amateur

Moving from writing to amateur video could not have happened without the easily available technology and the web and social media that enable the author to circulate their work without needing a heavy infrastructure. In this sense, and with the underlying open attitude to the concept of the literary and modes of publication, this new ‘vliterature’ is fundamentally governed by the logic of the internet. At the same time, in addition to being inspired by filmmakers’ diaries and experimental short film, it can also be seen as a return to an older form of literature, the tradition of orality. This paper proposes to discuss the context in which this trend has emerged and the various practices it has engendered, with a focus on the modes of presence of what can be considered to be ‘literary’ practices and artefacts in such ‘writerly videos’ or vliterature. François Bon’s reflections on the place of the videos in his work and their relation to literature, set in the broader context of the evolution of his literature from Minuit novels to blogs and print-on-demand self-publishing, will provide the main thread for thinking through the reasons and implications from the author’s perspective and imagining it further as a potential future form in the life of literature.

(Source: Abstract ICDMT 2016)

An extended and illustrated version of a talk at the Decade of Web Design Conference in Amsterdam, January 2005

When I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from what was on the web in the mid 90's.

I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution, but in order to stress that -- although I consider myself to be an early adopter -- I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to be different.

So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?

To be blunt it was bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer. One could say it was the web of the indigenous...or the barbarians. In any case, it was a web of amateurs soon to be washed away by dot.com ambitions, professional authoring tools and guidelines designed by usability experts.