[ISEA2009] Artist Statement: Jay Bushman – The Spoon River Metblog: Net-Native Anthology and Hyperlocal Culture Wars, 2008

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