Streams are both literally and metaphorically the central image of this work. Streams of consciousness, and of data. Images of and references to rivers flow through the interface. Many of the texts I am inserting into the original twelve essays of TCR 2-50 refer to rivers and/or to writing. TCR 2-50 tackles a broad range of topics in the realm of new media and new technologies - from biotechnology to performance art - yet themes of writing and language are persistent throughout all the essays and thus form the focus of my response. The texts of TCR 250 are the raw data feeding this re-reading endeavour. Whatever the texts say or mean or refer to, as far as RSS is concerned they remain just that: texts.
In her essay, “Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics,” Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams curator Kate Armstrong writes:
In generative digital literature, it is said that the work has the last word because the author and the reader are suddenly in the same position. The work is realized only in the instant that it materializes. But in this culture of feeds and streams, it is not the author that has the last word as in the classical model nor the work that has the last word as in the postmodern model of generative production. It is the reader who has the last word, because the work – after it is released from the control of the author and dissolved into a model of generative distribution – lands with the reader and accumulates there in a completely individualized shape. Not only is the final outcome individualized by becoming attached to the reader as s/he experiences the work, but the work becomes individualized as it blends with and is absorbed into the stream of information that is already coming to the reader.
Elsewhere in her essay Armstrong cites the famous quotation attributed to Heraclitus: You can’t step into the same river twice. In his 1996 novel Reader’s Block, David Markson claims: “Heraclitus did not say that one cannot step into the same river twice. One of his followers did.” Either way. There’s a bridge in Toronto that is emblazoned with that same quotation. The bridge spans a particularly murky stretch of the Don River, six lanes of highway and as many train tracks. The first time I, the reader, experienced that text in that context I’m pretty sure I read it in an entirely different way than any of its authors had intended.
READ: Kate Armstrong / Feeds and Streams: RSS Poetics
other islands in this text-fed stream
