In late 1995, I picked up a catalogue from the New School for Social Research. I'd heard they had something new -- a Distance Learning Program -- where I could take a class by computer from my home. I'd been hearing about a software program called Mosiac for surfing something relatively new, a graphic internet interface called the World Wide Web. I'd been producing a children's magazine on the environment that we had tried over the previous summer to turn into a computer program, and I knew there was something relatively new out 'there' called hypertext. That was when I first learned of the work of Robert Kendall, who was teaching a class in just that -- hypertext.

I must have read Kendall's course description a hundred times, with the wistfulness usually reserved for travel folders to places like Bali, as I toted up the cost of the class, the software I would need to participate, the fact that my oh-so-forward-looking first release Powerbook 180 wasn't going to let me do much. I wanted color. I wanted graphics. I started a savings account.

By early 1996, I had the computer, the scanner, the killer 17" monitor with 16 million colors. It was late May. I figured I'd get on the Net (what, the baud rates were now 28.8? You're kidding!!) and see the Net world had been up to in the past year.

One of the first web sites I found was Agnieszka's Diary. If any one person has pushed the internet envelope the furthest during its initial stages in the way poetry is presented, it is Marek Lugowski. I met Kim Hodges, then one of the editors for AgD on a mailing list and wailed "How do you DO all that?" and she said: "Just find a site you like and copy the code, then fill in your own text and graphics to give you an idea of how html is structured. You'll figure out how to design your own pages from there."

Well, my first image in Photoshop took up 3.2 mgs. It took me awhile to realize you don't need 300 dpi resolution to present graphics on the Web. And I couldn't make heads or tails of Marek's image maps (I was too embarrassed to ask for help) so I flailed away trying to make html do things it couldn't possibly do. But I soon learned it could do enough, and with the support of some of my offline friends in the New York poetry community, and my new online friends from Zero City's mailing list, I began to create what became the Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks.

It seems hard to believe that it is only three years since that heady summer and fall of 1996, when the meat of poetry and the means to present it starting moving under my hands like a culinary artist's dream feast. On the Net, I met people from all over the world who were just as excited as I was about the possibilities of poetry/html/the Internet, whose work, imagination and most important, generosity, did and continues to inspire me. This roundtable dialogue brings together five of them to talk to you about what that journey has been like, and where they see literature on the Web going in the future. Because if anyone is going to define the future of literary work on the Web, you can count on all of them to forge a part of that definition.

The participants:

Robert Kendall is the author of the book-length hypertext poem A Life Set for Two (Eastgate Systems) and many other electronic works published on disk and on the Web. His work has also been widely exhibited in the U.S. and Europe. His printed book of poetry, A Wandering City, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and he is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, a New Forms Regional Grant, and other awards. He teaches hypertext poetry and fiction for the New School, runs the literary Web site Word Circuits, writes and lectures frequently about new media literature, and is codeveloper of the Connection System software for hypertext writers.

In a former incarnation Ian Irvine was a singer/song writer for an obscure Australian alternative rock band. These days he creates, and occasionally publishes, literary hybrids as exotic in form as any of the new genetically engineered fruit trees. He also co-edits the arts ezine The Animist and teaches Medieval magic to unsuspecting undergraduates.

Sue Thomas is a novelist whose exploration of machine consciousness, Correspondence, was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction novel of 1992. Her second novel, Water, examined inorganics, sex and identity, and she is editor of Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories by Women Celebrating Women. Her researches now focus on virtual life and she is currently completing a novel set in a MOO. Her most recent work is displayed in paper printouts at lux: notes for an electronic writing at the Contemporary Art Centre, Adelaide, an exhibition of text on paper by local and international writers and artists whose practices extend to online digital environments, generating an electric relationship between text, reader, writer and physical space. Sue Thomas is Director of the trAce Online Writing Community, an interactive network for writers and readers around the world.

