If you've never seen the fabulously bizarre 1991 film "WAX or the discovery of
television among the bees" then you're definitely not where it's at.  You can
recover a little of your lost grace, though, by checking out the MOO version
of WAX, about which the filmmaker himself tells us a little bit below.

Phil

Encl:

Date: Fri, 19 Aug 1994 17:48:33 -0700
Subject: WAX found on the WWWeb
X-URL: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/wax/wax.html

Waxweb: Image-Processed Narrative

Copyright 1994, David Blair 
POB 174
Cooper Station, NY, NY 10276
artist1@rdrc.rpi.edu

Date: Mon, 30 May 94 22:22:10 EDT (WaxMOO URL updated July 27 1994) 


WAX's MOO Project is here 


I prefer to describe my work as image-processed narrative, in which
both the images and the narrative are processed. On the image side,
this puts me very much on the side of video makers who insist upon a
mediated image, and for whom the process of technique is always
foregrounded in the artwork. A major reason for my choice of working
method is that video imaging is something that I discovered and
learned on my own; unlike many of my peers, I do not have an art
school education. I actually began at the public library, where my
desire to make plastic-image work was fatally informed by the
discovery of works like Emshwiller's "Sunstone" and Paik's "Suite
212," both of which I found at the Donnell Media Center in New York
City. Later, by luck, I learned that it was possible to trade work for
access to equipment at Film/Video Arts, a media access center also in
New York; and not long after, I heard of the free studios at the
Experimental TV Center, in Owego, upstate NY, where I discovered the
tools and traditions of image-processed video. It is natural that the
method of auto-apprenticeship should combine with the process-oriented
approach of Owego-style videoart to create a taste for images whose
shape and meaning emerge through the process of attempting to learn
how to make them.

I studied fiction as an undergraduate in college, where I made the
uninformed decision to become a director of narrative films. My models
since high school had been "grotesque" fictions that often winked at
the viewer while describing the processes of their own creation, a
sort of fiction that has been given the name "metafiction," and was
one of the most important precursors of the what is now generally
considered post-modernism. My earliest instructors were the Firesign
Theatre, an audio-theatre group that distributed their fictions by LP,
and Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity's Rainbow I had the good fortune to
accidentally buy when it came out. Much enjoying the Firesign
Theaters' methods of constant association to create continuity, and
Pynchon's method of reading through primary sources in order to
discover the narratives of history, I began my own process of creating
artificial histories, whose general form was predetermined, but whose
improvisational shape was determined by the accidents of discovery and
creation that followed during the execution of the piece. At the level
of narrative, this could enter in the astonishing accidents that occur
that during directed random reading in the library (or any other
meta-text). At the level of images, it could take place during the
relatively unpredictable and uncontrollable shape-shifting that images
take during machine-mediated creation. And at the higher levels of
creation, it could take place in the strange accidents of
synchronicity that bound the guided acts of narrative and image
creation described above with the ordinary texture of my life, and the
events of history around me.

WAX or the discovery of television among the bees (85:00, 1991), is a
electronic-cinema feature created in this vein. This hybrid feature,
which can be called a film both from habit, and because modes of
distribution neccesitated a transfer to 16mm , is made completely of
electronic images; the majority of its 2000 shots were either
digitally post-processed, or synthesized using analog and digital
techniques. The narrative was also processed. The availability of the
cheap word processor, with its cut-and -paste functionality, made it
possible for me to write the script, a job that took place continually
over six years in parallel to the various forms of image composition
(the making of the pictures, and their editing). In fact, in WAX's
case it is very difficult to separate the creation of narrative from
this pictorial composition process, as it was artist-access to the
Montage non-linear editing system, a device archly self-described as a
picture processor, that made it possible for me finally compose the
film (Wax was the first independent feature cut on a non-linear
system). Though the edit machine was physically and computationally
separated from the writing machine, the similarity of their processes
(and the fact that I connected the two places) made the visual work of
writing differ only by a strange blur from the pre-verbal work of
editing.

