CHANCE OPERATIONS, FOUND POETRY, MULTIPLE AUTHORSHIP, AND FIVE PAY PHONES

In the fall of 1998, I was taking a course in "Webculture" at the University of Arizona. For this course, we were supposed to do a "project," the form of which was left unspecified. I toyed with some dull paper ideas and abandoned them. I decided I needed to do something more exciting, something that would use the potentiality of the Internet to create something more worthwhile than another dull paper.

I'd read about UK artist Heath Bunting and his Net projects in World Art magazine. One of his projects was to distribute a list of phone numbers through the Internet along with a predetermined date on which to call those numbers (which corresponded to a bank of payphones in a British Telecom station.) I decided to pick up where he left off.

I created a seed message that I sent out into the Net, which included phone numbers and a short list of instructions-- I wanted people to call me up on a pay phone in the University of Arizona Student Union Building and give me one sentence from some piece of text they'd encountered that day, to be incorporated into a long, multi-authored found "poem."

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