Alaric Sumner is a writer, performer, editor. He is Lecturer in Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts, UK. He was formerly Writer in Residence at the Tate Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall, UK. He edited the Writing and Performance section of PAJ 61 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). His performance work has been presented in in New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Montreal, and many UK and European venues. His collaboration with Joseph Hyde, Nekyia (for speaker, singer, electroacoustics and video) is currently touring. The Unspeakable Rooms (a collaboration with Rory McDermott) was described by Frank Green in the Cleveland Free Times as "one of the most powerful performances I've ever witnessed, and I've attended hundreds... a difficult masterpiece". Voices (for 9) was performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1994. Books and booklets include Waves on Porthmeor Beach (Illustrated by Sandra Blow RA) (words worth 1995), Bucking Curtains (Mainstream Poetry 1999), Aberrations of Mirrors Lenses Sight (RWC 1998), Rhythm to Intending (Spectacular Diseases 1994), Lurid Technology and the Hedonist Calculator (Lobby Press 1994). His collaborations with sound artist John Levack Drever have been widely performed and broadcast, and published on CDs from ISEA and Doc(k)s.

Alaric's work is included in Word Score Utterance Choreography (Writers Forum 1998) and My Kind of Angel: i.m. William Burroughs (Stride 1998). A paper is due shortly in the Metrum Rhythmus Performanz Conference publication from Peter Lang Verlag (Frankfurt).

Christy Sheffield Sanford was the first trAce Virtual Writer-in-Residence and an Alden B. Dow Creativity Fellow in 1999. The previous year, her piece "NoPink" was awarded The Well's prize for the Best Hyperlinked Work on the Web. Her online projects have been praised by Frederick Barthelme in Atlantic Monthly Online, George Landow in Hypertext 2.0 and N. Katherine Hayles in ArtForum. Her web work has been published by Light and Dust, Enterzone, Ylem, Salt Hill, New River, frAme, Perihelion and many other ezines and project sites. In 1999, her web projects appeared in the Amour-Horreur Show at Galerie La Centrale, Montréal and the Aix Art Contemporaine Web en Provence Exhibit. She has won nine grants including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two NEA-Rockefeller sponsored grants for New Forms. She is the author of seven books including The H's: The Spasms of a Requiem, The Italian Smoking Piece, Sur les Pointes: the Ballerina and the Sea Anemone and Only the Nude Can Redeem the Landscape. Her book, Library of Congress, is forthcoming from Bloody Twin Press. She is currently working with Reiner Strasser on a commissioned web work for Nottingham Now.

The Questions:

1. How much has the technology made available through computer software and the Internet influenced the work you create? Please give one specific example.

Robert Kendall: Computer technology has had a huge impact on my work. During the past decade most of my creative efforts have focused on interactive electronic poetry. In my electronic pieces I strive to make the interactive component as integral to the reading experience as possible. Essentially I have had to learn how to deconstruct my creative process and recreate elements of it in software code. The experience has been often exhilarating and often frustrating, but it has permanently altered and enriched my perception of literature.

One of my most recent works is the hypertext poem "Dispossession" (Eastgate Reading Room, 1999). Electronic elements function at several different levels in this work. The overall structure is nonlinear, so there are many alternative ways in which the themes and images can develop during a reading. Many of the nodes contain variable text, so when readers return to a particular "page," they will often find that the text there has changed either randomly or to reflect a new context. And of course the appearance and layout of the material is dictated by the possibilities of the computer screen rather than the printed page.

Ian Irvine: Well I suppose in terms of poetry I've always created work for two traditionally separate poetic disciplines - that of 'performance poetry' (which most often for me came down to how a poem sounded to an audience) and that of 'words on a page poetry'. The electronic medium is undoubtably pushing me in all sorts of new directions. At present my poetic transformation is a little behind my editor's transformation and the poetry I've had published on the Web has been in the fairly conventional print journal format - so I suppose it emphasizes the 'words on the page' side of my work. Though I've experimented with the recorded 'performance' side of my work - via Real Audio and Cool Edit Pro I'm not overly happy with the Web result (that hissing R.A. compressed sound). MPEG still takes too long for people to download as far as I'm concerned. I keep holding back from sending these Real Audio files out because I hear things as a muso, and that means lack of sound clarity really irks me - stupid really since we don't need that from poetry recitations. Currently, however I'm in the process of 'multimedia-fying' the collection of poems called "Facing The Demon of Noontide". I'm experimenting with RA, MPEG, interactivity (image and Java when I get the chance), animated gifs, videos etc. - anything I can get my hands on really, just letting it happen with one eye on CD-ROM formats and one eye on the future web download times ... there is no doubt that I'm starting to do things with those predominantly 'words on a page' poems that were simply impossible in the old 'performance' or 'words on a page' modes. Its very seductive!

