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Pathfinders

The Interview with John McDaid about Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse

This interview of John McDaid, conducted by Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop, took place on Thursday, August 8, 2013 in the Electronic Literature Lab at Washington State University Vancouver as part of the Pathfinders project. McDaid is the author of Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, a hypertext, multimedia experience that features a narrative based on a "chocolate-box of death." The conceit upon which Uncle Buddy’s was built (Re: you receive a box of seemingly random items from your Uncle Buddy’s estate) was derived from McDaid’s personal experience: In 1986, the same year McDaid began work on Uncle Buddy’s, his dying Aunt Rita sent him a See’s candy box filled with odds and ends that constituted a portion of her “estate” she wished to give McDaid. The interview is divided into nine parts and provides insights into the development of the work.








McDaid Interview, Part 1, "Dissecting the Box"











Dene Grigar begins by asking McDaid about three inventories: literal contents of the box; media encompassed by those contents; and the genres they all draw from or represent.







There are five 3.5" diskettes (in the original version).  When was the change to CD format?  McDaid doesn't recall.  [Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems writes: "at some point no later than 2003, we had replaced the floppies and cassettes with a CD."]







Discussing the booklet: a "colophon" and how-to, intended for readers wholly unfamiliar with the idea of hypertext.







How were the stacks assigned to their respective diskettes?  "Not an artistic decision," but a matter of packaging.  On the other hand, decision to require all component stacks to be in the same folder (directory) was intentional.  Stack scripts communicate with a central stack (Funhouse).  This was a design choice.







What media are in the project?  Letters, cassettes, e-mails, Tarot cards, journals, games and puzzles, a conference program, print fiction, photos, drawings, a screenplay.  Also, McDaid points out, "poetry, embedded audio, including system audio."  Also, HyperTalk scripts in some places are readable as texts.







The third inventory: genres and artforms.  Generative text, hypertext fiction, lyrics, facsimiles of books -- the "novel" as container of all this multiplicity.  McDaid: a "conscious aim" of the work was to have everything within it "modally appropriate" -- "using the tool the way the tool was designed to be used" -- "embedding the narrative diegetically within the actual artifact."







McDaid Interview, Part 2, "The Chocolate Box of Death"











DG: Characters of the work... there are two.  McDaid:  "There are ALLEGEDLY two main characters, Emily Keane and Arthur "Buddy" Newkirk.  There are other, peripheral characters: Buddy's fellow Reptiles, Al Magnusson, "Geraldus Cambrensis," co-author of Buddy's screenplay, among others.  But "two main speaking parts."







The black box, or "chocolate box full of death" (Mark Bernstein).  Cover design was McDaid's conception and original graphic (stretched to fit the boxtop).  McDaid has notebooks and "page masters" for everything in the Funhouse.  Who's the image?  It's John.  How the image was produced -- with ThunderScan, a module that snapped into an ImageWriter printer and allowed digitization of images by feeding them through the roller.  McDaid notes that this technology generally required use of an initial reproduction of the source image, so that the process began with photocopying, and thus immediately gave up image quality.  Once digitized, McDaid's images were further processed with the tools in HyperCard, which are essentially identical to MacPaint.  The graphics are all one-bit, on/off bitmaps.  A highly stylized and distinctive visual aesthetic -- curiously similar to the "retro" effect Shelley Jackson chose for Patchwork Girl.















Why black and silver for the cover?  Who knows, but the effect is edgy, "dangerous."  Oakland Raiders colors(?).







The chocolate box really was sourced from a manufacturer of confectionery boxes -- which is ironic, since an inspiration for the Funhouse was a See's candy box full of mementos sent to McDaid by his dying aunt.







McDaid Interview, Part 3, "Deleted Scenes and Inspiration"











Anything left out of the Funhouse?  Yes, two movie files too big for HyperCard and the diskette format.  One of these was a music video for the "Time Machine" song.  But aside from these specific omissions, McDaid regrets the loss of information in the reduction of photographs to the one-bit HyperCard format.  He shot original photos on 35-millimeter film, printed them to 8.5x11, then had to photocopy and ThunderScan, losing vast amounts of detail and nuance.  On the other hand, this low-resolution aesthetic made it possible to "get away with a crap ton of stuff," as in the sketchbook approximation of an interface in the HyperEarth stack.







DG: The box is like a coffin.  There's death here, or disappearance.  McDaid: or never having existed in the first place.







DG: Literary allusions -- Burroughs, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens ("Asides on the Oboe").  McDaid: the work has two main parents.  Its poetic "father" is Thomas Pynchon, whose novel Gravity's Rainbow [1973] contains music-hall numbers, popular songs, equations, and passages in the language of art, film, theatre.  Gravity's Rainbow showed that a novel didn't have to proceed in linear fashion.







The "mother" of the Funhouse is Ursula K. LeGuin "the most underrated living American writer."  Her 1985 novel Always Coming Home is an anthropological study of the Kesh, a group of people living in Northern California in the far future.  It contains a linear narrative, but mainly consists of artifacts and documents: anthropological reports, maps, and in the slip-cased version, cassettes of the poetry and music of the Kesh.  Seeing this work was "revelatory," says McDaid -- it was an example of modally appropriate presentation that "maintains the fourth wall and doesn't break."







