The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with our frenzied scribbling. An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars glaring down at us from their celestial encampments. Alone with stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships, alone with the black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives launched on their crazy courses, alone with drunkards reeling like wounded birds along the city walls. Then the silence deepened. “Let’s go!” We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts.
Reconfiguring the Author: The Virtual Artist In Cyberspace RECONFIGURING THE AUTHOR: THE VIRTUAL ARTIST IN CYBERSPACE By Mark Amerika Reconfiguring the Author: The Virtual Artist In Cyberspace is many things at once including a research paper, a pseudo-autobiographical narrative, a technical "white paper", a textual documentary, a survey of the state-of-the-art of contemporary writing, a self-reflexive metafiction on the "public domain narrative environment" called GRAMMATRON and, last but not least, an exploration into the science of writing as it gets teleported into the electrosphere. It is an elaborate extratext that attempts to challenge the critical strategies employed by most academic theorists confined to the print-publishing model and, as such, is intimately connected to the network-distributed milieu the GRAMMATRON project circulates in. Finally, it should be noted that the image above is of the Dead Sea Scrolls.