Introduction to Focus: The Collaborative Turn

At 2:05 in the first installment of the pop video series “Everything is a Remix,” the narrative jumps from a discussion of Led Zeppelin’s early thefts to a short aside about William S. Burroughs’s work in Paris, 1961. We are told he “not only invents the term ‘heavy metal,’” yet with a logic born merely from the connection of this term to Zeppelin’s music, “he also produces an early remix.”

The term “heavy metal” can indeed be traced to Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine (1961), which “Everything” cites as a product of the cut-up method (this is only partly true). Further, while the video does not directly attribute the invention of the cut-ups to Burroughs (most commentators attribute that to Brion Gysin, if not to the Dadaists at the Cabaret Voltaire, or to a host of similar practices occurring at earlier avant-garde moments), its diction is telling. The juxtaposition of images of Burroughs (taken from his film work with Anthony Balch) with a voiceover speaking the word “invents” (which implies a base level of intentionality) and “produces,” belies the larger argument of this video series…that everything is in fact a remix. The suggestion of the presentation and its narration, quite the contrary, is that everything possesses an interesting origin point.

So emerges the primary tension of what we are calling here The Collaborative Turn. This “Turn” might be defined as a series of often-interrelated techniques, texts, and writers, that not only brings to the fore the collaborative mechanisms of all aesthetic production (whether from DJ Spooky back to Homer)—focused still on the explicitly collaborative techniques of the current era—but also as an agon, a crisis, that revolves around the practice of the collaboratively inflected artwork in a still highly individuated artspace.

This Focus hopes to directly and indirectly confront this issue. I have curated essays and reviews that offer ABR readers a broad snapshot of zones where collaboration, remixing, pastiche, plagiarizing, copying (as in Marcus Boon’s recent In Praise of Copying [2010]), and uncreative writing (see the Doug Nufer-edited Focus of issue 32.4), along with a host of related practices, are moving toward increased visibility and prominence, while also expressing the conflict that these works represent for the traditional role of the author. It is neither accurate nor easy to argue that we exist now in a fully post-Romantic world, despite the seeming ubiquity of crowd-sourced art and comedy video kitsch and Twitterature and iPod DJ apps. Rather, the availability of new(er) technologies for the production of new work often merely reinforces the limits of the predecessor technologies, at least at first. Early Gutenberg press books primarily aped handwritten illuminated manuscripts, and we must expect the same growing pains for literature confronted not only with the possibilities promised by these techniques in a new media age, but also the unresolved limits of authorship blowing over in a strong gale from the Statute of Anne (1710)—the first copyright act—and the three centuries of art that have flown in its winds.

The Collaborative Turn is an agon, a crisis, that revolves around the practice of the collaboratively inflected artwork in a still highly individuated artspace.

To whit, the essays: Steve Tomasula, my partner at &NOW and a writer exploring the boundaries of text and the book, details his large-scale collaborations in works such as The Book of Portraiture (2006) and TOC: A New-Media Novel (2009). Significant to this discussion is his defense of individual authorship within his wildly ambitious collaborations, and his articulation of “the private space” of writing experience (pre-collaborator) that is yoked to the intimacy of the individual reader’s experience. Similarly, Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort open their essay about collaboration in electronic literature with a dialogue that reifies their own individual positions, and yet the onus of many of the works they cite that have been collected by the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, require active compositional collaboration with “it,” “the computer, or the database, the algorithm, and the limitations of protocols and software...