Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Honoria as Austin's own online community conceptualista has been
moving in the cyber circles of Silicon Hills since the early 90's.
Under honoria's alternate name, Madelyn Starbuck, she is a doctoral
student with a dissertation in progress called "Clashing and
Converging: Effects of Internet on the Mail Art Network." Honoria
redesigned and hosted the Electronic Museum of Mail Art (EMMA). Mail
Art is an international community of artists who over the last thirty
years have been exchanging art through the postal systems of 
the world.

Honoria is known to circulate in the Austin community wearing many hats
as an artist, virtual community consultant, elearning designer, and
theorist.  She can be found swimming in Austin's spring-fed 
pools, Ruby Red grapefruit juice and watercolors in hand. Honoria worked 
with the Well's jonl on the WholeFoods.com community.
  
Honoria is the impresaria of the first opera to be derived directly
from Internet interactions http://www.cyberopera.org. The 
opera evolved while honoria was studying at the University of Texas at 
Austin in the Computers Writing and Research Laboratory (CWRL) and
Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACLAB).
 
Honoria will be interviewed by David Scott Marley, who has been on the
WELL since 1990, and  has been dramaturge (literary manager) of Berkeley
Opera since 1994. He is best known in the Bay Area for the opera and
operetta adaptations he has written for Berkeley Opera, including the
sci-fi comedy "The Riot Grrrl on Mars", a critically acclaimed
adaptation of "The Tales of Hoffmann", and "Beatrice and Benedick",
which was revived last season to excellent reviews and full houses.
Works currently in progress include a new adaptation of "Carmen" which
Berkeley Opera will premiere next summer, and an original 
opera called "Small Packages" based on a short story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, 
for which Los Angeles composer Steven Gutheinz is writing the music.

Please join me in welcoming honoria and Scott to inkwell.vue!
  

    

Now, in keeping with honoria's premise in her cyberspace opera, which is
a "romantic, collaborative opera," honoria's introduction would not be
complete with a collaboration.  Here, then, is honoria's introduction as
provided by her friend, Mark Bloch:

"Honoria personifies every positive attribute of art networking. She
reaches daringly across boundaries to gently and lovingly coax her
correspondents out of the isolation that comes with the 
pre-determined roles and patterns she accepts but also abhors, She
explodes herself and everyone she touches out of these calcifying cliches
with her fresh, buoyant and upbeat approach to her work. Most importantly,
she effortlessly scrambles the differences between art and life with her
matter-of-fact engagement with new technologies, new ideas and new mores
that are very much a part of what is happening right now and now and
now. She is a woman of the moment, a force we all should be happily
reckoned with in the new century. Hail hail queen of the art bathtub! --
Mark Bloch, NYC"

Honoria may or may not expound upon the comment about the art bathtub!

So, without further delay, I give you honoria and Scott.
  

    
Thanks so much!  It's great to be here! I'm honored to be included in
a topic with so many  authors who interpret our techno culture and who
document  our dramatically changing times.

Mark Bloch. in his comments in speaking about my work, is speaking as
an expert on the Mail Art network and its founder, Ray Johnson.  I
appreciate Mark's assessment of my attempts to compare and contrast the
Mail Art Network and Internet-based virtual communities. For clarity,
let's talk about that bathtub thing...

For those who can't imagine what the "queen of the art of the bathtub"
might mean, please let me explain. The "art bathtub" refers to a
classic (since the late 1980's) and well-traveled, snail mail art
project called "Philip Guston's bat tub" (no h).

The bat tub project is an international distribution, via the snail
mail postal systems, of a line drawing of a bathtub with Ray Johnson's
head sticking out the back as if he were reclining in the bathtub. 
Traditionally, mail artists intervene on the image, usually inserting
more heads, photos, drawings, collage, crowding the bathtub and sending
the collaborative image to other mail artists.  The art images can
range from lowly photocopies to elaborate hand painted collage or 3-D
interpretations. The bat tub project has been bobbing up every so often
since the 80s and it's always a fun project to me.  

At a recent correspondence art  congress at the Wexner Art Center I
arranged for all the women at the meeting to pose for a photo.  I
copied the photo of all the fe-mail artists line up and put us all in
the bathtub. I sent the image from my post office into the
correspondence art network to mail artists who are familiar, or not,
with the project. To some correspondence artists, the bat tub may be
new, but simultaneously its image of Ray Johnson may be recognizable as
the originator of the mail art network.  To others, the fe-mail bat
tub image will be a comfortable new twist to the historical project.
The subtext of my intervention on the bat tub image has to do with the
under representation of women in international art in general, and in
mail art in particular.  Another subtext is Ray Johnson's gay
sexuality, and his appreciation of women icons.  We are all in his bat
tub. It's fun, relaxed exchange of art.

