Alan Bigelow

Alan Bigelow is part of the Living Legacy Project at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Click here to listen to his artist interview or read the transcript below.

Alan Bigelow is a writer of electronic literature who lives in Buffalo, New York. Trained as a traditional fiction writer using time-tested modes of expression, he began exploring the literary possibilities of the internet in 1999. To date he has created more than 30 works of "Flash fiction" (with the term "Flash" punningly referring both to the brevity of the format and to the programming language of the same name that he used for many years).

His digital projects typically include text, image, and sound to create a multi-sensory experience. In Bigelow's hands, storytelling becomes an invitation to play. In many works, the viewer participates in the telling of the story by manipulating the narrative or other elements. (See "The Quick Brown Fox" and "This is Not a Poem" for examples.)

When describing this innovative approach to writing, Bigelow mentions his delight in working in an emerging art form as he is "exploring the undiscovered territory where the signposts are mostly the ones that you put up. And you put them up not for others, but for yourself so you know where you've been, and how to get back, so you can go someplace else." [1]

Born in New York City, Bigelow has a BA from Bard College, an M.A. in English (with an emphasis in creative writing) from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and an MA and Ph.D. in English from SUNY at Buffalo. He has taught for more than 20 years in the Humanities Department at Medaille College, Buffalo, NY.

Bigelow's work has been exhibited at SFMOMA, the Library of Congress, Turbulence.org,Rhizome.org, Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, the National Art Center: Tokyo, MLA 2012-2013, FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, the Museum of New Art (MONA, Detroit), Art Tech Media, FILE 2007-2013, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, BlazeVox.org, and elsewhere. In 2013 he was designated a "Living Legacy" artist by the Burchfield Penney Art Center.

His digital art is collected at http://www.webyarns.com.

[1] Bigelow, Alan. "Ten Reasons Why I Write Digital Literature." Webyarns.com. 2013. accessed 11/27/2103 <http://www.webyarns.com/>.

Listen to Alan Bigelow's interview with Heather Gring of the Burchfield Penney Art Center on August 15, 2013. In it, he discusses the field of electronic literature and the democratization of the Web, along with ways that changes in computer language have changed his way of writing. He mentions some of his early influences, an eclectic list drawn from many disciplines. And he offers advice to emerging practitioners of his artform: “Always take risks; … push yourself further than you would have imagined.”

Transcripton available below: 

LLP Artist: Alan Bigelow
Interviewer: Heather Gring
Transcriber: Jordan Anthony
Date recorded:  August 15, 2013
Date transcribed: July 19, 2020

HG: This is the Living Legacy Project with Alan Bigelow on August 15^th, 2013. So, Alan let’s start with some of our more basic questions, I know you don’t describe yourself as an artist explicitly, but what inspired you to become a digital writer, or an artist or however you want to describe yourself?

AB: A complex response to that question, cause when I think about it, a couple factors are involved…I started writing poetry and fiction when I was a kid, when I was 12, and obviously I did that for many years until about 1999, and I had already a couple short story collections and a novel, a novel or two under my belt and some success but nothing outrageous. And then around 1999, thanks to my wife Elizabeth Licata’s help I discovered the web and started to explore the web a little bit more- actually 1994 is when I discovered the web, but in ’99 is when I started to think about writing and how writing could be adapted to the web. What I saw on the web was transcriptions of text on the web and that seemed like a waste of web space-you know, when you can do multiple media on the web, why would you just stick with just text? And so, I was starting to think well, maybe the web would be a great place to tell a story, but we’d have to think of different ways in telling a story, or a poem. In 1999 I actually wrote a very- my first test- my first, putting my foot into the water was actually putting my foot into fire because I wrote a novel-an interactive novel, that was the first thing I did. It was a flash novel called “Pamela Small” and its actually still assessable online at PamelaSmall.com, and it’s a full length novel and it actually was a text novel that I had originally written and was just sitting around, and I constantly revised and thought, “why not start with this?” I have the text and I’ll make it interactive and so I actually created this interactive novel, Pamela Small, and I’m not sure if it’s a complete success but it certainly did teach me how to make words work with images, animation, video and other kinds of multi media aspects on the web, in a way were of course I never considered when writing the text. Around 1999, I started collecting domain names, thinking I could make a killing, and so- I’m ashamed to say now- And by the way I didn’t sit on anyone-It’s not like I bought IBM.com or anything like that-much as I would of liked too if I could of gotten something like that in 1999, that was kind of like…1989, but I did have a whole bunch of domains and one of them was Cinema2.com, and I still have that and actually when I think about- Im sorry I have to go back a sec, Cinema2.com was actually the first piece I ever wrote, that and then Pamela Small, Cinema2 is actually a very short piece and I had this web, this domain; Cinema2.com, and I thought to myself “well I better do something with this domain or someone is going to come after this domain and take it away from me,” and I want to sit on it and make millions of dollars off of it. And what I decided was Id made Cinema2.com into a Fictional company, it’s a company that they, they move you. It’s a moving company, they move you, in other words they give you a catharsis and they have built in therapy and like these specialized electronic instruments that apply to you and you come in and they examine you and say “well, this is your problem and were gonna move you,” and then they talk with you and work with you and eventually they move you when you have a catharsis and you’re cured. And so that was actually the first one, and I did it simply because I wanted to make sure that if anyone came after that domain name- Cinema.com-also, by the way, got sold for 100,000 dollars, and so I thought well Cinema2.com what can that be worth, and of course it’s worthless-  but in any case that directed itself to a short story. And immediately to follow up to Pamela Small, that was actually the learning curve, Pamela Small. When you do a novel lengths work on the web, in a new application like Flash, for a writer like me- I have no technical skills but I simply just immersed myself in it and that’s certainly one way to learn how to do something is just, simply to get your hands, utterly, completely, disgustingly, dirty.

HG: Could you mention a little about some of the technologies you were working with?

