Adashboard (for fiction)

CIAO: writing a novel as a ‘distributed practise’
CIAO of het schrijven van een gedistribueerde roman

CIAO is a story that will exist as a novel in print and a digital narrative. The work-in-progress was part of the exhibition Place@Space until 25th May in Z33 in Hasselt.

CIAO is een verhaal dat zal bestaan als roman en als digitale vertelling. Het work-in-progress maakte deel uit van de tentoonstelling NowHere Place@Space, van 15 maart tot 25 mei 2008 in Z33 in Hasselt.

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Today I participated in the online reading session organised by Sönke Hallman and Falke Pisano, exploring the idea of a #collective textual performance#, approaching the text by #reading with the intention that the text becomes a place#.

After reading the excerpts, we all started to invest the ‘text-place’, straight onto the wiki, while we shared our impressions by chat. From straight Courier 11 laps-of-texts, we tried to turn them into inhabited decorated ‘text-places’. It is a good way to ‘live’ a text.

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This is the second of the 2 main questions I presented at the Open Knowledge 1.0 last Saturday in Limehouse Townhall in London.

The second question came up when I thought about the possibilities of linking collaboration and infinity with the practice of literary creation.

Authors are about the most individual workers on earth – apart from collaborating with their editors, they only ask others to read and comment on their texts. They decide on which comments they accept. It is a very intimate process. You don’t just ask anyone to revise your text, only people you trust and you choose because of their vision of life, on art, on society, etc. It could be an interesting experiment to try to write a community novel but I believe it is not more than a very fun game to play. If your interest is aroused, I can refer to a Penguin experiment. It was called ‘amillionpenguins’. Apparently, an infinite number of people can only write a comedy together. The meta-discussions about writing, terrorism, rules were the most interesting part of the experiment.
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Last night I was thinking about possible interesting uses of collaborative software for collective narrative creation. If ‘classic’ literary artifacts are closed by the dynamic interplay between form, content and materiality; net-native literary forms could be considered as open as storytelling and the oral tradition are.

I found some more mature reflections about it at the public mind space of if:book, a project of the NY based Institute for the Future of the Book.

Link to wiki
Read some critical comments

During five weeks all people on the globe can collaborate to the writing of a novel. The experiment – writing a novel using the wikitool – is initiated (and fully owned!) by Penguin and the students of the MA in Creative Writing and New Media of the Montfort University.

Participating into this is highly exciting. The wiki started off 5 days ago and hit more than 500 changes an hour. Hot discussions are going on about plots and characters. On the organizers’ side (an editor and a technician seem to be full time in charge of the wiki) this envolves all kind of funny problemsolving. » Read the rest of this entry «