Interviewer: So the appearance of randomness is something that is subjective. They are manipulating the randomness.

Jonathan Delacour: It's illusory. And I think that whole kind of post-modernist conceit that the user is constructing the story for themselves, is just so naive and nonsensical that it's almost insulting. It's not of any concern to me where people enter the work, or what route they take through it. So much as, paradoxically, this work has been enormously influenced by Japanese literature.

Japanese literature works very differently to literature in the western tradition, like the classic Hollywood three act structure where everything drives through a series of complications to some kind of denouement where the hero is either successful, or unsuccessful in achieving his or her objective. Japanese literature is not at all like that.

There's a number of different strands, one of which is an extremely strong confessional strand. I think that there's a confessional strand on the Web that takes different forms. Both Dana's work and Squire's work are confessional in different ways.

Interviewer: Much of what we're exploring is a blurring of the distinction between intimate conversational exchange in story and the public space exchange of story. And that those blurs are becoming accentuated by the facility of an Internet-connected multimedia. The explosive growth has been something to do about people's need to have this exchange of intimacy with a broader number of people; as their sense of public safety has been disturbed by the events of an evermore cruel and arbitrary world.

Jonathan Delacour: Absolutely. I think there's another issue here as well. When I was a photographer, I always thought it was important to be aware of what other photographers had done and how they'd approached certain problems in picture making. I have a regard for history, and one's antecedents. My antecedents for this project are the traditions of Japanese literature.

There are three main strands in the Japanese literary tradition. One is what they call the [niki], or the diary. One is what they call [juihizu], which is a series of linked essays. The Japanese means following the brush.

And so what you're talking about is someone starts to write, and writes wherever the brush takes them. The pleasure for the audience, or for the readers of those kinds of works in the [juihizu] style is the links that the author makes from one piece to the next. Maybe seven or eight hundred years ago, a couple of guys and one woman, in particular, are thinking about how you create fragments of text. And then create a larger meaning by the way in which you establish linkages between those text.

Interviewer: Yeah, early post-modernism.

Jonathan Delacour: Or early hypertext. And then the third is what I mentioned before, which is [watachi shore] which is loosely translated is the I novel. The success of that particular novel was judged on how closely it came to the writer's actual experience. The greater fidelity with which the writer transcribed his or her experience themore highly the novel was regarded. Because the work is about Japanese literature, and film, and culture, women, I'm trying to draw on those literary traditions in particular in building the space that the piece lives in.

Interviewer: And that's a really fascinating territory. In a sense, the cultural distance from you as a Australian of European decent also makes a particular context for the story.

Jonathan Delacour: It's interesting as well. I have conversations with Japanese, both here and in Japan. What interests me about Japanese culture is there seems to be a very, very limited interest in the subject to the contemporary Japanese person. They don't care about it. They look at me as though I'm a little bit odd. One of underlying themes of "La Japonese" is the unbelievable tragedy of the Americanization of Japan.

Interviewer: Globalization led by the Americans has many people in the world believing that sitting at the table of modernity means leaving yourself , your culture, behind. And that that leaves this tremendous territory for fundamentalists to exploit and explore and develop into counter-reactions to modernity, and globalization. Those of us that want to examine those histories and cultures from a sense of awe and wonder are left in a funny alignment with a more fundamentalist attitude in some of those cultures. You're treated as if, "Why would you want us to go backward?" When that's not really what you're saying.

Jonathan Delacour: All I'm saying is, "Why are you exchanging something profound and beautiful for something trivial and nonsensical?" Have you read "Cold Mountain" that book by Charles Frasier? I picked it up one evening in the book store. I'd been thinking about getting it for quite some time. And it impressed me deeply. Because I'd watched that Ken Burns series about the Civil War. And what struck me most about the program was, not the military history, but the voices of the people that came out of their letters and journal. And people, even ordinary people wrote so beautifully in that time.

Interviewer: I had the exact same impression. A big part of the theoretical argument that I constructed about broadcast consumer culture is that a core literacy of storytelling ability that existed somehow in my forefathers and mothers, was lost . It wasn't just literary. It was the centrality of language that develops with practice. Whether you develop it around the dinner table, or town square or in your bedroom.

I can't help but hope that part of our process, part of the emergence of these new tools is to just get people practicing a lot more. Arguably, even email has had people writing more, and learning to write better. Because you learn by that exchange.