AB: In fact, most- starting in 1999, I just wrote a series of almost 30 Flash pieces over the years. They are all flash, starting from 1999 of course, it was an earlier version of the application Flash, but then of course each year or so a new version of the application would come out and so I simply would go through those new applications because it was convenient and Flash was such a really beautiful way to create what I wanted to create I mean, there's… and I still think to this day, though I've moved on to html5, I still think to this day that Flash offers the best combination of animation, text, video, audio, and everything else that you can think of that you can put together into a single capsule; you can put it into a single frame. And that frame as long as the browser can accept it will see exactly what you created. There are no differences with Flash file. So, you know, I could send it to any browser and they would see exactly what I wanted them to see every single time as long as their browser was Flash enabled. And flash was such a user friendly interfaces well and just so good at using multimedia it's just a shame that you know, Steve Jobs decided that he didn't like it, and basically one man virtually killed a really beautiful application. For a lot of a lot of artists we had to have had been in still some still use flash but most have been moving on. So, I used flash from 1999 till about 2010. And then, and then since then I've been doing maybe mid-2011. Not sure, but I've been doing html5, since then.

HG: While we're talking about this… you speak so highly about Flash, but what are some differences you've noticed with html5? Some things you might like about html5 are some challenges that you encounter?

AB: The downside of html5 is not nearly as user friendly in terms of interface and interface me basically you code with html5 with Flash didn't do that much coding, anyway. And it's not as good with audio, it's not as good with they're getting better with video. The beautiful thing about Flash, it's like, this is where the word ‘artist’ does come into play. Because what Flash created was basically a canvas. And you could do anything; you could put in anything, any words on a canvas and put virtually anything you want on that canvas. And it's like I said, you could then send that canvas to the browser. And anyone could see exactly what you created. Html5 doesn't create a canvas per se. It doesn't create this kind of this ideal blank artistic canvas. You could put anything any place. I mean, ideally, you can, but it's not nearly as easy as it was for Flash. The good side, though, for html5 for me, I don't know I'm not sure what people who read my work are thinking about it now and had some good responses but that I don't really know is that it's forced me to completely change my way of writing, which has been an interesting experience for me and it has been challenging. Where before, I would emphasize the visuals and make sure that some sort of storyline or poetic line in there and have a lot of interactivity involved. Now the visuals and downplay the interactivity… it's been downplayed, but then recognizing that a linear storyline that you would typically see on in any kind of store whether it be web based or text based, recognizing that that wasn't really going to cut it for me anyway, has forced me to, well, reassemble the story a story. So right now what I'm interested in doing and what I have been doing for the last three or four pieces and in fact I'm doing a whole series on these is trying to take archetypal images, text, video, audio, and mixing them together in strange ways to create a story, but without it actually not being a story at all. If you can understand what I'm saying, it's very difficult describe. I don't think anyone, I mean, I know a lot of firsts. Besides, I don't think anyone's tried to do this before. Like peace I'm working right now on right now and I can tell you this because I know that no one will hear this for a while because I don't like talking about books and I'm working on but I'll tell you that the piece I just finished. It's called “My Life in Three Parts”. Alright. The first part was borrowed from if you were online, you are buying something, and a series of advertisements with buying icons, but each advertisement somehow archetypically had something to do with me. And at the end of that, I had a little sliver of a video of a cartoon. And that would be the end of that part. The next part was I took some classic artworks, you know, Picasso, Modigliani, and so forth, and then put captions and are each one, interpreting the picture. And, and through those interpretations, if you read them, I was hoping that people get a second sense of me, addition to the first part. And then the third part was, I actually had to create a new language for the third part. And that was…I took a series of mathematical symbols. And that part was, I think, called “How Many Times?” and so how many times have I you know, woken up to a new day? How many times have I drank a beer, how many times and then I connected those all with the mathematical symbols, meaning different things, and then made a little made equations out of each one of those sections in that part, all leading up to the end, which I won't give away because it'd be anti-climactic, even when you do see the end. So, in any case, what I'm trying to do, as I mentioned before, is try to experiment with the whole idea of how to create a narrative without actually creating a narrative. And so, the idea is to sort of obliquely play media off of each other text off a video animation of audio, and see by creating a contrast between them, creating something in that space within that contrast. That has meaning, has narrative meaning.

HG: When might we have an opportunity to see some of these works are you going to be putting them onto WebYarns [domain name]?

AB: The one I just mentioned is on WebYarns already. Some of the newest…there's a link on the upper left hand side called Newest WebYarns. And that's the newest one. Someone actually wants to publish it in some book already. So, it was even published before that happened. But the website is going to be completely redone in about one month, hopefully. So, then you'll find in some other section. I don't know where. But yeah, it's been so that so moving from Flash to html5. At first, it was dismal. It was, you know, I've lost I've lost the tools of my trade. I've been traded in. I've been replaced with a totally inferior tool. But so, instead of crying, which I did for a while, I instead I said, “Okay, well adapt or die”. And so, I said, but let's adapt in some way that makes use of this new tool in a way that would be fun for me and different for me, and maybe something completely new for everyone else when they see it as well.

HG: That's really exciting. I'm looking forward to seeing some of that.

AB: I would be interested your feedback, actually.

HG: When you were talking about “My Life in Three Parts”. We were talking about injecting some bio biographical references into a narrative that, in many ways is much more focused on intermedia. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the relationship or the balance between your biographical information and your works, and fictionalization. And where perhaps historically, that's played a role and where you see that playing a role moving forward into like html5?

AB: If I understand your question correctly, the biographical…the introduction of autobiographical material into otherwise not autobiographical works…my father who's now dead will would have denied this, but when I was an adolescent, I think, he knew I was a writer, wanted to be a writer. And one of the things he told me that stuck with me. As I said, he’ll probably deny it, was “the shortest book that you’ll ever write would be the book about yourself.” That pretty much turn the turn the page for me. And I recognized well if I'm going to write about something better not be about me. And although I have led a somewhat interesting life, turns out that I've distanced myself from myself in virtually all of my work, including that piece of “My Life in Three Parts” is a perfect example. I mean, here I could have said, you know, I was born here, I did this and this. And the second part was this and it would be a different narrative. And instead, I did in a completely off the wall way. More avoidance of, you know, examining who I am, which I think a lot of artists would probably agree is probably one of our main reasons why I do art: so we don't have to, we don't have to actually look ourselves in the mirror. Let someone else do that.

HG: Absolutely. I agree with that. You know, and I think that's the role of criticism in many ways is to see the relationships that the artist does not need to make explicit. That's not necessarily their role.

