page. Rather it exists as a flexible chain of
markers bound together by the arbitrary relations specified by the relevant codes... " (31) To
negotiate this dance between looking at and looking through, it is helpful to turn here to
Johanna Drucker’s articulation of materiality as a process of interpretation:
The basic conflict here- of granting to an object both immanence and
nontranscendence- disappears if the concept of materiality is understood as a process
of interpretation rather than a positing of the characteristics of an object. The object,
as such, exists only in relation to the activity of interpretation and is therefore granted
its characteristic form only as part of that activity, not assumed a priori or asserted as
truth. (43)
MOO Objects are procedural entities. They exist as the result of an iteration of an algorithm.
Drucker’s articulation might be thus reworded: “ the object, in MOO, exists only in relation to
the execution of the algorithm and is therefore granted its characteristic form only as part of
that activity, not assumed a priori or asserted as truth.”
This relationship is further complicated in graphic user interface MOOs, where the
textual representation of objects is preserved and presented simultaneously, yet not always
identically, along side a graphic representation of the same.
So now, to repeat: An object’s unique identity is established by its object number. The
graphic sign which represents that object is attached subsequent to the object’s creation and it
may be substituted for another graphic within the blink of an icon. Though there may be a
formal resemblance between the graphic sign and the referent beyond the moo, there is no
necessary identity between graphic sign and object. The very nature of the split screen
interface invites speculation on the relationship between word and image. One regrettable
effect of this design is the implication that there is nothing graphic about the activity on the
left side of the screen. Text based MUDS & MOOS with their relentless displays of ascii art
never let you forget that the letter itself is a graphical form.
The Functional MOO Object
The MOO object is not only a flickering writing surface- it is a text-generator in its own
right. Objects may be programmed to simply spit out texts randomly or in response to a
player, or they may be developed into complex language processing machines, performing
mesostics, lipograms, stochastic text generative procedures, etc. The MOO itself can be read
as a text-generator- a veritable spam factory. The MOO programming language invites "data
harvesting" of its own output because, like Perl, it contains within it so many functions for the
retrieval and manipulation of text.
For example, every MOO has a set of string utilities, a set of built-in commands that operate
on strings of text. The command $string_utils:explode delimits a given string according to a
specified character. So, if we apply the command
$string_utils:explode(apollinaire, "s");
where apollinaire is a variable which references the following text:
Icharrus
winging up
Simon the Magician
from Judea high in a tree,
everyone
reaching for the sun
great towers of stone
built by the Aztecs, tearing their hearts out
to offer them, wet and beating
mountains,
cold wind, Macchu Piccu hiding in the sun
unfound for centuries
cars whizzing by, sun
thru trees passing, a dozen
new wave films, flickering
on drivers' glasses
flat on their backs in the grass
a dozen bodies slowly turning brown
sun glares off the pages, "soleil
cou coupé", rolls in my window
flat on my back on the floor
becoming aware of it
for an instant
and "s" is the character according to which that text will be delimited, we get the following
result:
{"Icharru", " winging up ", "imon the Magician from Judea high in a tree, everyone
reaching for the ", "un great tower", " of ", "tone built by the Aztec", ", tearing their
heart", " out to offer them, wet and beating mountain", ", cold wind, Macchu Piccu hiding in
the ", "un unfound for centurie", " car", " whizzing by, ", "un thru tree", " pa", "ing, a dozen
new wave film", ", flickering on driver", "' gla", "e", " flat on their back", " in the gra", " a
dozen bodie", " ", "lowly turning brown ", "un glare", " off the page", ", ", "oleil cou coupé,
roll", " in my window flat on my back on the floor becoming aware of it for an in", "tant"}
There is even a built-in command which calls up the alphabet:
;$string_utils.alphabet
> "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"
The MOO programming language has an intimate relationship with words and their constituent
parts. It seems to beg for logophillic artists to form a menage à trois of literal play. Moreover,
all MOO cores contain a range of mathematical and statistical utilities that have yet to be
exploited in the ways that artists such as Jim Rosenberg, M.D. Coverly, and Neil Hennessey
have in other programmable media, to great effect.
