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4. Cyberwriting
as Intermedia
So far we
have only talked about the verbal element of The Egg The Cart The Horse The Chicken, but it has a significant intermedia aspect. Intermedia juxtaposes
word, image, and sound, which allows semiotic exchange to take place.
Semiotic exchange occurs when different semiotic systems converge (and
no one system is allowed to predominate): the result is that different
semiotic systems take on one another's characteristics (Smith and Dean
1997). In this piece, as in some, but not all of our other web works (Smith,
Dean et al. 1998; Smith, Dean et al. 1998; Smith and Dean 1999), we are
less concerned with introducing visual images, and more concerned with
the visual quality of the words themselves. The screen is the basic unit,
and the texts are designed to fit onto the screen: this means that the
texts take the form of bite-sized "screenfuls." The signifier
is emphasised as much as the signified; words become visual objects, and
spacing, fonts and colors play an important part in the reader's experience,
creating a synergy between the meanings of the words and the way they
look. Similarly the colors emphasise or contradict the meanings of the
words, often extending or interrogating them. Important also in The Egg The Cart The Horse The Chicken is the heterogeneity of the colors and
the way they match the diversity of the texts: there is no one color scheme.
Instead, like the texts, colors recur, recombine, and counterpoint each
other, forming their own metonymic patterns. Color is integral to the
structure of the piece; the lower screen is in black and white, while
the upper screen is in color.
The sound field of
the piece likewise engages in semiotic exchange: it challenges conventional
and predictable ideas of rhythmic and repetitive genres, but, at the same
time, it has a continuity that contrasts with the abrupt discontinuities
of the text and animation. Written and then autogenerated in the program
Max, it was rendered by using the sets of standard MIDI instruments available
on the contemporary Macintosh and PC. Because we wanted the sound to be
continuous while the text is discontinuous, we chose to have a non-interactive
sound field for this work, though some of our previous works have used
interactive sound. Ideally, the sound piece would be rendered directly
from a MAX file, so that it would vary every time it is played; but this
would require all users to download a much larger MAXPlay (freestanding)
file, which we judged undesirable.
MAX is an extremely
flexible platform for the algorithmic programming of almost any kind of
musical process, and it has been extended to permit raw sound manipulation
in MSP and image manipulation in NATO. MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital
Interface, is an acronym used to describe a standard set of codes that
pass through interfaces between computers and synthesisers and samplers.
These codes provide meta-data to trigger the performance of musical instruments
or other sounds. In The Egg The Cart The Horse The Chicken an autogenerated
performance was recorded as a MIDI-file in Quicktime, a standard multimedia
technology and plug-in available for all PCs. This file comprises instructions
for sounding the standard inbuilt computer musical instruments. Thus it
can be played by each user, and it sounds similar on different computers.
The resultant sound
field involves a systemic (minimal) musical approach, in which algorithmic
construction of rhythmic pitched motives and their rhythmic impact change
with time. A sequenced probabilistic method is used to control the number
of notes in the repetitive unit motive (ranging gradually from seven to
eleven equal-length notes), and to introduce deviant notes intermittently.
(In deviant notes, an individual pitch in the repeating pattern changes
during one rendering of the pattern, and then generally returns to the
original pitch in the next rendering.) However, eventually the frequency
at which the deviations occur is so high that more often than not the
note changes again on the next repetition rather than returning to its
original pitch. The sequenced probabilities also control the speed of
the notes and, therefore, the duration of each rendering of the motive.
The music gradually accelerates and, at the point that the pattern becomes
eleven notes, the duration of the unit pattern is briefly almost identical
to its duration at the outset with only seven notes.
The sound field reverses
in mid-stream, so that the reader/listener can experience many different
rhythmic juxtapositions with the text and animation. The reversal plays
a mirror image of the sound score, in that the events occur in reverse
sequence, but each individual event sounds identical in the forward or
backwards direction (in other words, the sound files do not play in reverse,
but rather musical events occur sequenced in reverse). The reversal was
timed so that most viewers would still be screening the text when it occurs,
and hence would experience new sets of sound-animation juxtapositions.
Overall, the sound field sustains, yet queries, linearity and predictability:
cause is not clearly distinguished from correlation or sequence.
Many aspects of this
construction destabilise the expectations of the minimal music genre typified
in the work of Steve Reich and others. For example, the genre generally
involves a tempo which is fixed within the precision of human performers.
Normally the rhythmic interest in minimal music is generated by repetition,
but also by simultaneous juxtaposition of rhythmic patterns of different
durations, for example of 3, 4 and 15 units of length, which come into
phase with each other only once every 60 units. Instead, the 'Egg' music
involves sequential rhythmic perturbations (See discussion in (Dean 1997)).
The sound of The Egg The Cart The Horse The Chicken, like the text, challenges
norms of stability, unity, and regularity.
5. Digital Creativity
and Education
Many interesting
educational ideas are intrinsic to an approach such as we have developed
above. For example, science is often perceived by lay people as a system
of definitive knowledge, although it can be argued that it is one of fallibility.
It can be as dangerous to rely on a received scientific opinion as on
any other. Our emphases in the themes and construction of the 'Egg' upon
unpredictability, and non-linearity, are corollaries of this view.
In a very practical
way, we and other web-artists have sought to enhance the multiplicity
of interpretation available to a screener. In an educational context,
this approach is often desirable when we want to encourage learners to
generate new ideas and interpretations and explore dissonant thoughts
about topics in which prejudice abounds. On other occasions, it may be
undesirable, for example, when our teaching goal is the transmission of
relatively unambiguous knowledge, such as algebraic formulae or a programming
language.
Like the linear narrative, the efficacy of traditional 'chalk and board'
teaching has been challenged and is often replaced or extended by interrogative
and non-linear approaches, such as 'problem based learning' and collaborative
learning. Educators need to turn attention to a fundamental issue in web
education which seems as yet little studied: the impact in educational
hypertexts of linearity versus non-linearity (and of the associated issues
discussed above) upon the efficiency of learning (Campos 2000; Moreno
and Mayer 2000). Because the web offers us multiple approaches to learning,
our studies of its educational impact may differ from discipline to discipline.
Empirical studies of learning efficiency based upon the different types
of hypertext also need to be explored before we can fully exploit this
new potential for learning.
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