TL;DR: the psest is a new form of creative writing, duets for text, made possible by web3. Find an example of a psest here.

~

I. Author’s note

I’ve produced this essay, following years of thinking on the subject of digital-era literature, primarily for two reasons. First, to debut my idea for a new literary form, founded on the mechanics of the web, which I’ve named the ‘psest’. The web’s latest iteration, web3, enables this form to move from the conceptual realm into actuality—a cause for celebration on my part. Web lit has long been overdue for a turning, I’ve felt; now I’m able to furnish a gesture toward exploring that premise. Second, to define the form and chronicle the history of the psest in some detail, and in doing so make a slim contribution to ongoing conversations around experimental writing, digital publishing, and outlier literary art, all of which have interested me greatly for the better part of my writing career.

Because of its technical nature and archival intentions, this essay may stray into territory that some find obscure. If that proves the case, then let me recommend taking a break and seeking out a psest, the experience of which will, I hope, impart a sense of literary expansion, while also helping make clear how the form works. From there—it remains to create a psest of your own.

Strength to your imagination for your literary projects, especially the digital ones.

—@benrwms, October 2022

II. Definitions

psest (p-zĕst′) n. A composite work of online literary art comprising three elements: (1) the title of the work, in the form of a word or phrase taken from another text, known as the ‘partner text’, found online. (2) The psest imago token, an image that functions as a ‘digital bridge’ to the partner text by pointing to its web location, and that incorporates the word or phrase taken from the partner text for the title of the psest in its image. And (3) a piece of creative writing that serves as the main literary body of the work and, when paired with a psest imago token, realises both a new work of creative writing and a ‘duet’ of the partner text.

psest imago token n. An image that serves as a ‘digital bridge’ pointing to the web location of a text, known as the ‘partner text’, whose contents supply a word or phrase for the title of a psest. The psest imago token includes this word or phrase in its image. Psest imago tokens may be created and circulated independently of psests.

~

The Psest Manifest-o
by @benrwms

impressed · possessed · contest · distressed · behest · obsessed · arrest · expressed · due west

1. A preoccupation with experimental writing

The notion that new technologies should occasion new forms of literature has been on my mind for many years.

During the rise of the web (late-1990s), Web 2.0 (early-2000s), and ebooks (c. 2007)—each in their own way ripe with potential for establishing fresh tendencies for writing and reading—I was on the alert for any hint of that seemingly presaged thing, the un-book, un-poem, or un-play which would leverage the evolving digital ecosystem to propel literature in a new direction.

My vigil was in vain; the new forms never arrived. To this day, the key vehicles for producing and consuming creative writing largely remain the old ones—the novel and short story, in particular, have held their shapes with admirable intransigence—and the most important period for experimentation in literature remains the febrile stretch from Hughes, Toomer and Woolf’s 1920s through Robbe-Grillet and Queneau's 1960s to Shange’s 1970s.

(In producing this highly subjective timeline on experimental literature, I appreciate that I lay myself open to criticism both for my choices and my elisions; but these are the writers whose experimentation with form has had the most lasting effect on my literary sensibility, so we’ll go with them.)

By late-2009, having published a novel of experimental fiction myself, and still preoccupied with the notion that digital-era literature could become something it yet wasn’t, I was struck with an idea for a new form of storytelling that, in theory, could be built on the infrastructure of the web then available to digital DIYers. User uploads, QR codes, online payments, social sharing—the usual mix of codebases and interfaces that passed as eye-catching back then—all would go into the platform that I would create to release my flight of literary fancy into the world.

I had a name for the new form, and, as was standard for the time, I set about purchasing the related .com domain. By April 2010, after a bit of back and forth, I acquired psest.com for a modest sum.

2. Networked literary art

The name of the new form of writing, accordingly, is ‘psest’—pronounced like ‘possessed’ without the ‘o’. I coined the term by trimming the word ‘palimpsest’, which is a quasi-literary form in its own right. A palimpsest, of course, is the result of an older text that someone writes over with a newer one, often rubbing out the original words first, which nonetheless remain present in their traces. Think of a draft poem written on a notepad in pencil, erased instead of scratched out, and attempted again. The earlier draft of the poem haunts the new one, discernible behind the latter, its faint markings peeking out from underneath the bolder, fresher strokes.

