As the mainstream publishing industry takes pride in its role of commodifying THE novel, as if THE novel were a prefabricated thing that one need only produce formulaically for a consumer market of novel readers, the intermedia environment offered by the web, on the contrary, enables digital artists to experiment with a multitude of novel forms that move beyond the book and challenge us to reconfigure contemporary narrative practice.

This has to do with what Walter Ong, in the subtitle to his famous book, Orality and Literacy, calls "the technologizing of the word." This "technologizing" process is opening up huge opportunities for narrative
artists to

1) experiment with formal issues that have been exhausted in book form

2) pioneer new modes of cultural production and distribution

3) problematize the individual Author-As-Genius model by way of collaborative authoring networks that sustain non-hierarchical group production and teamwork

Those of us who grew up reading books know the value of narrative art as experienced in reading novels. As literate readers, we are invited to activate ourselves in the structural development of the alternative worlds each writer points us toward and from which we get to practice our own interactive reading skills. Novelist Julio Cortazar, whose novel Hopscotch was a proto-hypertext published in book form, suggested that the interactive reader was "a co-conspirator," i.e. someone who proactively engages with creative writing in hopes of finding previously unexplored paths of knowledge, knowledge that the narrative interface, contained in a book, always mediates for us.

This reader-generated interactivity is the way we use our literacy to create meaning out of texts. Let's face it: with conventional novels, it's so easy, almost comforting, to pick up a book and get lost in its make-believe world of narrative transparency. For the literate reader, there is very little investment made in using our literacy skills to problematize the false consciousness promoted by quality-lit authors who, knowing we seek the comfort of his/her text, compose their "see-through" narratives for us to get lost in. As long as they play it safe and do not challenge our meaning-making potential, then we are happy. While reading these conventional stories, we never have to be reminded that what we are doing is reading a text composed by an author. "Losing yourself in a book," is something literate readers can relate to. It has gotten to the point where "see-through" novelists use this condition to further frustrate if not outright control the submissive reader. One writer, the novelist Ron Sukenick, has embarked on a program he calls Reader's Lib, that is, as an innovator of writerly texts, Sukenick hopes to create work that will liberate the reader from the confines of standardized narrative
behavior.

The more I am invited to curate online art shows that feature the work of net artists who experiment with text and narrative, the more convinced I am that the field is exploding with innovative stories that not only break away from the traditional "see-through" narratives of the commercial and quality-lit book publishing world, but that also challenge the modes of cultural production and distribution commercial novels so heavily depend on. For the writer today, things are changing so fast you either jump on the technology train or get left behind. With the advent of new digital formats like on-demand books, e- or softbooks, online serialization, hypertext, real-time publishing, Fiction for Palm Pilots, etc., I'm convinced that we are in the process of radically reconfiguring the writer into a kind of Internet Artist whose problem is no longer "getting published," but, rather, attracting attention to their work so as to build their audience share in the electrosphere.

Over the past three years, the trAce online writing community has become one of the premiere international locations on the WWW known for its generous support of net-based writing, particularly when it comes to bringing greater visibility to pioneering writer-artists who are busying themselves by reinventing writerly practice -- particularly our accepted notions of "authorship," "text" and "publishing." In an incredibly short period of time, under the guidance of its visionary and diligent Director, Sue Thomas, trAce has quite literally en-abled a World Wide Web of writers to continuously interconnect with each other through their creative work and ceaseless cultural production.

This curated collection of work here is yet another example of how trAce supports the most significant writer-artists of our time. In many ways, the selections made for the Ink.ubation salon exhibition are just the tip of the virtual iceberg. But having said that, it is my pleasure to present you with works that I think serve as groundbreaking models of writerly interface, works that blur the distinctions between I-art and I-writing (YOU can decide who or what is "I" -- "I" haven't a clue).

What makes the new media artists featured here, new, is not so much their use of "technology" per se, but, rather, the way they turn their emergent practices into ongoing ungoing works-in-progress that defy categorization while maintaining an allegiance to the suppleness of nervous words, sonorous syntax, vocal microparticulars, animated imagetexts, and unsung e-motions.

Cocteau once said that writing is a disease. Web writing is no different. Right now we are at that pivotal moment in the science of writing where everything is just now developing, again. We are witnessing that small, indefinite period of time between early infection and total outbreak. That time of incubation.

Let us hope we never find a cure.

Mark Amerika