Meredith Silverman

The following is my final paper for Recurring Concepts in Art.  The final version, along with images and citations, is here.

When I first heard about The Book of Lulu, I had a feeling it would inspire me. Now that I’ve tracked down a copy, it has become the main inspiration for my thesis.

My plan has been to tell a children’s story using text, sound, illustration, animation, and possibly gameplay. I didn’t know how to incorporate the other media into the text until I experienced The Book of Lulu.

The Book of Lulu is a CD-ROM children’s story created in 1995 at the peak of the hypertext era. The story is told mostly through text, but clicking on the pictures unlocks hidden animations and activities.

Every picture is different, and not every picture is responsive. Sometimes clicking changes the picture right on the page of the book; other times it launches a whole new window.

In one of the pictures, your cursor becomes a butterfly and clicking anywhere on the princess’s castle changes the season. In another, the cursor becomes a fly. When you land on the cat, he meows in protest, and when you click on the statue, a marble horse appears and rears up on hind legs.

These animations and activities help establish the world in which Lulu lives.

Lulu is a lonely princess who lives inside a book. One day, a spaceship crash-lands on the grounds of her castle. Out of the wreckage climbs Mnemo, a robot whom she immediately befriends.

Mnemo has been sent on a mission by his master and creator, Megalo Polo, a boy who, according to Mnemo, is a lot like Lulu. The boy too is lonely – he lives on a planet all by himself and creates robots for company. He has sent Mnemo on a mission to find and bring back human warmth. In the end, Mnemo finds human warmth with Lulu, and he takes her book back with him to his home planet.

There is no printed Book of Lulu. There’s the book-shaped world you explore by turning virtual pages and reading all about Lulu, Megalo, and Mnemo. And there’s the book within a book, the one Lulu lives in, Mnemo crash-lands into, and ultimately takes with him.

The book you see on screen is a metaphor for Lulu’s whole world. When you click on the illustrations in this virtual book, they open the text into a more immersive world you can explore on your own.

The Book of Lulu inspires me because I’d like to use this technique to tell my own stories. It seems to me like the perfect way to deliver a text-based story, and tell it from start to finish, while still allowing the reader freedom to explore and discover.

Technology has improved in the dozen years since Lulu was published, and I think I could create something just as great without a team of developers. Before I start building my story, however, I’d like to explore other examples – and some of the history – of interactive storytelling.

Before I go on, I should define my terms. By interactive storytelling, I am referring to any type of electronic storytelling that allows more user control than simply clicking to turn the page. Non-electronic examples include pop-up books (because you get more meaning by interacting) and Choose Your Own Adventure books (because they involve choice and allow you to explore non-linear narrative). Electronic examples of interactive storytelling include hypermedia and interactive CD-ROMs.

Hypermedia
The seed of hypermedia – text, images, audio, and other media that you can explore in a non-linear way – was planted in 1945 by Vannevar Bush. In an article he authored for Atlantic Monthly, he proposed a machine called a memex. This machine would store all your information – every book or article you’d ever read, every letter you’d written, and every conceivable image, all on microfilm.

When operating the memex, you would be able to look at several screens of information at once, and you’d be able to link any part of a document to any other. Bush envisioned users creating trails of information, linking content together the same way the mind associates ideas.

Ted Nelson coined the word hypertext in 1965. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, he and other technologists competed to build a ground-breaking hypertext system.

That moment came when Apple released HyperCard to the general public in 1987. The program came free with new Macs (when they were still called Macintoshes) and allowed non-programmers to create their own hypermedia spaces.

HyperCard released a flood of creative work, including Brian Thomas’s If Monks Had Macs. The main menu opens onto a monastery courtyard, with faint sounds of Gregorian chant. Your screen is equipped with 24 books – actually extraordinarily detailed multimedia essays on a variety of subjects – and a journal where you can take notes and create your own links between the texts. If Monks Had Macs was our first real answer to the memex.

Other early and influential HyperCard works included Inigo Gets Out by Amanda Goodenough and The Manhole by Rand and Robyn Miller – who went on to create the blockbuster games Myst (written in HyperCard) and Riven.

The CD-ROM
HyperCard programs (called stacks) were distributed through message board downloads and floppy disks. A floppy disk could store 2MB, enough for one or a couple of very simple games. Bigger programs had to be stored on more than one disk, which you had to keep switching out of your drive.

