Brenda Laurel

In Conversation with Jas. Morgan

 [Intro by Sally Rosenthal]

 M2: Well I've seen you roll your eyes at Jaron's notion of becoming
a "virtual lobster."  Do you find that guys have limited and limiting
ideas of what VR can be? And given no technical difficulties, what
would you like to be?

BL: Me? Well, probably a lizard. It's not "lobsterness" that bothers
me. I celebrate "lobsterness." [Ann Lasko Harvil] talks about the
lobster a lot. I just interviewed her for a SIGGRAPH article. It's not
the lobster that I ever had trouble with, I think the lobster is fine. It
was Jaron's assertion-as he talks about it in public-that well, you
decide you want to be a lobster, so you reach behind your left ear, and
you pull this lobster out, and you dive into it's body. And the thing
that Jaron never wants to talk about is how the lobster got there. I
mean how is it that somebody knew you wanted to be a lobster? Or
how did you tell the computer that you wanted to be a lobster, and
what a lobster looked like? You know, all those kinds of problems you
could just arm wave? In public conversation?

For me that's extremely important and maybe the most interesting
thing. It's like we as artists have to either anticipate the desire for
lobsterness [laughter], or we have to build systems with "virtual stuff"
in them that people can shape in the context of being inside the
experience. Because I don't think the future of VR is a bunch of guys
sitting at home with Swivel 3D and RB2 running on Macintoshes, and
then occasionally poking their heads in to see if the lobster's there yet.

M2: But the male/female modalities in VR, boys & girls...

BL: As far as boys and girls and VR, I've said before and I'll say
again, I think that, in general boys have this fantasy about leaving
their bodies. And I think that's a cultural artefact of the priesthood
who gave us computers. And that generation is just passing away.

M2: Now how is they just passing away?

BL: Well my observation is that since I started with computers in '76
is that the majority of men that I've found working in that field were
of a particular sort. They were people who, in general ,were not
socially very interested or well adapted. I don't know whether the lack
of adaption comes from a lack of interest or vice-versa. But there's a
personality type there that I think is being replaced by a new
generation of fusion people.

BL: There was a conversation that I had at Hackers in, I think, was
1989, there was a womans group. There were 13 women out of like
300 atendees, and there was a womens session. And so we all went. All
the women went. And some of the men went, mostly out of the sense
of social responsibility. And the girls were complaining about how
much discrimination they'd suffered, and they couldn't get on the
mainframe, and people turned off their password, and the usual rants.
And this one man, who I know, whom I won't name, who's just a
brilliant programmer and a good friend said, "Well maybe what you
don't understand is that the reason that we were in computers was to
get away from you."  And that had a huge impact. Somebody finally
had said it. And I think that although it's not about getting away from
women, it certainly was in the early days, a profession that was chosen
by people who weren't particularly interested in social intercourse.
And so, as a result, the body didn't seem to be very important to these
folks. I mean, the typical hacker stereotype dosen't come out of thin
air, right? The generation of folks that I'm talking about are
overweight or underweight and ill-groomed and unhealthy and
consume nasty substances and live their lives in the computer. And so
it's no wonder that their fantasy is to leave their body. [laughter] 'Cos
it's never mattered for much, they already have!

BL: When a new generation of people comes in, young women, young
men, old women, like me, there's a completely different paradigm.
Which has to do with an awareness of the relationship between body
and mind and kind of an implicit rejection of mind/body duality.  And
so, although that does tend to break down along gender lines in the
handfull of pioneers that have been around for six years in this
business, it's critically not going to be just that. It's going to be about
the artistic sensibility. And really it doesn't even break down as artists
and engineers anymore, I don't think. It did five years ago. And the
people I grew up with were of those two types. And now there are
these people in colleges and like Brian Hughes and people like Sandy
Stone-whose not even a young person, particularly-and the kids that
I meet on college tours who are fusion people. They have these majors
about ethnographic studies and computer science. So it's a real new
age.  And this dichotomy is largely historical, but we have to
remember the weight that the patriarchy carries. And the old
preisthood is now ensconsed at NPT and IBM and Apple to a certain
extent and their going to keep doing their personal influence, right?
Although it's history, demographically, it still counts institutionally
and we have to be aware of it, we have to be able to call it out.

M2: So in the historical context do you think that there is a masculine
and feminine modality to the composition of virtual worlds?

