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 · 26 Apr 2019

  

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April, 1994 _EJournal_ Volume 4 Number 1 ISSN 1054-1055


There are 646 lines in this issue.





An Electronic Journal concerned with the


implications of electronic networks and texts.


3256 Subscribers in 37 Countries





University at Albany, State University of New York





EJOURNAL@ALBANY.bitnet





CONTENTS: [This is line 19]





Eliza Meets the Postmodern [ Begins at line 49 ]


by Norman N. Holland


Department of English


University of Florida


NNH@NERVM.bitnet





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Eliza Meets the Postmodern [l. 49]





Norman N. Holland





Already we have a cliche: computers have launched writing into a


new Gutenberg Age. But already we have a misunderstanding, as is


so typical of literary theory. Theorists have proclaimed that


hypertext and multimedia prove various postmodern notions of the


literary work. This, I think, is not so, but I think the theorists


do raise a larger question. What *do* the new computer genres


imply about the postmodern and literary theory?





_Postmodern_ calls for an extensional definition, a point-to. In


postmodern literature, I think of the self-reflexive writings of


Borges, Barth, and Julian Barnes, to mention only Bs. When I read


_Letters_ or _Flaubert's Parrot_, my mind flickers constantly


between being absorbed in the story and wondering whether I am


reading literature or some new hybrid of forms celebrating its own


hybridity. In the visual arts, I read the Pop Art of Andy Warhol


or Roy Lichtenstein as asking me to think about the nature of art,


much as, in a very different way, the "white paintings" of Robert


Ryman do. I reflect, in a double sense. So with conceptual


sculpture. Is a set of instructions for making a chair somehow


artistic in a sense that the chair is not? I admire postmodern


architecture with its quotation and off-centering and out-sizing of


traditional forms. Perhaps the most accessible example is Philip


Johnson's AT&T building: straight international style, but with a


giant Chippendale curlicue on top. Or Michael Graves' teakettle


with its deliberate flouting of Bauhaus functionality. In film one


could mention Jean-Luc Godard, who has always worked with the


nature of movies. Even a popular film like Arnold Schwarzenegger's


_Last Action Hero_, plays with the relation between clearly


imaginary filmic reality, "reality" as represented in realistic


film, and the differently real worlds of onscreen and offscreen


audiences. I find it all vibrant, shimmering, disconcerting,


disorienting-- just fine. [l. 84]





I like less the usual theories about the postmodern. Most people


have adopted Frederic Jameson's criteria.^1 [_New Left Review_,


1984] As I read him, Jameson proposes two qualities to define the


postmodern. One is the quotation of other material in a spirit of


"iteration" and parody. The other is de-centering: focusing on


what is marginal, on the edges; preferring what is associational


and random to the logical and hierarchical. I think that's all


true, exemplified in the various works I've mentioned. But I also


think we can cut deeper.





We can find a straightforward starting point in that postmodernism


is a reaction against modernism. What characterized modernism? I


would say, it was a definition of the work of art as a thing in


itself, not referring to a reality outside itself (as, say,


nineteenth-century fiction and painting did). Think of the great


modernist texts: _Ulysses_, _The Waste Land_, _A la recherche du


temps perdu_, _The Pisan Cantos_. Think of modern painting from


early non-objective art to Abstract Expressionism, the massive


sculptures of Lipschitz or Chillida, the Bauhaus or international


style in architecture, or a painting like _Guernica_. These


modernist works are solidly *there*, whole and integral and


complete. They seem almost defiantly to assert themselves against


the societies or the previous arts to which the artist was


reacting.





Postmodernism reacts in turn against that modernist solidity. The


postmodern artist turns questioner. What have we here? Is this


sculpture? Is this a painting? A novel? Why am I doing art? How


do I make it new? How do *you* complete this skewed work?