In the 90s, CD-ROM technology emerged, with the capacity to store an entire encyclopedia on one disk. The Voyager Company led the way in publishing extraordinary media using this new format.

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was one of Voyager’s greatest successes. It’s a different kind of story – an audio commentary on this famous musical piece. The commentary pulls together the life of Beethoven with the life of the piece and places them in the context of the time period. You can further explore any part of the symphony using the “Close Reading” option. This tool provides a more technical explanation of the piece’s structure and themes.

The story was moving, and the music made it more so. Many people reported that Beethoven was the first time they ever cried in front of a computer screen.

Interactive Multimedia
Today, rather than hypermedia, we talk about “interactive multimedia” – although the terms mean largely the same thing. While as a culture we continue to create multimedia spaces for storytelling and non-linear exploration, the technology that enables it has advanced considerably.

Companies continue to create CD-ROM stories for children, often as offshoots to books or movies. Disney offers an Animated Storybook series around its most popular children’s movies with interactive stories, games, and other activities.

Many of today’s multimedia experiences are located online, where they can be accessed for free. Sesame Workshop offers a variety of interactive stories for children. Many of the stories are simple branching narratives with choices you click that determine the course of the plot. At the end of the story, you’re urged to start over and explore different choices.

In one prominently displayed story, Elmo urges you to help him make lemonade to run a lemonade stand. The animation is sophisticated, and the dialogue is lively. Unfortunately, the story has no resolution. At a certain point, clearly somewhere beyond its audience’s average attention span, it begins looping.

This feels like a cheat to me. The best children’s media has always been appreciated by adults too. I’m thinking of The Little Prince, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the Muppet Show, to name a few. Children’s media should be something children and adults can enjoy together, something that sparks discussion between child and adult.

Quirky and daring children’s stories are missing from today’s multimedia landscape. Most of what is available comes from a few monolithic sources. In the case of for-sale CD-ROMs, these come off as shoddy merchandising; in the case of free online offerings, they’re even shoddier efforts at brand advertising. In contrast, The Book of Lulu stands up in today’s multimedia environment.

As someone who helps develop games for a TV channel’s website, I can guess that Elmo’s Lemonade Stand cost Sesame Workshop between five and twenty thousand dollars. CD-ROMs cost far more, sometimes up to a million dollars. What a colossal waste.

Children’s Multimedia Landscape
Today’s kids are spending more time in front of computer screens than television screens, doing all kinds of immersive and entertaining activities. They’re chatting on community networks like Club Penguin or posting pictures of themselves on Facebook. They’re customizing avatars and playing games with them on sites like the-n.com. They’re adopting virtual pets and buying accessories for them with in-game currency or real money.

Children’s entertainment choices have come a long way since Lulu. In today’s world, how could a storybook, no matter how creative or interactive, compete with the rest? The same way all classic children’s entertainment has: by being really good.

Really Good Interactive Storytelling
An interactive story can do things that a physical book can not. It can read the whole text or just certain words aloud. It can change the mood with different music clips or make a static image spring to life.

In good interactive stories, not a sound, a word, or a pixel is extraneous. Unsworth criticizes the CD-ROM version of the book Stellaluna for unnecessary and distracting use of multimedia: “For example, when the text states ‘They perched in silence for a long time’, instead of making time for a reflective pause, the ’silence’ is interrupted by squawking and inappropriate action.”

The best multimedia takes advantage of the interaction between communication modes. A clue in the text might hint at the hidden link in the image. The image might fill in an ambiguity or foreshadow an event in the text. A still image might turn into video, then back into a still image. Because they have to process the connections, readers engage more actively with content that’s delivered multimodally.

In Dust or Magic, Hughes analyzes the qualities shared by all good software. The best software allows its users to feel in control. Children, even more than adults, appreciate a sense of agency. The software’s information space must be self-explanatory – it should be easy to get from one place to another, or back to the beginning. Good software uses standard conventions and teaches them to you intuitively. For instance, if you mouseover a flashing image once and it changes, you should be able to expect the same from any other flashing image you encounter.

Finally, good software considers its users every step of the way. In the case of children, the interaction should challenge users without frustrating them. For instance, it should consider the target age range’s ability to use a mouse, reading level, and attention span.

