The Love of the Social Writerly Game (Interview with Mark Marino and Rob Wittig)

Rob Wittig & Mark Marino share a friendship based on destabilizing literary norms with comedy, computers, and collaborations.

Their ongoing conversations range over decades of their work from anecdotes of Wittig's early writing process experiments that preceded the internet by a decade (IN.S.OMNIA, 1983) to a work they are completing together currently net-improv fiction distributed using hashtags.

Both these writers have consistently explored radically playful modes of writing that emerge through message boards, emails, and now twitter. Marino offers cogent critique on the underlying notions of connection that exist as a thematic under all Rob's practices; then describes his early comedy magazine Bunk, 'a playground for writers'. Douglas Adams emerges as the lifter of the 'bag of rocks' and both convert into ravens, black wings gouging the page into inky screens.

Interview 2012-06-23 at ELO Morgantown.

(Source: David Jhave Johnston, Vimeo)