I came to the Internet with the context of Correspondence Art and, as
a correspondence artist, a feeling of distributed community is natural
to me.  I hope this Inkwell interview will explore collaborative
creativity in relation to distributed community.
  

    
Hello, honoria. I'm delighted to have this chance to talk to you and
get to know about your work.

Let's start with your "cyberopera", which I'm very curious about. Can
you tell us about it, and how it came to be written?
  

    
Hi Scott, 

The opera grew out of observations of virtual communities.  I was
hanging out in some MOOs and listservs with groups of good writers,
dreamers and utopian strategists.  At first I was impressed by the
obvious spirit of sharing such as moo objects, fleshmeeting, and online
poetry readings but as I hung out longer I realized that in these
interactive environments were power plays, political intrigue, gender
switching, deceit, fights -- hey -- just add music and that's opera.

About that time, 1994, I needed a project for a really fun class
called Virtual Reality Cyberspace and the Arts at The University of
Texas. I sent out a call for rhymed couplets about people's actual
online experiences.  I was barraged with couplets and a few longer
poems that turned into the arias.  A group of friends  cobbled together
a libretto from the emails. I rounded up a bunch of wonderful
performance artists and dancers. They dressed up and talked/sang/danced
the libretto in front of a web cam and it turned out to be the first
opera ever webcast.

It was far from being a "real" opera but it was a cyber opera. Turning
the libretto into a staged opera is still a work in progress.  

I'm sure there are several operas in the Well's history and some more
happening right now. Where do your opera ideas come from?
  

    
Every one's a little different. Sometimes it's something that makes me
laugh or something that moves me.

Sometimes it's just reading something that makes me say, wow, I could
make a great scene out of that -- but how do I lead into it, and where
does it go after that? So I think about it for a while and if I come up
with some good answers, I start sketching out a plot. But sometimes
what seems like a good idea for a scene doesn't really go anywhere.

What defines a "real" opera for you? How are you fashioning the
material you have now into something to be staged?
  

    
"Real" opera poses some interesting questions, Scott.

"Real" opera to me means a dynamic collaboration of artists such as
librettist, composer, artistic director, dramaturge, musicians,
singers, set designers, costume designers, lighting designers, sound
designers, technical directors, stage manager, and an organization to
administer all of the above plus more like fundraising, public
relations, educational outreach...the list goes on in the "real" world
of opera! 

For example, until recently I didn't know what a dramaturge was.  I
had some vague idea from vocabulary building left over from my GRE
preparation but I had no idea that I personally needed one in my life.
Now I know the next step to bring the cyberopera to stage is to
dramatize the libretto for performance.  When I heard that you were a
dramaturge I felt that fate was giving me another lesson in how to make
an opera!

Fashioning the material is an ongoing saga. As you can probably tell
by now I didn't know much about opera when I got the idea to make one.
I've learned by doing, or talking other people into doing:-) - our
scores of volunteers have been fantastic.  Everyone involved has
learned from each other. The cyberopera's virtual community story
brought people away from their computers and into f2f contact with each
other to build small performances from stories that evolved in the
libretto writing/editing. The performances consisted of readings at
various stages of the libretto's development. One of the readings was
done in a swimming pool and is affectionately known as "the wetware
reading." Another reading involved a lot of glitter and overhead
projections...low tech and casual.  There is an opportunity for the
cyberopera to incorporate lots of multimedia but so far we are working
on the story.

Have you had a chance to look over the cyberopera libretto?  It was
written by over 60 people.  Ten people edited it. The libretto contains
a lot of stories woven together. It has that online communication
choppiness about it and will take some serious dramaturging to develop
impact. passion and performability.  

Have you ever worked with a collaboratively written libretto?  Do you
see a stage in your mind when you work with the words? Do you draw
storyboard sketches of action?  What goes on in the mind of a
dramaturge?
  

    
Hi, Honoria! Great to have you in the inkwell!