Sue Thomas: I began writing about computers in 1987 when I learned a little Basic and became fascinated by programming. The whole notion of that kind of rule-based system was entirely new to me beyond the little algebra I had done at school 20 years earlier, and I found it very exciting. I was immediately prompted to wonder how it would be if I could write a program for my personal relationships, debug it, and just let it run! These speculations provoked my first novel, Correspondence (1992), about a woman who makes a conscious choice to transform her body and mind from flesh to cyborg. In 1994 I discovered the Internet but didn't really know what to do with it until 1995 when I was introduced to MOOs at the Warwick Virtual Futures Conference, UK, (by GashGirl of the Australian cyberfeminist performance group VNS Matrix) and at that point Telnet became my application of choice. Once again it was an issue of programming, only now I found it really was possible to program personas and identities, and that led to my third novel, The [+]Net[+] of Desire, set in a MOO and examining the transformational experiences that some people have online. I find that my most constant theme, however, tends to be travelling via virtuality to find correlations between the organic world - landscapes, flesh - and the abstractness of programming and mathematics. The Net of [+]Desire[+] is currently being revised but the original first chapter is online.

Alaric Sumner: In 1976-7 I began publishing, performing my own work and started words worth magazine with Peter J King. We typeset the magazine on an IBM Selectric Composer at a typesetting cooperative and I was asked to join them as a worker and trained in 1979 on the Linoterm Photosetting system. So from near the beginning of my poetic exposure I had gone from pen to computing - though not (as Robert, Ian and Sue have discussed) in the programming side, but on the user side. I found that my handwriting got worse, but my work looked neat. Moving in the mid-eighties to a commercial printing firm which had little work for me but a superb designer's machine - the Berthold 'M' Series - I was able to construct the score of Voices (for 9), which has spreads 840mm (1yd) wide. I had to set them vertically instead of horizontally and each file crashed the printer, but luckily only AFTER it had spent 45 minutes printing each page. Voices (for 9) ) was a work I had been struggling to write on paper, but as soon as I realized how to lay it out on screen I could then work out how to write the thing. It was a key point for Barclays New Stages when the work was presented at the Royal Court in London - though their grammar left something to be desired - Designed on a computer, Alaric Sumner has created a text .... my mum objected to that.

Now, much of my work is created in collaboration with sound artists Joseph Hyde and John Levack Drever. I am also developing my own sound works using ProTools. Recording technology makes it possible to explore expanded performance works - Nekyia with Hyde and with Drever out of image (sandra blow), Sound, Hope, and Plans for the New Architecture: Speakable Rooms. It has also enabled me to work with Rory McDermott who used video and sound recording to make a performance version of my text The Unspeakable Rooms. Just as I have used these technologies to further works which could have been achieved without them (but only at great cost or with resources I can hardly imagine), so I have used the Internet so far mainly as a form of communication. I have had opportunities and provided others with opportunities in continents I have to jet travel to.

I have yet to make a computer/Internet specific work. When an idea arrives that requires this medium, no doubt I will make one, but until then it is for me a tool for the creation of works for performance and the page (or screen as page) and a tool for communication. The one aspect that thrilled me was the possibility of containing performance (in sound) with visual material (imagetext) in the same medium - unlike a book with a CD, this brings the two into extreme collision. Having now worked through with many of the contributors to the Sound/Text section (as Jennifer calls it), I find there are many differing ideas as to the relation between page and performance, image and utterance and these have disrupted my own ideas usefully. Most medium-specific work that I have come across on the Net so far is doing things that I do not get thrilled by or, at least, is doing things I am delighted that someone else is doing, but I wouldn't want to do. Computers are still so very useful to me as pens, printers, publishers, postboxes, performance aids that I don't feel any need, yet, to force myself to come up with some idea that exploits more of the medium's possibilities.