BL: Well, again it is a lot generational. I think the male/femaleness of
it is true and real, but that's really an artefact of the fact that women
more than men tend to artistic sensibilities and men more than women
tend to engineering and other kinds of sensibilities.  In other words
gender is an artefact of some other basic sort. And I think it's going
away because the culture is taking it away. The place where it's most
obvious is in all the issues around sexual applications of VR, because
women are just finding a way to have a voice around their own
sexuality and own it and find it OK to make representations about it.
So it's that side of the application possibilities, the erotic side. Because
you can't do sex in VR until you have tactile. [laughter] But you may
do erotica and porn. The people who are expressing that desire and
formulating it's content are men because they're more comfortable
with that. But I think that's changing fast and this may be a medium
where women have a chance to explore that stuff more.

And that leads me back to my lizard, I mean I've done bisexual now
I want to do trans- special, you know?

M2: Species symbiosis, Brenda?

BL: Yeah, right!

M2: Well, in the non-historical context, and for people who are not
familiar with people like Brian Hughes, would you describe what you
mean by this "hybrid person" that is currently emerging?

BL: Well, I think it has to do with the power of VR as a cultural
paradigm. Computing didn't attract these renaissance folks to the
same degree I would say as interactivity as a medium is now attracting
them. The people who were attracted to computing in the early days
were a different lot than the people who are attracted to it now
because it's becoming manifest as a medium. There are a lot of people
who know how to work with media and who have interests in media
and concerns about media, right? And that's a more pan- gender,
pan-cultural thing. That's part of it, but that's not all of it.

Sandy Stone's been a cyborg since day one. She is utterly in a
relationship with technology in a way that's extremely interesting, and
has also at the same time what I would consider to be off the scale in
terms of humanistic energy. She's a very current, very fast thinking,
fast moving philosopher. She's attracted to this because it just got
interesting. You know, it wasn't interesting when Von Neumann was
doing it! It's interesting now! And I think in terms of the young people
that I'm seeing, it's that personal computers have made the idea of
being involved with computers an accessable one. So an artist may
fantasize about computers, or a sociologist may fantasize about it now
in a way that they couldn't have twenty years ago. And so their energy
gets directed in that way. And then tools have come up to the point
where folks like that can start to actually do something. So it's a really
wonderful crossroads.

M2: In you latest book, Computers as Theatre, you make the point
that you don't consider these things tools, but that you consider them
a medium...

BL: Well a medium can represent tools. A medium can also represent
agents and companions and friends and worlds, right? I mean that's
Alan Kay's notion of the medium, and I subscribe to it. The way in...
Ivan Illich uses this word, "conviviality," and the point is that the way
in is now accessable. The way into writing a novel became accessable
a few centuries after Gutenberg. The way into film became accessable,
really, with the video camera. And the way into this stuff is starting to
become accessable to a slightly larger population because people have
bothered to develop higher level tools. Where it has to go is the way
of the printed word, where it has to be accessable to everybody and
where there's no context difference between the authoring language
and the presentation language. You don't write in a different language
to write a book or to take a photograph.  You have to know
something about the technology but you're working in the language
of images. And that's because computers have just found out in the
last decade that that's what they are. People who care about
computers are [???], that's what they are.

M2: What do you percieve will be the evolution of language?

BL: I was just talking with my husband about that, and it's
interesting. That's a really hard question, Jas.

M2: Well let's break it down into smaller bits. This brings to mind
Burrough's idea that when you hold up a picture of a rose you
immediatly know what it is, but when you hold up a card with the
letters r-o-s-e written on it, in your head you read r-o-s-e first before
cognition. So there's another level of translation involved. Do you
find a similar dichotomy between hieroglyphic and phonetic language
as there is a dichotomy between presentation language and authoring
language?

