SEATTLE – Nearly 30 years since its original contribution to the literary art scene, “Invisible Seattle: The Novel of Seattle,” by The Invisibles will be part of the “Electronic Literature” exhibit at the 2012 Modern Language Association convention Jan. 5-8 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle.
The exhibit was curated by Dene Grigar, director of the creative media and digital culture program and associate professor at Washington State University Vancouver; Lori Emerson, assistant professor at University of Colorado Boulder; and Kathi Inman Berens, instructor at the University of Southern California.
The MLA conference draws more than 5,000 humanities scholars and artists from all over the world. As a result, a new generation of literary art lovers will become acquainted with “Invisible Seattle” and rediscover the novel the city wrote about itself.
Ahead of their time
Grigar believes the time is ripe for highlighting the contributions of pioneering work like “Invisible Seattle” to the development of digital media.
In the early 1980s, The Invisibles – Jean Sherrard, Larry Stone, Rob Wettig, James Winchell and Philip Wohlstetter – deemed themselves “literary workers” and set out to create a novel written by the people of Seattle. Dressed in white coveralls and hardhats, the workers used interviews, questionnaires and fill-in-the-blank forms to collect comments about the city. The novel was constructed during the annual Bumbershoot Arts Festival.The Invisibles worked in collaboration by using desktop computers, phone lines and 300 bps modems to create irreverent, cultured, often hilarious texts in new forms. The result of the group’s efforts was a new form of literature accessible via computers. They came to realize that what they had created in “Invisible Seattle” was essentially a “database novel.”
“‘Invisible Seattle’ was among the first to play intelligently with many aspects of digital writing that entered the mainstream only decades later,” said Mark Marino, associate professor of clinical education at University of Southern California, who recommended “Invisible Seattle” for the MLA convention.
“(The Invisibles were) experimenting with collaborative, public diaries as an art form years be-fore blogs became common,” he said. “They were writing under different pseudonyms. And they were very aware of how what they were doing was part of the long tradition of the literary avant-garde.”
For more information about the MLA conference “Electronic Literature” exhibit, visit http://dtc-wsuv.org/mla2012.