INTERVIEW OF ADRIENNE EISEN BY GRACE STEARNS
Spring, 2000.

Grace Stearns: How would you describe "Six Sex Scenes" in one to two sentences?

Adrienne Eisen: A hypertext novella about personal memory, public history and sexual frustration.

GS:How did you become involved in Internet-based art works?

AE: I had a boyfriend who was working at Philips Media before CD-ROMs or the Web. Philips made CD-i and they were trying to figure out what content should go on something that is interactive. I happened to have been writing in a nonlinear way already, but had no way to present it except throwing it up in the air and seeing how it fell. So I forced my way into the corporate Philips people to show them my writing and get them to put it on CD-i.

GS: Would you consider "Six Sex Scenes" to fall under the category of Digital Narrative (if no, how would you describe the category)?

AE: I don't know... I wish it fell under New York Times Bestsellers.

GS: Do you prefer more text-based works that focus on the content of the piece or do you see yourself shifting to a more image-based or interactive style of working?

AE: I don't do images. I'm a writer. I could see collaborating with someone who wants a writer, but I'll never be a Flash artist or anything like that.

GS: Do you consider computer-based writings to be an evolved form of more traditional literary works or as something completely different?

AE: I think computer-based writing is just different. Like, there's poetry, there are comic strips, there's hypertext. I think that just like a good comic strip could not be a sonnet, good hypertext could not be anything else. So to that extent, I guess computer-based writing opened up the world for certain people to express themselves who would have otherwise been squashed into forms of writing that are unnatural to those writers.