BL: Well I think they tend to colapse over time in a medium that
becomes established, and in a medium that becomes popular as
opposed to a medium that remains esoteric. A lot of the problem with
science education and math education in America today is that the
medium of communication about those subjects remains esoteric, it
remains a priesthood.  Ideally what will happen to our personal
languages, the way we communicate mono-a- mono, will be that we
will come to have, as we are now, a better way of integrating visual
imagery into the way that we communicate with each other. It's
interesting. In film it was true and in computers it was true. One of the
first things that happens when you introduce visual imagery is that
there's an immediate thrashing about for a syntax of it. And I think
that's well on the way. In a perfect world, at least, the tools for being
flexible enough with visual imagery in the way that we construct
communications for each other will become available enough that
syntax can "grow legs." And evolve the way that it always does in a
culture. And unless some massive economic dislocation happens that
prevents all of the things that are evolving in the world from evolving,
that's right around the corner. And to me that's all to the good. And
the thing that my husband says, that is instructive, is that people talk
about that as "post-literacy." And this is another bone I have to pick
with Jaron, he talks about "post-symbolic communication." There's
no such thing! Unless you want to become an invertebrate! Everything
is symbolic, everything has syntax, as my friend Terence McKenna
says. [affects a nasal Terence voice "What in the world is text?"  You
know how he talks. So it's not a question of post-symbolic, it's a
question of post-Iron Maiden, post media-specific. We have the
opportunity to learn the syntax of multimedia information, and the
more we reduce the granularity of information through multimedia,
the more that becomes esperanto of the imagination.

M2: What signals will we see as language evolves toward this
construct you're talking about?

BL: We may not see them at all, because it may be that this country
declines into some combination of economic recession and political
repression such that people don't get to develop in this way. But
assuming that they do, the sign that it can happen is, in the near
future, the ability for an average individual to capture and store in the
random access format, visual imagery. The big bottleneck in
multimedia right now is that I can't capture my world in moving
images or still images and add that to the database of a multimedia
product. OK? And in virtual worlds it's just the same. If I can't put my
picture in there, then interactivity is constrained to the world of
changing form and structure. And you never get to add content. But
content is what it's about. So the way we'll know that it's going the
right way is when somebody announces next year that there's an
incredibly cheap read/write optical media. And if that happens, which
it will, in a world that's not overly regulated and constrained in
bizzare ways, the street will find it's use for things. And we will have
a different dialogue as a culture than the one we have now. We won't
have a few information providers which we must all interpret and an
information world in which we're only represented as numbers in a
poll. We'll have a world in which we're having discourse!  Neil
Postman said the telegraph destroyed American discourse in the sense
that information now came from places that weren't near you. And
that it didn't take any time to get there.  And you couldn't do anything
useful with it. [laughter] Well the Global Village requires a bigger
bandwidth than the telegraph, and that requires the ability to store
personal imagery.

M2: Let's talk a bit about you current projects.

BL: Well, Rachel Strickland, videographer and I, submitted a
proposal to [BAM?], so we got it accepted to build a virtual world next
summer. And it's giving me an opportunity to challange just about
everything that I find wrong with how it's going at the moment in VR. 
It's not going wrong, it's just going in a way that it's time for
somebody to change the water. And so we got this thing approved
called Virtual Coyote and we're going to be working with a lot of
texture mapped natural imagery for purposes of ambiguity, actually,
because we think that ambiguity is a key to the engaement of the
imagination and that polygons don't do that. So that's one thing that
we're testing. And another thing that we're testing that we didn't
know that we were testing, but which we are testing, is the whole
problem of the trendiness of multiculturalism. Because, we've based
the design of this world on a lot of Native American stories. We were
trying to disrrupt the average American's notion of time and space by
presenting them with the context that was "other than." And the one
that we were exploring had to do with mostly costal California
indians.  And then suddenly I realised that that looked a whole lot like
appropriation. And that we could be misinterpreted as positing to
represent those cultures. And so there's this new challange in the
project which is to represent things about those cultures, but to make
it clear that the purpose of our representation is to learn. And partake.
But not to warrant that we have now understood, or to submit what
we're doing as an example of multiculturalism. I mean putting an
Indian in the window does not constitute multiculturalism! And so
there's this real fine line, because on the one hand you don't want to
say "I can never learn from other cultures," but on the other hand
what you don't want to do is to create the illusion that you've
understood them. In the way that a person who lives in them
understands them. Multiculturalism, trust me, is the big buzzword of
the multimedia industry at this moment. IBM has invested 3.6 million
dollars in a project about multiculturalism. And their new slogan is
"Multimedia is Multicultural." Well this makes you nervous! "We'll go
deal with the problem of cultural diversity by putting it on
Macintoshes." (!) You know? Well, I don't want to be party to that.
But at the same time, the reason that they're finding it important to
co-opt that energy is because it's real energy and it's because we as
mainstream Americans find ourselves suddenly in the absence of of an
oral culture. In the absence of a culture all, that we had anything to do
with. And so how do you recognize what your culture really is? And
how do you recognize your power to create culture but by looking at
other cultures that have done both of those things? It's a fine line, but
it's an important one, and I'm going to try to take it on, 'cos I think
it's a huge problem.

