Web/Fiction/Design: A brief beta-test of this year’s winner of the ELO Awards, Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls

A (literature) award usually comes with publicity as well as responsibility. As this year's ambassador of digital literature, the US-American Electronic Literature Organization chose a webfiction that does not meet the technological standards of current internet or CD-ROM productions. Neither the rather outdated technique of frames, nor Flash (a program for moving images), nor the embedding of sounds have been implemented in a way that is technologically useful (there's nor debating aesthetics) or ar least more or less correct. About 15 years after the "invention" of digital literature (this date, too, is open for discussion), the technology available has become so sophisticated that a single author obviously can no longer live up to the demands as a lonely creative genius. The quality even of praised digital literature seems to indicate that, caused by the raising of technical standards, the future lies in what collaborative writing in hypertext or online "Mitschreibeprojekte" did not mange to establish: the dismissal of authorship in the traditional sense of authoritiy over the text in favor of a plural, diverse team-work.

(Source: article abstract)