This description of image-processed narrative indicates that Wax is a
heavily associative film, something almost like a punning machine,
with each click of its' time-base emitting a variety of verbal,
audio-visual, or synaesthetic pointers across time or space, creating
a virtual web of associative connections for which you are the
processor. As indicated, in heading towards this type of fiction, I
was molded by writers who rhetoricized a spatialized fiction, made of
fragments that existed like connected places or many-exited plazas....
e.g. Firesign Theatre or Thomas Pynchon. Unfortunately, working with
either the word processor or the non-linear editing machine, I was
limited in the amount of backstory, multiple paths from a single
point, and general sense of process that I was able to present to an
audience. One of the research goals I have set on the way to my second
feature has been to discovery ways around this
compositional/presentational restriction. A preliminary step along
this path has been to embrace hypertext writing. Hypertext refers to
computer assisted navigation through networked text. .... documents
where touching a word leads you to another page, or another document,
and you add these links as you see fit, between existing words and
docs, or to new ones you write. The program I currently use is called
Storyspace, and it literally presents the written fiction as spatial,
consisting of linked text-boxes arranged in a deeply recursive web,
where travel through the fiction is much the same as travel from place
to place, along a narrative topography. Unfortunately, the expanded
writing functionality offered by hypertext is still physically
separated from digital non-linear editing systems (still unaffordable
as of 1994), and of course most artist-accessible non-linear systems
still do not have sophisticated image processing or synthesis tools
built into them, so that research is still an appropriate mode for
these times.

This research travels in several directions, coincident with the
construction of this new work, which in itself constitutes a type of
research. On one hand, there is the collection of the base layer of
ideas, facts , and associations necessary for a floating encyclopedic
narrative. For example, it is relatively easy to integrate hypertext
writing with the use of on-line databases such as the digital
Britannica, now that relatively inexpensive LAN-style connections to
the Internet are available, allowing home desktop use of Mosaic (see
below for a description of Mosaic). On the other hand, narrative and
poetry machines, i.e. artificial intelligence tools for the automated
creation of association or even narrative, are still not easily
accessible to artists. This same limitation applies to many modes of
desirable image construction, for example, the use of remote
visualization across wide area computer networks to assist interactive
creation of images at a distance; the modular construction of large,
high resolution virtual worlds in relatively inexpensive workstations,
plus other applications of virtual reality to electronic cinema
production; and the use of artificial intelligence (artificial life)
techniques for interactive image creation.

Of course the simplest level of the research problem is shaped by the
need to practically apply existing resources to produce results which
at least imitate the above (current) unattainables. The simplest
solution is always integration of existing resources in unfamiliar
ways... i.e. hybridity. Fortunately, the growth of networked computing
offers some interesting, on-the-way functionalities, which further
shade the question in question by offering a new idea of what
integration can be...  not just the parallel operation of text and
image composition tools, but a blurring between the modes of
production and distribution.

To this end, not surprisingly, I have continued to distribute WAX in
order to discover new techniques of production. My catch-phrase for
this working method is 'multiple-media integrated narrative.'
Subtitles might include: How the Generic Brain-amplifier (networked
computer) allows artists to cast the shadows of a single integrated
narrative onto several media... or how integrated tools allow the
affordable creation of a multitude of hybrid forms which together
constitute a single narrative. One of the laboratories for the new
feature has been the project of retrofitting Wax into what I call
Waxweb.

Waxweb is a number of things. It began as a Storyspace hypertext. Wax
has no dialogue, but instead a narrator who delivers much of the story
through voiceover; a fact which combined with the film's natural
resemblance to hypertext, and its need for audience assembly, made it
a natural candidate for retrofit into a constructive hypertext... i.e.
a hypertext that can not only be read, but also written to. To this
end, I made what I call a baselayer of 600 nodes (windows), roughly
corresponding to the number of spoken lines in the "film's" monologue.
Accompanying the text of the monologue are descriptions of the film's
2000 shots, roughly padded with what might be called author's
commentary. These are connected on a single "script" path, and
surrounded with a simple indexing system, allowing transport around
the film. This entire experience is morphologically similar to
watching the film (like hand-bones vs. fin-bones.. producing a certain
type of aesthetic tension); pictures and sound are missing, but much
extra information and near instant navigation have been added..

