contributory

Textopia is an open collection of place-related literature. using this wiki you can browse all kinds of literary texts related to places, and add your own favorite quotes about the street you live in, sunset on the Golden Gate or whichever place in the world you might like. Better still, you may write your own texts and share them with the rest of us.

How does a town just disappear?

What does it feel like to be cut off from your roots in a digital age where people have so many tools for recording and documenting their lives?

How do those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age recover and maintain a sense of belonging that is becoming increasingly so hard to hold on to?

'In Search of Oldton' is an attempt to use other people's digital documentary in order to recapture and re-invent my own personal history.

Tim Wright will be touring the UK during 2004 in search of Oldton – his lost place of birth - and uncovering along the way the possible causes of its demise and the subsequent loss of his past.

Working with groups and individuals Wright wants to build up a substantial online archive showing people taking their leave of a place or a person - a range of personal stories about ‘saying goodbye’ and ‘moving on’.

Through texts, pictures, videos and oral testimony, he will build up a digital archive of fictional remembrances, tributes to numerous places and situations left behind.

And ultimately (he hopes!) his own digital story of memory and loss will emerge.

(Source: Project description, Incubation3 site, trAce Archive)

If, as Henri Lefebvre asserted, "spatial thinking" involves several different ways of conceptualizing space-as idea, as lived, as imagined-then perhaps an open system of examples can generate new ideas about "home" in the future. This is an experiment in reading; the CD-ROM is organized in an associative manner, since the subject radiates in so many different directions. There is obviously a "direction" here, that is no hidden-but the user may peruse and reconnect the fabric of the piece in many different ways. And, if our habitat may be located within a given social order, defined by economics, culture, and history, these forces must be viewed as interacting, rather than fixed.

"Home" is a core around which radiate issues of neighborhood, economics, safety, and environment. Where and how we live is undergoing tremendous change as the century draws to a close. As social services and government oversight are curtailed, innovative solutions to problems concerning shelter and land use are of great importance. Southern California, a place "invented by real estate developers," with massive infusions of imported water, seems to offer the prime model of the politics of space. There are also links outward. The piece allows users to consider and contribute text about various growth/land use issues, to print text from the CD and/or their files, and to mark return to points on their exploration.

(Source: ELO 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

Flight Paths: a networked novel seeks to explore what happens when lives collide - the airplane stowaway and the suburban Londoner. A supermarket car park lies directly beneath the flight path into Heathrow Airport. On at least five separate occasions the bodies of young men - stowaways - have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this place. This project explores the lives of one stowaway and the woman whose car on which he lands. The authors create multimedia elements that illuminate the story while readers are invited to contribute texts, images, sounds, memories, ideas, and stories. The project grows and changes incrementally. There is a long history of electronic fiction works that include user-generated content. But there are very few fiction projects that from the earliest, research phase attempt to harness participatory media as well as multimedia content in the way that Flight Paths does.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)