In what follows, I will try to elaborate on the launch of oneacre.online, an experimental publication and distribution project, that aims to utilise its online space to seed unprintable works.
oneacre.online begins with an attempt to probe its ambiguous online terrain and determine how much of a space an acre actually is when transposed to the digital realm. The opening text part preface/ part acknowledgements does its best to double as a launch/ announcement page and also capture the scopes and hopes of what the space could possible do as an experimental publishing and distribution project for unprintable works.
The text is flooded with references to all the thoughts/words/works that helped shape oneacre.online as we were thinking the space through. Mainly because it is important to us how origin stories are told since ideas are not thought in vacuum and it matters which thoughts think thoughts1.
As a preface for the space and the works that will follow, the opening text aims to introduce oneacre.online as an online terrain and then as a container. Concerning the former, it assembles a space organized around the action of scrolling as a potential unit of measure of online terrain. An acre built in a way that expands as you scroll through it. Where through the action, and the action’s repetition by each visitor, we hope to feel out collectively how much an acre online is. Concerning the later, it declares our interest in being a container by aligning with the traditions of Virginia Woolf’s Glossary for the “Three Guineas” and Ursula Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”. A container, as thought by Le Guin, “a thing that holds something”, that follows the line of “leafs, gourds, shells, nets, bags, slings, sacks, bottles, pots, boxes, containers” and — if I may add —places that hold things in general. We are conscious that actions, even as simple as that of scrolling, tend to bring heroes2 and we too, are uninterested in them.
As you may have noticed, this post contains no documentation of the website, besides the following iframe, offering a peek at what the website looks like now. As a space oneacre.online is defined by its online materiality, screenshots and pictures documenting a section of the website at one particular moment seem to miss the point of the space’s fluidity. Thus we find solace at the HTML <iframe> tag that follows nicely down the line of containers started by Le Guin.
Http iframes are not shown in https pages in many major browsers. Please read this post for details.
1 Donna Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene
2 Le Guin takes a position against heroes, firstly for their tendency to shape stories and narratives. Secondly for being “the central concern of the narrative” and thirdly for the ideas that a story isn’t any good if there isn’t.