Christy Sheffield Sanford: Great set of questions, Jennifer. Thanks for asking me to take part in this roundtable. Short answer: totally. Long answer: in late 1995, when I first came onto the Web, I sensed that web conventions would be an important area for me. The innovations that were flowing for the web browsers were astounding: tables, frames, forms and then the little bits of Java Scripting that made popouts and rollovers possible . (I imagine myself as Jackie Joyner-Kersee jumping over the hurdles.) I felt and still do that these are psychologically important to the creator and viewer. With each individual work, I focused on a new convention. That isn't all I was doing but was one significant variable. Moving Toward the Light, among other things, was a series of meditations on light and the solstice. It also dealt with rollovers!

Since late 1998, I've been experimenting with dynamic html. I started by downloading scripts from the DHTML Zone and from Dynamic Drive, and gradually learning how to control and make them unique. Compared to the Java Applets-text and image effects that I'd been working with -- the dhtml Java Scripts were a lot more digestible to my Mac friends and had a shorter loading time for both systems.

Finally, I downloaded a one-month free trial of Dreamweaver, an editor that codes page divisions and does some Java Scripting. At Christmas I received my own copy. I don't mean to wax lyrical about any specific product, it's the thinking that's behind dynamic html that I think is liberating. Some people seem concerned with the idea of a matrix, which is fundamental to dhtml, they feel you're going somewhere you shouldn't, into another dimension. I have the opposite sense. Much of literature and art have become surface attractions. Dynamic html allows infinite penetration. Whereas much of early hypertext was concerned with navigation and linking page-to-page to a new address, a new URL, I think now, hypertext can enjoy more depth, more interactivity and a sense of unfolding.

2. Who/what would you say were your influences when you first turned to the computer/Internet to generate and disseminate your work?

Robert Kendall: When I first started doing this stuff, I was only dimly aware of a handful of other people in the field. We were few and far between back then. I encountered Rod Willmot's long hypertext poem "Everglade" sometime in the early '90s, and it helped open my eyes to the possibilities of using hypertext extensively. Generally, though, I had very few examples to follow in the beginning and was motivated mostly just by a fascination with the untapped literary possibilities of electronic media. I sensed that the computer screen was the medium that was most truly and uniquely of our own time and that we as writers had to learn to turn it to artistic purposes if we were to come to terms with the age we lived in.

Ian Irvine: I was a relative latecomer to the Web - late 1997 - things were pretty much established by the time I came on the scene. Also the 'dissemination of work' aspect went hand in hand with the 'producing a quality literary e-journal' aspect, so I guess I had a kind of 6 month crash course in the whole culture of international literary ezines. What I was learning there intermingled with what I was learning from the publicity pages of writers, poets, artists and musicians - many of whom we interviewed for The Animist. I guess the pages of the Australian writers Carmel Bird and Beth Spencer were a big influence, likewise, I spent a lot of time in those early days looking at the Ozlit pages.

My original goal was to use the net to better understand Australian literature - experimenting with new literary/artistic form only came later, and later still came the globalised consciousness which comes from receiving submissions, fan emails, communications etc. from arts people all over the world.

Sue Thomas: I was very much alone. I knew of no other fiction writers who approached computers in the same way that I did. When I was writing Correspondence I fumbled for who to read, and found some books which would turn out to be very relevant for me. Sherry Turkle's sociological study of computer users, The Second Self, was extremely clear-sighted and useful, and her later book Life on the Screen would also prove to be equally rich when I was writing about MOOing. I also read Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind and Joe Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason, very different books but both very insightful into the way we think when we think with and about computers. Neil Frude's 1970's study The Intimate Machine is a great history of interactions with machines which really helped me to put the computer into a wider social context. I read and enjoyed Gibson's Neuromancer but it wasn't until I went online myself that I really appreciated the uncanny accuracy with which he described the act of being logged on - incredible, considering that when he wrote it he had never been online himself nor even used a computer. But although I knew a number of people in the UK science fiction scene, I knew nobody with my take on computers, and it wasn't until 1995, seven years after I began writing Correspondence, that I met and heard people with vocabularies for concepts I had been struggling to identify for years. At that conference, GashGirl was a major influence, but so too was another Australian performance artist, Stelarc, whose symbiotic relationship with his machines so closely mirrored my own imaginings that I was speechless with excitement when I watched him wire up his body so that the audience could direct his movements by remote control. To summarize, as a writer I even now feel pretty much alone, but as an artist and theorist I can now identify a number of people whose work is extremely important to me.