AB: Yeah, there's another story, but it's so apocryphal that there's no names involved, and no dates or anything. But some famous writer had written a book and some person came up to interview and said, so is it true that your book is really about this? And the writer’s response was “I never knew that until you told me now. And I'm sorry, you told me.” He didn't want to know. Yeah, so I guess if I guess my autobiography is sort of written within the works. You could probably do some sort of psychological analysis of you know, my work and other artists work and discover, you know, then you can come to all sorts of conclusions. But…

HG: Do you see yourself in a position of writing contemporary fiction, or do you see yourself as trying to create a new model?

AB: That's a that's a really good question. That's a question that really a lot of people might feel that no real answer for. I mean, we don't even know what to call it. Electronic Literature happens to be a name that we use currently, but there's been other names for it as well anything from Net Art to Digital Writing to whatever electronic literature is in favor now because the ELO, the Electronic Literature Organization is probably the main organization that has the conferences and organizes the databases and so forth associated with this field. I personally, and I've expressed this to my fellow ELO members, I personally think that the less we start to identify it, the better off we'll be. I think it is simply an extension of standard fiction, textual fiction, fiction that's text based on the page. It's simply an extension of it. In fact, in natural extension, it's another word system. Technology, as it always does with many arts any are many art forms that simply push the envelope a little further into how you use the same or similar tools to create certain effects. And so, I think it's dangerous to talk about Electronic Literature. Like it's something separate, for example, like it's different, because it really isn't. And in fact, I can prove it. I can prove, for example, the Electronic Literature, which most people talk about, you know, as if it's some strange hybrid that no one even knows about. And in fact, you It's true, you could go into a bar or museum and just, you know, stand up on a chair and say, “how many people in here have heard of electronic literature?” And if you're lucky, one person will raise their hand kind of hesitantly like, “I think maybe I have?” Alright. And in fact, that when I do a talk, for example, I'll actually point to a wall like a huge wall like this. In fact, that's what I did here at the Burchfield, and I talked here the other year. And I'll say “this is the internet. Way down here in this little tiny inch, half an inch here in the corner, that's the world of electronic literature or Net Art, right?” But that’s not true anymore, because as I said, I can prove it. All you have to do is go to Facebook. Do you want to see people telling stories using text, audio, video animation image? It's all happening there. People already accept that stories or multimedia events. There is no… there has been…there was maybe a couple of years where people were not sure about it. But it's so common now that it's not even worth mentioning. And so, I try to encourage people in electronic literature, world, Listen, don't even say this is different. This is this is simply literature. That's what this is. It's not Electronic Literature. It's just simply literature. And that's how I that's how I personally view it. But once again, when I describe what I do that it's so strange, it's a strange schizophrenia that people have. They're on Facebook every day doing exactly what I do. And you have you kind of say, “Well, have you ever heard of stories that are used created, you know, created using multimedia?” Oh, no, that sounds really strange. Yeah, they're doing it every day themselves. They're every day there's writing. This is what happened to me today. And here's an image or here's the link and it's all there. Played out. And yet, you know, talk about looking in the mirror that they don't see that the mirror that I present is that is them.

HG: So, you describe that what you do is a form of literature. But would you say that there are different complexities involved with what you do, then perhaps people who focus on just a flat textual medium in comparison? Yeah, is it is what you do similar different than contemporary fiction in that way?

AB: Yeah, I'd say this to answer that question from the perspective of the author of the perspective of the reader. The specter of the, from the perspective of the author, it's much more complex, because obviously, you know, you're not just dealing with text, you're dealing with other things as well. So, and you have to make them all work together. They have to synthesize right; they can't pull against each other and fall apart. They have to integrate in some manner. From the viewpoint of the viewer, the jury's still out. You know, they've done studies on what part of the brain is working when you're reading text on the page. You know, are you more actually more engaged there than you are, say with a hyper-textual situation? A multimedia situation? You know, the act of the reader, is that act a more vigorous act of when you're actually reading bare text or not? That I don't know the answer that question, but it's certainly I know people have studied it. And but for me, ultimately, because I have to look at myself as first, I look at myself when I'm creating something, I'm an author, but that I always think about as a reader as well. And one of the things I think about it's one of my tests for writing for writing anything for creating anything, it's actually when I do creative writing workshops or something like that. I talk to people who want to write one of the things I say is never write anything you wouldn't want to read yourself. Ever. Never, ever. That's the bottom line. And that's the one bottom line that I hopefully always remember when I write something is, I have to ask me something I want to enjoy. I would enjoy reading myself if I if somehow stumbled onto it, you know, out of the blue and didn't know I had written it. You know what I enjoy reading it. There is a story about Giuseppe Verdi, you know, the composer, Joe Green. A friend of his went to a concert. And they left the concert together. And his friend said, “so how did you like the concert?” And he said “it was pretty good. I particularly like that second piece that was really good.” And so, his friend said, “Giuseppe, don't you know, you wrote that piece?” Now he had attained what I think a lot of artists would love to attain is that kind of objectivity, where you can look at your own work and pretend you're seeing for the first time, as a reader would say, for example, with my workers or some artists with their viewers, that would be ideal. But I think as an artist, you have to work on both levels: as a creator and a consumer.

HG: You talked about your process, you talked about how you use Flash and how you moved to html5, but are there any components that you outsource to other programmers or that you rely on the expertise of people who are more in depth in the programming field for what you do? Or is everything that you create through your authorship?

