Interviewer: So I guess the starting point is what has been your work and what have been the realizations that came out of that work?

Adrienne Jenek: Right. Well there are several different tenets to my work. I have been consistently interested in having a dialogue or engagement with an audience.

So all of my art work has considered the process of feedback. In some ways many of my projects have been dependent upon audience response, actually, in order to exist.

Even while I was doing painting I was thinking about how can I create a setting in which people can have some sense of power in their feedback and how can I create an environment with my paintings. All of my work, even when it was presented as an object, has considered the social space or gathering in some way.

Those initial impulses grew certainly within the whole context of making interactive TV.

Interviewer: Well why don't we just go back far enough to give us a review of your career.

Adrienne Jenek: I began with working with, with Paper Tiger TV, a collective of media makers and political activists, people from the street, teachers, artists, etc. that came together to make a weekly public accessible show. The cable show used TV to critique TV and the structures around TV and particularly, mass media commercial television.

We sought to use both the means of production and distribution to give people a sense that they could have some critical power around this very powerful medium that was being broadcast into their homes. We also sought to give them a sense that they could potentially make media and so insert their own voices into that dialogue, should they disagree with us or have something else that they wanted to say.

Interviewer: And when did you start your projects with Paper Tiger?

Adrienne Jenek: Well Paper Tiger began in1981 as an open collective and I was inspired by the work and ended up joining as an active producer in1985. And so I worked with the group from 1985 through 1989. At that time they were beginning a project called TV satellite network, which was an attempt to network all these people that were using grass roots public access cable television. They worked with independent producers and use of satellite distribution networks to distribute media projects around the country and give people a sense on a local basis of what was going on in localities all around the nation.

We were trying to use these technologies as ways to have a sense of community. To build a sense of community, rather than treating each project as a final production and that it is the end of its relationship with its subjects or audience. It was about using TV to get people to turnoff the TV and go out onto the streets.

That began my interest. While I was making work with them, I was also doing some other kinds of alternative distribution work with the "What Does She Want" project, which is a home library series of women filmed videotape. So I have thought a lot about distribution. About how these alternative voices get out. Who was the audience for them? How would people access them? How would they engage in them? What role do they have?

And then I continued working as a programmer working with local audiences in Los Angeles. I was making short tapes that would be able to work within local or home distribution situations.

I moved into working with "new technologies" because I got wrapped up in a piece of literature, a book called, "Le Desert Mauve," by Nicole Brossard. I ended up adapting the work and producing a CDROM.

The thing that attracted to me in the novel was the author’s experimentation, the scenes within the novel that had a lot to do with translation and a questioning of subjectivity as it relates to translations through culture, through age.

The complexity of those scenes ended up steering me toward this digital medium. I wanted the scenes to get to a place where they would be fully understood. I wanted the scenes to be able to be explored and digested in a way that would be satisfying and fulfilling on the level of what I had experienced as a reader of the novel.

I began developing the project in 1991. Probably in '92, I began to consider what would happen if it moved into the new media realm. This was very early in the evolution of new media tools. At this point, most projects were done in Hypercard or other relatively simplistic authoring tools. I began to think about what the possibilities were and was fortunate enough that the tools and my own thinking kept developing in a parallel line and was able to produce this interactive narrative called Mauve Desert.