March 28, 2005
Implementation: romanzo
Now the world has truly begun to conquer my and Scott’s sticker novel Implementation.
We are delighted to announce that Riccardo Boglione, a scholar of 20th century Italian literature and graduate student in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, has translated the first installment of Implementation into Italian. His translation of installment 1 is now available for download and printout onto US Letter or A4 label paper. Riccardo plans to continue translating the novel, releasing one installment a month. (Implementation Italian home page.)
March 29th, 2005 at 3:51 pm
Have you had any strangers write you email, that they read a sticker, wanted to know what the hell it was, memorized / jotted down / stole a sticker, Googled some of the text, and found your project page?
March 29th, 2005 at 4:34 pm
We have not, although perhaps by scouring the server logs a bit more thoroughly we’d find evidence of this having happened. It’s a reasonable question, in light of graffiti/stickers that consciously link to websites, which exist in order to direct people away from the world and their surroundings, onto the Web.
While this might happen with Implementation, however, it isn’t the purpose of the project, any more that going to see The Gates is supposed to make me want to look up pictures of The Gates the Web. Implementation invites people into the novel without asking them to walk away from their public spaces and get online. It has its “real” existence on stickers and public surfaces, and while there are many stickers to read, there’s no puzzle you need to figure out by conducting an online treasure hunt. Reading a sticker on the street somewhere is reading the novel.
March 29th, 2005 at 5:48 pm
Andrew — While I would theorize that this probably has happened, except for the email part, we have no empirical evidence. The part of the project I feel like we miss out on is the reaction of the random viewer. I’m certain that people have noticed the stickers and in certain places — for instance Nick’s neighborhood in Philadelpia, and mine in the northern part of Brigantine Island, the density and frequency of sticker placements has been such that it is statistically likely that people have seen multiple segments of the novel over an extended period of time. I’m not sure that the most natural thing to do would be to write down the text and google it. More likely it has been the topic of an occassional conversation. “I saw one of them stickers again.” The nature of the project doesn’t really allow for us to be flies on the wall, though I’d like to. Maybe someday I’ll run into someone who has seen the project, wondered what it was, and only connected the dots after hearing us talk about it, or running across the project page on the internet. I’ve had similar things happen with the Unknown — a novel that a lot of people happened to encounter on the web while searching for other things. But just to reiterate Nick’s point, we didn’t conceptualize the individual lexia of the project as dependent on the others. Each sticker is meant to fit into the whole, but to suffice on its own, in isolation.