Interviewer: And sometime in that period you also did some other experiments in interactive TV?

Adrienne Jenek: I can't ever work on one thing at once. Some things, like the CD ROM, take a longer time and there is a certain cycle to those efforts. Often I like to work on either smaller or quicker projects that have an urgency to them where I can build up energy. So one of the projects I worked on during that time was a live satellite broadcast that was a collaboration with Guillermo Gomez Peña and Philip Djwa.

And it was a project of taking Guillermo’s and Roberto Sifuente’s characters , Naftzteca and Cyber Vato, and putting that into a pirate TV scenario- as if guerilla group had taken over the airwaves.

It included a live satellite broadcast with an internet hook-up over M-bone and a call-in, the potential to call in and actually engage with the pirate TV commando in their Vato bunker.

Live television is is a really important form that I am quite committed to in terms of the energy that gets created and also the possibility again of the audience inserting themselves to have an effect on the final production.

And my continued work within these technologies has to do with my sense of it as a place where the feedback loop is the essential ingredient.

Interviewer: We are discussing storytelling in the context of new media, and what similarities exist between the traditions of storytelling and these new interactive media forms. How to you see the question of storytelling in new media and your own work?

Adrienne Jenek: Well, first, I think storytelling suggests continuity. When we think of oral story telling and the passing on of story, you have a sense that when you hear the story, it is not the first time, nor will it be the last time, the story is going to be told. Something is going to be added and subtracted in the telling. But the core of it will be held onto, in a dialogic continuity that is conscious. But at the same time, there is an informality to it. There is a sense of it as part of a process and not a final thing that is all packaged, finished, to be bought and sold.

And yes, certainly these forms lend themselves to that. And that is very exciting to me. I mean a lot of the art of storytelling narrative that I see and engage with has to do with these continuity processes. For example, I am interested in foregrounding as a process within an interactive story. I like that sense of a past tied into a future. In certain ways, this sensation is made possible by within these forms again because they are not closed either from the creation or from the reception.

Interviewer: But with a project like your creation of an interactive narrative on CDROM or a fixed medium, how do you get that feedback?

Adrienne Jenek: Well, I am using the feedback loop in a broader sense, the sense that the audience member, user or participant, can effect the work.

So it is not about a direct dialogue with the author, but an engagement with the narrative process in which the audience’s participation alters the narrative. In Mauve Desert, the structure of the book had to do with a short novel that was found by a middle-aged woman academic who ends up becoming obsessed with it and deciding to translate it. And then you get to see her process unveiled as the book and the words and the power of those things move through her. And you get to see what happens on the other side of her desire line.

And what I was interested in translating the book into the interactive CDROM form was adding several more layers that would be available to the reader/participant. So I added I added a subjectivity layer of my own. So that my own process of encountering the book, becoming obsessed with it and my production process, suggest additional narratives for the audience to explore. The audience comes to know how I did all these things and how they changed me, if they were interested.

And also that I was interested in enveloping the person who was the user, the desirer, the obsessive, driver of this text of this interactive piece. I wanted to envelope them in the narrative process and to give them a sense of themselves being another layer within the narrative. And so when I talk about a feedback loop, I am thinking about these ways that the user is themselves drawn into the meta-narrative about obsession.

The form lends itself to and rewards a certain amount of obsession. And so people that entered into that text, into that experience ended up understanding that they were part of a continuity and that their story of their encounter with this book was going to spin off into other stories in their real lives. In their classrooms, or wherever they were.

Interviewer: This discussion brings up a big issue for me in terms of U.S. culture. New autobiography, a contemporary form of personal literature that fuses the novels dramatic structure, the essayist’ critical eye and the social historian’s sense of context, has become principally a feminist autobiography or an autobiography about making meaning from the stand pointof a woman's narrative. Many of these works balance empathy with critical analysis. The works are being written with an audience in mind that is aware of the manipulative quality of dramatizing intimate and painful material, and how this can disempower the reader, as opposed to generate self-awareness. Where does your work fit into this emerging canon of literature?


Adrienne Jenek: You know, I would say it is interesting because I don't consciously think about it. But I think it is reflected in my interest in the truth and my commitment to a certain openness of process. I mean these kinds of considerations are almost taken for granted and I think that that has to do with the time that I grew up. When I was younger I, not necessarily consciously, but unconsciously, considered the possibility of manifesting my own life. Like a lot of early, second wave feminists I just benefited from a level of assumption about my work and the way that it will be received.

And that has a lot to do with feminists artists and writers certainly, and activists that championed the idea of process over product. They promoted the idea that creativity would be a way to open ourselves into new and better lives and provide more possibilities for ourselves as full human beings. And perhaps these ideas even transcended gender.

I haven’t consciously set out to make a diarithic thing, but I am certainly interested in the larger community discourse. As I said, I make my work within the context of the dialogue between something that has both happened before me and continues after me. But let me add, I think it is empowering and important for people to understand their own story, and to be able to get their voices out there and have it be part of a large dialogue. But on a certain level I have this nightmare of all these very self-involved stories that are not created as part of a larger discourse. The only people really interested in them are a small group that center around that person.

I think it is dangerous for us as Western people to encourage a solipsism or narcissism in our narratives. I am not sure to what extent these technologies simply encourage a culture of self that does nothing to with a larger political or community sense of empowerment.