Other venue

The reader of this piece received SMSes over the course of 72 hours with instructions to do many strange things, thereby spreading the narrative into her or his physical surroundings. Invitations to sign up were both advertised on the web and distributed on unsigned fliers in London, thus combining physical and networked spaces. Here are some examples of messages sent, with the date and time they were sent out: 28. Write the word SORRY on your hand and leave it there until it fades. (21/11/01, 00:01) 29. Look at the stars. (21/11/01, 00:59) 30. Think about an ex-lover, naked and tied to a bed. (21/11/01, 10:00) 31. Call someone. Tell a lie. (21/11/01, 13:15) 32. Call them back. Admit that you lied but do not tell the truth about why. (21/11/01, 13:30) Surrender Control is not a narrative in the formal sense, but it may enact a narrative with the recipient of the text messages.

This piece is an exploration of oral histories and the use of technology as a participatory and inviting medium to perform and share stories.

It is an interactive piece, which consists of a series of extracts from interviews of refugees living in London and the connection between them. They are compiled in a database and linked by common key words. To represent the fractured realities and the formations of connected memories, the viewers need to interact with the piece by clicking on the coloured activated 'common keywords' in order to generate extracts of narrations from the different participating refugees. As an installation the piece includes a microphone to invite the viewers to read aloud and share with other viewers the experience of performing the work through their reading. 

As the reader explores and experiences the work by connecting the extracts from the narratives appearing in the screen, the fortuitous position of extracts produces new relationships, and in doing so, an on going process of meanings, connections and narratives; shifting from the semantic linguistic meaning to the visual, from the literal, the legible, the transparent to the abstract memory; and simultaneously creating a poetic space of readable and visual textualities. 

As with the oral storytelling tradition, in this work, the share of experiences happens at that moment in time. There is no recording facility; the text is in constant flux of becoming.

Some of the common key words used as links: war- escape- prison -money –government-refugee-passport –kill- documents- mother–father- family –airport-fear- help- country-asylum.

Implementation was written collaboratively and sent serially through the mail in the form of eight roughly chronological installments, each consisting of texts on thirty stickers. The stickers were also made available online in different paper sizes, so that people could print them out on standard sheets of business-size shipping labels. Participants attached stickers to public surfaces around the world, so that whoever happened to wander by the stickers could read them. Some of these placements of stickers were photographed by participants, and the photographs were sent back to be archived on the Implementation website.Because of the origin of this novel on sheets of stickers, and because of the way these stickers have been situated on public surfaces, Implementation consists of 240 short texts, any number of which can be read in any order. In the 2012 book version, all these atomistic texts have been arranged with a cohesive narrative flow in mind. Each page includes placements of the narrative stickers on various public surfaces. It is a book to be read in photographs.Implementation is about four main characters: Frank, Samantha, Kilroy, and Roxanne, who live in a Midwestern town. The action of the novel begins in September 2001 and runs through the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. One of the characters, Kilroy, is a reservist who is called up and then sent to Iraq, but the other characters are affected in much more oblique ways by the attack on the World Trade Center and the changes that follow. They continue to dine at restaurants, drink at bars, work, worry about their jobs and careers, have flings and relationships, and go to celebrations and funerals. While even a bombing in town changes little on the surface of these lives, the effects of the war can be read in shifts in their gestures, longings, and language. Implementation is a novel about the peripheral, everyday, psychological toll of the war on terror.

(Source: Project description from the Implementation book)

A novel told in email. Readers subscribed and received at least one e-mail per day for the month of May 2002. Blue Company is part one of a two part fiction; the second part is "Kind of Blue" by Scott Rettberg. Blue Company's e-mails are from a young marketing guy, Berto, who has gotten a really bad job transfer. He's been transferred to Italy, which is great, but he's also been transferred to the 14th century, which is dangerous and uncomfortable. The e-mails are nominally addressed to a woman Berto met shortly before his departure, and as he courts her we learn the story of his travels with a small group of 21st century corporate mercenaries called the "Blue Company" toward a fateful rendezvous beyond Milan. The e-mails are illustrated by hand since, of course, there were no cameras in the late middle ages.