AB: Good question. And the answer is emphatically, I do. I do outsource. Now recently, html5 has been actually getting easier for me because actually, a lot of the code is Boilerplate, but I make no qualms about it. If you go to my site, you'll see that what I always do, I actually write about it. I talk about you know, how I am not an expert in so many ways. And so instead of me re-learning, you know, something that someone else already does really well, I will simply beg or borrow--but I won't steal--beg or borrow that thing from them. And it's actually quite common on the web. But you know, we all do it all the time, in fact. So, like, for example, that piece I just mentioned to “My Life in Three Parts”. The second part with the art, the series of works that I do commentary on the video, I went just went online and I found a video of a guy teaching portraiture, and how to do a great portrait. And I thought “that's, that's right, I want to use that.” So, I emailed him, and I said, “Gee, I got this little tidbit here. I'd like to use it if that's okay with you.” Now, by the way, I found it on YouTube. And it was a Creative Commons, he had already labeled it Creative Commons, I could have taken it without even contacting him at all. Creative Commons means you can reuse it with attribution, but you don't have to contact anyone, but I did out of a courtesy because he was obviously a professional, he's actually good. So, he said, “Fine, and no problems.” And that would be a good example. The most recent piece in html5, we're using also use a kind of a slider effect that I have that you were if you're using a device handheld device like this, for example, this being an iPhone, or something else, you know, you can slide your way through it. That slider effect was open source code. And actually, that's one of the things about html5, it's a good thing. It's all open source. So, they want you to use it. And I give credit though, if you go to the credit pages of any of my work, you'll often find a long list. Now, before I go further with this, there are some people that I've worked with that have done what I consider like stupendous jobs. Tammy McGovern, for example, has done some coding for me in the past things I just could not code. And one piece, she helped code for me, and I'll tell you the effect that she did was, this is not a poem, or I took… honestly, I keep on forgetting the author's name, but I took that poem. “There's nothing, there's no there's nothing as beautiful as a tree...” I have forgotten. Perhaps you've done the research and could tell me. But in any case, what I did was is that by the way, that poem I found on Google gutenberg.org so it's public domain. And what I did was I created this thing as if it were a CD disc, right, and what this was a Flash piece, by the way. And so, what you could do with your cursor is, you could put your cursor on the disk, and it starts to spin. And it's me, my voice, saying this poem, reciting the poem. And then as it continues to spin, if you take your cursor and swipe it over the words, in the poem itself, the words fly out from the center into the edges. And then as each word is removed from that center, my voice no longer says that word. And so, my voice continues, though, and skips past that word and continues, in other words, saying the same poem again and again, but each time it's different because more words, or different words have been removed from the center. Tammy made that effect. I told her what I wanted, and she made that effect for me that it comes out like that and spirals out from the edges. That was something I could not do on my own. But that poem actually won me a major, major award and that was great that flew me into Paris. Put me up for Few days, and that's nice. I couldn't have done it without her. I gave her credit when I did my acceptance speech.

HG: In regard to using mobile technology, what direction do you see intermedia online work moving towards, such as the combination of all these different components and now with this handheld device that that makes these words even more transitory, in different ways?

AB: Transitory, as we've discussed before, as a matter of archiving, and as that's going to be, that's going to be the permanent problem that you'll have with art making creating works that will within as you said, within, sometimes even months longer be viewable. There's this example of Electronic Literature that came out in the middle 90s that you can't see anymore. You literally can't see them anymore. But there are archiving efforts right now, in universities around this country and abroad to actually save those pieces. For myself personally, when I started carrying--I use an iPhone--when I started carrying an iPhone a few years ago, I realized I was reading writing works that I couldn't see on my own portable device. And that was another reason why html5 seemed like a way to go. Now what I do is I create for portable, and you can use it on virtually any device, although there are some problems, like for example, I'll try a Samsung every once in a while, and it won't play right. So, I'm still working out the kinks. And I'll probably be working out the kinks for the rest of my life, as long as I'm doing this stuff. But to me, the idea would be to place it as many places as possible at play as many places as possible. So, a desktop laptop, handheld, portable device, you name it. Now, whatever next generation device they come up with, like an iPhone comes up with the wristwatch, you know, whatever that wristwatch is going to do. Hopefully, they'll be able to play anything that can play in the iPhone, but you but you never know. What it means is…I hope I'm addressing your question in some way. What it means is it's actually a huge struggle as a writer, I mean writer and certainly if I had to go back to your original question, one of your earlier questions like you know, what's it like, you know, writing and text versus writing multimedia, I'll tell you one thing with writing text, you didn't have to worry about how people were going to see it. Once it was published, that was it. But the problem was once was published, you couldn't change it. And that was the beauty part of being a multimedia where you can instantaneously change anything you want. So that's, that's a very big, time consuming thing is, is when you're creating, it's really time consuming to create a work of art. And then you have to spend days, sometimes weeks, making sure that it's viewable in multiple devices across multiple browser platforms across, you know, across language barriers, and you the list goes on. All right, well, I don't even bother with language barriers, by the way. I mean, I've had some stuff translated in other languages, but I don't I don't do that. I'm not going to go there. But it's constant, constant struggle. And I don't think I'll ever and I think as you said before, it's permanent. If I can get technical just for a second. I mean, one of the questions I've been asking myself is, you know, well do I do an app? Okay. The beauty of an app, as you know, is where you can download an app on your phone. And then it's like truly like that Flash file I was talking about before you see what you get, you get what do… you see what you what you use, you see what the artist wanted you to see. But then I recognized that the whole, it's kind of, you know, it's, it's challenging, okay, you have to download the app, which is sometimes easy, but you have to download…it's just local. So, what I've been so I've so far opted for online, which I believe in for me, is kind of has this kind of universal appeal. And for me, that is as an artist, because I anyone, any place that they have the correct technology can view it or experience it. But maybe, but I have no idea a year from now, maybe the Apple will have to be the way you know, I've been thinking toying with an idea actually, that's just between you and me, and I don't care. But what I wanted to eventually do is create an app that becomes like this holder for stories. And so, you can download the app from WebYarns right? And then then I can, you can update. And when you update the app, all it does is pull in the newest stories, and you just play them out of the same app every time. But Apple is pretty restrictive in terms of what they allow you to do. And particularly when it comes to creative, creative things, I've had some friends who run into problems. Because I've actually cold queried, I can use that instead of cold, cold, cold query. From email, you know, magazines. Like you don't do this yet, but have you ever thought about publishing these kinds of things? It's actually the trend now is actually from I can see is below the movie light of Laura Lee's Summit learning magazine, I'm actually moving towards incorporating more Electronic Literature, right. And it's still calling Electronic Literature, but it's just literature, right. So that's interesting. It's a trend that I think is going to continue actually.

HG: So, you kind of touched on this, and I've got a sense of it already, but regarding your source visual and sound materials, it seems like that's a very intentional process for you of selecting what you include based on copyright and Creative Commons, and even it's open source from a programming perspective, is that safe to say?

AB: Yeah, that's all safe to say.

HG: That's great.

AB: Oh, but I'll also, I mean, I also use, you know, ClipArt.com, where I pay $14.95 for a week's worth of unlimited downloading of images that I could then go and take into Photoshop and change any way I want. So…

HG: I noticed that in one of your… Oh, I think it was in Science for Idiots.

