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Stir Fry Texts

Jim Andrews with Brian Lennon and Pauline Masurel

Jim Andrews's Stir Fry Texts are exercises in combinatorial intertextuality: stretchtexts that refuse to stand still. A form of cut-up writing programmed in DHTML, these nervous texts change as the reader mouses over them. The project is notably collaborative. Although each of the texts is a distinct experiment in its own right, and has its own focus and theme, the entire project questions the nature of authorship and suggests that texts have viral lives of their own.

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Author description: The Stir Fry Texts are interactive texts that twitch and change as you move the mouse over them. Each stir fry consists of n distinct texts. Each of the n texts is partitioned into t pieces. When you mouseover any of the t parts of a text, that part is replaced with the corresponding part of the next of the n texts. Each stir fry contains a graphic that, when clicked repeatedly, lets you cycle through the n texts. I did the programming of the stir frys and did the texts of the first couple. Later, "Log" was done in collaboration with Brian Lennon and "Blue Hyacinth" with Pauline Masurel. The project also includes two essays. "Stir Frys and Cut Ups" relates these forms, and "Material Combinatorium Supremum" discusses the combinatorial form of the stir frys. The stir fry texts are steeply combinatorial. I did the programming in DHTML. I am indebted to Marko Niemi for his upgrading of the programming in 2004. Now they run OK on both PC and Mac and most contemporary browsers on both platforms.

Instructions: Mouse-over different text-fragments to alter the text. Click on the corresponding graphic to each Stir Fry Text to receive a new base text.

Previous publication: Stir Fry Texts is a collection of texts published progressively beginning in 1999 on http://vispo.com, though individual texts have been published elsewhere. Log is also published on http://ubu.com Spas text was translated into Chinese by Dr. Shuen Shing Lee and published on The Literary Café, a Taiwanese site co-sponsored by The United News's Literary Supplement and the Taiwanese Government Council for Cultural Affairs. Divine Mind Fragment Theatre is also published on the Iowa Review Web. Correspondence was also published in Denmark in the second issue of a CD produced by Kristoffer Örum called Lyd.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.