dd:
Mark, could you tell us first, why you switched from writing
books to writing
hypertext?
MA: The short answer
is that I wanted to continue experimenting with narrative
form and to expand the concept of writing beyond the print
culture. I have a background in making experimental film and
was interested in the potential of hypertext and other
emerging forms of new media, but did not
take it seriously until I
started developing my practice on the Internet in 1993.
There is a longer answer too.
First of all, you have to
keep in mind that, for me, writing is surviving. It is not a
leisurely activity that I approach in terms of "oh, one day
I would like to write a novel." Cocteau called writing a
disease, and Bataille referred to it as a madness, something
he could not NOT do. I can relate to those descriptions,
although I may be more apt to think of writing in relation
to Burroughs and his line about language being a virus and,
from there, writing being an addiction.
The reason I am giving you
all of these prefatory remarks is because it is actually
difficult for me to compartmentalize my writing practice
into different areas or genres. I write novels because I am
intrigued with the idea of exploding what has become the
standard model for narrative construction. Anyone who has
read my books knows that my novels came into being as
multi-linear storyworlds made of language play, graphical
page design and fictionalized states of desire. My novels
actively work against narrative closure and are
intentionally created to defamiliarize the reader's
relationship to conventional narrative devices like
character development, plot, setting, proper grammar and/or
syntax, all of the things that we expect to get from the
conventional book world and its one-size-fits-all novel
experience. I see narrative art as a place to work against
the pull of false consciousness that we find in so much
predetermined fiction writing.
My first novel, The Kafka
Chronicles, received a lot of attention in both the
mainstream world but also, more importantly, in the
alternative culture. It was taken seriously by the
underground music world and this led to my increased
interest in D-I-Y culture and the so-called zine scene. I
saw great potential in creating distributed communities of
niche audiences as opposed to the all-or-nothing
go-for-broke mentality of the big publishers. It just made
more sense to me as an artist and cultural
producer to take the
alternative culture more seriously. So the advent of the
Internet as a potential compositional as well as
distribution medium seemed the perfect fit for my evolving
interests in creating viable alternatives to the mainstream
publishing industry and its dependency on multi-national
corporate capitalism.
By the time the second
novel, Sexual Blood, came out, I had already started
Alt-X, perhaps the oldest surviving online art and writing
network, and when I went on my 16-city book tour for SB, all
of the attention was on Alt-X. I would give a reading to a
large audience in Seattle or Minneapolis
or New York, and then, after
the reading, I would ask for questions and expect to hear
from fans of my first book, The Kafka Chronicles,
since it went into three printings in a very short period of
time. But no, most of the questions were about Alt-X and the
future of writing and publishing in a network culture. This
was on my mind too, and by the time I had finished the book
tour, I realized I needed to explore these options more.
Meanwhile, I had already
started the first draft of a new novel called GRAMMATRON,
which was spurring interest from a few major publishing
houses, but I was adamant about what I wanted to do and
decided to create a unique work of Internet art that would
be made available for free to readers all over the
world.
Also, by this time, I had
already developed a relationship with Brown University as a
visiting artist, attending their Vanguard Narrative Festival
produced by Bob Coover and then, later, the Pong Festival
which was more focused on digital art. I applied to their
program so I could develop the GRAMMATRON project, and was
accepted, with a Creative Writing fellowship and, with the
help of Coover, George Landow, and others, spent two years
reworking GRAMMATRON, which I had already started in
Boulder. Now I could focus on both writing and cultural
production in electronic spaces without necessarily leaving
my narrative art practice behind.
dd:
Your web site Alt-X is widely praised and considered "the
literary publishing model of the future" (Publisher's
Weekly). What does this site contain, what is the concept
behind it?
MA: Alt-X,
believe it or not, is now over seven years old. In net
years, that feels like a millennium. At first, I thought of
Alt-X as an experimental art project, one that would create
a distributed community of writers and artists from around
the world who could build both individual and
collaborative art works aimed
at targeted literary audiences around the world. But
something else happened very fast: we were immediately seen
more generally as one of the most happening alternative
culture sites on the web which, at the time, was a very
alternative medium.
This mainstream
international attention was fast and intense -- totally
unexpected. All of a sudden, what I had been used to, i.e.
producing the printed Black Ice literary magazine for about
1000 core readers, exploded into an online publishing site
that was attracting between 75,000 and 100,000 visitors
a month. The pressure to
continually create new content every month and to turn it
into a profitable business model was overwhelming. But the
Alt-X team stuck to our guns and focused on creating even
more challenging work than we had been creating up to that
time. This is when we started rethinking
the entire site as a multi-linear, multi-disciplinary
network where the digerati meet the literati.
To this effect we have over
the years created an incredible amount of work. We started
off by publishing fiction, interviews with writers, artists
and theorists, virtually reprinting Postmodern classics, an
electronic book review and forum, irreverent manifestos and
essays, and my Amerika Online column, which has since
been translated into German at the 
Telepolis
site. Perhaps the areas of development that would be of most
interest to your readers are Electronic Book Review, Black
Ice, Virtual Imprints and Hyper-X.
Electronic
Book Review, in
particular, has continued to do things that no other serious
online journal is doing
right now. Joe Tabbi and Anne Burdick and the entire
editorial and design team are creating an entirely new
interface for critical interaction with new media and
literary work, a space where critical artists of different
backgrounds and interests radically reconfigure the ways in
which graphic design, writing, editing and reading converge
in the web-based interface. The interface itself, focused as
it is on threads and interweaving, is a metaphor for what
the site is doing with all of its rich content. And then
there are the hundreds of contributors whose work constantly
challenges our notions of writing and reading in relation to
critical theory, network culture and the blurring of the
visual with the textual.
Alt-X is also now about to
launch its own Ebook series, mp3 label, Palm Pilot programs,
and many other publishing projects. We're very lucky that
our senior editor, Ron Sukenick, who has been a kind of
behind-the-scenes Pomo Godfather to the site, is directing
the new publishing project out of
New York.
Of course, on our way to
inventing new modes of writing, reading and publishing, we
found that the mainstream literary art world was
emphatically opposed to our vision of literature's future.
Calvin Reid at Publishers Weekly understood what we were
doing, but not many others. Then, something changed.
Something unexpected. The visual, conceptual and digital art
worlds all started paying attention to what we were doing
and we began getting a reputation for developing some of the
early forms of Internet Art, which we were, even though we
weren't calling it that at the time. In
1996-97, and especially after
the release of my GRAMMATRON, the site started calling into
question what had become the arbitrary differences between
publishing and exhibiting, curating and editing, creating a
work of hypertextually-driven narrative or poetic art and a
new kind of net art or web
art.
Our online exhibition,
Digital Studies: Being in Cyberspace, was perhaps one
of the first sincere attempts at blurring these distinctions
and now, of course, everyone is doing it, from the Whitney
Biennial 2000 to ZKM to gallery spaces all around the
globe.
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