On the writing of Mask Music Body

Mask Music Body is a text that has undergone numerous twists and turns, rewritings, redesigns, reshuffles on a seven year long journey during which visions changed and perceptions altered - continuously. Has it turned into its bare bones; the bare bones that turn words into flesh?

From the beginning it was a completely different text, written in prose and intended for print - a novel, in other words. But life took an unexpected turn: my vision changed, and so did the text. I sat down and cut up the text, probably in the spirit of Burroughs. But it didn’t stop there. Realism was cut out and so was the narrative. Later, when I had to describe the text, I called it “a story without the narrative”. That phrasing has puzzled me ever since. 

The novelistic had thus disappeared and, in its place, the hypertextual emerged - a fragmentary text that had been emptied of realism, description of character and a narrative of chained events. It also included new writings from a new perspective and, when taken together, the text needed another form, a new form, but it wasn’t until I thought of a web site that I got the idea for how to write the text. I got myself an internet connection, and published the text in pdf!!! —- in the meantime though, I discovered hypertext fiction, hypertext art, new media writing, whatever you’d like to call it, and I increased my knowledge of internet technologies. But for every formal step I took I cropped refined the text—- 

The text hasn’t changed since but in 2012 the interface was modernized. Technologies change but the text has settled.