Alaric Sumner: I first got an email account in 1993-4 at university. I hardly used it. I don't remember looking at the Internet at all. But in 1996 I started to use email from work and found old friends through newsgroups. The Electronic Poetry Center is a useful resource, as is UbuWeb, but again I find it hard to focus on the Net and computers as if they were separate from, different from other aspects of my life and work - N Katherine Hayles Chaos Bound was very influential on my thinking (leading me to Shannon and Weaver and Information Theory), and Stanley Fish's Is there a text in this class? gave me a sense of recognition of ideas I hadn't yet realized I was already thinking. But I can't dissociate the net/puters from so many other aspects of thought to be able to answer the question. Hakim Bey's concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones has been a delight to dance with (echoing for me some of the ideas in Joanna Russ's superb The Female Man).

As a paper editor and publisher, I hate dealing with printers, I can't stand distribution. I have always had problems with copyright and consumerism - I don't think copyright protects 'authors' from anything. I think work is transformed into something different from itself when it is paid for. Value and money are incompatible to me. So, in many ways the Internet is a newfound haven. But it has also provided me with opportunities (including financial ones) which I would not have expected.

Christy Sheffield Sanford: Circa: late 1995. I could see how much easier joining image and text would be -- something I was already doing in the small press world. "Red Mona" was my first piece online. Bradley Spatz, a computer science engineer, developed a random script for that project. I can't say any one artist or writer influenced my style or form on the Web. I was a mature artist by the time I arrived. On the other hand, I much admired Mark Napier and Levi Ascher's "Chicken Wire Mother" at Enterzone and Terry Spatero's "Angels." Mark and I once discussed how overwhelmed we were by the luminosity of pixels on the computer screen. Janan Platt was/is doing interesting experiments with sound, text and image. Right away, I had a preference for those who regarded the Web as a medium.

Something that kept me going, more support than influence, was meeting Karl Young and Marjorie Luesebrink. No one knows more about visual poetry than Karl. He has been a publisher and poet forever. We'd have spirited debates, but more importantly I always felt he had some things to teach me. Not just about the history of visual poetry but a way of understanding. Now, Karl has published quite a bit of my work online at Light and Dust. But we had many, many discussions-maybe for a year-before that opportunity arose.

Margie Luesebrink I picked up on the Web with a challenging remark. I read an article on hypertext that she had written and wrote her saying why not include me next time. (I imagine myself as Loretta Lynn selling records from the back of a flatbed truck.). It turned out that Margie was working on her own creative work, and we were able to discuss and support each other. We also like to present at academic conferences so we've had the chance to meet and work together in that arena, too.

3. Does the Internet fulfill your needs (as the most practical way to distribute your work) or do you use it because it is a new and exciting medium to explore, whatever its limits, or for a combination of reasons?

Robert Kendall: The Web certainly has a purely practical appeal. I wrote an article last year for Poets & Writers Magazine ("The World Wide Web: Publishing's Awakening Giant") arguing that the Web is fast becoming the best medium for distributing all types of poetry. The barriers to distributing poetry in print have become almost insurmountable for many authors and publishers, and the Web removes many of these roadblocks.

For interactive writing the Web is the ideal distribution method -- far better than CD-ROM or floppy disk. It eliminates the problems of dealing with disks, software installation, and the chasm between Windows and Mac. Just as importantly, people expect interactivity and hypertext in things published on the Web. Hypertext is no longer something foreign that has to be justified and explained, as it was in the pre-Web days.