A psest, too, is a kind of haunting of an older text, aided by a digital bridge that is visual in form (see section 4, below), plus the ghostly nudges of online search and social media algorithms, which act in place of the eraser. The psest, the new text, appears on the web joined to, rather than on top of, the older one, which unlike in the case of a palimpsest is not diminished as a text in any way. Instead, the older text yields digital space to the new writing with which it has become associated. If this new writing gains traction, enjoying popularity among readers, it may in time efface the older text by, for example, moving up the ranks in search results for the keywords that the two texts share. If not, it remains ‘underneath’ the original as a moment of discrete literary production occasioned by the contact of a writerly mind with the work of another party.

Psests thus forge a new story layer from an element of a previously-published piece of online writing. The psest is networked literary art that amounts to a creative writing ‘duet’.

3. a. The first element in a psest: the title of the work, aka the keyword string

The first distinguishing element in the psest form is the word or phrase that the psest borrows from its partner text for its title. For psests to work, it is necessary that this partner text live online at its own URL. I often refer to the word or phrase that the partner text donates to the psest as a ‘keyword string’.

In my original conception, now twelve-and-a-bit years old, the classic psest, if there were such a thing, would take the partner text’s full online title for its duet. The author of the psest would publish a piece of creative writing as the new body text for this complete older title. The new writing might be a poem, a fragment, a short story, a piece of reportage, an excerpt from a memoir—anything the author of the psest might wish to associate with the title. The new writing might strongly relate to its title’s subject matter, or to the main thrust of the title’s original body text; or the new writing might be completely divorced, in term of themes and ideas, from its partner piece.

The keyword string used to create a psest thus might serve as a creative writing prompt, for which an author invents a new text from scratch; or the title might provide a convenient roof under which to house an already-extant piece. Either way, in creating the psest, what the author ends up with is a text that offers a new and original inflection on an older piece of copy.

To illustrate the concept more concretely, here are two examples of partner texts whose titles have potential for psests.

Let’s try—

’13 Really Easy Slow Cooker Recipes That Won’t Heat Up Your Kitchen’

—which is the title of an article by Margaux Laskey published in The New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/article/easy-slow-cooker-recipes.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20220812205734/https://www.nytimes.com/article/easy-slow-cooker-recipes.html

This title provides ample room to run as a creative writing prompt. To start, one immediately thinks of the Wallace Stevens poem, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’. How might one play with Stevens’ ‘recipe’ for image and meaning in this context? Then there are the terms in the title that lend themselves to suggestive, bathetic or ironic wordplay: ‘really easy’, ‘slow cooker’ and ‘heat up’. Finally, the title provides a ready-made setting for a creative writing scene: kitchens are spaces built-in to readers’ minds, after all; how might an author co-opt the kitchen assumed by this title into a piece that branches provokingly off from what was originally meant?

On a technical note, because The New York Times enjoys high credibility with search engines, the possibility of a psest with this title outranking the original article is slim. Accordingly, an author of a psest duetting a Times article would seek a readership for their work through their personal networks, rather than relying on algorithms to spread the word about their psest, with the possibility that their piece might gain momentum and recognition through social sharing, etc. If the psest achieved virality on social media, it might overshadow the Times article; otherwise, the psest would live in a rarefied realm of serendipitous discourse shared by many other literary works.

Our second example comes from a more obscure source. Imagine a piece of creative writing with the title—

‘The Evolution of Hope and Despair’

—which is the name of a scholarly article by Randolph M Nesse, offered for sale on an academic library website. This website, in turn, adopts the article’s title as that of its online listing:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971332

https://web.archive.org/web/20220405155737/https://www.jstor.org/stable/40971332

As the possible borrowed title for a piece of creative writing, ‘The Evolution of Hope and Despair’ has much to offer—one could take this atmospheric phrase on any number of tangents. Further, when considering Nesse’s article as a partner text for a psest, the niche, esoteric position that the original occupies on the web opens an opportunity for a new piece to mount a challenge within search engine results for the same phrase. Over time, the psest might start to outrank its partner text as the most credible example of a piece of writing that includes the keyword string, ‘the evolution of hope and despair’. The psest would then become a kind of meta version of its source word, the palimpsest, inscribing itself on top of the original within the stacked lists produced by search algorithms.

3. b. On copyright, and expanding what qualifies as a psest’s title

One of the universal rules governing creative writing is that, with limited exceptions, there is no copyright in title. This amounts to a critical license for a psest author who duets a partner text using its title: as titles may be borrowed or shared freely, there’s no concern that their work will run afoul of plagiarism strictures.

