As the mainstream publishing industry takes pride in its role of
commodifying THE novel, as if THE novel were a prefabricated thing that
one need only produce formulaically for a consumer market of novel
readers, the intermedia environment offered by the web, on the contrary,
enables digital artists to experiment with a multitude of novel forms
that move beyond the book and challenge us to reconfigure contemporary
narrative practice.

This has to do with what Walter Ong, in the subtitle to his famous book,
Orality and Literacy, calls "the technologizing of the word." This
"technologizing" process is opening up huge opportunities for narrative
artists to

1) experiment with formal issues that have been exhausted in book form

2) pioneer new modes of cultural production and distribution

3) problematize the individual Author-As-Genius model by way of
collaborative authoring networks that sustain non-hierarchical group
production and teamwork

Those of us who grew up reading books know the value of narrative art as
experienced in reading novels. As literate readers, we are invited to
activate ourselves in the structural development of the alternative
worlds each writer points us toward and from which we get to practice
our own interactive reading skills. Novelist Julio Cortazar, whose novel
"Hopscotch" was a proto-hypertext published in book form, suggested that
the interactive reader was "a co-conspirator," i.e. someone who
proactively engages with creative writing in hopes of finding previously
unexplored paths of knowledge, knowledge that the narrative interface,
contained in a book, always mediates for us.

This reader-generated interactivity is the way we use our literacy to
create meaning out of texts. Let's face it: with conventional novels,
it's so easy, almost comforting, to pick up a book and get lost in its
make-believe world of narrative transparency. For the literate reader,
there is very little investment made in using our literacy skills to
problematize the false consciousness promoted by quality-lit authors
who, knowing we seek the comfort of his/her text, compose their "see-
through" narratives for us to get lost in. As long as they play it safe
and do not challenge our meaning-making potential, then we are happy.
While reading these conventional stories, we never have to be reminded
that what we are doing is reading a text composed by an author. "Losing
yourself in a book," is something literate readers can relate to. It has
gotten to the point where "see-through" novelists use this condition to
further frustrate if not outright control the submissive reader. One
writer, the novelist Ron Sukenick, has embarked on a program he calls
Reader's Lib, that is, as an innovator of writerly texts, Sukenick hopes
to create work that will liberate the reader from the confines of
standardized narrative behavior.

The more I am invited to curate online art shows that feature the work
of net artists who experiment with text and narrative, the more
convinced I am that the field is exploding with innovative stories that
not only break away from the traditional "see-through" narratives of the
commercial and quality-lit book publishing world, but that also
challenge the modes of cultural production and distribution commercial
novels so heavily depend on. For the writer today, things are changing
so fast you either jump on the technology train or get left behind. With
the advent of new digital formats like on-demand books, e- or softbooks,
online serialization, hypertext, real-time publishing, Palm Pilots
content delivery systems, etc., I'm convinced that we are in the process
of radically reconfiguring the writer into a kind of Internet Artist
whose problem is no longer "getting published," but, rather, attracting
attention to their work so as to build their audience share in the
electrosphere.

Over the past three years, the trAce online writing community has become
one of the premiere international locations on the WWW known for its
generous support of net-based writing, particularly when it comes to
bringing greater visibility to pioneering writer-artists who are busying
themselves by reinventing writerly practice–particularly our accepted
notions of "authorship," "text" and "publishing." In an incredibly short
period of time, under the guidance of its visionary and diligent
Director, Sue Thomas, trAce has quite literally en-abled a World Wide
Web of writers to continuously interconnect with each other through
their creative work and ceaseless cultural production.

For those who don't know much about trAce, the first thing you should
know is that the British Arts Council, as part of its Arts-4-Everyone
program, provided six-figures worth of funding for the project, the
money having been drawn from designated proceeds coming from the British
Lottery. Like venture capital in the new media marketplace, the lottery
money served as a lubricant that got the wheels spinning and within a
short period of time, trAce was not only going through a major growth
spurt, but was immediately putting on international conferences,
supporting the emergence of an activist online writing community,
commissioning virtual artist residencies, funding net art exhibitions,
publishing state-of-the-art books, inaugurating serious hypertext
competitions, sponsoring electronic poetry events, as well as providing
Internet training courses for seniors and educational programs for
children interested in writing on the web.

As a result of these developments, trAce has become the most
recognizable online writing community going, always already
international, but with a deep local and regional connection to all
things literary and digital in the East Midlands part of the United
Kingdom. This year's conference, entitled "Incubation," was held at
Nottingham-Trent University from July 10-12, and felt like the
organization's first-phase capstone event, bringing together an intense
community of writers, artists, theorists and DJs–Scanner provided sound
environments for the nightly lounge events–. The at times rowdy cluster
of activist network-rhetoricians attending the event are some of the
leading web-experimenters who immerse themselves in everything from
real- time collaborative publication to investigating web-enhanced
theories of "electracy." In fact, critical media theorist Gregory Ulmer,
showcasing his home-movies as a kind of applied grammatology, played
beautifully with Stelarc's inquisitive look into the nature of "third
ears" and their place in the post-human, sublime world of cyborg-
narrators and self-effacing storyworlds.

As part of the conference, I was invited to curate a collection of work
that I named ink.ubation, work that I believe represents groundbreaking
models of writerly interface, works that blur the distinctions between
I-art and I-writing–YOU can decide who or what is "I"–"I" haven't a
clue–.

What makes the new media artists featured in this hybridized
publication/exhibition space–glorified hot-link page?–, new, is not so
much their use of "technology" per se, but, rather, the way they turn
their emergent practices into ongoing ungoing works-in-progress that
defy categorization while maintaining an allegiance to the suppleness of
nervous words, sonorous syntax, vocal microparticulars, animated
imagetexts, and unsung e-motions.

The artists collected at ink.ubation, including Jackie Goss, Adrienne
Eisen, Shelley Jackson, Yael Kanarek, Jennifer Ley, Bob Arellano, and
Linda Carroli, bring an eclectic mix of diverse sensibilities to the e-
writing table. With the Net fast becoming the medium of choice for
emerging narrative artists, there now exists a diverse range of work
being created by writers who are remixing the verbal with the visual,
the sensual with the visceral, and linking with thinking–for more info
on some of these artists, see my "Let's Get Lost" piece in the current
issue of ARTBYTE–.

Curating this show, one thing has become very clear: this is writing
beyond hypertext–though clearly, hypertext is present and, with the web
lost in http schizophrenia, will be so for quite sometime–. The better
term for what I see emerging in the web writing space would be
designwriting, for as we begin to recognize the more fluid forms of
writing being developed on the net, it becomes immediately apparent to
us that graphic designers, in particular, are participating in the
emergence of more visually-stimulating writerly forms being constructed
specifically for the net medium. In fact, many of the most experimental
web-writing projects coming online today are being created by design
professionals who juggle their roles as artists, writers, educators and
commercial consultants whose clients are in desperate need of their
skills and talents.

Cocteau once said that writing is a disease. Web writing is no
different. Right now we are at that pivotal moment in the science of
writing where everything is just now developing, again. We are
witnessing that small, indefinite period of time between early infection
and total outbreak. That time of incubation.

Let us hope we never find a cure.