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Barbara Dellenback: From KLCC Media, this is the Oregon Grapevine. I'm Barbara Dellenback. The Oregon Grapevine highlights fresh-pressed conversations with people who are actively and passionately creating the present and future in which they wish to live. Robert Arellano is the founding director of the Center for Emerging Media and Digital Arts at Southern Oregon University. Thank you, Robert, for being on the Oregon Grapevine.
Robert Arellano: I'm so happy to be here. Thank you, Barbara.
Dellenback: There are simple and more complicated ways to explain the art and work you create, so I'd like to start with the simple version. What does that center do, and how does it affect all of us?
Arellano: Southern Oregon University brought me here going on 16 years ago now, in 2010. A real visionary dean, my dear friend and mentor Alyssa Arp, wanted an interdisciplinary center that would bridge across computer science, art, what we had at the time as a video production program, as well as literary arts. What I do, what I have been doing for over 30 years now, is work at the intersection of those fields. The easy explanation for the Emerging Media Program at SOU is digital storytelling. We tell stories across all kinds of platforms, not only digital but interactive platforms in the real world as well.
Dellenback: That includes e-literature, for example. If you were going to read a piece that you all have created, it's not just words. It's pictures, it's many things. Are there links to other places? Can you explain in a conversational way how it works?
Arellano: Yes. I like to start with this, especially because we're coming up on a significant anniversary for me, and I think for American literature in digital format. Web 1.0, 30 years ago this summer, I wrote the first web novel. It actually was born five years earlier in the great American postmodern novelist Robert Coover's workshop at Brown in 1991, and it was the first-ever master's thesis, an MFA in creative writing, submitted at what was at that time a 230-year-old university's graduate school. It's called Sunshine 69, and it's still online. You can read it right now. This summer I'm going to be doing a series of online and real-world events to acknowledge the anniversary. It includes images and sound, but it is mostly words. That was something I picked up from Robert Coover: keep the prose, the primacy of the prose, in the foreground, as he used to say. We thought of it at the time as something like interactive storytelling, which we know well from Wikipedia, but in this case fiction and imaginative, sometimes surrealist, literary experiences.
Dellenback: Over the decades there has been talk about books and reading going away, and obviously there are still books and there is still reading. But there's also something else, something that has expanded beyond the book you hold in your hands. You are around all kinds of people, students and adults, and sometimes those are the same. What is your perspective, or what do you hear from people, about that conversation?
Arellano: Over the waves of decades now, I thought that some of Coover's early New York Times Book Review cover stories, like the one titled by the editors, without his permission, "The End of Books" in the summer of 1993, that has not come to pass, fortunately. I am also the author of six novels in print, and I still prefer, for my own reading experience, a good old-fashioned print-bound book. What I've been happy to see in the most recent wave is that Gen Z students in my classes now love interactive storytelling as an adjunct to their book reading and their online surfing. They call it interactive fiction. They use platforms that we might think of as more fan-fiction focused. Some of them in my advanced digital narrative course are writing stories based in video games, then bringing those out into the literary world. They keep teaching me new things. It's cool that across what's been two or three overlapping generations since I was a student, it's as strong as ever, and people are telling stories on new and innovative media all the time.
Dellenback: This is tangential, but I imagine it also affects your work. AI is a specter that is everywhere, and it touches on everything we can think about in terms of taking away jobs, writing and creativity. How does it factor into your world? Are people embracing it and using it, or are they unsettled by it, or all of those things?
Arellano: I really want to answer on behalf of my students for this one. I think I was a little more ready to let AI in, as you know, as early as a year and a half or two years ago, when all of us were maybe experimenting for the first time with that free version. I've always chosen not to make an account with OpenAI, for instance. But my students told me, and I have graphic design students as well as writing students, that they wanted me to keep it out of the classroom. I'm glad they did, because as an artist and a creator, I'm realizing you can't just let a little bit in. You crack the door, and it's like that scene from "Close Encounters": you get blasted by both the seductive echo chamber of the incessant affirmation of the chatbot, but you also get drawn in by the artificiality that at the same time seems so seductive in the images, and not just images but deepfake videos, the ability to simulate sounds and voices, type something in and have 500 different characters try to do a reading. So I'm all for staving off the "you shall be assimilated" moment as long as possible.
