The Impermanence Agent: Project and Context

Introduction

The Impermanence Agent explores a model for literature/art that is specific to the Internet-connected personal computer. It is not like a book, which we pick up and read. It is not like a painting, which we visit and inspect. It is not like a hypertext artwork, on which we click. And, similarly, it is not like a story on a Web page, a picture on a Web page, a Web-based hypertext, or any other stand-alone artwork that is intended for our full attention. Instead, The Impermanence Agent is an artwork that operates as functions of the user's Web browser. The browser is approached as a daily computer tool, in which the artwork becomes part of the daily browsing experience.

When the Agent is engaged, user browsing causes a story to be told. This story is experienced peripherally, in a corner of the PC screen, over a period measured in days rather than minutes. And while it is presented in a small Web browser window, the Agent's story does not act as other Web content. It will only move forward as the user clicks on other Web sites (those not associated with the Agent), and there is no way in which to "click on" or navigate the Agent's content directly. Simultaneously, the Agent monitors the user's Web traffic, and here takes on the semi-autonomous character from which parallels with more traditional software agents (discussed below) can be drawn. The Impermanence Agent continually alters its story using material from the user's browsing (and occasionally intervenes in browsing itself). By the time the Agent's story is complete, the story's contents are nearly entirely determined by browsing actions of the individual reader.

Part I: A Storytelling Agent

This section describes our collaborative development of The Impermanence Agent, a Web-based storytelling agent that customizes its story for each user [figure 1]. The Agent is both a critique and employment of a number of Web technologies and mythologies. It begins with a story of remembrance and loss, a collage-story merging family history and personal narrative into relatively traditional fiction. Information from the user's Web browsing is used to customize this story, and this customization continues until none of the Agent's story remains. The Agent project bears some relation to Phil Agre's formulation of "critical technical practices"—and also to games the authors have played for decades.

i. Playing

We began playing together before we were even school age—when Brion's mom became Noah's babysitter. We like to make things, and we have a habit of finding materials in inappropriate places. One day we opened up Brion's front lawn to get two sprinkler assemblies for a robot we were building. They were brass, and the perforated heads rose up—clack—when water passed through. No one was pleased with us.

Brion's father worked for Ford Aerospace, and Noah's father wrote for Infoworld. When we opened up software to make our own versions, to make parodies of them, no one at home minded. Brion was almost always the one at the keyboard, and we talked continually as he typed. We mostly rewrote the text portions of games, creating new narratives from the re-purposed parts of their "interaction mechanics"—new meanings using the same programmatic structures. And we wrote the Klingon warships pink.

Recently we have been playing again, making a project called The Impermanence Agent (collaborating with a. c. chapman and Duane Whitehurst). We're playing using the tools of the e-commerce Web, within the technocultural narrative of "agents," and making an artifact that operates as a Web-based customizing storyteller, driven by the daily act of browsing. We have designed this Agent to tell a story of impermanence...