Digital Fever

Carlos Basualdo is the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Philadelphia Museum of Art and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the Universitá IVAV in Venice. He served as curator for "The Structure of Survival," as part of the 50th Venice Biennial in 2003 and curator for "Topological Gardens" for the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

Barbara London is a curator of media at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Along with commissioning, and publishing on the work of media artists including Laurie Anderson, Terry Fox, Nam June Paik, Gary Hill, and Bill Viola, London has embarked upon several travel-intensive "dispatch projects," prospecting for new artworks and electronic tendencies worldwide.

Christian Bök is a Canadian experimental poet and scholar of pataphysics. His work "Eunoia," is one of the best-selling works of Canadian poetry. Bök currently teaches at the University of Calgary and is the author of Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imanginary Science and Crystallography.

Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and the Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Drucker has been on the faculty of Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Harvard University.

Craig Dworkin edits Eclipse and is the author of "Reading the Illegible" (Northwestern U.P.), a critical investigation of the politics of misuse. He teaches 20th and 21st century avant-gardes in the Department of English at Princeton University.

Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet living in New York City. He is a music critic for New York Press and a DJ on WFMU. He is founding curator of http://ubu.com.

Brian Kim Stefans runs the media mini-empire http://www.arras.net,. He is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Angry Penguins (Harry Tankoos, 2000).

Darren Wershler-Henry, the former senior editor at Coach House Books, is the author of two books of poetry, NICHOLODEON: a book of lowerglyphs, and the tapeworm foundry, and teaches in the school of Communications Studies at York University.

Nick Montfort is coeditor of The New Media Reader , author of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, and a Ph.D. student in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Scott Rettberg is assistant professor of Literature at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Rettberg is a coauthor of The Unknown, and is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Associated Exhibition

In conjunction with "Ubu meets Gertrude (Towards A Post-textual Avant-garde)," Slought is pleased to announce "Implementation: CARRY OUT, ACCOMPLISH; especially : to give practical effect to," a storefront display by new media authors Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg from January 1 - January 31, 2005, that proposes a new culture of writing in the public sphere.

Implementation is the first novel-length work of fiction to be published and distributed on stickers. Implementation is both a work of fiction and a work of art. Implementation is a novel about the peripheral effects of the war on terror, psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, identity, and the idea of place, and an art project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. Both Montfort and Rettberg have written electronic fiction in the past, and see the sticker novel as one way of connecting ideas of nonlinear narrative and interactivity with printed texts in physical space.

On the Implementation website, readers can read and download .pdf files installments of Implementation. Each serially released installment consists of 30 individual texts printed on 3 sheets of stickers, and the completed novel includes 8 installments. Participant readers can then print the installments on standard shipping labels, and adhere the stickers wherever they choose. Many readers then photograph the sticker placements, and email those photos back to us. In addition to the texts, the website includes over 1,000 photographs of sticker placements at a variety of locations in the U.S. and Europe. The act of situating the chunk of story in a distinct physical place (examples include a war protest in Chicago, the lobby of the British Museum, the entrance to the New York Public Library, and an abandoned Soviet sports structure in Tallinn, Estonia) has some interesting effects on its interpretation, and comprises an exciting way for readers to interact with and to help shape the narrative. The first phase of Implementation was completed, and all 8 installments published on the website, as of November 2, 2004. All downloadable installments and photos of sticker placements are freely available through the project website.