M2: Do you have a strategy for implementing this?

BL: [laughter] No, I have a philosophy! The next year is about
figuring out what the fuck the strat... Well I do have a strategy in the
sense that I'm working on a multicultural project with Simon &
Schuster in the multimedia world. And the strategy is to make the
authors of the content also the authors of the structure and the
interface, to the extent that we can.  So that we're not appropriating
content and putting it into White Western form and structure, which
is the essiential sin of appropriation. But that we're working like mad
to create tools that are free enough of our cultural biases where the
subjects of our investigation can create our own forms and structures.
And that may be utterly impossible, but it's worth trying.

M2: So, now we know the strategy, what about your philosophy?

BL: The philosophy that we should recognize and respect and honor
other cultures is an incredibly important one in the world today. I've
talked to Tim Leary about the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the
Eastern Europe and he says "This is great! This is great! Even though
it's lead to awful violence, it means that people are hanging on by their
teeth to their cultural heritages. And that they're trying to reconstruct
them. And if we were smart we would do the same thing, and maybe
America would become a different collection of entities." Tim's big
fantasy is that Vancouver to San Diego would become a country. The
point is that multiculturalism is not about "review it, take it as nod,
and then become global." It's about "recognize it, honor it, support it,
preserve it."

M2: What is the thing that you find most disturbing about the Rave
Scene?

BL: It's that there is this utter emphasis on global culture. And we
don't know what that is except that we think that we're constructing
it. And there's an utter numbness to personal culture, family culture,
local culture. Any kind of context for us as human beings. "The Brave
New Teenager," you know? And the Brave New Teenager is at risk if
they sever the cord of spiritual continuity from their individual and
family and national and ethnic cultures. We can advocate and move
towards global culture, but global culture has to be "I be, I see." It has
to be the Vulcan standard. Not the Federation standard. We cannot
throw out the baby with the bath. It's too late in the game to have to
reconstruct our spirituality and our ways of communicating and
revering our elders. And it's too late, and too long to say "I don't care
what the Inuit believed, because I'm a Global Villager." I was talking
to Todd Rundgren last week and he said "I'm a global citizen, and I
don't have a country and I don't have a culture." And in a major way
I'm behind that. Certainly my country has failed me. Irrefutably failed
me. But I do have an individual culture and I have a family culture
and I have an ethnic culture...

M2: You have a genetic culture.

BL: And a genetic culture.

M2: You have a genetic wisdom...

BL: And I have gifts to give. And if we decide that any gift which has
a coloured or cultural nametag attached to it is not an acceptable gift,
then we are in deep shit! So when I stand in a neo-Dyonisian rite, with
sampled sound which has no connection to rap or funk or ju-ju or
jazz, I gotta say to myself "We have thrown out the baby with the
bath." And it's no surprise to me that there is a complete absence of
eroticism in these gatherings.

M2: Oh, yes! You've finally helped me piece some of this together!
That's the big thing that they play up. You go there, and nobody has
to hit on each other, but nobnody wants to meet each other either...

BL: Yeah!

M2: It's regressed below the Village People...there's not even an
Indian and a construction worker anymore...

BL: Yeah!

M2: And when you're so completely devoid of culture, sampled
sound, like Gary Numan in the early 80's with his hit, "Here in my car,
Here in my car..." I mean, his style was no style.

BL: No style. And we're living in a world...it's not just sampled
sound...it's sampled information. It's sampeled experience. Neil
Postman,of course, is the master at articulating this, but the evening
newscast fragments what we might learn about the world into a
sample. It's utterly meaningless. It doesn't have enough depth or
length to support any kind of content that might hook one up. And so
my advise is, "Let's not throw out the baby with the bath." Let's get
radical. I mean radical isn't, saying "I have no paths, I have no future,
I have no identity, I have no country." It's saying "I have all these
things, I have my wisdom, I have my personal power, and I am
placing that in the service of a global community. That's completely
different! So I have a real issue with the Rave shit. And that's why I
remain a Deadhead.