Similarly, copyright does not protect names or short phrases—and stumbling upon this fact led me, a few years after conceiving of psests, to expand the protocol for creating them to include, not just titles, but any eye-catching word or phrase within a third-party online text that would work as a title for a corresponding piece of creative writing. I began collecting such phrases, and now have a treasure trove of them—some truly wonderful verbal oddities that I hope to transmute into psests in due course. Here is an example, which comes from a 2015 article in The Bookseller by Heloise Wood on the ‘fake book’ scams then plaguing Amazon:

‘the consequences are not always desirable’

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/hill-and-dickinson-fall-foul-amazon-fake-e-book-scams-663041

https://web.archive.org/web/20220828050832/https://genius.it/www.thebookseller.com/news/hill-and-dickinson-fall-foul-amazon-fake-e-book-scams-663041

What especially drew me to this phrase, apart from its marvelously brittle understatement—it contains sentiment ripe for shattering with some electric prose or verse—was that it also comprises part of the title of one of the fake books that the article documents. Using this phrase to duet The Bookseller, then, would also involve reaching through that article to touch a third online text—one that no longer exists, Amazon having purged the fake books from its system. A psest bearing this title would thus have duetted two texts—a double literary duet from a single new piece of creative writing.

In summary, then: for the first element in the psest form, any keyword or keyword string originating within a partner text may be surfaced as the title of the psest.

4. The second element in a psest: the psest imago token

The second distinguishing element in the psest form is the psest imago token—the digital bridge, in the form of an image, that signals the author of the psest’s intent to duet the partner text. The psest imago token has two required components: a link to the partner text’s location online, and, for purposes of literary clarity, the keyword string from the partner text that will now also serve as the title of a psest.

Here is a replica of the first psest imago token, LET THAT SINK IN, which I created in August 2022:

Note that this psest imago token satisfies all the requirements of the form: (a) it is an image; (b) it contains the keyword string from the partner text, the phrase ‘let that sink in’, that will serve as the title of a psest; and (c) it contains a link back to the partner text—the QR code rendered as a brown square, bottom row, second from the left (not scannable at this resolution). For archival purposes, here is the link to the partner text; how quickly can you find the keyword string ‘let that sink in’ within it?

https://web.archive.org/web/20220129093525/https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Misinfo_inBrief_NNLW.pdf

https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Misinfo_inBrief_NNLW.pdf

The idea that the psest imago token should be created separately from the psest’s text is critical to the overall concept of psests. The psest imago token is meant to float by itself until it finds an author willing to provide an anchor by supplying the new body text that turns the keyword string into a duet. The creator of the psest imago token may or may not be that person. They may, for example, only be in the business of finding and distributing promising keyword strings and their corresponding links, packaged together in an image. In the case of the psest imago token above, the creator of the token and the author of the psest are one and the same–me—but it’s easy to imagine many scenarios in which they would be different.

The psest imago token is like a book jacket seeking an author to provide it with a story. The image might be replicated once, twice, a dozen, or a thousand times, finding many different authors to create many different texts for it, each distinct from the next, but all sharing the same title, and the same link back to the partner text. A single book jacket provided with many stories—a myriad of duets derived from a sole source—what a wonderful shuffling of the digital literary deck.

5. The third and final element of the psest: the body text

The final element in the psest form is the body text, the writing that is paired with the psest imago token, taking the latter’s keyword string as its title. Once this writing is in place and published together with the psest imago token, as a pair, then the psest is realised, a new work of literary art.

For this element, there are no rules, except that the body should be original text.

But how do we ensure that the creators of psests, and psest imago tokens, are recognised as the originators and authors of their work?

6. How web3 solves for psests

The infrastructure provided by Web 3.0, or ‘web3’, which is the shorthand I prefer, elegantly solves for the problem of assigning credit for and value to psests and psest imago tokens.

First, thanks to the blockchain technology that underwrites it, web3 makes possible the publication and circulation of both elements as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. NFTs certify origination, authenticity and ownership and can be minted, bought, sold, traded, given and received across a variety of web3 networks without too much ado, once you get the hang of them.

For my first psest, LET THAT SINK IN, I published the original psest imago token above—the very first psest digital bridge, hurrah!—on the web3 marketplace OpenSea, opensea.io, as part of a collection of twelve such images, and the literary duet—the very first psest, hooray!—on the web3 publishing platform Diamond, diamondapp.com. I’m publishing this essay, meanwhile, on Mirror, mirror.xyz, in acknowledgement of Mirror’s pioneering work at the crossroads of literature and web3.

To create the first psest on Diamond, I made a lower-resolution, non-NFT copy of the psest imago token, which I own as an NFT, then attached that image to the piece of creative writing I had written for it, which then was wrapped by Diamond into its own image-plus-text NFT. I also included the address of the psest imago token NFT at the bottom of the psest, to show a chain of creativity intrinsically linked back to me (which was not strictly necessary, but makes for a pleasingly arcane artefactual detail). I’m a web3 amateur, but working to synthesise ideas across blockchain-powered platforms for literary ends has been truly enjoyable—an experience that I trust others who craft digital literature will also find fulfilling.

