Cave Writing
Fall 2009 LITR 1010G S01
Log in to MyCourses
Instructor: John Cayley
Please check the Detailed Class Information for up to date information about this course.
Information on meeting times for this course can be found on Course Schedule at http://selfservice.brown.edu
Course Description
An advanced experimental writing workshop in spatial hypertext, introducing text, sound, and narrative movement into the immersive reality environment of Brown's "Cave" (Center for Computation and Visualization), using an easy-to-use application that allows non-programmers to create projects on their own laptops and install them in the Cave without the intercession of computer programmers. Broadly interdisciplinary. Involves writers, composers, designers, modelers and programmers working collaboratively. Instructor permission required. S/NC.
Instructor's Description
The aim of this course is to produce - individually or in collaborative arrangements - a significant work of writing in programmable media which makes effective and critically engaged use of a particular technological system: the Cave, Brown University\'s four-wall, immersive, so-called \'Virtual Reality\' device, a complex instrument - a room that is a monitor - for the visualization and also the audio rendering of software processes.
We will (re)discover and (re)question what it is and what it may be to write in \'new\' media, particularly the illusionistic 3D \'worlds\' that the Cave can generate. However, we will also bear in mind other more traditional writing practices, those that you, as students and writers, bring to the space on/in which you are going to write. Will you be able to carry over any of those aspects of your own writing or thinking or creative production - whatever you consider to be significant or affective about what you do - into the Cave? Or will you have to find new things to write and think and make?
As both facility and constraint we will have one main tool to produce our initial experiments. This is software - including a \'Cave Writing Text Editor\' and a Previewer application that is Java based and so runnable on Windows, Mac and Linux systems - was coded by past students on the course and is still under development. Within constraints, this tool allows us to get textual (and audio visual) objects into the Cave space and control them in a variety of ways. For the first weeks of the course we will all be learning the editor and working with its constraints.
Assignments and Grading
This is a workshop course. There will be a number of required assignments designed to familiarize you with the software and systems, and to give you ideas for your own projects. For mid-term you will be required to produce a two-three page written and illustrated description of your project. You will then complete one final end of semester project, a piece of \'writing\' for the Cave that is be capable of being shown to other class members and/or a select audience. Projects may be collaborative with other class members or Cave writers.
Readings and Required Texts
Here are two books that I have requested as textbooks for the course. There is a mass of related material in the New Media Reader in particular that can be applied to Cave Writing:
Hayles, N. Katherine. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Nick Monfort, eds. The New Media Reader. Includes CD-ROM. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.