In four rooms on the Nottingham Trent University campus in England, a small group of students and writers are exploring the future of creative hypertext as music from the aerobics classes next door throbs through the wall.
Like their counterparts in America and elsewhere, the participants in the Trace International Writing Community are studying the ways that the Web, online communities, and virtual environments like MOOs are changing how we feel about ourselves, how we tell stories, and, as Gertrude Stein once said, "how writing is written."
Unlike many other pioneers venturing out on that frontier, however, the Trace writers have serious financial backing. Courtesy of the Arts Council of England, which derives its funding from the highly popular British lottery, Trace has gotten an injection of roughly US$500,000 to host conferences, workshops, and innovative online projects over the next three years.
The latest Trace experiment -- a patchwork-in-PERL of submissions from writers all over called the Noon Quilt -- launched Monday. The idea behind the Noon Quilt is to create a composite picture of the planet through human eyes as the sun's apex moves through the world's time zones. Writers are invited to look out their windows wherever they happen to be at noon local time, and describe what they see in 100 words. The impressions are woven together on the site.
Other Trace projects in the pipeline include a hypertext writing contest with a prize of £1,000 (about US$1,600), and a conference on Writers and the Internet, to be held in Nottingham on 16 October. Topics slated for the conference include online copyright, creating interactive art, and innovative modes of teaching in MOOs.
Director Sue Thomas says she hopes the Trace project not only captures the attention of a worldwide community of writers on the Net, but also raises consciousness about new media in England. The online fever that has taken hold in America -- home of free local calling and flat-rate unlimited Net access -- has been slower to incubate in Britain, where phone companies can tack 6-cent-per-minute surcharges onto dialups made during peak hours.
Thomas compares the enthusiasm of the young Web writers she works with to the spirit of William Morris' Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century. Morris -- a poet, craftsman, typographer, designer, and early Socialist -- believed that even "the lesser arts" of fabric design and papermaking could play a role in ennobling existence when such daily things were made by hand with care, rather than churned out by a machine.
On the Net today, Thomas says, "young people are teaching themselves the craft of Web design and HTML. It's a treasure trove of design, experiment, and invention, and all handmade, shared, democratic."
Thomas, who recently completed a novel about love in a MOO, called The Net of Desire, is in no hurry to leave behind the subtleties of written language to embrace a fat-pipe future of streaming video and flashy avatars.
"Text-based virtuality will never go away. If you describe yourself as 'the scent of a rose on a hot summer's day,' that's an immediate sensory communication. To do that with a graphical avatar, you have to be a really wonderful artist," she says.
Hypertext innovator and Alt-X publisher Mark Amerika, who will lecture at the October conference, calls Trace "the kind of project I have always dreamed about. Not only does it provide Internet writing workshops while supporting the development of virtual communities, but they are totally committed to investigating the artistic potential of the Net and encouraging international writing collaborations.... I wish we had something like it here in the States."
Though the Arts Council funding gives Trace financial backbone that would be the envy of stateside hypertext greenhouses, Thomas says she's not interested in becoming a bland, mainstream writers' workshop for the Web.
"We don't have ambitions to become the Amazon.com of writing communities," she says. "We want to stay at the edges."