AB: Yeah, that was actually… that was... Yeah, I took some public domain comic strips from the golden age of comic strips, the United States in 1920s 30s and 40s. And then I took them into Photoshop, took out all the text and then refurbished the visuals because a lot of them were aged. And so, I've been happy with the color and refurbished the visuals. And then I put flash animations on them in the background and then animated. And they put new texts and animated the text. And I created a series of three of those. That was actually fun. That was fun.

HG: It looks like a really fun project. I'd like to talk a little bit about the technological aesthetic that you have been working in and where you see yourself going forward with that. You're, perhaps because many of your works were created in the late 90s in the early 2000s, but some of your works on WebYarns.com…

AB: Can I interrupt you for a second to make sure for those people who don't know what a yarn is. A yarn is a sort of fanciful story, imaginary story. So, WebYarns, that's the problem with dealing with the language is constantly changing as the definitions of terms disappear. So, I asked my students, anyone know what a yarn is? And most don't, really, so I've got some colleagues to say “why don’t you just use AlanBigelow.com and just make it stick?

HG: I don't think that's as fun.

AB: Yeah, but doesn't make much sense. They don't know what yarns means.

HG: But at the same time, if you google Alan Bigelow, it's the first result that comes out.

AB: But if we talk about branding, you know, branding is important. Anyway, sorry. Sorry.

HG: What's the name of the piece? The quick brown fox…?

AB: Pangram

HG: Pangram. Yeah, that one is really phenomenal. I enjoyed that one a lot.

AB: That's a lot of clipart images. That was actually pretty easy to put together. Also, that was a Flash piece. That was actually that I was asked commissioned to do that piece by SF MoMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. So… $200 nothing to get excited about right. But a colleague was put it was doing an online series and so I was one of the people he chose to do and so I'd made that piece special specially for that series. I had a good time with that actually. I kind of enjoyed it. I'm surprised that piece… I mean, it was there, that it worked for them. And it's been in some festivals and shows, but hasn't got the I don't know it hasn't, you know, some pieces like clicked, you know, clicked with the public more than others, obviously. But that that piece never really seemed to click with the public as much as I thought it should.

HG: I enjoyed it a lot.

AB: I'm glad to hear it. See, that makes up the difference right there.

HG: Alright, so now let's get into some of your biographical history. Can you tell us a little bit about where you went to school, where you did both your undergraduate and graduate work and advanced degrees?

AB: I was born and grew up in New York City with weekends and summers in Connecticut, went to Buckley School a small private school for Grammar School in New York City. Then went to a series of four high schools one two years at the boarding school, Brooks boarding school, which was probably the most the worst one of the worst experiences of my life. I mean, you actually had to wear a uniform. And then half a semester at New York tutoring School, which is probably the elite, you know, highest cost school and a private school in New York City and then Julia Richman High School, which was free and also a terrible experience and one of the worst educational experiences of my life. And then ended up at Friends Seminary for my fourth year, and then went from there to four years of Bard College, and which the best years of my life is my father told me when I was going off, he said, you will think this now but this will be the best use you’re your life, and he was so right. But I didn't think at then. And then University of Colorado in Boulder for my Master's in creative writing, and then SUNY Buffalo, State University of New York at Buffalo for another Master's in English and a PhD in English. And that's my formal education, my informal education courses every frickin’ day. I'm on the web, learning, reading more electronic literature, reading new things about this and that and constantly striving to grow and change.

HG: As we all should meet us, education is not just an academic experience and I think that's something that is not spoken of, or given enough credit within our current cultural ideal.

AB: I talked to my most of my students, and they just want to make money. They want to learn just enough to make enough money.

HG: So, speaking of your students, can you speak a little bit about your professional career, your day job or whatever you want to call it?

AB: Um, while I was doing my PhD at SUNY Buffalo, I took about four years off to write fiction, straight fiction and then finished the dissertation and got a job for six years teaching part time at Medaille College and then finagled that into a full time job Medaille College and I've been there for 20 years as a full timer. Interspersed with that, for a couple semesters, I was a PhD and master’s advisor for De Montfort University in the UK for their media program. What else? I think, you know, students have contacted me to interview me and things like that as part of their coursework. And I know I guess I'm straying a little bit here, but I know a lot of you know, knock on wood, a lot of course curricula, you know, use my work in the United States and around the world. Not an excessive amount. I mean, I'm not famous, but you know, more than any, any time ever that I would have achieved without still text writer, text based writer. You know, when people talk to me about you know, you know, “well, you used to be a text based writer, you know, and what you're doing now, you're, it's like this esoterica, you're like this avant-garde stuff that no one even knows about!” That will just like get very frank and say “Okay, so how many people read your work today?” It's a well, you know, “I…I just published a book last year at 2000 copies, or 5000 copies.” And I say “that that's very good. That's good for text world, that's really great.” In the world of web, you know, you can get a couple hundred people a day reading your work or not. Even if you're getting 20 people a day, added up over a course of the year, that's more than most mid…I don’t know the exact term but in print the print world it's like mid-rank,  published writers, that's about where they are. Right, and they're thanking the Lord for that. Right, but on the World Wide Web, that's one of the reasons why I went there also is because it offered this unlimited audience unlimited. Unlimited… not to say I have that, by the way. I don't have that kind of, you know, I think I just hit 200,000.

HG: Yeah, still that's, that's quite impressive. So working in a web based medium offers some really unique affordances when it comes to the democratization of access and taking access to literature outside of this kind of traditionally capitalistic structure in many ways where people don't need to buy your works to access them. Does that influence why you chose this medium or how you relate in this medium or anything about it?

AB: That influenced why when I did the medium, somewhat, right, although, I was also bored, I was bored writing paper, right? And also, I want to protect my domain name. Don't forget, right. So otherwise, what I make doesn't I just make it for the web. That's all. I mean, it doesn't I don't really think much about I think somewhat about wanting inspired I don't think that once again, my primary earnest is myself. I've got to be able to please myself, because it's a sense of play, isn't it? You know, like I'm having fun. If I know if I know I'm on a good track if I actually laugh out loud while I'm working on something. Or if I cry which has happened once or twice. But otherwise, you know, I mean the medium in this case, it's not the message.

