MelbourneDAC 2003 From Interface to Interspace: LiveGlide and the 3 rd Dimension Diana R. Slattery, William Brubaker, Charles R. Mathis, Robert E. Dunie Academy of Electronic Media Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute E-mail: slattd@rpi.edu ABSTRACT: The Glide project is an ongoing series of explorations into the new possibilities for writing and for language itself enabled 1 by the computer. Glide is a visual language, a system of discrete signs or glyphs that can link and morph dynamically. Glide signs carry significance and behave semiotically. Current research moves the writing space from planar inscription into the 3 rd spatial dimension. Some implications of this added dimensionality are examined using a theoretical framework derived from N. Katherine Hayles recent work, Writing Machines, [5] which foregrounds the importance of materiality in the production and reading of technotexts. The Glide Collabyrinth KEYWORDS: Writing technology, visual language, material metaphor INTRODUCTION In the narrative world of The Maze Game, [12] Glide takes several forms: as a secret, gestural language; as a physical maze on which a game is played; as a written language for making poetry and philosophy; and as a computationally assisted oracle. Outside the narrative, Glide functions as a model, a would-be language, a “highly abstracted version” of a language, “based on theories about what ‘worlds of experience’ are like.” [4]: As such, it can be viewed as a strictly delimited system, a set of simple forms with which to experiment. But language, especially language about language, resists simplicity. As a model, Glide faces two worlds simultaneously: the ‘real world’ and the ‘narrative world.’ Glide is already an interface, or, more properly, Glide models the interfacial or mediating nature of language, the sense in which language itself is the modeling machine that generates all models. What began, just sentences ago, as an effort to describe, metaphorically, a two-sided mirror-sandwich with (a model) language in between, rapidly ran to the self-reflexive, a move which marks any effort to model language, to use language to talk about itself. This confounding in one object, Glide, of a narrative and a theoretical discourse, lends itself to a literary theory informed by science, as found in the works of N. Katherine Hayles and David Porush. Porush uses metaphors drawn from science to talk about this hybrid discourse: In brief, one of the most important consequences of this postmodern shift is a reevaluation of the relative veracity, or epistemological potency, of literary discourse versus scientific discourse. To put it another way, in my view there is another synthesis consequent upon Prigogine’s theory: a collapse of the epistemological value—though not stylistic or generic distinctions—of scientific over fictive discourse. [9] Scientific discourse has had great success in describing the experienced world in its aspect as material ‘stuff’ accessible by the body’s senses and their myriad extensions. Literary discourse describes with equal vigor the ‘non-stuff’ of mind, imagination, dreams, emotions: all that is ‘immaterial’ or ‘subjective’ in our experience, accessed by the ‘non-senses.’ The effort to describe a linguistic system such as Glide that confronts both discourses with a different model of language itself unearths epistemological quandaries that go beyond the choices made in situating a discourse. Epistemological challenges acknowledged, it is nevertheless hoped that modeling new ways of expressing and utilizing linguistic forms with Glide can provide abstractions that can be generalized to other potentially semiotically charged systems growing at or outside the boundaries of natural language. THE MATERIAL METAPHOR The spatially dimensional aspects of regulation and organization of the Glide linguistic system are described in light of what N. Katherine Hayles calls in Writing Machines the “material metaphor.” [5] Hayles stresses the essential importance of understanding not only the text (in the broader Barthean sense) of the literary production (print or electronic) but equally the materiality of the medium of production, in this case, “the symbol-