Frequency: Scott Rettberg
Title: Frequency
Frequency is a constraint-driven network hypertext novel and poem. It is a work-in-progress (about 20% complete) which will eventually include 2000 story nodes, lines of a poem, and photographs. The story will be arbitrailly arranged by the reader's selection of link words from individual lines of a poem. A working version will be read from at the seminar, though I anticipate it will take at least another year to complete the project.
The constraints driving the project are as follows:
- The poem text includes only words from a list of the 200 most commonly used words in the English language.
- The photographs used are Creative Commons images selected from 100 most commonly used flickr tags.
- Each of the story text includes one of the 200 most frequently used words from the word "Frequency," in descending order.
- Each story fragment then is intended to respond to the line of the poem to which it is attached, to the photograph which is arbitrarily assigned to it, and to include one word from the "frequency" list.
Some things I’m interested in exploring in Frequency include:
- an obviously constrained writing practice that nonetheless results in a coherent narrative.
- a hypertext intended to deliver multiple fragmentary but coherent reading experiences in multiple reading sessions.
- the idea of the collective (un)conscious — will a text derived in part from the words most often used and in part from the tags that people most often choose to put on their photographs in some way reflect a collective consciousness (or not)?
- a Creative Commons fiction. I’ll be releasing the work under a CC non-commercial attribution license — the same one as I’m getting the photographs under—and I’ll encourage people to remix the work under the same license.
- a story that is also a separate but related poem.
- the idea of “atomistic fiction” — in some ways this is a continuation of a thread that Nick Montfort and I were exploring in Implementation — the idea of writing a novel that both “works” in whole and is composed of distinct “narrative moments” that can be isolated from each other.
- creating a work that could be delivered in different ways (and in different formations) in different platforms.
- an exploration of contemporary America in the late age of fear.
The Bergen presentation of Frequency will be the first presentation of a web-based version of the project-in-progress, which will eventually have several different online and offline manifestations.