"And she [LeGuin] lives right here in Portland!"  McDaid recounts his encounter with LeGuin at a science fiction convention ("total fanboy squee"), when he had his copy of Always Coming Home autographed and asked the writer if she had ever considered doing it as a hypertext.  This was in the early 1990s, and LeGuin hadn't heard of hypertext.







McDaid Interview, Part 4, "Hypermedia Community"











DG: The term "hypermedia" was not in wide use in the late 1980s and early 90s...







McDaid: Through "an accident of geography" -- living in Rhode Island -- he was able to be part of a circle of innovators based at Brown University [the Computers in the Humanities User Group, CHUG], organized by Elli Mylonas, then of the Perseus Project.  This group included George Landow, Robert Coover, Andries Van Dam, Greg Crane, and others.  "I was able to hang out with these people who were talking about hypermedia."







Grigar remembers a moment in the early 1990s when all the academic hypermedia research could fit into a small volume.  McDaid: "It was a simpler time."







Grigar asks about HyperEarth and its anticipation of Google Earth.  McDaid: "An obvious idea... someone's gonna do this.  Maps are a killer app for interactivity."







"I'm a little happy that I called it 'Street View,' though."







John Barber asks about Tristram Shandy.  McDaid: "not part of my reading at the time.  I'm a genre writer.  All I ever wanted to be in my life was a science fiction writer.  I would read [mainstream] literature if it had science fiction in it."  Barber turns the question to classic SF (e.g., Canticle for Liebowitz) in which the reader has to figure out the nature of a world based on documentary evidence.  McDaid agrees that this is a major strain in science fiction, referring to Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke.  Making a world from traces is "the magician's 'force'," the manipulation that creates suspension of disbelief -- and allows us to see the world we inhabit as "a little weird."







McDaid Interview, Part 5, "Discussing Immersion"











Grigar asks about "immersion," noting the criticism of Janet Murray and others that hypertext fictions  (like Joyce's afternoon) fail at the effect because they require non-trivial user engagement.  Grigar points out that the Funhouse, with its multiple modalities and its emphasis on building an experience, seems to contradict Murray's line.







McDaid:  Immersion is relative.  As audiences become more comfortable with media, immersion becomes easier.  E.g. the introduction of "jump cuts" in modern film, which we sometimes no longer even perceive.







But in the Funhouse "you are doing nothing else but what you are doing -- you are sitting at a computer looking at a vanished writer's hard drive.  YOU ARE THERE."







DG: Should Murray have been looking at the Funhouse instead of afternoon?  McDaid:  "I'm sure she did the best she could with the tools and texts that were available."







On Burroughs and cutups -- a way of understanding hypermedia and the Web?  McDaid: the Web isn't explicitly Dadaist, but it has some aspects of the cut-up.







McDaid:  "Among my challenges in the Funhouse was to try to write a novel that no 20th-century writer could write.  To do this I had to push the text beyond what it's possible to do."  McDaid comments on the emergent qualities of the text, its ability to produce things not directly intended: to transcend itself.







McDaid Interview, Part 6, "Digital Mosaic Chips"











John Barber asks about interactive fiction and the role-playing game tradition, noting that the reader's predicament at start of the Funhouse might as well be the start of a Dungeons and Dragons session (multiple entry points; which way do you go?)







McDaid recalls playing IF -- Adventure on a PDP-11 before Zork! -- including A Mind Forever Voyaging and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  "What I saw there was the limits of a paser and the limits of choice-point fiction.  The Funhouse is not parser driven but MOSAIC.  Its pieces are not choice-points but chips in a tessellated environment."







Barber:  So, hypermedia rather than hypertext?







McDaid:  Infocom games were basically texts, so yes.







Grigar recalls resistance to including graphics in early multi-user environments (MOOs).







McDaid: It was an established tradition -- and graphics were "freaking difficult."







Grigar:  "Is the Funhouse science fiction?"  [Barber: So different from Heinlein!]







McDaid:  "It is absolutely SF... living in the Interzone; or in the world of Always Coming Home.  Humanity confronting scientific and technical realities."  In 1992, the year the Funhouse was initially scheduled to be published [it appeared in 1993], McDaid was admitted to the Clarion Writers' Workshop, one of the leading professional academies for science fiction writers.  His acceptance was partly based on "Tree," Newkirk's story in the Funhouse.  While at Clarion, he wrote a "recursive SF story" written by either Buddy or Emily, in which the protagonist is at Clarion writing a story the other one will never be able to read.







McDaid:  The "central conceit" of the Funhouse is the Escher image of two hands, each drawing the other -- "Identity under uncertainty."















McDaid Interview, Part 7, "Limitations of Technology"











McDaid Interview, Part 8, "Potential Influence"











McDaid Interview, Part 9, "Preserving the Ephemeral"




 

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