Storyspace has a simple groupware functionality, which allows people
in difference places to add hypertext nodes and links to a single
document. I asked 25 writers scattered in the US, Japan, Germany,
Finland, and Australia, all connected by the Internet and equipped
with teh software, to add writings onto the baselayer. For most
people, the Internet is a text-based medium where reading and
traveling are mixed up, where distance is pointless, and where things
can happen in many orders and still retain coherence, so that it very
much resembles hypertext. And in reverse, the visual interface to
Storyspace looks very much like a network diagram, with text windows
resembling subnets or individual machines, and hypertext links as
their virtual intercommunicative connections, altogether creating an
interesting fit between form, process , and content. I expected that
the new contributors would act almost as an analogic poetry machine,
creating unexpected narrative material and connections through their
processes of reading/writing. It would be the job of the two appointed
editors, the well-known hypertext author Michael Joyce (Afternoon) and
anthologist/critic Larry McCaffery (Storming the Reality Studio) to
shape entire eventual text into a meta-narrative.

Our tool needs were quite simple... Macintoshes, Storyspace (provided
when needed through Eastgate's generosity), and dialup access to the
internet, which in turn provided access to an entire set of virtual
tools, such as person to person email, and a listserv based at the
Institute for Advanced Research in the Humanities at the University of
Virginia, which allowed an individual correspondent to send a letter
to all Waxweb participants, creating an asynchronous discussion group.
Files were shared through the use of a private ftp site in St. Louis,
a harddrive space from which all participants could retrieve (or
upload) files. For synchronous conferencing, where people had to be in
one place at the same time, we decided to use MOO software, installed
at Brown University... using the telnet tool, we all could travel to
that distant machine and logon.

MOOs are object oriented MUDs, and a MUD is multi-user dungeon, a
piece of multi-user software originally created as a game in the style
of the text-based Dungeons and Dragons adventure.Like that board game,
they are both most often designed architectonically, as interconnected
rooms.To play in a MUD, people travel (telnet) to a machine running
the software, log on under archaic pseudonyms, and wage text against
other users. The live, on-line intercommunication is what makes them
unique... they are text-based virtual realities. While MUDS are fixed
gaming areas, with fixed rules, MOOS are completely open and allow
users to reconfigure the space, make new rooms, and even do a certain
amount of Basic-style programming. The source code is also available,
so that the software itself can be reconfigured at a deeper level by a
programmer. MOOs can still have gaming aspects, but they are more
often used as meeting, presentation, and workplaces, where you can be
alone, or with many people.

Coincident with our decision to use the HotelMOO at Brown, Tom Meyer,
the "owner" of that MOO, introduced some interesting customizations.
First off, he wrote a filter which converted Storyspace hypertext
files to MOO-space, in the process of which each hypertext node became
a room in the MOO's virtual architecture, and each link became a
passage between rooms. Meyer also converted the room- construction
commands native to the original MOO software so that they would more
resemble hypertext authoring commands.

Thus it became possible to put the Waxweb hypertext base-layer in a
public place, so that anyone with telnet, regardless of their desktop
machine, could literally read and write the Waxweb hypertext. Access
to a Macintosh and a copy of Storyspace were no longer prerequisites;
internet access was the only requirement. Visitors to the MOO were
invited not just to read the ported hypertext, but to add to it using
the online hypertext tools, and in addition to talk to one another.
Traditional writing, hypertext writing, various levels of programming,
as well as several types of synchronous and asynchronous text
communication were all supported in this environment, a hybrid
functionality resulting from the placement of a constructive hypertext
in a virtual-reality environment. Though the easy-to-use visual
interface of the Storyspace software was lost , a huge group of
potential writers/readers was added; Storyspace still remained the
main authoring tool for myself and the 25 original writers, because of
the power and speed with which links could be constructed. I had
expected this first group of writers to act in unison as a poetry
machine, and continued to believe that the quantum froth of net
contribution would show an unexpected autocatalytic ability, which
could be amplified by the pattern-recognizing abilities of the two
editors and myself.