I would sum it up this way. < In postmodern art, artists use as a


major part of their material > *our* < ideas about what they are


working with >. Postmodern art addresses the very activity that we


carry on when we perceive art. It works with our knowledge,


beliefs, expectations, wishes. It works with the hypotheses we are


constantly trying out on the world, including works of art. This is


a concept of the postmodern that places the postmodern historically


and, to some extent, explains the phenomenon. [l.123]





Often, the artist evokes our ideas by quotation, as Jameson


suggests. Often we feel disoriented or surprised, because the


artist has used those quotations in a jokey, parodying way. Often


the artist upsets our beliefs or explanations by making things


off-center, marginalizing what would ordinarily be central, or


violating familiar ideas of logic or order. In other words,


Jameson's criteria are sound, but seem arbitrary, even superficial.


This view provides an underlying rationale for them.





What then are hypertext and multimedia? Modern or postmodern? Just


for the record, hypertext means an electronic text such that, when


you are reading, say, _Great Expectations_ on your computer screen,


you can "click" on a word in the text and bring up a short essay on


religion or the penal system in Victorian England or display the


Marcus Stone illustrations or portraits of Dickens or critical


essays.^2 [Landow/ Intermedia] In hypertext, the medium is mostly


text. Multimedia means that, when you are listening to Beethoven's


Ninth, you can call up the score or related pieces by Beethoven or


rock and roll versions or a description of life in Vienna in


1820.^3 [Robert Winter/ Voyager CD/ 1989] With multimedia, you get


text plus sound plus photographic-quality images. Fundamentally,


though, hypertext and multimedia are the same, and people combine


them in the portmanteau word, *hypermedia*.





Hypermedia have become remarkably rich. _Perseus_ combines


classical texts with dictionaries, glosses, maps, and architectural


diagrams, spanning much of ancient Greek literature. _A la


rencontre de Philippe_ allows the student to enter into (quite


literally!) the search for an apartment in Paris-- newspaper


advertisements, answering machines, telephoning, an angry plumber,


and all. With _Interactive Shakespeare_, the student can "read"


_Hamlet_ as folio, quarto, gloss, or the cinema versions of


Laurence Olivier and Franco Zeffirelli. [l. 157]





Labeling hypermedia as postmodern rests on two claims.^4 [Landow/


_Hypertext_, etc.] One, hypertext equals webs of text rather than


linear text. There is no center, no particular starting point.


That perhaps exaggerates a bit, since we did, after all, start with


the linear structure called _Great Expectations_. But, it is


argued, because hypermedia do not require us to follow a centering,


hierarchical, logical-outline structure, they are postmodern.


Second, in some forms of hypertext, one reader can annotate the


text so the next reader can get what the first reader said. This


electronic co-authorship, it is said, also de-centers, because it


cancels the centrality of the original author. Here, too, though,


this is not as exotic as it seems. It is rather like finding a book


in the library all marked up by a previous user.





In general, hypermedia simply do electronically what a reader or


researcher might do "by hand" in a library. That is, one could


interrupt one's listening to Beethoven's Ninth in a music library


to consult a score, a biography, or criticism. In a way,


hypermedia are simply a variorum or a Norton Critical Edition done


electronically. They are by no means as radical a departure from


familiar forms as claimed.





In fact, the hypermedia author can be even more dictatorial than


the print author. The hypermedia author can control not only the


visible text, but the very jumps the reader makes within that text


or to other texts. The author can make unavailable to the reader


connections or interpretations or intertextualities other than


those the author chooses.





For all these reasons the claim that hypermedia somehow validate


popular notions of the postmodern seems exaggerated. The mere fact


that you *can* make a text toward which people *can* make


associative rather than logical, hierarchical connections doesn't


mean that the text in some intrinsic sense *is* that way. It may


very well be just the opposite.





The confusion arises because of the error, endemic in the world of


literary theory, of attributing to texts what is really action by


the reader. Texts, finally, are inert objects. They are


inanimate, powerless, and passive. They don't *do* things. Readers


act, texts don't.





One would think this obvious enough, but I hear endlessly in the


drone of modern literary theory that texts deconstruct their


apparent meanings or impose other texts or marginalize people or


de-center themselves. Claims that texts determine our perceptions


of them fly in the face of modern perceptual psychology and


cognitive science, which include the very large field of the


psychology of reading. I once asked our reference librarian to


check the computer index of the psychological literature (PSYCLIT)


to see how many articles in psychological journals used _reading_


in their titles or as keyword. 5000 in eight years! This is not a


field where one can simply say the text de-centers or deconstructs


or determines its meaning. 5000 articles say that matters are not


that simple. [l.213]





Those who experiment with actual readers and actual texts do come


to a fairly unanimous conclusion. Most cognitive scientists hold a


*constructive* view of perceiving, knowing, remembering, and


reading. That is, you *construe*. You act. You do something.


