Writing a novel where everyone types
Antonella Beccaria interviews members of the WuMing collective, translated by Bernardo Parrella.
WuMing is a collective that produces crowdsourced writing and other projects. It has been based in Bologna, Italy, since 2000. "Wu Ming" is Chinese, meaning "anonymous" or "five names," and it is meant both as a tribute to dissidents ("Wu Ming" is a common byline among Chinese citizens demanding democracy and freedom of speech) and as a refusal of the celebrity-making machine which turns an author into a star. Among its literary and cultural activities throughout Italy and Europe, the group published "54" in 2002, a novel with dozens of characters (including Cary Grant and Marshall Tito) set in 1954, also translated in English, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. The WuMing Collective just released a new novel, "Manituana," revolving around the American Revolution and the Six Iroquois Nations. On it's Web site, the collective is soliciting crowd contributions to "level 2" of "Manituana."
Q: "Manituana," your last collective novel, just hit the shelves in Italy, while its companion Web site serves as an on-going extension based on the crowdsourcing model. Do you employ a particular model?
A: We do not follow a specific recipe, there is no predefined method. We pay close (attention) to the community around us, the community that keeps us alive. Trying to embrace that rhythm, we dance to it. Each time we take a shot at creating or learning new steps, performing new acts and acrobatics, trying to avoid any routine. For many years we have launched and managed trans-media projects, collective writing and world-building activities. We pursued many different ventures: from the 'open reputation' of the Luther Blissett character to field investigations about oral history, from an open-source novel soon became musical and then comic book ("La ballata del Corazza") to the blossoming of new writing groups such as Kai Zen and Emerson Krott, from the establishment of DiQuindici (a reading committee aimed at discovering good unpublished material and providing assistance to doubtful and new writers) to a novel that inspired a music CD by Yo Yo Mundi to a movie script writing "Lavorare con lentezza"). Along with its Web site, "Manituana" is the first episode of our new project: the "Atlantic Trypthic," a synthesis of our entire journey so far. There are some fixed points, but we cannot say that we are following a specific method nor that we know how and where it will lead us. For instance, this "superior level" we opened up on Manituana.com -- it is a challenge, a bet.
5/21/07
