Pip and Mop visit the Interpreter's House to learn about tools that can archive information from websites. The Interpreter is in a fugue state mumbling about how the past influences the present through history and events like Y2K. His house appears unfinished or under construction, filled with artifacts from different cultures and histories. Mop wonders if the Interpreter ever shares his own story or just translates the stories of others, and whether simply knowing history is enough rather than using it to shape the present.

1. geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop
Concept based on The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan,
and written for Contemporary Media Work Practices,
a course at RMIT University
(www.rmit.edu.au)
c. geniwate 2012-5
Interpreter’s House 3

2. RSS doesn’t help me archive stuff, Mop
complained to Pip on the way back to the
Interpreter.
To archive you need a whole range of
other tools. You can get tools that let you
save information directly from a website.
You mean, copy and paste?
No, Pip sighed. Where have you guys
been? I mean apps that save your stuff to
the cloud, organised the way you want,
accessed for any machine that you’ve
networked.

3. Like what, Mop prodded as they reached
the interpreter’s door.
Like its time you learned to do your own
research, Pip replied with a smile. Only do
it, you’ll be much more efficient.

4. When they got inside, they found the interpreted in some sort of fugue state. He was whispering:
Dreams turn into history, and from history comes the present. We live in our history; everything
about the internet today is because of the way it was yesterday and the day before. I’ll give you an
example. At the inception of the internet, the first coders didn’t realise that they’d set their
machines up with a date system that couldn’t cope with a date like ‘2000’….
Then they thought they heard him mutter the planes stayed up… the planes stayed up …. It
sounded like good news.

5. The interpreter’s house was mainly scaffolding; they weren’t sure whether
it was unfinished. Mop looked around the room; it was full of artefacts
from different cultures and histories. The interpreter seemed to be a
gatherer of stories and things. Mop wondered whether he had ever told
his own story, or whether he was just some sort of cipher, translating one
story into another language. There was a lot of that about, masquerading
as originality. It seemed to Mop you have to build on history to transform
the present, not just sit in a little house, knowing it.

6. interactivity