implementation-haakonsgt.jpgI relish the stickers I received in the mail last weekend. A gift: three pages of stickers, each with a narrative fragment printed on it, the first installation of Scott and Nick’s sticker novel Implementation. I’ve already stuck some of these gifts on signposts, giving them to others, opening the narrative to passers by, mixing meanings by what I stick them next to. Then I took photos and sent them back to Nick and Scott, who have put them on the web in a new cycle of giving.

In her introduction to Claerbout’s Present, Sara Tucker quotes Lewis Hyde on art as gift:

In (..) The Gift, Lewis Hyde argued that a work of art is essentially a gift, not a commodity. The fact that Claerbout’s flowers were made for distribution via the web is especially appropriate since most network-based art is created and shared without expectation of profit. Hyde also argued that a gift must remain in circulation, writing, “a gift that cannot be given away ceases to be a gift. The spirit of a gift is kept alive by its constant donation.” In this sense, Present is truly a gift, with repeated donation included by design.

Gift literature, viral narrative, stories spreading by quite different distribution chains than publishers and bookshops. They’ve promised PDFs so you can print your own soon. Voluntary infection.

8 thoughts on “gift literature

  1. jcwinnie

    J-
    I want an RSS feed of your category networked_literature, si vous plait?
    J-

  2. Jill

    Oh. I suppose I could do that. If I wrote a template for it in Moveable Type. Don’t suppose you have a template already written for such things, do you?

    It’s cool that you like the category!

  3. Jill

    Well, look at that, I did it. Like most things, of course it’s easy once done: I looked at Diveintomark’s beautifully shared MT templates, used his stuff about how to tell MT to publish these in Blog Config, and his directory path stuff, then I pasted in the regular RSS thing in from Moveable Type’s template collection, but told MT that it was a Category template and hey presto, look at that, they’re all there: feeds for all my categories. Amazing, innit?

    I suppose that does kind of make sense. I mean, I generally prefer browsing my blogs WITH visuals, I LIKE seeing different pages, you know, visiting instead of just seeing lists of posts in an RSS reader. I tend to agree with Zeldman’s FAQ answer:

    Q: If you offered an RSS feed, I could read your stuff without visiting your site.
    A: If you stored your groceries on the sidewalk, we could eat your food without sitting across the table from you.

    But I can see how someone might be interested in SOME stuff and not ALL stuff in a blog, and just getting one category… Yeah, OK.

  4. Gandalf

    Hi

    Thank you very much for suggessting me an idea !

  5. Your Guess Is As Good As Mine

    Adventures in Metadata
    Implementation is cyberfiction, a bookmark from jill/txt. It would seem to have all the right ingredients — a sticker of the times, eh?

  6. scribblingwoman

    Gifts of web art
    Jill at jill/txt has an interesting post on web art; check it out and follow the links. And here is…

  7. 'if' ..

    Implementation
    “.

  8. texturl

    /narrative in space/
    Nick and Scott’s Implementation is a project I’m watchign with close interest. It’s a narrative implemented with techniques borrowed from,…

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