Das Kollektive Gedächtnis

Bored? E-mail and chat with AOL and the internet. 

Can "the interactive" be the fun factor of online art?

I'm thinking it's not "the interactive", but rather the "interacting", namely with other real people. Hence the success of chats and forums and mailing lists. But hence also the failure of interactive artworks, where I as a user should be playing with a machine as well as myself.... !

If one simply looks at the works, one will probably find no "internet literature" in what circulates here: the differens collaborative projects, the texts to be forwarded, the collective stories and collections. The objection is always right: one could have done this on paper....

And yet: one CANNOT do it on paper. Not with THESE people that we have met on the internet - and with other people in the print world or locally in creative writing-workshops it would have been very different! 

Translated by Kine-Lise Madsen Skjeldal

Original: Claudia Klinger, am 11.11.97 in der Mailingliste Netzliteratur. http://www.dreiundzwanzigvierzig.de/vorwort.html