Dellenback: One footnote for students and people who are studying emerging technologies: what is an emerging technology, and from that, what are people doing with that major and that study? Where is it going professionally? I'm imagining it's not everyone just writing novels.
Arellano: So true, Barbara. I'm glad you asked, because this is that time of year when folks across Oregon and other parts of the Pacific Northwest are trying to decide what college to attend. I still think we're a differentiator at SOU, partly because in 2010 we chose the word "emerging," and it wasn't just me. It was a team of great faculty from all those departments I mentioned, and we realized the process was still being written. People were using terms like new media, multimedia and digital media, and we thought "emerging" best encompassed what we were doing. It covered mostly what I think of as the three legs of the stool: graphic design, a bit of interactive storytelling with my own digital narrative work, and the beginnings of game development, animation and motion graphics. Now it includes UX/UI, app prototyping that students do in our foundation-level classes, and VR, where students create immersive worlds using assets borrowed from Steam. In about 10 weeks, one student can create something that looks like Fortnite or Red Dead Redemption 2. It's incredible. But we still keep storytelling in the foreground. You can have all the flashy bells and whistles you want, but this is going to emerge on the basis of voices that still have integrity, literary and journalistic. We have a sound design certificate now, where students do several levels of beginning and intermediate podcast and radio production. Thanks to JPR, the NPR affiliate Jefferson Public Radio here on campus, our students still get internships in radio, and that's great, because we know now that radio is as much about the streaming later as it is about the playing over the airwaves now.
Dellenback: I'm just going to back up for a second. You used the word VR, which is virtual reality, correct? Just throwing that out there as an acronym.
Arellano: I'm glad you did, because it also allows me to mention AR, augmented reality. The famous example from some years back is Pokemon Go, which allowed us to look at our phones and see things in a collective VR world transposed upon our actual visual material world. That's AR, augmented reality.
Dellenback: You brought up gaming in terms of people creating games or using them to tell stories. Is it all under one large umbrella? There's gaming, there's esports, there's emerging technology, some of which is of course beyond someone of my age to totally understand experientially. How does it all relate and move into the future together?
Arellano: I'm a fellow traveler in that, and if it weren't my full-time job I don't know how I would keep up. I was just telling my students yesterday that in our best workshops, it really is peer to peer. They're teaching each other more than I could ever teach them alone as their coach. It's more like a long-distance run than a sprint, and we carry each other along sometimes, waiting up and making sure no one gets too far ahead. One of the characteristics I find most attractive is that students are still playing tabletop RPGs, and I learned that acronym from them: role-playing games. They're playing Dungeons and Dragons, they're playing board games, and they move fluidly, code-switching between the digital and the material world. That's really exciting to me. They're more comfortable doing that and recognizing that both online gaming and real-world play are important, interwoven with each other and with their interpersonal experiences and family life. We recently taught a course called Intergenerational Game Space about people playing across generations of family and community. They really are leading the way and showing me how to stay at least current, if not relevant, in my own work.
Dellenback: I'm just laughing at a thought that's crossing my mind, which is the classic old story of someone coming home and saying, "Mom, I'm studying philosophy," and the parents just looking at them like, what are you ever going to do with a philosophy degree? To some degree, I can imagine there's a similar generational gap when someone comes home and says they're studying emerging media, and their parents look at them like, what is that?
Arellano: I'm glad you mentioned that, because I want to circle back to the heart of the matter: the jobs out there. The parent generation, who I often meet only on the last day, you know, you know students for four years and then parents come to commencement and you finally get to say thanks for trusting your student to us for those years, they more than ever are seeing it. It started to happen when we would teach app prototyping and a student would go home on break and show their family a fully working example of their original mobile app idea on their phone. The parents would say, "You're learning this, and it involves graphic design, it involves interactive experience, UX/UI, and it often involves innovative ideas about business and philanthropic potential for emerging media." As well as in other examples we're now seeing: students are getting hired to create short streaming Instagram reels for local and regional businesses, because social media strategy and social media storytelling, terms I prefer over "being an influencer or a creator" though they're adjacent, are actual needs that some larger public relations and marketing agencies haven't picked up on as nimbly as freelance and small-company student organizations have.