[demo sillibot]
Human Literary Agents in MOOspace (coming soon to a theatre near you)
The MOO literary object is further complicated by its relationship to the reader. As a
piece of code, it is interpreted by a variety of agents, and some of these are human. Marcos
Novak notes that cyberspace subverts our relationship to information- we are now within it.
(Novak 255). Within this liquid architecture, it is difficult to ignore the materiality of our
experience of language. Karen Mac Cormack's question seems rhetorical until one
contemplates how it might be answered in a MOO:
.... in the act of reading an innovative poem, the poem (is) actualized through the
writer and reader’s textual activation or encounter. Surely a component in the basic
unit of concern (being) the body is that even the body in action lives with and within
language, spoken or written. So the forming of architectural encounters is done so in
conjunction with language. (Does this make language itself an architectural encounter,
too?)
In Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred, we find the following exchange between
Alison Knowles & George Quasha:
Alison Knowles: George, couldn’t we extend the scale further and have a whole city as
the contents of a book? Huge pages as the side of an office building, a single page
with water pouring down the front in the park, a page out flat as bridge, as door to the
city?
George Quasha: I’ve dreamt of such a city all my life, the house or castle with a vast
interior. In the transvironmental city one travels to the depths of inside while
extending the roads and gardens of outside. It’s all one transrupting surface where
anything leads to anything else, governed only by imaginal necessities. The book is
the instrument by which we tap in on the reading that produced it. We not only could
read it, we live in it. Our limbs leave invisible pollen on the pages for the next readers.
(93)
To enter a MOO is to enter a transvironmental architecture such as Knowles & Quasha
envisioned, with one significant difference. The human interactors in a MOO cannot help but
leave marginalia on its pages. The guest character, with its limited set of permissions, would
seem to be most likened to more passive readership roles. Yet the moment any person
connects to the MOO, she is written into the text: several messages are generated to
announce the character's entrance, some of which are logged in the remote recesses of the
database, others merely witnessed by other human interactors or MOO objects. Reading does
equal writing the MOO.
The MOO constantly interpellates the reader, representing her actions back to her. It
functions as a literary space in the manner described by Foucault in “Language to Infinity,” a
doubled double writing, " a virtual space where speech discovers the endless resourcefulness
of its own image and where, it can represent itself as already existing behind itself, already
active beyond itself, to infinity." (54) The MOO addresses the reader in the 2nd person. No
impartial observer, you are drawn in to the narrative of this story in which you are Hiro
Protagonist.1 But lest you @set your gender to egotistical and claim the MOO for your own,
you would do well to remember that all objects on the MOO are addressed this way.
During a
recent synchronous online workshop on the MOO, I gestured towards a "generic recording
device," a commonly used MOO object that generates a written transcript of MOO discussions.
When I read the log of the discussion, and came to the moment where I had pointed at this
Jill Walker explores the narratalogical implications of this in her insightful piece, “Do you
think you’re a part of this.”
1
MOO object, the transcript read back: "Katherine points at you." What kinds of literary
experiences are possible when reader/author/ and textual object are given the same
subjective status?
Not only are all MOO objects potential subjects, but all human subjects on the MOO
are, in fact, objects. The dialectics of materiality, presence, and agency of human interactors
in MOOs partake of the same complex relationships that plague all MOO objects. But these
dynamics are now further complicated by the animating presence of human "players," who
perform their subjectivity in and amongst and against the coded objects that represent their
identity within the space. The player-object, once created, becomes part of that MOO's
database, and it is always located somewhere in the MOO, represented as "sleeping," waiting
to be animated by its human interactor. No one really leaves the MOO, not entirely. Each
player is present, named through the language, the player-object a waiting mask or persona,
an iconic representation of the self. But, the relationship between authentic self and persona
is not binary, but supplementary, co-creative, liminal. The dormant player- objects are not
static shells. They are an iteration of the performance of the MOO itself, a result of the MOOs
text generative activity, literally subjects in process.