I took photos at a reading of the "Honoria in Ciberspazio" summer before
last. Various cast members showed up at Honoria's apartment, drank some
wine, and hopped in (and around) the pool for the reading. Some of the
photos are posted at 
http://www.well.com/~jonl/honoria/honoria.html

The article I wrote around the same time is at
http://www.auschron.com/issues/vol17/issue12/screens.opera.html
  

    
What a dramaturge does varies from company to company. At Berkeley
Opera I'm sort of the "house writer" -- I write a libretto every year
or two and I also write most of the advertising copy, program notes,
that sort of thing.

Most opera companies don't have anything like a dramaturge -- it's
something you see mostly in companies that do spoken theater. I think
one reason is that most opera companies do well known works with a well
established tradition of how they are performed. With that approach,
you don't have a strong need for someone who specializes in drama --
you rest on the tradition, the tradition tells you what to do and (if
it's a good tradition) it supports you, and you can focus your energy
on the other values.

And also audiences often go into the opera house with low expectations
-- opera isn't "supposed" to be good theater, the plots are all silly
anyway and no one can act, so just enjoy the gorgeous singing and don't
worry about making sense of any of it. Which is a shame because it's
not really true, but that's a very pervasive mindset. It's stronger
here in America than Europe, though, and I think that's partly because
in this country we've never had a strong tradition of doing opera in
our own language.

I'm trying to wrap my mind around the idea of 60 writers and ten
editors working on one libretto -- that's an impressive feat. As
impresaria of this project, how did you bring that many collaborators
together? And how did you meld all of their efforts into a single work?
I'm curious about the process by which this all happened.
  

    
Hi Jon! 
 Your photos are so fine at capturing the true nature of the wetware
reading. 

Scott, 
Thanks for the insights on how you work.   It's a challenge to answer
your question about bringing collaborators together. The idea of the
work came first, then collaborators arrived, mostly unknown to each
other, to fill the idea with content. The collaborators arrived in
droves as soon as an invitation to write an opera about online
identity, love, and misunderstandings was announced.  I can't tell you
what a rush it was to open my mailbox every day to find dozens of
original rhymed couplets about love and loss, quirky connections,
surreal passions.

Some of it was pretty heavy handed such as:
Woe, woe, to you, a thousand times woe
Love does not down the Information highway go.

Or silly:
Unless you seek, you can't compile.
Your fear will freeze you for a while.
I remind you of the method how, sir,
You can't carouse without a browser.

Or romantic:
I feel your presence in cool electric heat
I touch your soul and paralyze
reflections of our dreams fill the misty skies
and when you send to me the essence of your inside
we meet in sacred space, our atoms do collide

I received several hundred couplets, about twelve whole poems plus
some long segments of blank verse in Italian during the semester. 

The editors were a fun group: the opera's editor-in-chief is an
economist who loves opera, a Shakespearean scholar arrived from Spain,
a zen consultant added the spiritual comments, an eighteen year old
Goth joined the group, and several graduate students helped to bring us
to the current version.

The libretto won a number of awards for innovative interactive use of
the Net. Our brick and mortar cultural organizations are striving to be
on the net. The cyberopera project is born of the net and moves in the
opposite direction, out of the Net toward a real stage.  Is it
appropriate for the cyberopera to emerge from the Net and onto a stage,
to tell the story of Net culture in exaggerated manners common to both
the wired world and to opera?

I hope for advice and connections that will facilitate a performable
text and music so that all the hundreds of participants over the years
will be able to see a staged production and so that the Net's story
will be written by its players.
  

    
I'd like to hear more about the inception. What made you decide upon
opera as a form to work in? And what was the invitation process -- how
did you go about inviting people to take part?
  

    
The cyberopera's inception takes me back  one hot Texas August day
sitting in a cool computer lab at school. The idea came to make some
creative project about how people felt about their net identities and
the relationships that the identities had with each other.  I wanted
the project to concentrate on just the projected identities and their
online culture, not the real people sitting at the keyboards creating
the identities.  I wanted to embody the drama of the real time instant
fiction created in the communities. 

For an opera to be the end product just popped into my head.  I looked
up from my reverie thinking about making an opera about online
identities and said outloud to the friendly looking man in a long skirt
sitting next to me who looked arty enough to handle an inspired
outburst in an otherwise quiet lab.  "I'm going to make an opera."  He
said that he made operas all the time.  It turned out I was speaking to
Ryan Goertz, a composer and opera freak.  Suddenly with an expert on
board it seemed quite possible to actually create an opera. So we did.
That next semester saw phase one when performance artists realized the
webcast from Sandy Stone's living room.

