A decade at trAce > 15/11/05

A quilt of testimonies about the impact of technology on writing is being built at trAce as it celebrates its tenth anniversary.

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as browsing turns to clicking > 05/04/05

In 1999, William H. Gass wrote in his In Defense of the Book that readers of books will become increasingly better readers as the internet would be the end to ‘good’ reading. He also regretted the loss of browsing in the sense that you can browse the book shelves in a library and, by serendipity, find what you never would have looked for in the first place.

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site of the other > 16/03/05

When Barthes proclaimed the death of the author back in the 60s, it was not the writer he meant but the author as organizing principle of a body of work. Not much has changed up till today. It is still the author as authority and origin around which we talk about the work of a writer.

A web site, though, challenges this construct. It is here not the writer who is on central stage, but the site and the very interface. The web site becomes the organizing principle that undercuts every claim to authority and origin, and the works themselves are located / written at the site of the Other rather than (the intentional ego of) the writer. Can we ever talk about authority, intent, origin, when talking about the web? Could we ever? Isn’t it all a myth, as Barthes claimed long ago, and a myth we have outlived today?

shifting grounds > 08/02/05

In an article at trAce from March last year, Tim Wright discusses the drifting of new media writing towards new media art as more and more writers incorporate hypermedia and technological possibilities into their writing - a shift he sees happening at Alt-X, ground-breaking site where the literati was supposed to meet the digerati but, as Tim says, "more and more, it appears that it is neither the digerati nor the literati who embrace and drive net.art and new media writing these days. That role has fallen to the modern art community, intent on filling its galleries and museum with interactive installations, online exhibitions and digital performances."