Not only so, but these player- objects may possess a degree of agency, independent
of their human animators. For the player- object is just that, a piece of code; it may be written
and rewritten to perform in many ways. I have written a variety of text-generative processes
into the "say" verb, the command that controls speech, onto Salmon, one of my player
characters. Through a happy accident, I also wrote a verb that allows any other player to force
my character into utterance. The text is generated by random procedures, which undermines
my control over what I might say at any given moment. I also have limited control over when
I might say it: Salmon can be made to speak by another player even when I am not logged
on, when I have no immediate control over her actions. One might say that she talks in her
sleep.
[demo]
The self in a MOO is a collaborative creation between human interactors and the
algorithms of the MOO. The self in a MOO becomes a potential site of creative activity. To
program the player-object is to engage in work that most closely resembles the body
modifications of Stelarc or Orlan . This is dangerous and exhilarating ground. We court the
posthuman- a word that still raises the hackles of cybertext authors and theorists alike.
In last year's edition of the Cybertext yearbook, John Cayley imagined that text
generative processes might be used in MOOs to dynamically generated a player's description,
and thereby draw attention to the relationship between textual manipulation, textual
representation, and identity. (90) I imagine this, and much more. I imagine grotesque
couplings of player-objects and generic containers, or player-objects and generic rooms. In
fact, I have acted on these imaginations, and in a stitch-bitch gesture of my own, I grafted a
MOO room onto one of my player characters- the poor, beleaguered guinea pig known as
"testie." Testie is now a hybrid player-room. Any player can enter or exit her, an experience
which is disturbing enough. It gets worse. While logged onto the MOO as Testie, I walked
through the door that connected her/me to the rest of the MOO, and entered myself.
The result, somewhat predictably I suppose, was not unlike the moment in Being John
Malkovoch where Malkovich enters himself. I was faced with an endless recursion of Testies:
Testie within Testie within Testie.
These may all seem like glib party tricks, but they needn't. I contest that they are
serious play, experiments motivated by a desire to really know what it means to experience
the self as a linguistic construct, a constellation of codes, a desire to answer a question raised
by Michel Deville, in response to the work of Arakawa and Gins:
" One of the most important considerations in dealing with architecture on this level is
determining the boundaries of self and world: to what degree the world that envelops
a person's body belongs to that body and is in some way integral to its functioning has
not yet been determined . . . Where does person leave off and world begin, or, indeed,
does this happen?" (58)
It should be obvious by now that the notion of authorship in MOOs is a deeply complex one.
Let me add a few more salient technical points for consideration.
As mentioned earlier, object-oriented programming works by models of inheritance.
You create an object. You make it fertile. That means it can have children- called "kids." A
child of an object inherits all of that objects functions, until new ones are written over top of
the old. Thus, each object's function and behaviour is dependent on complex hierarchies and
interrelationships. If we want trace the path back to first causes, we could say that all player
interaction on a MOO has been partially authoured by Pavel Curtis, who wrote Lambda MOO
and the Lambda Core from which all MOOs are either direct or indirect descendants. (and even
he didn't work from scratch) Nevertheless, writing the MOO is always a multi-authoured,
collaborative endeavour. Trying to trace the lineage of certain objects, or the algorithmic
genesis of various lines of code is often a futile project. These tangled skeins of code tend to
shape the warp and woof of the MOO in ways that become increasingly difficult to predict.
Because the authorship is so distributed, the possibility for a poetics of non-intention blooms
in the MOO.
Tracking the source of textual interactions in the MOO takes you to unexpected places.
