Recently I bumped into Shelley Jackson. Of course our encounter was metaphoric and far from literal, but through the onslaught of short bursted information centralized within keyword searches about the incredible creativity that this woman has exude over the last twenty years; I began to feel some sort of kinship towards her. I never realized how in depth and "out of the box" an author/artist could be. Shelley Jackson is doing things that literally blow my mind. Certainly she is not the "be all end all" of text creation, but what she is doing is flipping the script on what modern publishing and literature is and can be. Jackson is on the front lines of the new media renaissance and she is paving inlets into this vast open new media terrain so that future creatives can tread deeper towards the evolutionary precipice of which we seek.Shelly Jackson grew up in Berkley, received her Bachelors of Arts from Stanford, and her Masters in Fine Arts from Brown University. In 1995 she published her first hypertext novel entitled Patchwork Girl. Apparently, a hypertext novel is a literary work that is displayed electronically and framed through the use of hypertext links. These hypertext links within the literary work allows the reader an in depth control of direction to the narrative, kind of like the choose your own adventure stories I read as a child wherein the reader makes choices about the direction of the story by making selections from different prompts at the end of a set of pages. Jackson's Patchwork Girl is a loose non-chronological adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Shelly later wrote two more hypertext novels with her sister Pamela Jackson. They are entitled The Doll Games and My Body.
One of Shelley Jackson's most recent projects, one in which I have become a supper huge fan, is called Skin. Skin is a short novel of about 2,000 or so words. The short novel is currently being published but not on paper as typical novels are printed and distributed. In this project Jackson has recruited volunteers to tattoo one word form the novel on their skin. This is the only means in which this novel will be published. Jackson has set up an informative web site describing in detail all angles of this project. A short video piece has also been created where in each participant in the Skin project videos their tattoo and says the word. All of these submissions have been edited together to tell a shortened version of the multimedia novel. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times, Jackson discusses the project participants;
I usually call them words, or my words, as in, "I got an angry email from one of my words," or "Two of my words just got married!" I really like the ripple of surreality this induces in listeners who haven't yet become inured to the usage. It comes from my original call for participants: I specify that once they are tattooed, "participants will be known as 'words'. They are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as their embodiments. As a result, injuries to the tattooed text, such as dermabrasion, laser surgery, cover work or the loss of body parts, will not be considered to alter the work. Only the death of words effaces them from the text. As words die the story will change; when the last word dies the story will also have died." I am a word myself: the title, Skin.The importance of Shelley Jackson's work is still yet to be determined. She is creating outside the norm of her generalized medium, but is that not the point. Within the spectrum of the new media renaissance all restrictions, traditions, and economics are tossed into the fire. Creatives working in this new medium must embrace the multidimensional type set. No longer are we bound to the type faced text. No longer must we hold tight to deteriorating economic models that have defined our expression. Shelley Jackson is of the vanguard of this new paradigm. She creates beyond our past and is actively defining the future: a new horizon of expressed communication.
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