I find that conceiving an opera is like getting pregnant.  As soon as
you decide to do it everyone in the world tells you how hard it is, all
the bad stuff that can happen, and how much money it costs.  But by
then its too late. The wheels of fate are in motion.  The art work is
destined to be born in one form or another and you just try to do
everything possible to make the birth healthy and easy.

Since you probably haven't been pregnant you probably have a different
way to think about the birth of an opera.  What is your description?
  

    
What was it that inspired you to think of it as an opera? Instead of,
say, a poem or a play or a comic book or whatever? Just a whim, or did
you have a reason?

I've been involved in with a lot of operas that ended up not
happening, and a few that haven't happened yet but are still
possibilities, so I can't say that I think the artwork is "destined to
be born" -- I find it takes an enormous amount of work and sometimes
you work and it still doesn't happen. Sometimes you think the project
is dead and then it comes back to live three or four years later;
sometimes it stays dead so long that you're a completely different
person from the one who had the original idea and even if you wanted to
go back and complete it, you couldn't.
  

    
I'm also interested in that as well.  When I heard the description of your
show, it sounds much like a George Coates work from a few years ago, in
which the band performed a kind of virtual rock concert, where the
musicians were contributing their music from far-flung places via the
internet.  

I guess the question I have is:  What makes it a cyber opera and not a
cyber melodrama?
  

    
Why opera? Great question, Konsigliari Kafka of the Cosa Nozzo and
Scott. 

At the time the cyberopera was conceived online communities were
speaking grandly of an emerging globally linked culture. The text-built
landscape was sweeping, grand and operatic. Now the Net seems much
more tawdry, commercialized and less dramatic.  The cyberopera libretto
represents the cultural themes from the time when it was written by
those 60 collaborators.  While some of the writing has not kept its
relevance and some of it truly registers the importance of those early
days of intensity and passion.  

How do you characterize the character of Net communications through
your experiences with it?  Do you think the patterns of how people
interact have changed over the years? 
  

    
Several other operas popped up about the same time as honoria in
ciberspazio. 

BRAIN OPERA
There was MIT's Brain Opera organized by Tod Machover.  I did my
master's thesis on the Brain Opera as a constructivist teaching tool. 
The Brain Opera was a great academic project and I enjoyed Marvin
Minsky's Society of Mind as a libretto. I saw the Brain Opera four
times with a group of people who also work on the cyberopera team.  We
learned a lot about what we were not from the Brain Opera. 
http://brainop.media.mit.edu/indexold.html

ULURU
Another opera webcast and with an expansisve website  was ULURU by
Robert Bachman.  Uluru is called a fractal opera about Australia
aborigines and complex mulitiplicities.  You can read more about it at
http://www.orbitex.ch/uluru/   The story has nothing to do with net
culture.  Recently we received some strongly worded mail from the Uluru
people telling us to take the words "first cyberspace opera" off of
our site because they claimed to be the first.  I wrote them back
explaining that our story came from the net and thus it was, as far as
we knew, the first opera about cyberspace.

ROME
The most interesting other cyberopera was performed in Rome. I really
wish I'd seen that one. It was an adaption of Jason and the Argonauts
story adapted to the Net.  The producer of this opera also objected to
our use of the term "first cyberspace opera" but when we checked the
dates of performances our's actually had been webcast before his was
produced.  Unfortunately my correspondence with the creator of this
opera is on an earlier hard drive and my search strategies in my brain
and in Google are not pulling it up. If anyone has the link to this
opera I'd like to revisit it.

The best source to learn about great Net projects used to be Matt
Mirapaul's Arts@Large column in the CyberTimes section of the NYTimes
on the web.  Recently that column was discontinued but you can still
look at the archives.

Do you know other web opera projects?
 
  

    
Nope, I'd never even heard the word cyberopera before this.

You say the opera represents cultural themes from the time when it was
written. Can you tell us a little more about what those themes are,
and how you think the 'Net has changed?
  

    
I'd also like to hear about the comment you've made to me, perhaps
half-jokingly, that the opera is about 'sex in cyberspace.' 
  

    
The cultural themes of the time were concepts such as
 - McLuhan's idea that by inventing electric technology we
externalized our central nervous systems; 
- information wants to be free; 
- the Net is anarchistic in terms of access, distribution and contol;
-  technology is an enabler of human creativity;
-  we have begun a communications revolution, and 
- my personal favorite by Sandy Stone: The war of desire and
technology at the end of the mechanical age.

Look at that: war, freedom, anarchy, desire, human creativity,
revolution, externalized mind. It looks like an opera to me.
  

