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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathCommunication
 
The World's First Collaborative Sentence (Davis, Douglas)Assoziations-Blaster (Espenschied, Dragan; Freude, Alvar), 1999
 
 
 

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network to globally distribute their sound material from various servers over live audio streams and to mix various streaming sources live.[65] Xchange investigates the Net as a soundscape that possesses «specific qualities in regard to data transfer, delay, feedback and open, distributed cooperation models.» This leads to a cooperative, globally distributed «placeless» work of sound art that can be heard only on the Internet.[66]

Open source, open text, open theory: Open and participatory (co-)writing projects on the WWW

It is only consistent that Douglas Davis, the pioneer of interactive television and initiator of early telematic projects, launched one of the first Net-art projects on the still young WWW in the early 1990s. «The World's First Collaborative Sentence»[67] (1994) is a single, endless sentence whose readers have been able to add to since 1994. Davis sees his web project as a continuation of his attempts, from the 1970s onward, to «break out of the rigid transmitter-receiver paradigms of mass-media media circuitry.»[68] For Davis, the Internet is therefore the ideal medium, allowing as

 

it does active participation.[69]

On the Internet, however, in the second half of the 1990s wholly different forms of participation and cooperation developed that were largely the product of the free-exchange and gift economy principles whose roots lay in Net principles but now, thanks to Open Source, Open Theory or Open Law, took on a dynamic all of their own. These new forms were collaborative annotation and editing systems, often implemented as «weblogs,» which enable the collaborative authoring–often over very large distances–of projects (software, encyclopedias, laws). Building on the debating, conversation and cooperation cultures of discussion forums, newsgroups, MUDs and mailing lists,[70] the new hypertextual networking possibilities offered by the WWW are now also becoming production paradigms for artistic Net texts. This development is illustrated by the «Association Blaster» (1999 onward) created by Alvar C.H. Freude and Dragan Espenschied, who describe their project as an «interactive text network. Anyone, including you, is allowed to contribute to the text database. And all the texts inside this database are connected automatically

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