writing community

This paper presents an experiment in facilitating public contributions to an experimental system for locative literature called textopia. Discussing approaches to collaborative writing and the relationship between games and art, the paper presents the development and testing of a game designed to foster participation in the system. The game is based on the recombination of found texts into literary compositions, integrating the act of exploring the urban environment into the act of writing, as well as into the medium that is studied. Resulting texts are read as a form of situated, poetic documentary reports on the urban textual environment. The experiment also draws attention to the importance of live events in building a literary community.

(Source: Author's abstract)

In this paper I look at some often-overlooked aspects of creative collaboration, drawing on my experiences in a series of group projects in which I participated over a span of almost 30 years. The infrastructural and interpersonal details of creative collaboration— the architectural space and seating arrangements, food and drink, public and private meeting spaces, meeting management, social conventions—I will argue to be important factors in the quantity and quality of the work produced. These elements are often excluded from certain types of scholarly discourse and I will make a parallel argument for the importance of their inclusion in literary history and criticism.

I use examples such as: Invisible Seattle (a literary/performance group and early e-literature pioneers), Persimmons & Myrrh (a structured show-and-tell society that included among its members David Sedaris), Chicago e-Lit Dinners (a breeding ground for e-literature projects and community), Rude Trip (a German/American collaborative literature project) and Imperial Quality Media (producers of netprov e-literature).

Adapted from a talk given at the Electronic Literature Communities Seminar in Bergen, Norway on September 21, 2010, as part of the Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) project.

This text serves as an annotated archive with links to various media that give account to the accomplishments of the trAce Online Writing Centre: "Between 1995 and 2005 the trAce Online Writing Centre hosted and indeed fostered a complex media ecology: an ever-expanding web site, an active web forum, a local and and international network of people, a host of virtual collaborations and artist-in-residencies, a body of commissioned artworks, the trAce/Alt-X International Hypertext Competition, the Incubation conference series, and frAme, the trAce Journal of Culture and Technology. What emerged was one of the web’s earliest and most influential international creative communities."