More specifically, you do something in two stages. One, you bring


hypotheses to bear on what you are reading (or perceiving, knowing,


remembering). You bring pre-existing ideas to bear, and two, you


get feedback from what you are addressing. Then, are you pleased,


bored, annoyed, anxious? How you feel about that feedback


determines how you continue the constructive process.^5 [see Taylor


and Taylor, 1983]





If one views reading as the psychologists do, then a lot of


contemporary literary theory sounds nonsensical. Almost any


sentence in which the text is the subject of an active verb begins


to seem silly. Even sentences which separate properties of a text


(like structure or meaning) from some human's perception of those


properties sound fishy. Most turn out to be quite confused.


"Foundationalist" would be an appropriate and fashionable epithet.





Where does this notion of the active text come from? I think it


mostly comes from a misreading of Saussure. Postmodern theorists


have adopted his model of language: a totality of signs in which a


sound-of-word or signifier produces a meaning or signified.^6


[Culler, 1976] But this is to take poor old Saussure to a place he


never intended to go. As he tells us early in his lectures, he was


trying to produce an account of language free of psychology,


sociology, anthropology -- a purely linguistic account. Today's


theorists, however, translate him back into a psychological


statement about how readers read.





As a result, most of today's theorists substitute supposed


activities or properties of the text for what are really activities


by the reader. This newest idea, that hypermedia are postmodern,


also mixes up text and reader this way. The theorist focuses on


the de-centered look and feel of what is on the screen and ignores


the activity of author and reader that does the de-centering. It


is, after all, the reader who has to click on a word or choose from


a menu or stop to listen to the music. All the author does is


automate choices that readers have always had. If we chose to read


_Great Expectations_ without interruption or listen to Beethoven's


Ninth from beginning to end, we would not get the look and feel of


hypermedia.





Even the active, annotating reader is only functioning like another


author. The annotator provides a text for subsequent readers just


as any other author does. It is a text that subsequent readers can


read, skim, or ignore-- like any other. [l. 262]





In short, hypermedia simply use a computer to assist in tasks that


have always been open to readers. There is no radical change here


in the nature of literary texts, nor even much change in readers'


activities. What differences there are are differences in degree,


not kind. One could, after all, sit down in a college library to


read _Great Expectations_ and laboriously surround oneself with


treatises on Victorian prisons, religion, or lawyers. The computer


just makes that easier.





Are there electronic texts, though, that are definitively


postmodern? I think there are, although they are far less


razzle-dazzle than the hypermedia. Consider the familiar ELIZA


program. Joseph Weizenbaum invented it back in 1963, naming it for


the heroine of Shaw's _Pygmalion_.^7 [ACM, 1966] Like Henry


Higgins, Weizenbaum had taught the computer to talk-- sort of. As


the "reader" types text onto the screen, the program scans it for


key words. Then it turns around and displays various texts in


response to those key words as if it were answering the "reader."





Although, in principle, ELIZA could be sensitive to thousands of


such words, it was designed to imitate a Rogerian ("uh-huh") kind


of psychotherapist. That way, demands on its seeming ability to


answer would be small. The responses can simply be canned


sentences. "Yes." "Tell me more." Or the program can respond by


substituting a word for the key word. The machine hears "mother,"


perhaps, and asks about "family." At its most sophisticated level,


the program can reverse or incorporate a typed-in sentence so as to


make a reply apparently based on an understanding of what has been


said by the "reader." This is a sample of its dialogue (the


computer is in capitals): [l. 293]





I need some help, that much seems certain.





WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU IF YOU GOT SOME HELP?





Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother.





TELL ME MORE ABOUT YOUR FAMILY.





My mother takes care of me.





WHO ELSE IN YOUR FAMILY TAKES CARE OF YOU?





