Why is online writing unique?
(editorial - talk to be given at AWP conference Albany, NY. April 1999)

Simon Mills

Many thanks for inviting me to talk at this conference. When I was initially asked I thought I could give a talk about the frAme online journal I edit and design. This in turn led to the idea of an actual "website demonstration". However recently I've been thinking quite a bit about what this online medium is, what makes it so special or distinctive. One of the aspects is that it is a very intimate medium. Although a website can potentially be published to millions of people the actual way each of these people will actually consume it is usually intimate and private. I think it is probably quite rare for several people to look at a website together. This being in my mind the thought of a website demonstration seemed somehow incongruous.

Instead I thought a more interesting exercise might be to look at what makes this medium so unique and interesting for so many writers, readers and artists. To this end I shall refer to some of the work published in frAme so as to give those with little experience of the web a better idea, perhaps of it's potential and for those who do have experience of it a wider scope for disagreement!

On deciding to present my talk on this subject I thought I'd do a little research into what other people had developed on what we might call web-art. Well, after a little searching around, (everybody knows the web is a great resource!) I found a great talk given by David Ross of San Jose State University about Net Art at the end of which he gives a list of qualities, which he believes, makes Net Art distinctive.

So I thought, well lets look at this list and at the web and what's been published in frAme and see what's relevant to writers here.

Perhaps the most obvious place to start is the actual lifeblood of the web itself and that is hypertext. Hypertext was around long before the web but I think it has been the web that has popularised it. How writers are adapting to this new environment is still a fresh issue. This year we saw the first International Hypertext Competition and the range of styles of entries was staggering. This variation can even be discerned just by looking at the difference in type between the two joint winners. One is a sprawling text based hypertext the other makes more use of sound and graphics to compliment short text fragments.

Not only does hypertext lead to new forms of creativity, it also leads to new forms of reading. No longer is the reading process something that is strictly linear. It is left to the reader to navigate a text as they please. In this sense the reader becomes partly responsible for the formation of the text.

With this revelation came the idea that somehow hypertext was a form of liberation. The idea that the reader has some control over a text instantly reminds us of post-structuralist assertions made by the likes of Barthes and Derrida. If you're interested in this then take a look at Belinda Barnet's piece in frAme 2 which asserts that the control over the text the reader has is an illusion: hypertext in-itself facilitates nothing of the sort. She writes,

"The Author has been there before us, has layed down the lines and the possibilities. We can go this way or that way in the same way that we can choose this product or that product in the supermarket. There is a choice, but not a contingent choice in this unfolding now."

Another upshot is the thought of how can a work be judged objectively if everyone reads a different version?

This is not the place to get deeply involved in hypertext theory but I thought I'd mention that these are the kind of ideas some hypertext writers are struggling with at the moment.

Of course many writers may not be interested in the connection between Critical Theory and Hypertext at all. To many it is simply an exciting and challenging new medium.

Another major factor in what makes web-based work unique is its ability to play with notions of identity. I touched on this when I mentioned the idea that with hypertext the reader in some way authors their experience. Thus juxtaposing notions of readership and authorship.

However there are other projects which play with notions of identity rather more directly and deliberately. One example of this is the Amechan website. (http://www.part1.org/amechan)

When you visit it you find yourself reading the journals of an Australian born Japanese woman who visits Japan to see her Mother and stays. There are also archives of emails sent between her and her mother and friends. In fact you are also invited to email her directly and discuss her work and life with her.

The site is updated promptly once a week so readers interest in the development of the characters relationships is maintained.

In fact the site is a work of living fiction. It is actually written by an Australian artist/writer living in Japan so in a way the story is an inverse of her life. With the help of some friends she has also managed to get photos to pad out this fiction. It is an online novel as such and you can watch it grow and even interact with the main character something previously unheard of.

It is not a deception however. The author undertook the project as a work of art as something new and different compared to other fictional works already in existence.

As well as highlighting the way one can play with identity online it also introduces the way in which online works can be opened up for feedback whilst the work is actually in progress and this feedback can in turn become part of the work itself. Email Amechan and you may find your words in her journal.

In fact whole projects online have revolved around the idea of audience participation or reaction to an idea. TrAce's own Noon Quilt is a good example. Participants were invited to write a hundred words on what they witnessed outside of their window at Noontime. This simple idea worked because of the sheer variety of people who took part in it globally.

And in some way all the people who took part in the project became part of a community: emails were exchanged remarking on what a unique experience it was to be part of this literal patchwork of human life.

Community is a vital part of being online. Just by editing frAme I feel like I have become part of a community of like-minded artists and writers. In fact in a way this constitutes the most important aspect of being online and that is that pretty soon you're likely to become part of a community and when you get a community then pretty soon you start getting collaborations. I think this is another important aspect of much web based writing and art. Through the use of the web medium a great number of unusual and interesting collaborative projects arise that quite probably wouldn't have happened in any other way.

One personal interest of mine is the idea of the duration of web projects. Like no other medium it invites projects of all duration. I remember reading a poetry book by Gary Snyder called "Mountains and Rivers Without End". This poem is a continual work in progress. In an interview the author compares it to one of those Chinese landscape scrolls that unroll and go on and on depicting all life. Of course by the time I'd finished reading the book it was already out of date. No doubt the author had written a new part of the poem that had yet to be published

The web invites this kind of epic quality. The idea that a web project is never finished is not strange. If anything it is the norm. Not only can projects online always be expanded they are also always open to revision. A quality you don't often find in the print world.

