Artist Statement
Internet based, fictionalised hyperlocal group news blog
The Spoon River Metblog, an Ambient Fiction, or A Hyperlocal Blogging as Epic Poetry Cycle. Ambient Fiction embeds story and fictive content in web-based locations that are traditionally used for non-fictive purposes. Hijacking these tools for the repurposing of classic texts allows them to slip past objections to the ‘old’ and ‘irrelevant’. The Spoon River Metblog is a modernization of the 1915 Edgar Lee Masters poetry classic ‘Spoon River Anthology’ in the form of a hyperlocal group news blog. ‘Spoon River Anthology’ is an epic cycle of 245 one-page poems, each the voice of a deceased resident of the town. The 245 individual voices combine to give a picture of life in Spoon River, and multiple meta-stories are woven throughout the narrative. spoonriver.metblogs.com
- Jay Bushman (USA) produces The Loose-Fish Project, an experiment in re-imagining classic works of literature as net-native storytelling. loose-fish.com
Full text (PDF) p. 30