Medialab Prado

This presentation outlines a project called the Story Engine, currently in development, to be completed in early 2008. The Story Engine is an experiment in hypertext as a model for active readership and collaborative authorship.

The Engine itself is an online tool through which collaborative groups will create hypertexts that are not just linked nodes of text, as the Web is, but a single self-organizing text block composed of different strands contributed by different authors. The visual form the Story Engine takes is a three-dimensional chain, of which each word is a link. A reader can choose to split off from the original chain at any given word, creating a sub-chain leading off from that point. Subsequent readers can choose which strand to follow, add their own new strands, or view the entire project, including all existing strands, at once. Thus not only can the reader explore different versions of a different narrative, but the text as a whole can be simply viewed as an abstract aggregate of words, growing denser as user activity increases.

The Story Engine is an experiment in applying game theory to the spontaneous, collaborative creation of written texts. In doing so this project re-addresses, as do many network art projects, the questions of identity and authorship that were brought up by postmodern theory and that continue to lurk in the background of contemporary culture. Roland Barthes famously proposed that “This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost).” The Story Engine literally makes use of code, in its programming and in the way it determines the actions of its users. How does this particular code prescribe user behavior, and how does user behavior interpret the underlying code?

http://digital.uncg.edu/ellis/rhizome/diagrams/1string.gif