View source for Writing to be Found and Writing Readers

Poetic writing for programmable and network media seems to have been captivated by the affordances of new media and questions of whether or not and if so, how certain novel, media-constituted properties and methods of literary objects require us to reassess and reconfigure the literary itself. What if we shift our attention decidedly to practices, processes, procedures — towards ways of writing and ways of reading rather than dwelling on either textual artifacts themselves (even time-based literary objects) or the concepts underpinning objects-as-artifact? What else can we do, given that we must now write on, for, and with the net which is itself no object but a seething mass of manifold processes?

Part one of the essay presents a brief analysis of recent experiments in "writing to be found" with Google, making some claim that such writing may be exemplary, that its aesthetic and conceptual engagements are distinct, and that there is something at stake here for "the literary" or rather for certain practices of literary art. After very brief discussion in part two of some broader implications of writing with the Google corpus and its tools, part three addresses more examples of writing to be found, and introduces a collaboration with Daniel Howe, The Readers Project, many processes of which engage with "writing to be found" "in" Google and making use of its tools.

(Source: author's abstract)