I have been impressed with how much impassioned discussion has come in reaction to Jackson's "Skin" project. My initial reaction was positive, but reading the fire that has come down on this piece from thenewblack and tophat1 caused me to question the validity of my own response. Hopefully I am going to quality and break down some of what I am thinking, but there is a distinct chance that I will just step into the middle of this.

Honestly, I think that there is real art and interesting thought in what Shelley Jackson is doing here. Walker's piece on distributed narrative raised interesting ideas on what exactly a narrative is and how much unity must factor into the equation. In a modern or postmodern world, we have to respect that any writing is radically compositional by its very nature. We must accept the fact that we or any output we produce is more complex than we can consciously account for. Knowing that, the convention of reproducible narratives with a regular form and single location seems constructed. Our ideas aren't rational, so why should the products of those ideas pretend to be? An attempt to look finished or insulated can be almost pretentious in an era where we are beginning to now better.

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?

The question that black lace brought up of whether stickers are art or graffiti reminded me of a project someone did at Pomona two years ago. Someone thought it would be really clever to post stickers that said "SIGN" on them on any kind of sign they could find. They didn't just put them on paper signs, though-- they stuck some to walls and doors and other places from which stickers are very difficult to remove.

Now, not only did it fall to the Housekeeping Department to scrape all of these obnoxious stickers off of Pomona College property, but the people who posted the stickers didn't draw a distinction between College property and individuals' private property. Which meant that several postcards and other handmade, irreplaceable, personal things I had posted on my door got "SIGN" stickers slapped on them. I was livid. The gall some one must possess to believe that he has the right to deface my property or the College's property (that someone else will have to clean up) in order to accomplish an intellectually not-that-interesting project amazes me. And that's what really got my goat in Implementation. Not the story itself-- I really enjoyed the actual story-- but the part in which Samantha talks about her alleged ambivalence regarding the work involved in removing the stickers she makes and posts struck me as so unbelievably narcissistic. Here's what she says:

Hypertext author Shelley Jackson (Patchwork Girl, Eastgate Systems) has published - I suppose this qualifies - a distributed text of some sort as tattoos on the skin of apparently close to 1395 people.