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Thom Swiss

Collaborative Work

As a poet, I began my own collaborative, Web-based work with visual and sound artists three years ago with a sense that the opportunities and demands of Web-based poetry, like many other New Media practices, have their roots in the shared notion of community that was integral to the development of internet.

I was also increasingly interested in what Hal Foster calls "the twin obsessions of the neo-avant garde": temporality and textuality. Web-based poems -- especially those involving links, animation, and attention to the pictoral elements of writing -- suggest novel approaches to thinking about time and the text.

Collaborative work redefines artistic labor in what is for me new and complicated ways: what is the relationship, for example, between my language and the images and sounds others create, even if under my "direction"? How do the images and sound "change"the meaning of the language (and vice versa) and in what ways can the piece be said to still be a "poem"?

Collaboration allows writers and artists -- like myself and those I compose with -- to reconsider both our work and our identities, to literally see them anew, as we move from individual to composite authorship.

http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/directory.htm