[techne] W3LAB
A lab for thinking technology and writing together, mapping the early web as a space of critical experimentation. Formerly at http://gsa.rutgers.edu/maldoror/techne/w3lab-entry.html
Section
Hyperclassics
Foucault is entirely right: the reader is the double of the book. To domesticate this double, to contain the reading’s measureless imagination: this was the strife that caused D. Quixote his public humiliation. Seminal essays and early web fictions tried to understand what happens to this double when reading moves into networks, links and screens. This section gathers some of those hyperclassics (texts that helped define the place of literature, criticism and “theory” in an evanescent virtual librar. They map a moment when criticism, literature and media theory migrated to the web and began to use hypertext, not only as an object of study, but as a way of writing and thinking.
seminal essays / hypertext theory / paleoweb criticism · classics that keep rewriting the shelf
One of the key nodes for theory and criticism about digital culture, literature and networked media in the late 1990s.
Trace
An online writing community and magazine dedicated to digital poetics, fiction and theory. Formerly at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/
A literary magazine experimenting with web layouts, side indexes and new ways of organising the page.
A reflection on how hypertext reshapes reading, attention and the feeling of being inside a text. Formerly at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/dfi/artfeb99/mark/index.htm
A special issue of eBR devoted to electronic poetics, theory and practice on and with the web.
Paradoxa
A journal exploring experimental narrative and theory, including engagements with hypertext. Formerly at http://www.accessone.com/~paradoxa/contents.htm
Eastgate’s doorway to essays and materials around their hypertext catalog — a kind of meta-shelf about hypertext fiction and criticism.
A Brazilian essay connecting literature, media and electronic affinities on the early web. Formerly at http://www.uol.com.br/internet/netvox/vox0608.htm
A survey of web-based literary magazines, charting a scene where zines migrate into browsers.
A series of essays introducing the ideas and practices of hypertext to a broader audience.
Vannevar Bush’s classic 1945 essay, retrospectively canonised as a prehistory of hypertext and the web.
Ted Nelson’s book on hypertext, links and non-linear writing — one of the central references for this shelf.
Imagining Imagination
Adrianne Wortzel’s essay on imagination and networked art, written in the mid-1990s. Formerly at http://artnetweb.com/views/wortzel/intro.html