Summary
The task I set before myself is to create an interactive story that is good enough to become a classic. I’ve just begun learning about the history and strategies of interactive storytelling. But, as a human being, I’ve been learning how to tell a story for my whole life. At ITP, I’ve learned to tell them with more than just words – now I know how to tell a story with sound, animation, video, and gameplay. I have a feeling that my thesis really will represent a culmination of my studies. Let’s hope I’m up to the challenge.

Overview
I’ve created a recipe box, filled with recipes that I’ve invented or adapted, and notes and drawings that are all my own. My goal is to create a kind of heirloom to be handed down to a friend in this class.

Physical Process
I’ve spent the last few years learning to cook, standardizing my favorite dishes, and writing them down as recipes on my computer. For this project, I’ve taken those recipes and made them into notecards in a recipe box. So the artwork I’m reproducing is actually a re-reproduction: from food, to computer file, back to a physical form.

I dyed each notecard with coffee to create an aged appearance, hung it to dry on a clothesline, and ironed it to flatten it. Then I copied my recipes onto notecards, added drawings and notes, and placed them in alphabetical order in the box.

I dripped food (where possible, appropriate to the recipe) on specific notecards for verisimilitude. I aged the box by filing the edges and throwing it around a little.

Thought Process
I always wanted a feminine education I never got. More specifically, I wanted to learn the arts of the kitchen. My mother, although armed with a recipe box handed down from her own mother, hates to cook.

In addition to a relaxing hobby, I see cooking as a way of nourishing and pleasing my family, my friends, and myself. Although I distrust such seemingly anti-feminist sentiments, it means a lot to me when a friend stops by and eats my leftovers rather than picking up a slice of pizza.

It was important to me not just to create this object, but to pass down the recipe box and the information it contains. I’ve chosen a female friend in this class who has lost her mother. From the first moment, I created this object with her in mind.

Class Concept: the Aura of Originality
I’m counting on the idea of the aura as described by Walter Benjamin. The recipe box is an authentic, unique original. The recipes, my handwriting, and especially my notes and drawings communicate a part of me. I hope that the time and energy I spent on it have infused it with something like aura. More precisely, I’ve put love and accumulated knowledge into these recipes and their physical manifestation. I want their new owner to feel that love.

On the other hand, I’ve constructed a functional object, not a fetishist symbol like the artworks described by Benjamin. I hope that my friend will actually try out the recipes in the recipe box. Although each iteration of a recipe is in a certain way a dimmer copy of a delicious, Platonic original set down at the time the recipe was written, it’s also different and original each time. Unlike a postcard of the Mona Lisa, a favorite meal cooked after you’ve had a chance to miss it loses none of its aura. If anything, the dish becomes more nostalgic and comforting with each reproduction or reworking. And like Benjamin, I’m comforted by the fact that new channels of distribution will allow my recipes to meet a larger audience halfway. If someone else cooks or shares a recipe I’ve invented, I’ll reach the people those people serve the meal to, probably without even knowing it.

Class Concept: Reappropriation
I’m also drawing on the idea of reappropriation, taking a mass-produced recipe box, identical blank postcards, and a plain black ballpoint pen, and using them to conjure something much more authentic and personal.

I’m employing reappropriation here more in the style of Sherrie Levine doing Marcel Duchamp than like Duchamp himself. That is, I’ve taken a mass-produced object and altered both its content and its context. Duchamp recontextualized objects mainly by placing them in a new context. His art was as much about the dialogue it unleashed as the physical objects themselves. As proof of their non-art status, many of the readymades managed to fall back into obscurity or into their original uses. But Levine and other artists like her have added new layers of meaning to this process of recontextualization. Her works add both new context, and new content to the objects represented. By pointing to more than one ideology, art criticism, or artwork, the “contingent object” takes on complex and shifting levels of reference and meaning. I’ve altered the card file’s content by supplying it with content (both physical and conceptual), and I’ve also altered its context by declaring its status not as office supply but as art object.

On the other hand, I’m more in line with Duchamp’s method of evoking of mass production. His readymades were serendipitous, almost arbitrary finds. Similarly, when I conceptualized the project, I knew that I wanted to use a card file, it didn’t matter whether its brand was Rubbermaid, 3M, or Staples. In contrast, because she was quoting a specific work with her Fountain, Levine found it meaningful to seek out the specific model of urinal Duchamp had used in his.

Summary
I’ve taken advantage of this assignment to create a personal object for a friend. I’ve imbued it with a lot of care and also with the thoughts and ideologies we’ve been exploring together in class. I hope she likes it.