HG: We were talking about, you know, text based writers, maybe we get a run up 2000 or 5000. But that made me think about was even 2000 or 5000 people who read that work within the structures of literary industrial complex, if you will, you know, there's, um, there are constraints of how people can access your work, you know, if people don't have access to the historical knowledge about a topic, or they don't have a library card, there's all sorts of restrictions on how you can access text based works. But really, when it comes to what you create, there's a lot of freedom for access, but at the same time, if nobody knows what you're doing, you know, you know, if nobody knows to search for WebYarns.com or if nobody comes across it in their hyperlinking journeys throughout the internet, they might not come across it as well.

AB: There's in addition to that, the anonymity that the web offers, so resoundingly free virtually everyone does…99.9% of people on the web are not virtually anonymous. Never seen. No, I mean, in a sense are never known. Right. You know, most people surf the same dedicated, you know, 20 sites every day. And they stray occasionally through links, but they… otherwise… it's funny, you know, you think that the unlimited world with the web would offer an unlimited, unlimited readership and also unlimited offerings for those readership. But as Google well knows, because they track us and they know this through the tracking, and then they take they take advantage of the fact that we're all in fact, you know, on this whole world of the internet, we actually just use a very, very, very small little part of it that suits us and we just simply ream ourselves like that mouse right into the hole there and just sort of sit. But there's also another restraint that you didn't mention that's very important that that that applies just as much to the world the web as it does, for example, the text based and that is economics. Economics restraints. If, you know, the larger population of the world doesn't have a handheld device or access to the web in the same way that you and I are so accustomed, so it actually does sort of raise the specter, if you can call it that, but it's probably not a specter. But, you know, raises the issue of, you know, is the web in essence… does it create a higher kind of economic hierarchy? And are the privileged the ones that are able to read on the web and the underprivileged the ones that are not? And what and what kind of, you know, what kind of distance does that create in terms of stratification of society? Those would be interesting questions to pursue. I'm sure someone's already pursued them. But after others, you have to follow up with that by adding of course that you know, as instruments like handheld devices like this get less and less expensive, and as the web, Internet access becomes more and more ubiquitous, that you recognize, we recognize that you know, this percentage will fall, people who don't have access to the web the same way we do.

HG: That's a great point. And I'm glad you brought up that other side of the coin because absolutely correct. Thank you, thank you for that. Um, who are some of your most important influences in terms of mentors, influential artists, or even peers?

AB: I've been asked this question before. And so, I just went to an old interview, and it's lifted it because I don't remember this stuff. I'm sorry. I'm an idiot. You know, I'm, I'm good at certain such situations, but I'm not. For example, I would never make a great game show player. I can't think on the spot to save my life. Unless I'd been drinking and, you know, perhaps doing other things. Then somehow that seems to electrify my brain and I'm able to think in ways you know,

HG: Like I said, if we ever need to do a follow-up interview, I’ll bring the six-pack.

AB: I’ll have to really dig, dig deep. So, what I did was I printed out a list of some of my influences. And first of all, let me preface it by saying that one of the things I tell people when they ask about doing writing electronic literature is I say, first of all, like I said before, listen, you're on Facebook, you're writing it already. Okay? Anyone can do this. In fact, I have it on my site, if any, if I can do this, anyone can do this. Right? I have no technical abilities whatsoever. When I first started, nothing, I didn't know Flash I, in fact, I'm left brain, right brain, left brain, right, whatever, you know, however they call it. So, I normally don't have activity in that direction. But these days in almost anyone can create a website and using open source code, and tweak that and add images and text and create stories the same way I'm doing virtually. Or you could do it probably in a week you create something like I'm doing, I may not make quite as polished. It may not be quite as successful as I hope that I'm producing. But you could still do it. Right. So that democratization of the web that we've been touching on that does seem to include terms of like, anyone can do this, right? If you all have to have access to a domain name that will call $12.95, and then your server costs are 9 or 10 dollars a year, or $10 a month. And then you're all set. Right? So, and once again, the economy comes in, right? Not quite a democracy, like we'd like to believe it is. So, but maybe in some ways I have to admit, I mean, you know, that I was in some ways, regardless of how people may think I'm successful or not, right. I am maybe more suited for the world of multimedia writing than some of my peers. Especially nowadays, the students are going to college. I was required. And I always did. I grew up in an environment New York City, I had access to music, the best museums in the world. I had access to the best books in the world. You know, I was reading, you know, I would deliberately go to the Met [Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC] on weekends on some weekends and deliberately lose myself in the man. I literally walk in the door and I would wander as deep as I could. Then just simply, it wasn't a matter of finding my way out. It's just simply a matter of “Okay, this is where I am now.” And I will just simply admire my way out and just look at everything on the walls, it just sort of wander around until I exit into the, you know, blinking into the sunlight. And there it was, wow, I got lost in the Met again. How beautiful is that? All right. And so, access to those kinds of things. I traveled a lot when I was a kid. You know, Junior year abroad in London, my parents had enough money that you know, upper middle class and so my parents took us a lot of vacations around the world. So, I had knowledge in that area. And so, the idea of multimedia for me comes almost naturally, I was a music major in college. So it seemed when I started doing this stuff, it seemed natural to start to mix these things together and maybe in reflect and when I reflect on it, I realized that maybe I have some advantage over other people in that area perhaps. Alright. So, in terms of influences that my influences are far and wide, by the way, quick segue like a lot of students today in college, they're forced to major in the first year I see this my students all the time, they don't have the access to liberal arts that I did so. But fortunately, the web gives them access with our colleges don’t. And so, they're exposed all the time on the web to visual stimuli to how things can look, you know, they can go visit the mat on the web, that you know, these things are, although they never will. Most of mine anyway. So, when you talk about influences, I mean, we're talking about a wide variety of influences anything from musical artists to more traditional fine artists, to writers. And so, so here I'll throw some names by you because I have right in front of me, writers, there's theater. I also love theater. I used to volunteer at the Eugene O’Neill theatre center in Waterford, Connecticut. I used to go there in the summers and work as in the kitchen cleaning, cleaning dishes and then and then I'd go see the rehearsals and I got to meet, you know, Martin Esslin and Arthur Miller and the list goes on. I met these famous people and got to watch them work, you know, and then while they were breaking, I'd go to the library and I'd read plays and then I go clean dishes and then I go out and watch them rehearse. And so, in the world of theater, you know, we have Sam Shepard who I did my dissertation on. Tom Stoppard and Jean Blanchard, Pirandello, Sophocles and then as far as fiction goes Lawrence Sterne, who were you know, in the 1700s… I wish some of these guys were alive now and doing what I'm doing because Lawrence Sterne, you know, this is a guy… novelist as you know, who you know in the middle of the novel he'll have a page that's entirely black that's this this idea of a good time, and that's my that's my idea of a good time to you know, where you can play with the page and these the way these guys did these guys would be such naturals for the world of Electronic Literature's T.S. Eliot, John Barth, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Emily Dickinson, you know, Jean Blanchard again and the list goes on and on. Music, you know, anything from experimental to whatever. It's really the broad panoply of these of these artists and writers and musicians and thinkers that created I think, sort of the bedrock on which I built what I do. And but I believe that same kind of, I believe everyone expose the same way, those kinds of, of features and have the same kind of opportunities presented to them. So, I seriously still believe that anyone can do what I do. I seriously believe it. And I think maybe people are better trained now than I ever was. I mean, no one ever trained me to become what I do. I just thought of it. In fact, when I started doing in 1999, I didn't even know about electronic literature. I didn't know what other people were doing. I thought it was the only one. And in fact, I was one of the few and but there was a guy in England, and we just stumbled across each other's work. He's a really great writer. I’ll remember his name in just a second. He says this website dreaming methods calm. Andy Campbell. He's terrific writer anyway, I think I emailed him I said, I, you know, I'm doing something similar what you're doing and he said, wow, you know, and then we started communicating and that was a sign of the world became a lot smaller. So influences all over the map. Fortunately.

