ust as the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers) interfaces of mod-ern computers provide a context for much digital literature, it is also important to note that other digital literature embeds its computation and data in utterly different contexts. Perhaps it will help clarify the issues if we ask ourselves an-other puzzling question, such as one first posed to me by Roberto Sima-nowski: How do we understand the difference between Guillaume Apolli-naire's "ll Pleut" and Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv's Text Rain? Apol-li . , . G nau:e s poem 1s made up of letters falling down the page like rain. Utterback and Achituv's installatiott, takes a video image of the audience standing before it and projects that image on the wall in front of the audience, with the addi-tion (in the video scene) of the letters of a poem falling down like rain and resting on the bodies of their readers. Obviously, one difference is the passage of time in Text Rain, and another difference is that Text Rain is audience inter-active (lifting up a hand on which letters rest causes them to be raised as well). But, at least as fundamentally, another difference is that Text Rain is situated in a physical space other than a printed page or a computer screen, in which the method of interaction is the movement of the readers' bodies (which are rep-resented within the work itself). I would suggest that one way of conceptual-izing this is through the idea of a work's smface, which gives the audience ac-cess to the results of its data and processes and through which any audience interaction occurs. The surfaces of "ll Pleut" and Text Rain are obvio
In digital works when audience participation is required, what is the role of the audience member? Here, we see that the audience's bodies are used as images for this piece, as well as determining the behavior of the text in this piece. In this way, are they partly author as well?