The interactivity and the possibilities of exchange offered by the Internet
allow for the creation of collective works redefining the limits of the
text. These projects made in collaboration lead to the infinite growth and
the continuous transformation of the text, while delegating, at least in
part, content production to the visitor.
Some of these Web Works are in this regard exemplary, especially Douglas
Davis project entitled the longuest collaborative sentence. This work
originated in the context of exhibitions and performances welcoming many
participants and its life has been prolongated on the Web since 1995,
without any known ending... Each visitor can add some text onto the last
fragment and thus become part of that enormous project.
just change beliefs by Jenny Holzer is another important collective work,
composed of an ensemble of statements forever revised by the participants.
The variations introduced by the visitors, as well as the new propositions
being added to the ones already there, confer to this project an unlimited
life.
Finally, Maurice Benayoun's work, Et moi dans tout ça ?2, also relies on the
visitors' collaboration in order to rewrite a given text in a continuous
manner. Here the amount of text remains about the same. Text fragments are
being replaced by others in the course of the story by the reader turned
author. The participants' intervention is altering the original text,
Genesis from the Bible, a well-known story rendered hardly recognizable
here.
