Streaming Media Trail

Streaming Media Trail [1] (Fig. 2), Part I of the 3-part hyper-epic Revelations of Secret Surveillance, is a fictional examination of the impact of intelligence-agency stalking of artists, writers and musicians.

A web-based metaphoric narrative that begins with U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance of German artists and writers who came to this country to escape the Nazis in the World War II era, Streaming Media Trail uses a combination of fictional juxtapositions and extensive documentation to examine how a climate of government persecution of the arts has been created. It also brings questions of reality interference into the present by presenting both fictional interpretation and background documentation of the existence and impact of global electronic communications surveillance systems such as ECHELON [2,3] and brain scanning technologies that read and interfere with people's thoughts [4-9].

In a sense, Streaming Media Trail is an unfolding mystery that in its first screen states, "The surveillance devices observing this scene are not visible. The people responsible for their presence have not been revealed." As the work unfolds, no one solution to the mystery is offered. Rather, the reader accompanies the writer through a harrowing process of understanding that moves from a poem by an exiled German poet to a conversation with a reporter who is investigating covert eugenic-based manipulation and on to a performance artist's metaphoric juxtaposition of interference—in his own life and in the lives of musicians—with a chain of events that begins with Operation Paperclip, in which U.S. intelligence services hid evidence of Nazi war crimes when they brought some 1,000 Nazi scientists to this country in the aftermath of World War II [10].

When I began to write this work, I started with the idea of using a fictional approach to examine the climate for artists and the arts in the United States that has been created by such government interference as the House Un American Activities Committee's role blacklisting writers [11] and by the role of the extreme right in curtailing funding for individual artists [12].

Fig. 2.

A screen from Canto Ten of Streaming Media Trail.

© 2004 Judy Malloy

As I researched the background, however, a much more harrowing history of persecution unfolded. At every step in the creation of this work, some new revelation changed a shapeless paranoia into a cruel reality—how the FBI deliberately derailed University of California educator Clark Kerr's career [13], evidence of FBI persecution of rock musicians [14], evidence of the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in fostering a drug culture [15], evidence of covert CIA interference in the arts [16].

In tandem with overwhelming evidence of governmental tampering in the lives of the creative community, Streaming Media Trail and the other two parts of Revelations of Secret Surveillance—Dorothy on the Western Front and The Day of the Exhibition—seek also to remind the reader of the creative community's heroes—from escaped slave Frederick Douglass, who published the antislavery newspaper the North Star; to Varian Fry, who rescued over 1,000 Jewish and anti-Nazi artists and intellectuals trapped in occupied France; to actor/filmmaker Leslie Howard, whose films supported the British war effort before the plane he was on was shot down by a squadron of Junkers 88 fighters; to photographer Robert Giard, who traveled the country by bus photographing gay and lesbian artists.

With some modifications, Streaming Media Trail uses Narrabase IV, the interface I designed for Dorothy Abrona McCrae [17]. Housing a narrative that can be approached either as a diffuse hyperfictional experience or, for those who prefer it, as a more sequential page-through experience in which the unfolding of the story is of primary importance—Narrabase IV is designed to create a seamless reading experience in the contemporary Web environment, where art and literature exist side by side with commercial and informational "pages." In this interface, as in much of my work, the emphasis is on the lexias—short, screen-based units of text that in my implementation can either stand alone or be...