Midwestern Water Wars is an on-going wiki project to construct an evolving knowledge base of an apocryphal series of natural/human events in the mid-twentieth-century biosphere:
Its process of construction combines elements of indexicality and narrative, dada informatics and role-playing games. The authors add content and develop the site structure independently and in dialogue with each other. The evolving narrative structure produces, as its outer horizon, a lexicon of terms that become its conceptual framework—and vice versa. This is an example of site construction as an emerging digital genre.
I am interested in the concept of content that is being interrogated here, as it intersects with the mediated form of the wiki site and its attendant features. In what way can we speak of content as conceptually determined via a process of mediated artistic production? How might a site like this be seen in terms of earlier conceptual strategies to develop content through definitional, procedural, or aleatorical means?
Content is undertheorized. I would like to see more examples of content developed in such ways, as indices to the construction of knowledge. As a site construction of a single author, the present site hopes to undertake a like experiment in content development, combining language, narrative, data, architecture, and links through conceptual definition, procedural unfolding, and systemic engagement.
