It is a dance made of words that began when the Internet was still young and collapsed over 4 years later under the enormous weight of its own invisibility. But I am compelled to let it be known that though this one was probably not the first, the last, or perhaps not the best On-Line Collaborative Poem, it should not go unnoticed. These sorts of collaborations are probably commonplace nowadays. It takes you places that "virtual reality" wishes it could go. One of the guiding principles of Panscan was that 1200 baud was OK because the words were enough to do what needed to be done. In its totality it is mesmerizing and meaningful because it captures over 4 years worth of the spirit of the people who participated and their relationships to one another- the spirit that was Panscan, an ineffable on-line performance piece made up of zeros and ones. In truth the entire work is one long rambling 36,000 word work-in-progress and at times it can be quite powerful. Some of those parts took us an asynchronous year on-line to complete, others just a few minutes. It had natural rhythms and breaks so I tried to let those coalesce into the 39 Parts or movements, if you will, that you see here. When it was "finished," I broke it up into 39 sections that made sense to me. It is over 8000 lines long, each contributed spontaneously by an Echo participant. Panscan was an experimental conference and many good things came out of it and this was one of them. There it continued for over 4 years and would have kept going but Panscan got closed down.
So it moved into one of the items in the Panscan Conference on ECHO, a BBS in New York City. Actually it began a few months before that as an E-mail collaborative poem, but that didn't work because I kept misplacing the e-mail. The Panscan Conference on Hosted by Mark Bloch
An on-line collaboration in 39 parts Dozens of participants (listed by their chosen pseudonyms in their respective sections) Novemto January 11, 1995
0 kommentar(er)