Second, web3 provides unmatched traceability of events, which helps with establishing timelines and provenance. The first instance of a psest imago token’s publication, and the first time it is used to duet the partner text it points to, can be verified by any observer when the activity happens on the blockchain. This ensures that psest imago token creators’ images and psest authors’ writing have inbuilt acknowledgment of their origins; and also provides insight into the networks that psest authors inhabit. If writers flock to an author’s psest imago tokens to pick one up for a psest of their own—activity the blockchain allows all to see—then the author is likely to be someone whose own writing is worth following. The mechanics of the blockchain provide for communities to form around all the elements that go into the making of a psest.

Relatedly, decoupling the psest imago tokens and the fully-realised work of literary art, the psest, anticipates slightly different marketplaces for each. Artists can create psest imago tokens as collectibles that occasion literary creativity for author- or art-driven marketplaces; writers can create fully-realised psests for reader-driven literary marketplaces; and so on. In theory, web3 enables creators to have greater control over their commercial destinies; this matches up with a key element informing the design of psests from the very beginning, which is ownership of the commercial potential of one’s literary ideas and work. Taking LET THAT SINK IN as an example again, I’ve listed my initial psest imago token series for sale on OpenSea as collectable art, and my initial psest as a collectable literary item on Diamond. If I’m lucky, I’ll sell some of the images and/or copies of my first psest efforts to collectors, which will encourage me to create more.

Last and best of all, through web3 the idea of the psest is happily unshackled from any platform of mine that it might previously have required for its internet oxygen. (See section 9 below for more on my first attempt at building a platform for psests.) Web3 allows for decentralised literary creation, and this is good news for writers and artists who wish to create psests and psest imago tokens on their own terms and timelines.

7. The psest as a hopeful monster

Why psests? Why pursue this figment for more than a decade to the point of its final, belaboured-but-happy emergence into being?

As with all writing, the short answer is—why not? A literary sage once peered at me over his steepled fingers and said, of fiction, ‘there are no rules’. Apply this dictum to all original writing, I say. How wonderful to have one’s experiments pre-blessed in their attempts.

A longer answer might unfold along the following lines. As many have pointed out, one of the features of contemporary life is its irreducible complexity. The lineages of our material culture are permanently scrambled; the origins of the structures and objects around us are impossible to trace. We are insentient to the latent significance in the things we touch, taste, hear and see, which is one reason why authenticity at the human level is so highly sought after, as it transmits a sense of connection to what is real, original and known.

Similarly, in the digital era, I would posit that writing has become referential in ways that are beyond our grasp. All new texts are inter-woven with references to other texts, regardless of the writer’s intentions. Reading is like looking into a mirror facing another mirror, with meaning curving off into the barely-apprehended shadows before disappearing altogether. The lineages of the writing we encounter today are not so much lost as impossibly abstruse—understood partially at best, especially by writers themselves.

Given an infinitely referential world of texts, psests represent a new way of making literary meaning, one in which reference to other texts is an explicit quality rather than a latent murmuring. This is not to say that the murmuring of other texts is absent in a psest, merely that, through the psest, the writer is able to assert an acknowledgment—serious, playful, ironic, or otherwise—about the valenced nature of their work in a way that adds to the art, again at the human level. The psest form co-opts referentiality as an aesthetic component supplying dimension to its literary aims.

Finally, all writers are in the business of tending to the hopeful monsters they keep. Psests are one of mine. You have to release them into the wild eventually.

8. On Artificial Intelligence

Some readers will have noted that I’ve used the word ‘original’ in relation to ‘writing’ a few times in this essay. This is because I’m leery of the artistic value of texts produced by AI, which, as mechanically-generated works, are not ‘original’ in the standard sense. AI-created texts have aesthetic quality, but I’m inclined to hold doubts about their aesthetic worth.

The same goes for images. Art born of human creativity and practice has more significance than art generated by AI, because the former involves social and political situatedness that produces historical meaning, not merely effect.

One of the unique ways that psests reflect such situatedness, of course, is via the interplay between keyword strings, psest imago tokens and body texts, each of which is curated or created on a different path, according to different, medium-specific aesthetics, skills and ideas. The resulting combinations make for a kind of kinesics of literary intent that is most significant, for me at least, when expressed within a human scheme.

In short, while AI has reached the point where it has the capacity to knock out psests on an industrial scale, the psests of greatest value will be those whose elements comprise original curation, writing and imagery.

