Authors

Giulia Gallo¹;  ¹ Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Discussion

The paper aims to analyse problems of trust pertaining to the authorial figure in Evgenii Gornyi’s digital project Others’ Words (Chuzhye slova, 2001). In this project, which is presented as a quote collection and is accessible via a dedicated online interface, the author is no longer a creative figure but a collector who reassembles passages from various literary works into new literary formations. This literary experiment anticipates the technologies of creative AI, becoming thus an ironic ‘human intelligence’. Its prompt is the readers’ interest and will to play the literary game and to find their own textual associations. In fact, the interaction established with the reader bestows the user with the responsibility of creating one’s own form of narration starting from a series of randomly presented quotes ranging from texts to images. At the same time, it trusts the reader’s instinct in consciously experiencing the work of art in a certain way, with no instruction by the author. 

Such authorial behaviour, made possible by the interaction of literature with digital media, makes the concepts of form and content collapse together. Moreover, it shows distrust in the tendency to pan-narrativism, frequently found in web literature studies, as the narration, in this case, is rather odd and dependent on individual experience, far both from traditional linearity and from other instances of digital non-linearity. The distance to narrativsm transforms texts into a mere, arbitrary association of ideas; thus, the author’s connections overlap with the randomness generated by the software and create other and further aesthetic associations.