My father.





YOUR FATHER.





You are like my father in some ways.^8


[Boden, _AI_, 1977]





As in that last response from the "reader," people relate to ELIZA


as though it were another human being, because it *says* things.





That is why I call it (her?) postmodern. These programs-- texts,


really --create the illusion that they are animate beings. The


writer writes them, then takes hands off and leaves them to run on


their own, just as writers usually do. But the ELIZA programs,


once their writers let go, then create the illusion of acting more


or less of their own free will.





Although very simple, these programs have fooled a lot of people.


In fact, PARRY, designed to imitate a paranoiac, fooled most of


the psychiatrists who read its dialogues. Since 1991, the Boston


Computer Museum has been holding a competition for these humanoid


programs. The contest stages a "Turing test," the classic


behaviorist criterion for artificial intelligence. In a


conversation, can you tell the difference between responses typed


in by a person and responses generated by a machine? In 1991 and


1992 more than half the judges mistook one program for a human


being. Yet the program had been developed by one man in Queens


and now sells for a couple of hundred dollars. (Interestingly, in


1993 journalists substituted for lay judges, and nobody was


fooled.)





The original ELIZA program was also very simple. It ran in BASIC.


Even a novice like me could modify it. [l. 339]





Yet we readily take these relatively uncomplicated programs for


human. We trust them, so long as they behave fairly reasonably.


There are many anecdotes. One of the earliest concerns


Weizenbaum's secretary, who asked him to step outside because she


was beginning to discuss personal matters with the seeming


therapist. Conversely, there is a negative Eliza-effect. People


get quite frustrated and angry when the program fails to behave


naturally. This tells me (as a psychoanalytic critic) that we are


dealing with a failure of basic trust. We trust the program


because it "feeds" us satisfying answers. If it doesn't, we get


angry. We are experiencing the boundary merger (associated with


early oral experiences) that we allow in all literary "suspension


of disbelief."





As that analogy suggests, readers begin to treat ELIZA programs as


a kind of literature, particularly as they become more complicated


than the original, very simple ELIZA. Consider the


_CONVERSATIONS/ CHARACTER MAKER_ program developed by Janet Murray


in her creative writing class at MIT.^9 The program offers the


prospective writer a template on which to create a character.


That is, the student chooses keywords to which the ELIZA-type


program is to respond. Then the student specifies answers which


the program can make (plus priorities for different answers,


default answers, and so on). The student writer can thus create a


character: an evasive politician who dodges your questions; a


Jewish mother who keeps trying to feed you; a lover who is dumping


you.





The reader of such a program creates a conversation that is like a


little short story. The writer, having completed authorship, may


only have created what amounts to some stock phrases and some


computer code. The final "work of art" is the conversation that


results from what the reader puts into the program. This final


text will be variable, different for every reader and different


for every "reading" by the same reader. This work of art has no


clear boundaries between reader, writer, and text. It is, it


seems to me, completely de-centered. It is finally and


definitively postmodern in that it works wholly with what its


"reader" brings to bear. [l. 379]





Murray is edging her program toward greater sophistication. She


hopes to be able to vary answers according to semantic context, so


that the program will "know" whether _B-I-L-L_ refers to a dun, a


bird, or the President. She hopes to be able to supply the


program with "knowledge," in the form of scripts, so that it will


know what to expect in a restaurant, say, or a department store.


Then, by using story grammars (such as those of Propp or Lakoff),


she can allow the "reader" to move progressively through pieces of


a standard plot like: meet, be tested, overcome obstacle, achieve


goal, receive reward. The plot, again, can depend partly on the


"writer," partly on the "reader," and it will vary for each


reading.





Murray's program is relatively simple. Yet, from the point of


view of literary theory, it seems to me to go beyond much so-


called "Interactive Fiction." One of I.F.'s most talented


practitioners, Robert Coover, described a number of such programs


in the _New York Times Book Review_ (Aug. 29, 1993). Most are like


hypermedia. You choose. You may choose to "click" on this word


or that. As a result, you may get this or that text. You may


choose this ending or that. You may be offered forking paths, and


then you can choose different ways through an otherwise fixed text


from a repertoire of routes. Given permutations and combinations,


that repertoire can become very large.