Of course web work can also last for a fleeting amount of time much like a TV or Radio broadcast. The Noon Quilt project mentioned could have kept going indefinitely but a time limit was enforced.

A mistake that might be made is to try and judge work on the web using standards developed for traditional literature.

As Lance Olsen writes in an article you'll find in frame:

"In the age of the Web, everything becomes, at once,
source and effluent text, in an endless watercourse of
meaning: TV shows, news events, music, zeitgeist shifts,
untold histories, images, asinine jokes, recipes, sex,
maps of Earth, the most sublime expressions of
philosophy and art."

For example the essentially dadaist/Surrealist notion of cut and paste has moved into its heyday. Not only are people creating art by scanning existent art and mixing it up online or taking texts and feeding them through computer applications but they are even appropriating other websites and playing with their contents.

For example Eugene Thacker's Bioinfomatics takes existing websites relating to genetics companies and uses them as the setting for his writings on the subject.

In fact the computer is the perfect home for Dadaism. Tom Rodwell's article in the current issue of frAme examines how some individual software developers are producing freeware and shareware music applications that enable new ways to produce avant-garde music. In areas like this we must ask ourselves exactly where the art lies here: in the software, the user or more probably both.

There are literary examples of this kind of technique. Alan Sondheim reports on his process of writing:

"I write and rewrite into a winperl program, changing it, substituting
texts for noun lists, etc. The program is the matrix/catalyst/chora for
subsequent processing. Once the program is transformed, I run it, enter sentences, bypassing the natural language of the questions. Run over and over again, texts emerge. The texts are then modified, sutured, eliminating program artefacts. The program itself undergoes continuous rewrite in relation to the texts. The program and the texts merge, diverge. I work towards the unimaginable representations of the imaginary. I pull emanants out from me, as if the body were wounded, as if ectoplasm were ASCII."

Here we witness literature and programming coming together to produce something unique. A cyborg text perhaps?

Before I wrote this essay I made a note that web-based work somehow upset traditional structures. By this I didn't just mean political or business structures such as perhaps the pirating of commercial music over the Net which certainly does, but that traditional forms of literature and artistic creation were being disrupted. I soon realised that what was happening wasn't so much an upsetting but an extending of traditional structures. More precisely it is how web-work blurs the boundaries between many traditionally discrete areas.

For example a work like Teri Hoskins meme_shift makes use of a variety of different skills: Graphic Design/ Artistic Practices/ writing/ animation/ information management/ photography/ typography/image manipulation.

Alan Sondheim also uses programming. Others introduce database skills or digital audio.

The digital artist is a true multidisciplinarian.

It is interesting to try and understand a history of how this developed so we can perhaps see that these New Media works aren't alien or divorced from traditional structures but directly linked. So although I think we can't judge New Media works by the standards of traditional literature it should be borne in mind that they are an extension of it

In an interview with Geert Lovink entitled Digital Constructivism: What is European Software Lev Manovich says;

". . . with new media, modernist communication techniques acquire a new status. The techniques developed by the artistic avant-garde of the 1920s, become embedded in the commands and interface metaphors of computer software. In short, the avant-garde vision was materialised in a computer. All the strategies developed to awaken audiences from a dream existence of bourgeois society, like constructivist design, new typography, avant-garde cinematography and film editing as well as photo-montage, now define the basic routines of post-industrial society; that is, the interaction with a computer."

Thus it is argued that what we are seeing today far from being a break in cultural form is a logical continuation, and in some sense an implosion brought about by the use of computers.

In the same interview Manovich says:

"During the 1980s in the US, all art students were required to read classics written by, for example Foucault and Barthes. How much they understood and whether this led to better art, is another question . . . However, similarly, I now start meeting doctorate students in different disciplines, such as communication or film studies, who are also quite proficient with multimedia and JAVA programming. I would hope that they will be able to synthesize theory and new media."

And indeed this is one of the things we are seeing happening. Talan Memmot describes his recent work, "Reasoned Metagoria" as Theory/Fiction.

A couple of concerns often heard are that the internet will alter the notion of the author and perhaps even be responsible for the death of the book. Although, as I have already mentioned , the role of the author can be altered when working online it needn't necessarily be so. Yes, collaborations can make it difficult to know whose work you are viewing and linking to other sites adds to the confusion, but the fact remains that the author still retains control.

As for the claim that the internet will destroy the book or perhaps more accurately the traditional forms associated with it such as the novel and short story I personally think this is very wide of the mark. In my opinion there is not a competition happening here.
Web based art or literature, as I've tried to point out, offer something distinct from the already established forms. They are not a replacement.

Ironically there has been similar concern within the internet community that the web is taking the internet in the direction of being just another form of television. Although this might be true in some cases the ability for interaction offered online and the myriad ways this can be deployed means that even if it came to pass that services like pay per view films did become a reality the potential offered by the uniqueness of the online environment would not disappear. In fact I see it becoming more diverse as the next generation of web artists, those who perhaps grew up with the computer, arrive on the scene. Something tells me they will not be content with the online world just becoming a broadcast environment.

To conclude I would just like to say that frAme came into being because we at trAce are excited by what artists and writers are making of the online medium and as this medium matures we hope that those working with it are taken more seriously.

Hopefully what I have done in this short talk is give some limited indications as to what makes online works special and perhaps allay the fears of many I have met that this online world is something too esoteric, radical or even just filled with trash to be of any real consideration.

I can see why people think all these things but would re-iterate that what we are seeing today is a new form that is occurring because of modernist techniques born at the start of this century married to new technology accelerating in development at its end.

Nottingham, April 1999.