HG: I want to talk to you about a specific relationship you have with someone that you went to school with in Colorado and now are very close with here in Buffalo, Ed Cardoni, and talk a little bit about perhaps maybe how your relationships with artists in the community here might have impacted your work in some way.

AB: Ed isn’t…when I first met that he was writing fiction and good writer, and he still is a good writer. But I don't think he writes unless he's working secretly, which could be I don't think he's writing fiction anymore. So, but he's, you know, he does his done a terrific job at the Hallwalls as an administrator as director, you know, doing everything is done down there. I mean, you know, you have Tammy McGovern. Who is an artist as well as a great credible coder. And so that's… I believe that's, I call that a collaboration. For me, I've used one of Polly Little’s. I took a photograph one for images, and that was for the piece, “Lord's Prayer, The”, yeah, you're pointing your finger like you remember it?

HG: Well, yeah, I was just looking at it earlier today. I was wondering what that second image was, because that's…

AB: That’s Polly Little, and she has credit, she's got credit on the site, just for people who might hear this. I mean, you know, that's a piece where I took the Lord's Prayer. This is actually one of those difficult pieces I had, in terms of the text that actually that I had ever tried to do, as you know, but you have the Lord's prayer and then you have a sound you know, there's an audio and there's an image behind it, a classic image, I don't remember, but I've given it credit, but so you know, classical, you know, religious image, iconography. And then you click, and it shakes, strikes start shaking back and forth and the letters in the Lord's prayers start to move apart from each other. And then you shake it again. And each time that letters move further and further apart, and then you know, by the time you get to the fourth, I think the third and the third shake or the fourth shake, all the letters have moved and then rearrange themselves in an entirely new poem. That was really difficult. Taking the exact words of the Lord's prayer and then rearranging them to make it intelligible poem that took me a long time and actually had to cheat. I think I made a contraction where there wasn't one. It was hard. That was a difficult piece. But once again, Polly Little did the image for that and great image just seemed perfect for that.

HG: It does. It stood out I didn't know who did at the time because I didn't look at the credit.

AB: She's a great artist. She's like, I'm gonna work a lot like Mark Levin to her husband's. But in terms of, you know, in terms of what I do, there's not too many electronic literature writers in here in Buffalo, New York. There's Loss Glazier at UB. There's me. So, in collaboration now, I'm a solo… It's an interesting question if I can quickly do a follow up because people have asked Andy Campbell, the guy just mentioned in DreamingMethods. He's been wanting to do collaboration with me for quite a long time. And I keep on putting them off, and I feel bad about it. But I just like the solo flight, almost, I've always been kind of a solo person. And I like doing the solo thing. And eventually I'll do collaborations in the real true sense of the word. But then, of course, one could always claim that if I'm using ClipArt, and I'm taking videos off the web, you know, permission on those collaborations have the right sort of a collaborative montage. So, you could make I could make a claim that actually I've been collaborating on along.

HG: A collaborative collages. Yeah.

AB: But not locally. Yeah. As much as much as I'd like to. Oh, actually, I shouldn't forget Brad Wales. I attended his class at UB he invited me to come to his graduate architecture class, because I went up to in some party where I had a couple beers, and I said to him, “I'd love to collaborate.” Actually, I did tell him this, I did say I'd love to collaborate, because what I wanted to do was to have him create a sculpture that I could put an iPad into, and then make get the iPad would be interactive, but it would be within a sculpture. And I kind of like that idea of electrons and steel, you know, put together. And so, we actually started working on and we had students actually came up with some ideas. But then as you know, Brad got very involved in this project here at the Burchfield. So, my emails to him have remained unanswered. So, I wanted to follow up, but no luck. Um, one other thing on this I just occurred to me, you know, people don't talk about this very often. But you know, a type of collaborator for someone like me is, you know, we appear in like, you know, certain every year a certain amount of festivals and galleries and so forth, right? You wouldn't think Electronic Literature would, but you'd be surprised. Curators are collaborators to because of how they set your piece up, where they put it in the gallery, how inventive they get with that can be an act of collaboration as well. I've seen it happen. This piece I did for a gallery in California and remember those something they actually had a special table they made, and they must have had it completely white with a white chair. And then they put my piece on top of it. And it looked gorgeous. It was like I had I had to email them say thank you some of your curator skills are incredible. Thank you so much. Yeah, that so that can sometimes work as well.

HG: Okay, now we're going to get into some broad questions such as, is there anything that you hope to achieve with your art or anything that you have hoped to achieve with your art? Or your writing, let's say: Is there anything you hope to achieve with your writing?