Basically, though, most interactive fictions are not as fully


interactive as the ELIZA programs. We expect a fixed sequence in


a literary text, and I.F. does change that. But most I.F. texts


allow the reader no more input than the privilege of selection.


Today's I.F. is midway, perhaps, between ELIZA and hypermedia,


between modern and postmodern.





My criterion is, Does the text *do* things, as if it had a will of


its own, when it responds to the reader? If so, then definitely


postmodern. Or does it simply offer a reader choices? If so,


modern. One would have to judge interactive fictions one by one,


but clearly ELIZA and CONVERSATIONS allow readers more input than


merely choosing among passive alternatives. In fact they open up


startling possibilities. [l. 419]





Suppose one were to combine these programs that "talk back" with


virtual reality. That is, you put on a helmet and "see" a space


in which you "move" right and left, up and down, in and out,


through different rooms and passages. Suppose that in that space


there were computer-simulated people. Suppose you could talk to


them in an ELIZA way, and they would talk back, responding


variously to your various words.





What I am describing is "interactive drama" or the OZ project


(under Joseph Bates at Carnegie-Mellon). The technology is very


difficult, even more so than for hypermedia and interactive


fiction, but some of it will almost certainly be feasible within


the next few years. The Boston Computer Museum has a continuing


demonstration of virtual reality (VR), and in October 1993 the


Guggenheim Museum Soho exhibited VR works by a variety of video


and visual artists. You may remember Boopsie doing virtual


shopping in _Doonesbury_ --the goods are virtual but the bills are


real. (An image for late capitalism?)





In one of Project OZ's scenarios, you enter a bus station. You


manage to buy a ticket from a recalcitrant clerk. (ELIZA-type


dialogue here.) A man nearly blind from recent surgery is told by


the surly clerk to fill out forms. (More dialogue. Do you help


him or not?) As he (and you?) work on the forms, a young tough


comes in with a knife and harasses the blind man. (Further


dialogue. Do you intervene?) If you call the clerk's attention


to this, she gives you a gun. (Do you shoot?)





This is a play, and the authors have written lines. But what


lines you hear depend on what you say and do. You are being asked


to make choices, open-ended moral choices, like those of life, not


the multiple-choice options of interactive fiction or hypermedia.


Moreover, your choices have consequences that could frighten you


or reassure you or make you proud. You are acting in a play, like


a character in Pirandello, but the words and actions of this play


change in response to your words and actions. You are being asked


to discover yourself, just as you always are in literature.^10


[Bates, "VR ....," _Presence_, 1992] [l. 458]





The programs and machines to accomplish interactive drama will be


very large and complex. They will happen, I would say, by 1997,


but they have not happened yet. In the meantime, to test out the


ideas behind interactive drama, Bates and his colleagues have


hired human actors to impersonate the machines (which are, of


course, impersonating humans).^11 [Kelso, Weyhrauch, Bates;


"Dramatic Presence," _Presence_, 1993] Surely this is the


ultimate postmodern, de-centered irony.





Whatever the technological problems, though, we can now see that


the ELIZA genre, even the most rudimentary one back in 1963, had


already changed the nature of literature. Why? Because the text


*says* things. Like other literature, the program is created by


an author, and then the author stands back. *Un*like all other


literature, however, this writing then creates the illusion that


it is another human being with a will of its own, independent of


the author whose hands are now off.





The postmodern, properly understood, represents a real shift in


world-view from the modern. Postmodern artists use as their


medium our beliefs, expectations, and desires toward the work of


art. Literature on the computer sometimes adds to such a


postmodernism and sometimes doesn't. Today's hypermedia, for


example, and interactive fiction don't really change anything.


They are dazzling, to be sure, but they are just texts in the


traditional sense. They don't *do* things-- they offer finite


choices. By contrast, the ELIZA programs allow the reader an


infinity of possible responses. Then the ELIZAs speak and act,


seemingly on their own. As a result they differ profoundly from


any literature we have hitherto known. Truly, we are seeing


something new under the sun, something that may even be beyond our


notions of the postmodern.





