Wednesday September 10/97, 7:30-9:30 pm
InterAccess, 401 Richmond St. #444; 599-7206
$3 members / $5 non-members

Participants:

Kathleen Pirrie Adams (moderator)
Francois Lachance (panelist)
Tony Spencer (panelist)

office@interaccess.org

Even if the end of print is not immanent, the nature of publication is being daily redefined by the existence and ever increasing importance of the web. This panel looks at how accessing written information on-line involves a particular experience and encourages a specific way of reading. It looks at how interactivity and the architecture of the web work against linearity, making aphorisms, riddles and advertising copy likely points of reference for those writing for the web. Discussion will focus on how web builders imagine their audience's interest and how they style and manipulate information accordingly; what works and what doesn't, as well as where the web's refiguring of the text is leading us.

Kathleen Pirrie Adams is the Programme Director at InterAccess. She writes about art, popular culture and sexuality, curates film and video and does research for Chatelaine Online. She is currently organizing an exhibition entitled Game Girls.

lachance@chass.utoronto.ca

Francois will be using the example of Clioscope to discuss the authoring dynamic text. The presentation will focus on three areas:

• Adequate Redundancy - comforting and surpising readers
• Hybrid Audiences - accomodating the varities of surfers
• Contingent Closure - planning for future linking

Francois Lachance has written about theories of technologically influenced perception. His doctoral dissertation Sense: orientations, meanings, apparatus is available on-line. He also works in shorter forms such as the poster The Written, The Archived and the Active which explores issues of access and interactivity. He is also the author of creative works including the gender-fluid hypertext Clioscope. He presently describes himself as a scholar-at-large and works in the field of advertising.

mongoose@inforamp.net

Tony will discuss the role of the writer in relation to the more commercial aspects of the Web. His own professional experience supports the theory that interactive calls for an expanded menu wherein a writer also acts as co-architect, planner, producer etc. in the process of making good work. He will speak about the importance of developing a palette of 'voices', the audience of 'one', stylistic considerations, working with programmers and the importance of text in this still nascent stage of the Word Wide Web.

As a lover of verbal tangents and creative serendipity, Tony has carved out a micro-niche by linking the sometimes discordant worlds of advertising and interactive media. Active in writing for the Web since the dawn of the browser, Tony has freelanced with a number of local developers including the early edition of Bulldog, Crave Media and initiative interactive, a division of Maclaren McCann. Journalistic forays writing for magazines like 'Marketing' and 'Canadian Business' were an excuse to meet and interview a galaxy of digital mediaphiles. Prior to ever writing ads, Tony was a local performance poet. Presently, with his company < Body English > Tony bounces between writing for advertising and interactive media while adventures in instrumental guitar music help to maintain an appropriate level of personal sanity.