Author's Note

    © 2002 Thomas Swiss.
    All rights reserved.

    ENTER: The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce

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  1. To hear critics tell it, one problem with emergent digital literary and art forms is that they don't yet have established stars. Where's our Shakespeare of the Screen? Our Pixel Picasso? How long before we have a Digital DeMille? The assumption is that we'll have them eventually--undisputed geniuses working in what is now generally called "New Media." But behind this assumption is another assumption, one with a long, sometimes thorny history--that the "best" or "most important" art is created by an individual, a single pair of hands in the study or studio.

  2. As a poet, I began my own collaborative, Web-based work with visual and sound artists several years ago--with a sense that the opportunities and demands of Web-based poetry, like many other New Media practices, have their roots in the shared notion of community that was integral to the development of the internet. I was also increasingly interested in what Hal Foster calls "the twin obsessions of the neo-avant garde": temporality and textuality. Web-based poems--especially those involving animation and attention to the pictorial elements of writing--suggest novel approaches to thinking about time and the text.

  3. Collaborative work redefines artistic labor in what is for me new and complicated ways: what is the relationship, for example, between my language and the images and sounds others create, even if under my "direction"? How do the images and sounds "change" the meaning of the language (and vice versa) and in what ways can the piece still be said to be a "poem"?

  4. Collaboration allows writers and artists--like myself and those I compose with--to reconsider both our work and our identities, to literally see them anew, as we move from individual to composite subjectivity.

  5. However, while the art world remains open to collaborative work--in the long shadow of Duchamp's experiments with Man Ray, the shared labor of producing art in Warhol's Factory, the many hands needed to make a film--the literature world has always had a hard time accepting collaborative work, even in our digital age.

  6. "The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce" is a collaborative experiment in New Media Poetry--combining text, images, and sound. Following the artist Christo's work ("wrapped" objects such as Running Fence and Wrapped Pont Neuf), the collaborators on this piece developed one answer to the question: what might "wrapped" language look like in a digital environment?

  7. Our initial discussions revolved around thinking through some of the following issues and "problems": the act of wrapping or hiding language; the physical and metaphorical transformation of language while it is wrapped or hidden; the final act of unveiling language that has now acquired "full" or "new" meaning because it has been partially hidden.

  8. Out of these discussions, over five months, came "The Narrative You Anticipate You May Produce."

  9. The piece is "interactive," requiring the reader/viewer to locate and click on bits of language (phrases, lines) as they appear on the screen.

  10. Before the piece begins, the order of the pages is randomly shuffled. The resulting order is represented by the serial number (in red) at the top of the screen.

  11. The backgrounds and animations on each page are randomly drawn. Finally, the reader's interaction with the screen is what sets the words in their final states.

    12. Talk Back

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