And so it makes perfect sense to me that the first graduate fellow in electronic literature at Brown, Talan Memmott, was trained as a visual artist in painting, video, installation art, and performance, and that he has worked in theater, as both an actor and a director. Memmott similarly feels that “electronic writing sort of pulls together all of these interests – from painting, to performance, theater and text. It’s all part of what I think of as electronic writing” (Brown has its first graduate fellow, unpag.). Although the audience is limited owing, in part, to the physical limitations of the cave itself (only a handful of people can be accommodated at one time and the caves are very expensive to construct and calibrate), Memmott believes the cave nevertheless “puts literature into exhibition mode,” and that “there’s great potential for what I refer to as narr-act-ivity, rather than narrativity” (Curtis 2000b: n. pag..).

With respect to this, there’s one other item I’d like to note before concluding. Theorist Greg Ulmer, who coined the term “electracy,” has noted that with respect to electronic literacies, the kindergarten curriculum has much to oVer the high schools. He writes “I am not saying to forget literacy, but to include aesthetic and performance experience in the educational process. K–3 teachers … allow the children to … relate to the story not so much in terms of meaning but doing. High schools to become electrate need to add this aesthetic performance dimension to learning as well” (Memmott, n. pag.) And many of us would agree that more Kindergarten activities – hands-on, experiential – probably wouldn’t be so bad at the university, either. Because as readers of electronic texts, it will be through doing – experimenting, making sense of, puzzling through – that we will begin to know and to learn what kinds of knowledges and ways of understanding these new artefacts demand, encourage, or make possible.

What I’ve suggested to you here today is that I think, at a minimum, we will be challenged by electronic texts to:
–learn to read databases. And if Lev Manovich is right, the database will increasingly compete with traditional narrative for our attention;
–we will learn to read digital constellations – to see the materiality and depth of code, the sculptures of stories, the scaffolding of essays, their shapes;
–we will continue to crave stories, closure, narrative pleasure, I think, but perhaps we will increasingly recognize code, its intrusions and enhancements of texts. Perhaps by rendering information more opaque these texts can, paradoxically, allow us to see things anew;
–we will, through virtual reality technologies like the cave, inhabit information architectures and change the stories we wander through for our having been there. There will be a new kind of “literature” in immersive virtual reality not readily described by old terms or understood with reference to the printed page.

Finally, and with a great deal of excitement, the only thing I can predict with any certainty: we will need to learn to read shapes and texts that none of us here has even begun to imagine.