NOTES [l. 493]





^1 "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,"


_New Left Review_ 146 (1984): 53-92.





^2 _The Dickens Web_, Developer: George P. Landow, Environment:


Intermedia 3.5 (Providence RI: Institute for Research in


Information and Scholarship, 1990).





^3 CD Companion to Beethoven Symphony No. 9: A HyperCard/CD


Audio Program_, Developer: Robert Winter, Environment:


HyperCard (Santa Monica CA: Voyager, 1989). Other


multimedia webs deal with Chinese literature, _In


Memoriam_, and the moon.





^4 See, for example, George P. Landow, _Hypertext: The


Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology_


(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), or Edward M. Jennings,


"The Text is Dead; Long Live the Techst" (Review of Landow,


_Hypertext_), _Postmodern Culture_ 2.3 (1992), available on


Internet: PMC-LIST through LISTSERV@ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu.





^5 Of the many textbooks in the field, I usually recommend


Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor, _The Psychology of


Reading_ (New York: Academic, 1983).





^6 Jonathan D. Culler, _Ferdinand de Saussure_, Modern


Masters Series (London: Fontana, 1976).





^7 "ELIZA--a Computer Program for the Study of Natural


Language Communication Between Man and Machine,"


_Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery_


9 (1966): 36-45.





^8 Margaret A. Boden, _Artificial Intelligence and Natural


Man_ (New York: Basic, 1977), 107.





^9 Developers: Janet H. Murray, Jeffrey Morrow, and Stuart


A. Malone. Cambridge MA: Laboratory for Advanced Technology


in the Humanities, MIT, under development. Environment:


Macintosh.





^10 Joseph Bates, "Virtual Reality, Art, and Entertainment,"


_Presence: The Journal of Teleoperators and Virtual


Environments_ 1.1 (1992): 133-38.





^11 Margaret Thomas Kelso, Peter Weyhrauch, and Joseph Bates,


"Dramatic Presence," _Presence: The Journal of Teleoperators


and Virtual Environments_ 2.1 (1993): 1-15.





Norman N. Holland


Department of English


University of Florida


Gainesville FL 32611-2036 U.S.A.


NNH@NERVM.NERDC.UFL.edu


NNH@NERVM.bitnet


*******************************************************************************


* This essay in Volume 4 Number 1 of _EJournal_ (April, 1994) is (c) copyright*


*1994 by _EJournal_. Permission is hereby granted to give it away. Any and *


*all financial interest is hereby assigned to Norman N. Holland. This notice *


*must accompany all copies of this text. *


*******************************************************************************





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Consulting Editors - April, 1994





ahrens@alpha.hanover.bitnet John Ahrens Hanover


ap01@liverpool.ac.uk Stephen Clark Liverpool


dabrent@acs.ucalgary.ca Doug Brent Calgary


djb85@albany Don Byrd Albany


donaldson@loyvax Randall Donaldson Loyola College


ds001451@ndsuvm1 Ray Wheeler North Dakota


erdtt@pucal Terry Erdt Purdue-Calumet


fac_askahn@vax1.acs.jmu.edu Arnie Kahn James Madison


folger@watson.ibm.com Davis Foulger IBM - Watson Center


george@gacvax1 G. N. Georgacarakos Gustavus Adolphus


gms@psuvm Gerry Santoro Penn State


nrcgsh@ritvax Norm Coombs RIT


pmsgsl@ritvax Patrick M. Scanlon RIT


r0731@csuohio Nelson Pole Cleveland State


richardj@bond.edu.au Joanna Richardson Bond


ryle@urvax Martin Ryle Richmond


twbatson@gallua Trent Batson Gallaudet


userlcbk@umichum Bill Condon Michigan


wcooper@vm.ucs.ualberta.ca Wes Cooper Alberta





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Editor: Ted Jennings, English, University at Albany


Managing Editor: Chris Funkhouser, English, University at Albany


Editorial Asssociate: Jerry Hanley, emeritus, University at Albany





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University at Albany Computing and Network Services: Ben Chi, Director


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University at Albany State University of New York Albany, NY 12222 USA





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