to begin is a work of digital language art created for the Cave Writing workshop at Brown University, an immersive, interactive 3D-stereo audiovisual environment. to begin is an all-but uniquely extensive full-length work of digital literary and dramatic art produced for an immersive environment. It is based on Samuel Beckett's last longer prose, How It Is. The piece incorporates excerpts of original writing by its creator. The Cave, darkened and self-contained, provides appropriate media with which to address many of the concepts represented in How It Is, a tale in which its characters crawl through a world of endless mud, torment, and solipsism. The artist writes: "to begin is not merely an attempt to transpose Beckett for the Cave, rather it is my attempt to engage in a dialogue with his text. After reading How It Is, I found myself feeling indignant and a little frightened. What Beckett proposes in How It Is is bleak yet hard to disavow. The sense that people are fundamentally alone, trapped in the inescapable 'dark' of their own minds, is an experience common to us all. Yet in 'light' of this deeply acknowledgement, we still seek each other out. Despite our sense that we are each separate, we work to become closer."
