Physical components in Electronic Literature

As Lulu mentioned in an earlier blog post, I've found the projects page to be an excellent procrastination tool, and whenever I want to do something other than what I ought to do, I've found myself poking around in various people's projects.

I was just having a look through crashingintowalls' project page, and I have to say that I'm intrigued by the physical element of the project. The appendix mentions a desire for a more "grounded" approach (paraphrasing very loosely), and I think that this has been achieved. I find the very openness of the project interesting. Not only is the "text" completely open to input from the community at large (including a kid who mentions that he or she "is not in college" but drops in to say "this is cool"), but it is also open in a very physical way being exposed to the elements as it is. Not only can any passerby modify the frame on Walker Beach, for example, but who's to say that a strong gust of wind couldn't have made some kind of authorial contribution as well?

Also, I think one gets a sense of evolving collaboration from the two sites of contribution. At least a couple of the entries in the notebook refer to the ones already written. While the individual contributions are ephemeral in the sense that they reflect whatever happens to be on the individual's mind at the time of writing, the text as a whole projects a certain solidity and a definitive nature in that they remain physically present at the site of their conception.

In conclusion, it's a really interesting form of resistance to the disembodied nature of electronic literature, crashingintowalls.