Dellenback: This field of academia that is emerging media, and which SOU is to some degree leading the way on, are there other schools or institutions that you find are also doing it in creative ways, and with whom you have conversations?
Arellano: Yes, and in fact this week I'll be celebrating with my friends at Washington State University Vancouver the 15th anniversary of their Electronic Literature Lab, which they call the ELL or the E-Lit Lab for short. They've been both preserving and archiving the history, now over 30 years old, of emerging media, and discussing what's next. And my own alma mater, Brown University, is also creating an electronic research repository through its university libraries that's integrated with the 200-plus-year-old library collections at the school. It's great that digital archiving is also taking into account innovation and scholarship going forward. And sometimes there's an outlier that just blows me away. I know a professor in Boulder, Colo., who has a PhD program called Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance, IAWP for short. There are people who are doctors of this now. So there are good programs in every time zone, if you will.
Dellenback: How did you go from studying with Robert Coover, who was not exactly traditional, to realizing that interactive storytelling was what intrigued and inspired you? I happen to be, oddly enough, a fan of his.
Arellano: I say that with two minds, because Coover never himself published anything on these platforms, and I was taking note of that. I was his teaching assistant, and when he went on sabbatical I became junior faculty and spent 10 years on the faculty at Brown, after six years as an undergraduate and then graduate student. Myself having written six conventional novels, I still go back to the print-bound novel. But I want to give you a good example from Oregon literary history, which has an incredible richness and variety of novelistic innovation and experimentation. I think that's what Robert Coover always believed, and why he wanted to be a teacher if not a practitioner, is that it was a place for innovation, a place to create new kinds of stories, and therefore new relationships between the author and reader. That was what originally attracted me and got me to write Sunshine 69: that excitement of giving the reader a choice, or thousands of possible choices. Sunshine 69 is about 300 chapters, with a variety of links, some just a sentence long, some requiring you to scroll before reaching the bottom. Between those 300 passages there are over 5,000 different links, creating thereby hundreds of millions of reading possibilities. That's what attracted me. Then about 10 years ago I realized the 50th anniversary of Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion" was coming up. I taught it in a traditional English class, and we discussed how the non-linear experimentation of stream of consciousness, the way Kesey would sometimes swap voices in the middle of a phrase, was its own form of literary experimentation in print. I think of Ursula K. Le Guin and all the great rich Oregon history of imaginative experimentation in science fiction, and that still goes hand in hand. The history of digital literatures and the print canon of contemporary American letters are being woven together.
Dellenback: A piece of your life and culture that we haven't touched on here, but which I know is related to your writing and work, is the fact that you are, I believe, a first-generation Cuban American. Setting aside the political moment, how is that experience, the literature of it, affecting your perspective and what you write? How do you bring that into the world?
Arellano: I'm so glad we didn't leave that in the rearview mirror, because I've been to Cuba, I've almost lost count, but I know it's at least 23 visits since 1992. The 35th anniversary of my first trip is coming up next year, and I'll probably go back again. My first few trips were to where not only my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, but my brothers and sisters, all the last four of five siblings, were from Cuba. Before I was born, the family left, and so I felt like I was returning to my own patria, my own motherland, for the first time. I was so inspired. I was pen in hand constantly. I didn't have a laptop yet, of course, and seven or eight trips, sometimes twice a year, throughout the '90s left me with reams of raw material that I finally turned into a novel that was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2010: Havana Lunar. That's a double entendre. It's written in English, but "lunar" means both lunar and like a balloon in Spanish, and it can stand for a beauty mark or birthmark. That's a kind of crux to this Cuban noir, as my publisher Akashic Books out of Brooklyn helped me market it. I also wrote a standalone sequel to that novel called Havana Libre, peppered with some Spanglish here and there but an English-language novel I'm pretty proud of. Both have been turned into audiobooks, one of them by Blackstone Audio right here in Ashland. We love that we've got the world's largest independent audiobook producer right here. There's the Goliath, Audible, and then there's everyone else, and one of the largest in that remaining group is Blackstone. Those books really embody my somewhat fictionalized but genuine love for and experience with my Cuban heritage. I recommend them to anyone. I'm glad they're still in print and also available in audio and ebook formats. Check out the free sample on either Blackstone's or Audible's website, because the voice actor, Jonathan Davis, who has won a number of Audie Awards, does a fantastic job code-switching into the various dialects of Cuban and Cuban American Spanglish that I use.
