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A World Exhilarating and Wrong: Theatrical Improvisation on the Internet

IN 1994, THE AUTHOR BEGAN USING THE MULTI-USER ENVIRONMENTS known as MOOs as a type of performance space or online theater. Technically, MOOs are a form of computer software and database accessible by multiple users via the Internet. Practically, however, users experience MOOs as a form of shared fiction that they create and inhabit simultaneously. The drama unfolds as text into a unique form of verbal theater with its own rules of structure and unexpected beauty of thought. The critic J.C.C. Mays once referred to the great Irish writer Flann O’Brien’s surreal comic fiction as “a world exhilarating and wrong.” By “wrong” he meant not morally wrong but askew, out of kilter with our usual sense of things. The world of MOOs is wrong in the same sense, but for that very reason it has great potential as an imaginal realm. Here the author looks at the distinctive characteristics of online performance through the lens of her recent experience as director, writer, and performer.