In order to speak in the MOO, one uses the "say" verb. Logical enough. It would be even
more conceptually logical if the "say" verb were located on the player object- after all, it is the
player who speaks. Not so. The "say" verb is located on the room object. The dramatic truth
of this is revealed if, as a player, you move yourself to the location known as "-1." This is the
void of MOO space, a virtual sensory deprivation tank. While in "-1", a player cannot hear,
cannot speak, cannot move. All of these functions are found in the code for the room-object,
not the player-object. Thus, a player's very creative agency is dependent on the room she is
in. The walls have ears, eyes and tongue. "Where does person leave off and world begin, or,
indeed, does this happen?" Good question. It is hard to think of the author in a MOO as
anything other than a machinic assemblage.
performance space, performed space, performing space
Lambda MOO was designed to support social interaction, to sustain a community. As a
digital writing community, we are still learning how to translates our experiences from the
solitary encounter between reader and computer screen, to the temporal communal
experience of the poetry reading or the poetry performance.
Most often, these trials have
been held in analog space. Clearly, the MOO, or any online environment that supports
synchronous communication, should be a compelling location for performances of digital work.
It is not possible here to do justice to the concept of performance in MOOs, performance itself
having such multi-valent theoretical trajectories. Let me therefore outline a few speculative
fictions.
One possible future: MOOs as a site for performance writing. As we have seen, the
linguistic object possesses more than its fair share of agency. What might Caroline Bergvall
do in such as space?
What if the writing were to openly interfere with the live piece? What if it were to
force a disjunction between performing a hidden text and performing writing? Can
one turn the hour-glass and argue for the specificities of a live writing (I use the
term with caution) where the performer's presence is cut open, emptied out,
absented by the writing's own presencing (mise-en-presence) ... I remain excited by
this idea of a live situation where writing is another performer and as such needs to
be addressed explicitly.
This excites me too. I also remain excited by the ways in which the question, "who
speaks," may be further interrogated in poetry performances in MOOs, where the "power
of presence" is exchanged for the performance of a pattern.
And I'm excited by the possibilities for experimentation with notions of
temporality in what Matthew Causey calls post-organic performance spaces that
complicate the notion of present tense. We talk of "real time," and "virtual space," but in
truth we experience the "accidents of liveness, the appearances of now." When an action
is performed in the MOO, the human audience knows only the representation of that
action, not the action itself. If I wish to pick up a stone, it is not moved into my virtual
grasp as I am typing the words, "get stone." Nor is the action perfectly synchronous with
the words that appear on the screen, "Katherine gets the stone." The actual performative
linguistic act happens beneath the surface of human linguistic activity, where machine
speaks to machine.
I have only scratched the surface here, and if, at this point, you find yourself feeling
slightly confused, and overwhelmed, I can't say that I am sorry. To engage the MOO,
conceptually or otherwise, requires no small degree of time and effort. Indeed, this is often
the cited as the most significant barrier against participation. But, coming from writers who
celebrate cybertext as ergodic literature, work whose traversal requires non-trivial effort,
these protestations seem a bit disengenious.
So do concerns about the marginality of MOOs
in the larger spectrum of the internet experience. I would have thought that space as yet
unsullied by the AOL experience, unblemished by banner add or virus or e-mail spam would
hold a certain appeal. At times, I wonder if there is a fear at the heart of the resistances.
There is no clean getaway in a MOO. It makes us complicit in ways that are unique in our
experience of digital media. Projects by Miekal And and John Cayley were intimidating for
readers perhaps because these poets understand this nature of the space too well.
If, however, there are conceptual firewalls and practical barriers to MOO poetic
activity, these are by no means insurmountable. Certainly, if we are to see anything new
under this virtual sun, we must be willing to lose some time and sleep in the pursuit. For the
digital revolution does not only transform texts and their materiality. It transforms our
relationship to these texts, and our own sense of our materiality, and, indeed, our very own
materiality. And that's bound to hurt a little.