    
Sex, Jon, yes.
The plot of the opera is about four people who type their desires and
then press return.  Their words merge in the net to eventually form
reflections of their desires.  Their desires return to them in the form
of idealized lovers. Each of the four has a separate
relationship/story to live with their net-born lover.  We called the
lovers "clones,"  not  genetic clones,  projected desires cloned from
the characters words. Confused by the clones, the four characters seek
advice from an oracle who seems to be a great prophet but soon
disintegrates into random databasish trash.  The oracle's power is
assumed by a mysterious cyborg born in the mists between human longing
and technological potential. The four characters and their clones get
into some hot and heavy interactions on their paths to ideal love. 
  

    
That's what I love about the libretto... it finds the operatic grandeur
within cybersex relationships and elevates sexual longing to the level of
a spiritual quest.
  

    
Can you give us a specific example, maybe tell us about one of the
four characters and his or her relationship with a clone? I'm
particularly interested in how these themes work out in terms of the
specific details of a story.
  

    
The characters are all based on real people, by the way.  I'll take
the character bookish.  Bookish has the fiestiest clone.  He is a
scholarly type who reads French philosophers and who thinks he wants an
intellectual counterpart in his clone, however the clone reads between
the lines of his mail and presents a rather brazen sensual persona who
teases him about his intellectual pretenses. Here are some lines by
bookish's clone.

--------------
Objectivism, Structuralism, Past-Post Modernism.
I'm sure in the texts seduction fits in.
For knowledge and experience from French philosophers and machines
is much more revolutionary and dangerous than it seems.
It can liberate those from human regimentation
Transforming modern culture to allow autonomous experimentation.
no longer will you need only your critical lenses,
As people reappropriate all of their pleasurable senses.
--------------

Bookish is the one character who becomes totally seduced by his clone
and merges with her in ciberspazio. Ciberspazio is the Italian word for
cyberspace. Where or what ciberspazio is and how it's represented will
be up to the creative director.  I often wonder, if we get that far,
how ciberspazio will be represented.  Maybe it will be formed by
mysterious abstract lighting dimensions, a wired techno nightmare, or a
product placement arena. It will be fun to find out. Have you ever
seen the web depicted in an artistic representation that could be used
in theatre design?
  

    
I've seen a few attempts, but none of them blew me away.

So am I right in thinking you see ciberspazio, within this piece, as
someplace the characters can actually inhabit, someplace they can merge
with each other in a meaningful way? You say Bookish is the only
character who becomes seduced by his clone -- do the other characters
meet their clones, too, but aren't too crazy about them? Or is there
some outside obstacle to forming these relationships?

It's always seemed to me that cyberrelationships are especially
vulnerable to illusions and false expectations, that people in
cyberspace can't help but present an idealized view of how they see
themselves even if they're trying not to.

Are these clones real people, other people in cyberspace? So that
perhaps Bookish is a "clone" to the other person, too? Or are the
clones more like invented personalities, so that Bookish's clone is
more a function of what he wants to find in cyberspace, and doesn't
really have an independent existence apart from him?
  

    
I'd like to hear more about the process, not of creating the ideas behind
the cyber-opera, but more about the staging process of giving flesh to the
cyber-opera. Or to quote one of my teachers "Ideas are cheap.  Making the
audience see your ideas is expensive."


I viewed a bit of the 1999 video on your web site, which was a staged
reading/singing.  The music seems good, although it's a little hard to 
concentrate on it. (even on my fast connection, the singers are badly out
of synch with what they're singing)

Have there been other performances?  How are you hoping
to go from web-page to stage?  What cuts/changes/re-thinkings do you
anticipate having to go through as you make the cyber-opera a real opera.
And what are you thinking in terms of set design?
  

    
One stage design element that I think might be good for your show  is
something I saw Fred Curchak and Daniel Stein use in a show-- which is a
very long string that cordons off the stage.. The string goes in between
the audience and the stage, back and forth, until it becomes a web of sort
that encloses the audience in it.  There's this real geometric beauty to
the different figures that you can make with this one long string....

The other thing that I think might be interesting from a cyberspace idea
is the Dance of the modems-- the negotiation that has to take place
between two computers in order to exchange and receive information.


In some ways, it seems that even though this is a cyber-opera-- in order
to make it a live event you need to stage a story about the connections
between people.  (Even if those people are the clones)  It's the
connection (and their striving/longing/desire for connection) to others
that seems to be at the heart of the story....