M2: Another aspect that nags me about the Raves is that you walk
into a room filled with any species of this week's technology that they
can possibly manage to fit...all of it blinking at you at once...

BL Well, I think there's a tremendous amount of eliteism in the
producers of these scenes.  Because they believe that the "Gee Whiz"
factor is enough. In fact, to be fair, it may not be elitism, it may be
some sort of magical realism, you know? That if "I just show the
outward and visible sign of this new technology that it will alter
everybody's consciousness"  But the fact is that interactivity is intensly
personal. You cannot demo it. And you cannot project it. Now if
somebody wanted to carefully and lovingly craft a communal virtual
reality they could do it. And in fact, I'm working on it, and I want to.
But to say "I'm gonna blast you one eye from somebody else's VR
experience," or "I'm gonna give you sampled CG," is just Gee Whizz
bullshit! It's right up there with Crack for stupid.

M2: Well, tonight they're rioting in the streets of California. I can't
help but think of the need for a kind of telepolitics, a kind of
teledemocracy...

BL: In my role as techno weenie, right? I think that utterly it could
accomplish a global revolution. The electronic agora, the electronic
town hall, the electronic meeting with Ross Perot...

M2: Well, we are talking about a discourse...

BL: The numbers are wrong for there to be deep discourse with
everyone. But if we believe that we talk to each other well, and that
Joe Beet's from Iowa and Fred Smith's from California can do an OK
job of representing us, then it could work. I'm so impressed by John
Hawkenberry's new program. His new NPR program that's a national
call-in show. There's one 800 number and people call in from all over
the country... NPR, as a medium, as a channel, gives huge amounts of
time to the stories that they deliver, as opposed to the broadcast
media. And Hawkenberry's Talk of the Nation has topics from
abortion to funding of public television to what women dream about.
What he does as a talk show host is that he engages each caller in a
dialog. And it goes on for a long time.  And it's representave
democracy. And it's the best! It's like ad hoc representave democracy.
If we could be having those conversations with each other, if I could
know more about what's going on tonight in San Francisco, from "in
people" who are living tonight in San Francisco, than I know about
it from KRON, I might actually get involved in the situation, it might
become my issue. Even though the numbers are wrong, in terms of ten
million who want to talk and one bandwidth, one broadcast channel.
Representative democracy works that way. And I think it might be,
actually, amazingly, way cool.  Even though I have huge issues around
Ross Perot's personal funding of his campaign, and also I want to
know where he got it, and what ethic lead him to believe that it was
OK to get it that way, I've got to say, I will vote for him for two
reasons. One, because he has proposed this thing, which is utterly the
right thing. And, two, because I want to blow up the two party system.

M2: And he's doing a good job of bringing the two party system
down...

BL: Yeah! If he gets even ten percent he's going to make a huge
difference.

M2: Now you have some involvement with a TV show due to air this
autumn...

BL: It's a television series that's based on... it began as a comic strip
in Details magazine by a guy named Bruce Wagner, who is a novelist
and has done also several screenplays, and it's about VR, it turns out.
So I met this guy at CyberArts, a friend of Roger Trilling, who's a
friend of mine, and Bruce was writing this thing called Wild Palms for
Details. It's a plot. The story is about a loose conspiracy to use VR to
continue to bludgeon us with our current media enviornment. In other
words it's a nightmare of one-way VR. I met him, and I talked to him,
and he made me a character in his strip. I guess because he liked me.
So I started showing up in his strip, under my own name, and then he
wrote a treatment of it and sold it too... Oh God, Oliver Stone was
interested in it... And Oliver Stone and he sold it to ABC as a series?
As a six hour series. Then Bruce hired me as a consultant for the script
of the series 'cos it had to do with VR of the future and he wanted to
know what that might be like. And then as we worked on it he said
"You ought to audition for it," so I have this really strange
involvement with it as a script consultant and as also a potential an
actress in the series. The reason that I chose to work on a series that
portrays VR in a very negative light is because I think it's important
that we consider VR in a very negative light! And also that we
understand, as [????] keeps trying to tell us, that there are conspiracies,
in the world, that are casual, or formal, and conscious, or
unconscious, but that they exsist. So that's what I'm doing, I'm going
on this wierd odyssy with these Hollywood guys. And it starts in
September on ABC!