Remembered, Read and Experienced Time in Virtual Text (= Tempo lembrado, lido e experienciado no texto virtual)

This is an electronic reprint of the original article. This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Please cite the original version: All material supplied via JYX is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, and duplication or sale of all or part of any of the repository collections is not permitted, except that material may be duplicated by you for your research use or educational purposes in electronic or print form. You must obtain permission for any other use. Electronic or print copies may not be offered, whether for sale or otherwise to anyone who is not an authorised user. Remembered, Read and Experienced Time in Virtual Text (= Tempo lembrado, lido e experienciado no texto virtual) Koskimaa, Raine Koskimaa, R. (2015). Remembered, Read and Experienced Time in Virtual Text (= Tempo lembrado, lido e experienciado no texto virtual). Texto Digital, 11(1), 250-262. https://doi.org/10.5007/1807-9288.2015v11n1p250 2015 Artigo Original http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1807-9288.2015v11n1p250 Esta obra está licenciada com uma Licença Creative Commons. Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 250 REMEMBERED, READ AND EXPERIENCED TIME IN VIRTUAL TEXT Raine Koskimaa * ABSTRACT: In this article I will scrutinize Screen (2002, by WARDRIP-FRUIN & al.), a literary work set and experienced in a CAVE Virtual Reality environment, especially from the perspective of its temporal aspects. There are obvious themes of remembering, forgetting and textually constructing the past in this work, but most notably, Screen emphasizes the temporality of the reading act itself. I will analyze this highly special work in relation to the remembered, read, and bodily experienced time, and thus, attempt to better understand both the notion of fictive time and the temporality of fiction. KEYWORDS: Fictional time. CAVE. Screen. Virtual reality. Virtual text. Introduction In narrative texts, there are always several temporal layers juxtaposed. Most notably, there is a temporal distance between the instance of narration, and the narrated events. Narratology has provided detailed accounts of the temporalities within the narrative structure, but the question of reading time, the time a person spends reading certain text falls outside the scope of narratology, nor has there been too many attempts to conceptualize reading time in other schools of literary research either. It is relatively easy to dismiss the relevance of reading time in respect to traditional narrative texts. The case, however, is wholly different with digital literature where the texts may be programmed to behave in various ways, which require the reader to react to the changes on-screen within the time-constraints provided by the dynamic text. The texts themselves becoming dynamic, transforming entities complicates the textual temporality in many ways, and understanding this novel textuality is only gradually developing (cf. WARDRIP-FRUIN, 2009; ESKELINEN, 2012). * Department of Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland and Hermeneia Research Group. E-mail: [email protected] Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 251 Understanding Fictional Time Repeatedly it has been pointed out that the exceptional quality of digital fictions lie in their inherently dynamic nature, how they may be flexibly programmed to generate new content and alter the already existing contents. This adds a new temporal level, compared to traditional fictions. Already the history of digital fictions presents us with a variety of temporal practices, even though this dimension has not been thoroughly discussed so far. One of the classic hypertext novels, Michael Joyce's Afternoon (1987), employs conditional links, with the effect of temporally postponing the accessibility of certain parts of the hypertext. Stuart Moulthrop's Hegirascope (1995) is a 'textual cinema', where each page possesses a measurable true time duration. Reagan Library (1999), also by Moulthrop, varies the amount (or length) of text in a node relative to the reading time: if you re-read certain node, its contents have been extended. In computer games, part of which, so-called ludo-narrative games (AARSETH, 2012), also belong to the field of digital fictions, this sort of real-time dynamics is routinely taking place. Thus, in the existing digital fictions we have examples of ways to manipulate the relation between story time (the time of events told) and discourse time (the time of narration) which challenge the conventional ways of understanding fictional time. In classic narratology (eg. GENETTE, 1980) time in narrative fiction was studied in three dimensions: order, frequency and speed. Order deals with both the order of the events as they happened, and as they are narrated (the point of departure here is that events may be told in the same order as they happened, or, in a different order). With frequency the situation is very much the same: the events may be told as many times as they happened or different amount of times (a single event may be told twice, for example). The speed is very different phenomenon, however, since there is no proper way to quantify speed in textual narrative. Instead, we have to rely on certain conventions providing us with the framework of pseudo time (time measured spatially, by the amount of text used to describe a passage). Thus, if the events of a Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 252 life time are recounted in a few pages, we have the feeling that narration is speeded up, that the discourse proceeds faster than the events. Or in another direction, if some simple event is recounted using several pages, we have the feeling that the discourse is proceeding slower than the events. Somewhere in between, there is the balance where the discourse and the story seem to proceed at approximately the same pace. All this applies to digital fictions as well, but in addition to the pseudo time we also need to take into account the measurable true time. Thus, we have at least the following four temporal levels for digital fictions with narrative content: 1. user time (the time the user spends reading the work) 2. discourse time (the time of the narrative discourse) -pseudo time (of textual narration) -true time (of the behavior on screen) 3. story time (the time of the fictional events) 4. system time (the time of the digital system states)1 All this is largely not covered by research yet (game studies being somewhat of an exception). What more, paying attention to the measurable true time leads way to the realization that narrative time altogether is badly neglected in research. Investigating the temporality of digital fictions necessarily entails a critical re-examination of our notions of fictional time. Screen: Fiction in Virtual Reality There is a particular class of digital fictions, installed in immersive Virtual Reality environments known as CAVEs. With CAVE works, there is one more added element, to be accounted for, that is the bodily experience of the reading act, as these works require the reader to physically move inside the three-dimensional textual landscape. The interest in this paper lies in how the fictional structuring of the 1 The system time falls out of the scope of this article. I have discussed system time in eg. KOSKIMAA 2011. Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 253 time within the text, the reading time, and the bodily experience of the work relate to each other in Screen (2002) by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (with Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, Andrew McClain, and Ben Shine; on CAVE as a writing environment see CAYLEY, 2005). Screen has been made for the CAVE virtual reality environment at the Brown University. In this CAVE three walls and the floor function as displays and create a virtual space within which the user physically moves with goggles on her eys and a pointer in her hand. This article is based on various encounters with the work in 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2011 (the Brown University CAVE has been rebuilt after the last visit, and the specifications given here do not hold with the current setting)2. Screen begins with a scene, where text passages gradually fill the walls, with voiceover recitation, so that eventually the reader is surrounded by three stable (for a certain period) text walls (see Figure 1.) Fig. 1 – Screen, soon after the words have started to peel off the wall. 2 In addition to the first hand experiences, this article is also taking advantage of the video recording of the Screen available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSLChcV_a3o>. Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 254 After a while, individual words start peeling loose from the walls and fly circulating in the air, prompting a word by word reading. In addition to reading, the user can also knock the words back to their places on the wall using the pointer in her hand. This adds an element of play into the experience. The speed of the words peeling off gradually increases, and eventually it will be impossible to knock them all back to the walls. (see Figure 2.) This creates an ever densening, rotating mass of text in the center of the space, where no individual words are fully legible anymore. Some of the words knocked back to walls will not return to their original place, but to another vacant position. Thus, also the text on the wall starts to syntactically and semantically deteriorate. Finally, all of the text collapses in the center of the cave, rendering it into a totally unreadable “white hole”. (see Figure 3) Figure 2. Words peeling off the wall. Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 255 Fig. 3 – The collapse of the text walls. Reading Screen The work combines three ways of reading. First, there is the traditional reading of stable text in the opening passage. Even here, the text appears gradually and accompanied by the voice-over, so there is a light temporal constraint upon the reading. Second, there is the reading of moving words when they start to peel off the walls and the accompanying (and optional) hitting of them with the pointer device. The uncanny feeling of ‟touching‟ words creates a specific sense of estrangement, and the movement of words and the related attempt to hit them brings also a strong sense of play, even a fight, into the work. The play is ambiguous, though, as playing faster and ‟better‟ prolongs the experience and initially creates a sense of success, but, the longer the play - and reading - lasts, the more disordered the memory text becomes, as the words hit do not usually return to their original places, but to any vacant positions. The reader may only prolong the experience to an extent, in a highly physical act of moving around the cubicle of the CAVE, trying to find suitable positions to both hit the words and to have best possible angle to read them. Eventually, there is no way to avoid the word-walls collapsing to an illegible „white hole and the reader cannot but try and dodge the final crash. Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 256 All this physical playing activity combined with the more conventional reading as deciphering textual messages forms an exemplary case of what Espen Aarseth has termed „ergodic reading‟ where „non-trivial effort‟ is required from the reader (1997, p. 1-2). Time as Theme in Screen In the fictive text of Screen, there are apparent themes of remembering, forgetting and textually constructing the past: Three fingers running across his scalp, parting his hair at the roots, untensing the skin. His mother, cutting his hair. […] She is alive then and close. fearful of losing our very selves if we lose the stories of ourselves The opening passage‟s musings about the nature of memories and their importance for our identity-building are highly metafictional in how they anticipate what is going to happen in the work: In a world of illusions, we hold ourselves in place by memories. […] fixed and meaningful texts in the indecipherable flux of the world‟s words, so vivid at times that we feel we can almost reach out and touch them […] and when they start to peel away, we do what we can to push them, bit by bit, back in place These musings may even be read as a kind of manual for Screen, advising what to reader is supposed to do when the texts, actually, start peeling away. The three walls contain each a passage, one telling about a woman, one about a man, and one about a woman and a man together. It is quite obvious assumption, that it is the same man and woman in each passage. One interpretation would be that the story is about how the woman and man, after a break-up, are each sleeping Texto Digital, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brasil, v. 11, n. 1, p. 250-262, jan./jun. 2015. ISSNe: 1807-9288. 257 alone and remembering their time together (among other reminiscents). Both the passage telling about the woman (and narrated by a female voice over) and the man (with male voice over) relate a moment of waking up, the evanescent moment of dream and reality merging. The ephemeral nature of this moment is juxtaposed with the nature of memories, how illusory and incomplete memories are. The fabric of memories is as thin as dreams, and still they constitute the basis of our very identities. There is an almost painful realization of the fundamental ontological fact that the past is only accessible indirectly through artefacts like photographs and mental constructions like stories. The recurring descriptions of reality and dream merging and past and present merging are also reflected in the narrative situation, where the past comes alive through a narrating act in the present. There is also a passage in the text, which refers to the various time zones. She reaches for the lampswitch, to wake before sunrise, to bring Nana breakfast, but her fingernails tap the plastic face of her alarm clock, its boxy numbers telling the time of another continent. Here, again, we are witnessing the fusion of two temporal levels, this time two time zones being confused in the person‟s head. Reference to the geographical time differences reminds us of the situation where some things happening „at the same‟ in various parts of the globe actually happen at different clock measures, that we are constantly inhabiting just one of the several parallel time zones. The time zones themselves are just handy fictions, or contracts, to avoid the mess of each Meridian having its own time (the „true time‟ based on Earth‟s movement around the Sun). Experiencing Screen The textual space of Screen, in one way, resembles a letterized planetarium where the relative motions of both the gazer and the gazed are intertwined. It can be the reader who is moving around the word objects, or, from other perspective, the word universe moving around the reader. In the CAVE setting, this equals to the screen contents being opaque (subject for gazing from various angles) or transparent