Scott Rettberg

Nick Montfort and I are working with a designer to develop a coffee-table photo book version of Implementation, the sticker novel we published in 2004-2005. Originally, most of the photos submitted were of a resolution only suitable for the Web. We are currently looking for readers to help re-implement Implementation and to send in higher resolution photos of stickers in situ. To participate:

1) Email at implementationphotos at gmail dot com with your postal mailing address, and we will send you an installment of stickers from the novel.

2) Choose interesting places to put the stickers up in public environments and stick them there.

3) Photograph the sticker, attempting to get photos of the sticker both at a close/legible view and from some distance, showing the placement of the sticker in its environment.

3) Standard or high photo resolution on most contemporary digital cameras will work for this — we are trying to get photos that would be of suitable resolution for a book project.

4) Send the photographs to implementationphotos at gmail dot com — in the subject of the email include the location (City, State/Region, Country – you can be more specific if you like) where the photograph was taken and the installment number, which will be indicated on the back of the sticker sheets. Please also indicate if you would like the photo to be attributed to you, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous.

For the purposes of the book project, photos received over the course of the next month (returned before 15 January 2010) will be most useful. By submitting the photos, you agree to grant us the rights to use the photos for the book project and online versions of the project.

Gmail takes up to 25MB attachments per email message.

If you enjoy the experience and would like to put up more stickers, let us know and we will send you another installment.

Happy implementing!

I’ll be giving a talk this evening on Implementation in the contexts of Situationism, Fluxus, and sticker art campaigns this evening at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference in Chicago. For the first time this year, the conference includes a stream of presentations on electronic literature. The conference will also include a stream for ecocriticism; a stream for the conference theme of cognitive science and emergence; and a stream for work in the visual arts. The plenary speaker is Gerald Edelman, winner of the Nobel Prize. Invited Artists inclue Eduardo Kac, Warren Neidich, Allison Hunter, Eve Andree Laramee, Daniel Wenk, Zane Berzina. Keynote panels will match invited artists and prominent critics, among them Cary Wolfe, Barbara Stafford, and N. Katherine Hayles.

PiPs did an excellent job with the Implementation display, including a wall of photos and a DVD running on a monitor in the storefront, at the Cube2 Gallery in Providence as part of Provflux 2005. It was a real pleasure to see Implementation among like-minded projects, and I really enjoyed watching people wander up to study the pictures and take home sticker sheets of their own.

Implementation Reading at the Steelyard

On Sunday, Nick and I read Implementation as part of the Provflux lectures at the Steelyard. We read from photos which were projected on the side of a truck. About 20 people were in the audience, sitting on stools and benches or lying on blankets spread out on the dirt floor. Hanna Wallach took these pictures.

Implementation: Moscow Bus Stop

An intrepid reader sent in this shot of Implementation near St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

Nick and I recently got word that Implementation has been accepted by Provflux 2005, both as an Intervention (live event) as an exhibition. Implementation’s second gallery exhibition will take the form of mounted photos from the project, a DVD of distance shots, and take-home sticker sheets on display at CUBE2 Gallery in downtown Providence, Rhode Island from May 19th through June 4th, and we’ll be in Providence May 27th-29th for the event itself, with a goal of distributing, placing, and documenting the entire novel in one weekend in one location. Bring your digital camera and camping gear if you want to join us. Implementation joins about 50 other public interventions, games, urban exploration, lost space recovery, and tech mapping projects for this fluxist/situationist/public art happening.

Implementation next to the tower

Originally uploaded by marinella.

The first photos of the Italian translation of Implemenation, from Marinella in Pisa.

Over Easter weekend, Jill and I were visiting Nick Montfort and Hannna in Philadelphia when we got an exciting bit of email from Riccardo Boglione. He is translating our sticker novel Implementation into Italian, one installment at a time. The translation of the first installment is complete, and will be posted to the site, along with the English version and the photo archive tomorrow. We will post the rest of the translations as Riccardo completes them. I'm pretty excited, grateful, and hopeful that we'll also see some interesting photos of the stickers from the Italian version soon.

The audio archive of “Ubu meets Gertrude (Towards A Post-textual Avant-garde)” featuring: Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, from the December 28th event at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia is now online. I'm almost afraid to listen to it. Johanna and Christian said a lot of smart things about Implementation, I remember, and I resolve to learn more about Pataphysics.

On December 28th, I'll be participating in a panel discussion: “Ubu meets Gertrude (A Post-textual Avant-garde)” along with Johanna Drucker, Christian Bok, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Nick Montfort. The discussion and reception will launch an Implementation exhibit in the storefront of the Slought space in Philadelphia (the surrounding neighborhood will also be heavily implemented).

This Friday night at 1 AM, after spending about twenty minutes debating whether to go with “cold cold,” “welcoming,” “permanent,” “moist,” etc. or finally “accomodating” ground, Nick and I finished writing Implementation. The next steps: sending out the final installment and putting it online, preparing a limited first edition of the complete novel in sticker form, to be distributed by Spineless Books, and getting ready for a December/January exhibit and event at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. And future readings and publications of the project. And of course, we'll keep adding photos to the site until people stop sending them. Still, it was satisfying to complete the actual writing, and to bring the project to fruition to the extent that we had originally envisioned when we first started work on it about a year and a half ago.

Implementation is half-done now. We just posted the fourth installment (of 8), and the site now includes 531 photographs of applied stickers from Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, London, Bergen, and a bunch of other locations. Get 'em while they're hot.

and Passover too. Peace.

The first Implemenation Pics are coming in. We've heard from Bergen, Philadelphia, and Duluth. Ben Franklin is my favorite so far.

The project description for Implementation is now online. Nick and I will be launching the project February 14th with a reading at the “Joint Work” reading at Kelly Writers House at UPenn in Philadelphia at 4PM. Nick and William Gillespie will also be reading 2002, a palindrome story, and William and I (and maybe Dirk) will also be reading from The Unknown.

Nick Montfort and I are working on Implementation, a sticker novel. We'll be releasing the first installment in February. I posted some pictures from the first sticker untitled sticker project Nick and I wrote a while back, which we installed one afternoon in September on the streets of Philadelphia.

The ever-intrepid Nick Montfort has arranged a reading for February at Penn. Nick, William Gillespie and I will be reading from three collaborative projects, The Unknown (Gillespie, Rettberg, Stratton), 2002: a Palindrome Story (Gillespie, Montfort) and Implementation, the sticker novel that Nick and I are currently working on. The reading is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, February 14th, 2004 at Kelly Writer's House.

The reading will coincide with a visit to Penn by Harry Mathews. Nick is curating an exhibition of Mathews' papers, which are now housed in the Penn Library. Mathews is the only American member of the Oulipo, author of the The Journalist, Cigarettes, and several other novels, essay collections, and short story collections. The Mathews' exhibition will open with a reception on Thursday, February 12th.

I'm looking forward to seeing Harry again, and to reading with Nick and William. It will be the first time that William and I have done a reading of The Unknown since March 2002 in California. Harry's a wonderful writer, a raconteur, and a connoisseur. I had a great evening with Harry, Joe Tabbi, and Rob Wittig back in Chicago a couple years ago.