A "mortal" work of art

I was very intrigued by Shelley Jackson's Skin project. The idea that "each participant will be known as a word, and as words die, the story will disintegrate" is fascinating, and I'm also a little disturbed at how destabilizing this can be for a text. (12)

Walker calls this a form of distributed narrative, and it's a perfect example of her so-called "feral hypertext," an undomesticated and wild text. My question is, if this narrative is written in such a way that it cannot be read, is it still a narrative? It fits under Walker's definition of what a distributed narrative should be, but for the unsuspecting reader/viewer, would we approach this as a work of art and not even consider it a narrative? For me, I saw the project's concept as the story which the author is telling, rather than seeing the actual content of "Skin" as the narrative. Does this make sense?

I suppose this is another one of those times where I feel like I'm bound by traditional ways of thinking about texts, and I do not know how to classify an alien genre. Maybe I shouldn't be classifying things in the first place. My initial approach to Skin, before I read Jill Walker's pieces, was that this was a cool project, a project trying to make a statement, rather than a self-proclaimed piece of literature or narrative. That's probably the point, if there is one.

Also, I felt uneasy about and intrigued at the idea of a "mortal" text. The frontpage of Skin describes it as a "mortal" work of art, and Walker also emphasizes this fact. I guess we can refer to the "mortality" of two entities: the participants and the work as a whole. And literally, the mortality of the latter depends on that of the first. It makes me uneasy at the fact that this is such an unstable work, that the art/work/project will "die" when the people themselves die. While books can be destroyed very easily too, I always tend to think that there are many copies of a piece of literature, so for the most part, the stories are immortal in my eyes. This project, though, has a very short lifeline--literally only several decades. Perhaps people will write about this work critically in the next century, but it will be like scientists talking about dinosaurs. The actual work is dead, gone. Jackson seems to be promoting this idea, especially since it's emphasized that each participant is a word. While I usually think of a good story or book as "alive" in the figurative sense, I normally don't see narratives as living, breathing things or people. Walker's distributed narrative criteria that "no single author or group of authors has complete control of the narrative" (5) is frighteningly true in this case. Any of the participants can literally just die, and basically collapse the story at any time! I don't think I've ever run across such an unstable, collapsible text!