Article in a print journal

When we talk about literature based on the computer, it is not possible to distinguish between content and describing hard- and software. This is of crucial consequence for the filing. Netliterature that has the character of a work of art is to be divided into works of art that need proprietary software as a basis to make a performance possible and works that rely on open(ed) standards. Talking about the latter it is possible to file works together with the source code of the software that is needed to perform them and the documentation of the open standard. If you are interested in this kind of thing you will always be able to reconstruct a functioning platform on a universal machine of your own time. Digital works of art depending on proprietary software, however, typically must be allocated to the performance art. Therefore this type of performance art with proprietary software can only be filed as documentation. This is true for any performing netliterature that does not have the character of a work of art. Therefore, a digital piece of work that has not been documented after a certain time hereby is sufficiently filed. Typologically the phenomenon of weblogs cannot be assigned to network literature. Blogs are a „digital enlargement of an oral tradition“ (Geert Lovink) and therefore not a new form of writing. When trying to file the blogosphere it seems that a snap-shot-method is the most appropriate method that produces and files snap-shots of the blogosphere in scientific-statistical intervals. Peerto- peer networks are most likely one of the best filing methods for a knowledge-based society. However, by extending patent- and brand-law as well as copyrights, knowledge is systematically made proprietary and therefore these adequate forms of filing are constricted for the digital era.

"The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore", by J. R. Carpenter, reflects upon The Broadside of a Yarn, a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR code reader and a hand-made print map of dubious accuracy. The Broadside of a Yarn was commissioned by ELMCIP for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, 1-17 November 2012. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signified that it was intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of this printed map are QR codes which link to web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues, performance scripts replete with stage instructions suggesting how and where these texts are intended to be read aloud. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. The stated intention in creating this work was to use the oral story-telling tradition of the sailor’s yarn, the printed broadside and map, the digital network, and the walk-able city in concert to construct a temporary digital community connected through a performative pervasive networked narrative. Through the process of composition the focus shifted away from the temptation to lure people on walks through a city tagged with links to stories of the sea, toward a desire to compel people to collectively speak shifting sea stories ashore. This paper reflects critically upon this shift, toward an articulation of The Broadside of a Yarn as an collective assemblage of enunciation.

This essay analyses Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1991), a singular hyperfiction within the context of hypertextual narratives released during the 90s. Taking into consideration the campus novel and anti-war novel themes, I focus my reading on the technological mediation of war and the intertextualization of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “El Jardín de Senderos que se Bifurcan” (1941). Therefore, I argue that Victory Garden is an appropriation and recreation, via a digital medium, of several Borgesian motifs and his beloved metaliterary theme: the labyrinth.