Soon after, Waxweb became a 600 room hybrid of text-based virtual
reality and on-line hypertext, the project of adding WAX's audio and
video was put forward in the context of an installation at SIGGRAPH
T94, the largest annual computer graphics conference. Tom Meyer
realized that the best way to realize this, and preserve the existing
on-line functionality, would be to make Waxweb a dynamic hypermedia
document on the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is essentially a Internet hypermedia document
publishing standard established and maintained at CERN in Geneva,
which allows the creation of a distributed, virtual, hypermedia
library across the network. Documents can be defined in any ascii
editor, as the heart of the system is a simple markup language called
HTML (hypertext markup language).  These markup codes define intra-
and interdocument links, allowing navigation through document data
distributed throughout the world. A reader in New York may click a
link on her local screen -displayed page to bring forward another
virtual, formatted page from Cardiff. Clicking a word link on the
Cardiff page may bring forward yet another page from the middle of a
document in California, while clicking a different link on that
Cardiff page might bring forward a color picture from Australia, if
the reader has the ability to receive and view pictures. This ability
is dependent on the type of connection the user has to the internet.
If people have text-only, dumb-terminal style connections to the
Internet provider, most usually through a telephone connection, they
can still capably read hypertext documents using Lynx, a
DOS-commandline style of reader which runs on their provider's server,
and shows links as highlighted text on the screen, chosen by using the
cursor keys. If users have a LAN-style connection to the network,
which allows them to use Windows-style intelligent terminal software,
they can run the current standard interface to the World Wide Web, a
piece of software called Mosaic, created at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (Illinois). Mosaic is freeware; versions
are available for almost all current platforms.... Mac, Windows, Unix
workstations of various types,and even Amigas. Mosaic's power lies in
its visual interface, which allows point and click navigation through
links, plus the ability to easily view stills, audio, and video.  All
files are transferred before being interpreted by the machine, which
means on even a relatively highspeed (ethernet) Internet connection, a
small one minute digital movie can often take more than a minute to
transfer, at the completion of which the playback begins.

Mosaic is essentially a reader, and so does not offer useful on-line
writing tools. Though a user can save personal annotations locally,
there is no way to make these visible to others, and no real
opportunity for synchronous intercommunication, all of which limits
its usefulness as a workgrouping tool, though of course it is a
wonderful platform-independent tool for the presentation of networked
hypermedia, such as an audiovisual Waxweb. To keep the writing and
intercommunication functionality present in a Mosaic environment, Tom
Meyer Ts solution was to turn the MOO into a virtual, dynamic World
Wide Web document. This meant that the MOO, running on a distant
machine, could answer requests for 'pages' from a copy of Mosaic
running on a local user's machine by sending out a representation of a
MOO-room (hypertext node) in WWW format. Since the MOO is by
definition user-reconfigurable (meant to record the intentional traces
of its users), this allowed user annotations to be readable almost
instantly by other reader/ writers. Users able to run Mosaic on their
local machine would, by most definitions, be able to run multiple,
similar, "smart-terminal" style programs at once, in a multi-tasking
fashion, and so could easily run a MOO "writing-session" in a separate
window simultaneous with the Mosaic-reading session. The text only MOO
would provide hypertext authoring functionality and
intercommunication, while the Mosaic session would allow the user to
view formatted hypertext, and embedded stills, audio, and video. As of
this writing, Meyer is working on ways to allow writing from within
Mosaic itself through the use of pop-up forms which will soon be
available in all versions of the the standard software. High-end users
would then use the text based MOO solely for intercommunication. Hints
are that later versions of Mosaic will have a MOO-reader, which will
also allow this to be handled from inside Mosaic.

With the basic functionality in place, the multi-author,
multi-thousand link Waxweb hypertext was imported; 2000 color stills,
one for each of the visual descriptions, were embedded in the
hypertext pages; as well as 600 MPEG format compressed audio/video
clips, making the entire film available as page-embedded pieces.