AB: Alright, I'm not just the aesthetic level presumably, I mean, because I'm always trying to you know, one up myself. And try to create something that I would consider to be beautiful or enduring or worthwhile putting that aside, you know, just in terms of pure greed, then it would be you know, I've been in a lot of festivals, galleries, publications, etc. Lots, you know, probably, I don't know, the last five years or so probably averaging 20 to 30 a year. So, but what I found with these festivals and galleries is that you know, you it's a part of, you know, by the way, these are group shows, you know, there's no market, you know, I wouldn't want to go to a solo show of an artist like myself because it'd be like a bunch of computer setup. That's not very interesting. Now I've had actually retrospectives that were solo shows, right. But it doesn't matter. All these things. They don't really create traffic, web traffic. They're one offs. They're incidental events that really contribute to the resume, but they don't really contribute to the readership or the viewership. So, is what I like to do is I want to break through I want people I want to lock a broader audience to recognize that what I and other many people like myself do is actually interesting and fun, and that it's worthwhile. And it's, it's mainstream. It's already mainstream, right? But it's, I want people to recognize that it's mainstream, and I don't see any reason why either me or someone else, you know, doing what I do can't become mainstream. Alright, I'm not talking household awards here. We're just talking mainstream readership, you know, in terms of like, you know, not on the verge, not in the edge, but someplace more towards the center. Now, also, although this is a good start for me, I'd like to have more local visibility. I mean, I've been spending a lot of time looking at international events and stuff like that, you know, but I've kind of neglected my local, my local obligation, if you will. So, this is a good start, actually. I mean, this is when it rains it pours like, it's like this. It’s this a brush up for that, although this that interview will be a lot less detailed than this. Oh, yeah. It’ll be five questions. You know, do you look good in plaid? Do you look good in plaid? Stuff like that. I don't know what the questions are. But that would be like, you know, Buffalo Spree. I love Buffalo Spree. My wife is the, you know, Editor in Chief of Buffalo Spree. So, it's my favorite magazine of every magazine in the world, none excluded, none excluded seriously. You know, I don't ask for a lot and I'm happy for what I've got. But I just like to think that there's, you know, that the Electronic Literature has more to offer to the general public than it does currently.

HG: In the aims of increasing your local visibility, what are some of your needs as an artist that the larger community that you're a part of here in Western New York can provide to you? What are some things you need from the Western New York Community that would help you advance your career?

AB: I'd like to do more performances locally. I've done only one here at the Burchfield actually invited today to do one at Medaille. And I think…Yeah, I think that's it. I think that's the only performances I've done. Oh, well, actually no. I did a performance in Squeaky Wheel. But really, it's been very low key, very low key. So, I mean, I like to perform. So, I'd love to do more performances locally. I would be interested in curating an Electronic Literature show. But the only problem with it is it's kind of boring in terms of technology. It's not… you know, it can work. I mean, I was just in a show at—I’m going to drop names—Library of Congress, I went down and did a reading there too. All right. And a lot of people came by, and, and kids, too. Everyone enjoyed it. It was like, you know, people were playing with the pieces. So, we had manual typewriters out, and these some of these kids had never seen a manual typewriter. And they're asking, “how do you it?” they're hitting the keys and saying, “but it doesn't, write!” And then you tell them to hit harder. And then they weren't sure how to spool the paper. It was a lost technology; in any case the show was really interesting. And it proved that you can actually have a show of Electronic Literature as long as you put some other cool stuff in there, like, like regular tech, you know, manual typewriters. But the bottom line for me is artworks. It's difficult to display them as artworks. I mean, you have a desktop computer, I mean, iPads are a little more ‘arty’, especially if you can embed them something but you know desktop computers laptops and the cache is kind of gone. You know, you're inviting people to come to a gallery for a unique experience not to come and do something that you can do at home. And so, I’d love to curate, you know… Kathi Inman Berens and Dene Grigar. Okay, Kathy, Inman Behrens and Dene Grigar curated the show at the Library of Congress in April 2013. And that show, like I said, I was in a piece of that show, and also performed in that in the Library of Congress as well. And that the show was great because they able to put all sorts of different things involved into the show…different technologies. But once again, by online, listen, you know, I'm going to come to a gallery so I can, I can play with an iPad that I can play with at home? And so, I'd want to talk to someone. That'd be interesting to me, like, not just simply to do more performances, but also to talk to some about the possibilities of, you know, how do you curate or create a show of Electronic Literature in such a way that it's actually a unique experience?

HG: What I think is interesting is that you're talking about curation as a three dimensional experience. But there is a lot to be said about digital curation and the curation of online exhibitions. For us, for example, there are so many works by Charles Burchfield, and through a digital medium, we can curate exhibitions that we could never curate a person.

AB: That's a really good point. And actually, that's actually the natural fit. I've actually curated such online shows before.

HG: My last question for you…is fairly unique given the media that you work in but imagine a young writer in a similar vein to yours to you. I don't even want to call them an electronic writer. I just want to call him a writer. But imagine a young writer who works in similar media. What advice do you have for them starting to explore this field?

AB: Dagnabbit! this always kind of you that question, isn't there? Jeez!

HG: Or you could even say if you could talk to yourself in 1998, you know, what are some things even you would say to yourself to think of that, you know, now that you didn't know then?

AB: I do have the answers to these. One, as I said before, and I think probably the most important, is to never create anything that you wouldn't want to read yourself and enjoy reading yourself. Two, know enough about the context within which you're creating to know whether what you're creating is new or not. Three, always take risks. Never be satisfied with following the norm. Push yourself further than you would have imagined. Five, never be satisfied. There's no six, no six, let there never be a sixth. Five is enough. That's what it's about. That's your fingers in the hand right there.

HG: That’s it! Alan, is there anything else you'd like to say?

No, thank you very much. You’re very perceptive and a great interviewer and a great listener. Thank you. You had some some very good questions…they were probing and making me think, I appreciate that. And I just for the record, I really appreciate what the Burchfield is doing. I'm honored and pleased to be a Living Legacy,

HG: And Alan, we are so excited to have you participate in the second year of the project. I mean, what you do is really unique, even within the diverse types of art that we're trying to encapsulate with this project, and we're so excited to be able to have this time to talk more about it.