Network Writing - Ava Garcia

 

Network Writing is Electronic Literature created and published on the internet. Networks are a condition of contemporary life and they have changed the nature of communication, our style of writing, and the way we structure our thoughts. The fragmented and distracting nature of networked communication however, has in some ways degraded our experiences of reading and writing through the use of memes, bots, and mindless scrolling it can almost feel like network writing is shifting the way we produce and enjoy electronic literature. Yet, for all of the negative aspects of network writing, a greater population of people spend more of their time reading and writing than ever before. Play is an essential part of electronic literature that allows readers and writers to play with new media environments in order to explore their potential for storytelling and poetics as well as playing well with others. Network writing as a whole encourages audiences to reconsider the situation of humans in the contemporary network apparatus. The works allow us to defamiliarize and rethink the ways we engage with the network which is one of the most important functions of electronic literature.

https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9300/ray-johnson-c-o

While the Internet is considered to be the most important contemporary communication network, the postal system has also been used to create literary art. Ray Johnson, a New-York based artist in the 1960s began sending collages, drawings, annotated newspaper clippings, and other objects and images to other artists and included interactive instructions and invitations to reply. This network became known as “The Correspondence School”. Some of these works functioned as surrealist exquisite corpses as each response added new elements to the piece. The Correspondence School exploited the specific materialities of the postal system in interesting ways that challenged the art world. Works of mail art are essentially de-commodified and there is no guarantee that the artist will receive anything in return. Mail art represented the rejection of the gallery system and the conventional art economy. For the Correspondence School, art way the exchange of ideas as material objects sent through the postal system from one artist to another.