Dellenback: What inspires you to do this work, and to take this kind of journey through life?
Arellano: I think I am being more inspired than ever by a fire not to let what's keeping me, and I think all of us, a little discouraged about the world also keep me from preserving and perpetuating what's exciting and essential about storytelling among humans. I would be remiss not to mention that SOU, my home institution, is in a real crisis right now. It's in the news, everyone can look it up. It's the real-time dismantling of a college that's really the only four-year university for 150 miles in any direction. A lot of folks, my friends and neighbors in Ashland, Phoenix, Talent and Medford, are going to lose their livelihoods. This process of SOU inviting me here 16 years ago to start this interdisciplinary center that I'm still keeping going with some good friends, I've got to perpetuate what it is that only we know how to do. As I would happily call myself a mid-career artist and educator, this is something I'm not finished building yet. So in order to rage, rage against the dying of the light of higher education, every day I get energy from the students. You'll carry this forward, and someday people will say you are the OGs, the originals, of the emerging media creativity world that was hopefully going to be with us for generations to come.
Dellenback: Oregon Grapevine is OG. That's how I refer to it, so I love it.
Arellano: I was thinking the same thing in my shorthand.
Dellenback: Now you know my little secret.
Arellano: You are. You really are.
Dellenback: My sons will be happy to hear that.
Arellano: Yep.
Dellenback: Anything you want to add, Robert, that we haven't covered? There are obviously deep places we can go, but just in general, something people should know about this field, and how to make it a little less scary. Can other people touch into it? How does that work?
Arellano: Shout out to the Miller Foundation. For those who don't know them: the James F. and Marion L. Miller Foundation's three-year commitment, which we are right now square in the middle of, supports mid-career artists through their Spark Award. That was a monetary award, but it also connected me with a cohort of 19 other Oregonians. This year's theme was literary and interdisciplinary arts, and it has re-energized me. I wanted to bring it up because the first year was musicians and composers, announced at the end of 2024. I met all my fellow cohort members in December, and next year is visual art. Lots of great information on the Miller Foundation's website. And it's worth saying, Oregon for whatever reason has the best support of any arts community, not just in the Pacific Northwest but perhaps anywhere right now. With the NEA being dismantled, and the NEH having so much of what would seem like ideological cancellation happening at the program level, where people can find their funding revoked or clawed back over a single word that sets off an internet search, for the Miller Foundation to step in with a grant that is frankly even richer than I think the NEA annual arts grants, and to give it specifically to Oregonians who are keeping this kind of work going, really speaks to why I feel like we're in the right place at the right time. With the legacy of Ms. Le Guin and Mr. Kesey, and filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt, and friends and colleagues like Nisha Burton, who I know was on the Oregon Grapevine some weeks back, we're going to keep the flame of telling the stories of regular Oregonians alive.
Dellenback: Thank you so much, Robert Arellano, for being on the Oregon Grapevine, for doing the work you're doing, and for giving me and the listeners a little insight into this world of emerging media.
Arellano: Barbara, thank you so much for keeping these stories going. I'm down with OG.
Dellenback: The secret's out, I guess.
Arellano: Yeah, it is. Call it by its name.
Dellenback: You've been listening to KLCC Media's The Oregon Grapevine: fresh-pressed conversations with people who are actively and passionately creating the present and future in which they wish to live.
