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printing process had by then become the norm for mass-produced books. The problem with artists' books is, of course, that they require much skill, money and resources to produce. Small numbers of expensive books are produced using technologies that become more and more outdated and are not suitable for a mass market. Nor is the concept of self-publishing feasible, since it requires not only a great deal ofskill but also expensive equipment. The telegraph and the telephone made the world smaller and a vast amount of information became almost instantly and constantly available. The demand for cheap reading material and fast distribution ofthis information, predominantly by newspaper, increased constantly and with it came further advances in printing technology. Typesetting machines eventually became widely used and made the laborious typesetting by hand redundant and with it newspaper production much faster. Photography was a new and important invention and once the technology to include it in newspapers matured, radicallychanged their layout. Short bold headlines and captions in newspapers and on billboards were competing for the readers' attention and tty to guide them the masses ofinformation flooding in. The computer is, on the one hand, only the last in a chain of technological developments that made the layout of printed pages more flexible and the including of images and illustrations easier. There are, however, some important differences. The average computer user has now access to facilities that before were only available to the professional printer and the professional publisher. The creator of a text can now easily, with a few keystrokes and hopefully a good eye for layout, decide for her/himself about the look of his/her text. The visual aspect becomes again an important part of the creation process, just as it was for the scriptor of mediaeval manuscripts and just as Morris and other artists concerned with artists' books wanted it to be. This time a technology is used that is both efficient, unlike handwriting, and cheap and widely available, unlike handprinting. There is now scope for individual expression no longer only in the style of writing, but also in its physical presentation. Author and text are again coming closer together. Chapter 4 - page 153
Electronic text processing and distribution systems can be described as having two opposing characteristics: on the one hand they allow authors to leave their work in a constant state of flux and to write and re-write not in one solitary act, but in acts of constant feedback and collaboration, with awork embedded in a network ofother texts. On the other hand theygive authors muchgreater control over any aspect of their text and cut out the collaborations ofthe traditional print production process. Alternative X and, one could argue, the whole avant-pop project, tries to straddle the gap between those two extremes and, in the process, inevitably becomes tangled up in contradictions. On the one hand it not only fully accepts notions of interactivity but implements them in practice as much as possible; due to its internet existence it can exploit the possibilities of electronic links to other texts to the full. Consequently it has to accept one of the premises of intertextuality, namely the changing role of the author not as original creator, but as re-arranger or, as Raymond Federman puts it - pla(y)giariser 71 {I}magination does not invent the SOMETHING- NEW we too often attribute to it, but instead how (consciously or unconsciously) it merely imitates, copies,repeats, echoes, proliferates - plagiarizes inotherwords - what has always been there. I...} By cutting itself from the authority of its creator and his precious imagination, art evacuated from itself (from its center) the imposture of originality. {...} As a result, contemporary (postmodern!) culture could no longer produce original works of art (masterpieces), nor could it have great artists (masters). It could only produce works orart that resemble one another, and artists who imitate or plagiarize each other's work" . The idea of pla(y)giarism is not a new one (Federman first used the term in his book Surfiction in 197f 3 ) but does become more acute in the electronic medium, where copying, repeating and plagiarising is so easy to do that it develops from a mainly theoretical proposition to everyday practice» . But at the same time the medium puts authors in a stronger, more self-sufficient position, and Alternative X embraces the possibilities of direct, unfiltered internet 71 deliberately "with a Y because I am also playing", Raymond Federman, Critifiction: Postmodern Essays (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), p.p. 72 Raymond Federman, Critiftction: Postmodem Essays (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993>, p.p; 56. 73Raymond Federman (ed.), Surfiction: Fiction Now ...and Tomorroui (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975)· 74 And in some contexts to a real threat, as the continuous debates about copyright, copyright protection and, on the other hand, freedom ofspeech/information show. Chapter 4 - page 154
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Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1.
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