The Web definitely has its limitations compared to the currently more mature software environments for disk-based work. Yet today's Web is merely the doorstep to an entirely new artistic world that will take shape in the next century. In ten or fifteen years it will be possible to do just about anything on the Web -- that is the really exciting thing.

Ian Irvine: I'm also in transition in regard to this question. I've always seen myself as a hybrid animal -- poet, musician, writer and academic -- it's just how I work. Some of these disciplines are well served by the Web and in all honesty I'd have no problem distributing my output from these creative disciplines purely through the WWW. In the areas of poetry, academic writing (essays), short stories, editing an ezine, the Web is already the best place to operate for a variety of reasons - direct access to informed international audiences, cheap distribution, immediacy of response, you name it. Having said that I recently had a story published in Southern Ocean Review and an essay published by The Antigonish Review and I admit it was exciting to be published both in print and online.

The novelist, non-fiction writer (longer pieces) and musician sides of me are more hesitant about the value of the Web, in those realms I want to see my novels and longer non-fiction pieces appear as published books and my songs appear as CD-ROMs. I have no hesitation in trying to get my best short stories and poems published at quality online literary sites, but I currently refuse to make my major book length works available on the Web -- I put years of effort into those pieces and I refuse to distribute them for nothing.

Sue Thomas: I don't distribute my work online very much. I still see print as my main publication medium, and I don't have a very hypertextual brain so my attempts at hypertext have been more linear than anything else. In fact my most recent 'hypertext', which I began writing online, was purchased by a gallery in Adelaide and actually printed out onto paper for exhibition! But I feel very emotional about the Web, and about MOOing. I see cyberspace as my home and my muse. I spend most of my day there, and most of my artistic and professional life happens there. It seems to me that the Lake poets -- Wordsworth, Coleridge et al -- took much of their inspiration from a certain type of landscape, and in my case, it is the cyber landscape which intrigues me. But I also write about the organic landscape -- the sea, farmland, the wilderness -- and I find that the two easily interact. An example of this is the series "Imagining a Stone" which is a combination of essay, interpretation, and MOO texts, and which also refers to the sculpture of Andy Goldsworthy, who in my opinion manipulates the landscape from the physical until it becomes virtual.

Alaric Sumner: I use the net because it provides the opportunities I need now. I wanted to combine text and sound. I couldn't do that easily in another medium, so I turn to the net and Jennifer pops up waving and smileyfaced :). For me still at the moment, it is working that way round. I want to do a piece with a soundscape that I can perform with live -- Ah! here is the technology that can do that. I am sure, soon, I will find that the equipment will start demanding that I deal with its opportunities, but even with such a simple thing as scanning, it has only been during the creation of this issue that I have realized that a whole area of my work which I have hardly touched since 1987 would be easily possible (in one form) on screen. Again, this is an idea from outside the technology which will work more easily and be more easily distributed on it. However, Lawrence Upton asked me today if he could put a book I published of his in 1978 Mutation on to the Web since we have few copies left. Of course, I agreed, but I am aware that the texture of the paper and card of the cover (which took hours of decision making) and the smell of the ink, which have been part of my experience of the poem since I first bound the first copy in the Poetry Society in Earls Court, London, will be lost. My screen has seen hundreds of images and texts, but handing books or originals -- one of Carlyle Reedy's fragments or Wendy Kramer's RAIS Art of Fire is a thrill few readers of this issue will have. Yet every reader of Mutation had a unique copy (! if you see what I mean). Our screens don't change for each different work -- all works are presented on the same format -- the medium is so much of the message. Sometimes I want to put my hand into the screen and touch the work I am looking at. Mindtouch and bodytouch are so different -- writing is a form of mindtouch but a well-loved book is not merely a mindcontainer, it is felt.

Christy Sheffield Sanford: I use it as a way to explore and develop new work. I have the pioneer sense and exhilaration that I'm one of those defining web specific work. (I imagine myself as Gertrude Stein writing the play "Listen to Me:"

Curtain.

It is very easy not to be very lively in the morning as the earth is all completely covered by people.

Curtain.)