or:
Archive files[1] salvaged by Heiko Idensen
following a system crash[2]
[1] Oswald Wiener introduces the imposing
fifteen-page index - which functions as an intertextual source archive - to his
novel "Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa, Roman" with the following literary
memory storage utopia: "literature references: the following is a compilation
of writings, to which i have referred either expressly or covertly in the
course of the present volume; i also list books that have provided no more than
a general background; with few exceptions, i have included no books from the
sectors of art, fashion, architecture and music, and i have deleted the
"classics", with which every reasonably educated person may be assumed to be
familiar. i felt strongly inclined to add a list of other sources as well - in
fact i had already begun compiling a list of such sources (shop windows,
conversations, landscapes, data, faces, pornographic photos, coincidences,
LP's, films) - but i had to give up in view of the plethora of entries."
(Oswald Wiener: Die Verbesserung von Mitteleuropa, Roman, Reinbeck bei Hamburg
1969, p. CXCIII) Rather than the long expected "Poetics of the Age of Science",
a literary analysis of artificial intelligence research was published under the
pseudonym Evo Präkogler, which also utilizes the storage functions of the
recording system computer itself in the publisher fiction: a civil servant from
the Ministry of Public Relations discovers on two disks the file "Prekog.BAK"
of unknown origin. He presents this file unedited and with the addition of a
few notes. The hero of the novel has lost his short-term memory - and thus he
is able to become the ideal medium for free-floating text fragments, although
he is ultimately not spared the insight that he is himself a simulation,
"bioadapter", only capable of perception via media and medical prostheses. Woe
is he that does not see the symbols, or he that has the notion of running on a
computer! (Evo Präkogler (Ed.): Nicht schon wieder...! Eine auf einer
Floppy gefundene Datei, Munich 1990)
[2] Fortunately there are backup copies, CD-Rom
archives, texts circulating in networks and (in an emergency) at least a few
texts that were printed out at one time or another or published somewhere else,
so that even after a total deletion of all the texts he ever wrote or copied,
it is still possible for an author to re-import the texts to his home harddisk,
so to speak, through extensive search operations or, if all else fails, by
scanning texts with a text recognition program. Since any reader could do the
same, not only do the distinctions between author and reader blur, so do the
distinctions between different texts. However the author-fiction Heiko Idensen
seems to practically exploit the storage and transmission technologies of
digital text universes for the generation and compilation of texts, and the
rhetorical structuring of hypertexts instigated by himself: seeming assumption
of the role of the reader, lexicon-type arrangements, playing games with
footnotes and references, illusionary dialogues with search engines, filtering
cache files, science fiction intermediary texts are all part of the used and
abused "network culture techniques", such as the simulation of dialogue
generators or experimenting with commentary techniques, which should be passed
on for the reader to use wherever possible, e.g. via WWW sites, to which
readers may append remarks online.
Text-Netz-Werke & Hypertextarchiv (Heiko Idensen)