It is interesting to contrast this project with a previous incarnation
of Wax on the Internet. In May of T93, Wax was sent across the mbone,
or multimedia backbone of the Internet, which is a special,
high-bandwidth testbed for delivery of real-time audio and video
across the Internet. The New York Times ran a story in the business
section ["Cult Film is First on the Internet", May 23, 1993], which
declared that the experiment pointed towards the 500 channels,
unfortunately neglecting to point out that the net-cast was a
multicast, meaning anyone who could receive could also send audio or
video (or text, of course), so that an individual's reception screen
could be filled with little boxes of reconfigurable
intercommunication. I kept this partial misconception in mind as I
planned the Waxweb project, which in many ways is a re-multicast of
Wax over the standard, lower bandwidth Internet. As this extremely
inexpensive project goes up on the public, free network, a wide
variety of multi-million dollar commercial video-server trials have
been announced around the US, and in some cases constructed. Many of
these new networks have been conceived on an expanded cable-tv model,
offering mainly more channels, and user interaction only at the level
of movies on demand, and simple shopping. Many offer high-bandwidth
networks 50 to 100 times faster than what is available to high-end
Internet users. Though Waxweb on the Internet is based on file
transfer, rather than a continuous stream of digital video, I like to
point out that if this sort of bandwidth was available, the functional
difference between the two types of server would blur. With a
practical eye on the high-end, Waxweb also allows functionality to its
lowest end users.... it is important to note that all readers/writers
of Waxweb will have access to its densest layer, the constructive
hypertext. Users able to run Mosaic will have access to additional
levels of functionality, dependent upon the width of their connection
to the net (or their patience). But text-only users, which at present
constitute the vast majority of internet connectees, will have nearly
the same amount of opportunity to interact with the narrative. This
project is an example of a narrative server scalable from the bottom
up, from text up to pictures, and in a broader sense demonstrates the
strengths of an open, reconfigurable system. If the bandwidth were
available, the ability to send narrative audio/video one way would
only be a subset of the system's total functionality. My rhetorical
point is that the 500 channels offered by the videoserver trials are
simply a high-bandwidth subset of an open, accessible, reconfigurable
system, not the other way around.

It is the hybrid practicality of the open computer network medium,
which amplifies the individual machine (just as the machine amplifies
the individual user), that allowed the new functionalities discovered
in the research described above. On the production side, Waxweb is an
example of inexpensive distributed workgrouping tied to the integrated
use of distributed resources; the result could just as easily elements
of a feature film as elements of a hypertext, and in fact can be both
at once. In the context of my next feature, I take the visual,
intercommunicative, inexpensive workspace of the Mosaic MOO as a
possible pointer to practical realization of what was described above
as the use of remote visualization across networks to assist
long-distance interactive image creation. That would simply mean
hybridly reconfiguring the functionality and (hopefully inexpensive)
bandwidth provided by an open system to allow me to work with a fellow
artist or willing institution across some ocean. This is not separate
from distribution; I also consider "Waxweb" a practical and aesthetic
experiment in what I described above as multiple media integrated
narrative, a process by which hybrid tools are used to affordably
create a unified data set from which can be created multitude of
hybrid media forms which all constitute a single narrative.

Focusing on text, we can see that most text tools have collapsed into
the integrated text amplifier... or computer, allowing us to do
anything we want to do with words, in any order we want, on the way to
composition. Concomitantly, we have gained the ability to project
these functionalities across any distance, allowing us to not only to
write or read, but to do a lot of hybrid things which are neither
exactly one nor the other. The continuing collapse of general media
tools into the integrated media amplifier.... or networked media
workstation... where hypertext, image processing and synthesis,
editing, and a variety of in-between functionalities can allow
anything to happen in any order, on the way to composition,
collaboration, presentation, and things in between, will not only
increase the number of hybrid media-production forms, but the number
of hybrid, multiplexed works, which are unitary, yet take multiple
forms... where a single, variegated chunk of proto-narrative,
proto-image, proto-anything data can, and often will, take many
different forms, which will all have the esthetic tension of being
morphologically similar, though in different media.

In the case of Waxweb, the film became a hypertext, missing pictures
and sound, but offering much extra intra/internarrative information,
plus instant navigation; the MOO came from the hypertext, offering
many more user traces and proto-narrative intercommunication, like a
literary game (or poetry party); and finally the Mosaic document came
from the MOO, offering a visual interface to the MOO, and which, as a
stand alone, resembles an on-line, dynamic CD, and so a new type of
digital movie. As best as possible under present conditions, my next
feature is authored from the start as an integrated database
preserving all varieties of association, collation, and composition,
so that final authoring in a variety of related narrative forms can
easily be accomplished. A feature film in a darkened theater offers
one type of narrative, both in meaning and presentation; a parallel
Mosaic-style version, with as much narrative material as 7 to 15
CDROM's, plus user interaction, constitutes another place, with many
related stories; and the variety of user-reconfigurable personal,
portable media, such as a videotape, floppy disc, or CDROM, each offer
additional narrative functionalities.

Where production and distribution begin to resemble one another, and
hybrid tools create hybrid narratives, it is also possible to imagine
the practical availability and narrative application of poetry
machines, autocatalytic images, and visual VR techniques in the
production (and distribution) of digital cinema.

         IATH WWW Server