This is not to rule out the use of AI in the creation of psests, or indeed any art, merely to encourage that AI output be explicitly acknowledged, for better contextualisation of the work. My first series of twelve psest imagos, for the LET THAT SINK IN project, include a couple of images that incorporate AI-generated art, which I note in the images’ metadata. For my own writing, meanwhile, I've adopted the Japanese kanji 碗 (meaning ‘porcelain bowl’ or ‘teacup’) as a symbol which, when placed at the bottom of any piece of mine, indicates that I wrote the piece without the aid of AI.

In the age of AI, the cracks in the china will become ever more cherished; and encounters with art will increasingly be a case of caveant artifex et conspiciens, caveant scriptor et lector, and naturally, caveat emptor.

9. Notes on the early history of the psest

For the archive, a few notes on my crude build of the first psest website.

Here is the moment in 2010 when I acquired the domain.

When I built version 1.0—an attempt that achieved reasonable functionality but had no aesthetic whatsoever, and has long been archived—the image serving as the digital bridge was a simple QR code containing the URL of the partner text, with the keyword string that made up the title centred underneath it. I don’t have many good screenshots from that first build, but here’s one that shows roughly what it looked like:

(Note the QR codes above point to my now-decommissioned development server, not to any psest’s partner text URL.)

The aim of the v1 interface was to allow users to ‘mint’, on the fly, QR codes linking to articles which had high potential for duetting. Following that, they could either write the corresponding psests themselves, revealing them when ready, or they could circulate the QR codes and their titles within the psest community, for other authors to acquire for their own duets. Authors might acquire the QR codes in a number of ways, including buying them.

In v1, a QR code for a discrete URL could only be minted a single time, creating the kind of scarcity that I imagined would encourage a more urgent uptake of the idea of psests. Many writers are also collectors, after all. My hope was that a psest ecosystem would arise, with literary communities sprouting up around individual psests and their authors, but also around those who were adept at finding the juiciest phrases from the most obscure partner texts, and therefore had a store of the rarest, most desirable QR codes to list on the psest marketplace. A micro literary exchange would develop from the circulation of the psests and the codes; eventually, remixing would enter the equation alongside duetting; and the end result would be a continuous stream of literary surprise and delight burbling along in channels all across the web.

Of course, the odds of such literary ferment materialising on the back of a weedy website put together with some slapdash PHP—remember the good old days of the LAMP stack?—were slim. Once it became clear that v1 of psest.com would be more of a hindrance than an aid to the actualisation of psests, by dint of its sheer unwieldiness, I shelved it.

With that, I also shelved the idea of scarcity, as it pertains to the images that serve as digital bridges to psests’ partner texts. Let anyone create any psest imago token for any partner text however they like, and in any quantity. Finding the nugget in the partner text for a psest title, then crafting it into a digital bridge, should be as enjoyable and creative as writing the psest body text itself. The images would still be unique to their creators, and the best of them would still be collectible, catalysing literary inspiration through careful harvesting of the internet’s abundance.

Despite the retreat from my original build, I never gave up on or forgot about my belle idée / bête noire. The composite form of the psest, an image joined to texts whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts, has remained a knot in my mind for more than a decade. Luckily for me, web3 finally cuts through the problem of how to make the form possible. No need, any longer, for quixotic websites hosted on bespoke domains to do one’s literary remixing.

10. Fin

If you found this essay interesting, and are inclined to acts of philanthropy in the name of literature, any small donation (in Ether) would be gratefully received here:

Ξ 0x9c3A3099e2D9945f06E34A057B831f295Aa50dE0

You might also consider collecting my psests and psest imagos, which I will continue to publish as I am able.

Meantime, send your own psests my way. I look forward to reading them.

Thank you for your time and attention, and happy psesting.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220829042147/https://hashify.me/IyA6KQ==

~

III. Adjacent web3 concepts

For more on literature in the age of web3, see also: ‘literary NFTs’ and ‘tokenised storytelling’. Psests created on web3 may be classified as either/both.

IV. Appendix

psest; see also:

PSEST: Post-Secondary Education and Training
PSest: Probability of Superiority
PSEST: Production Sampling Environmental Stress Test
PSEst: Propensity Score Estimation
PSEST: Protective System of Emerging Sanitary Technologies

~

@benrwms, aka Ben Williams, aka Ben Oswest, is a writer, editor and publisher. He is the author of the experimental novel, The New Suffolk Hymnbook (2006), and the founding publisher of The Johannesburg Review of Books. He holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and an MFA in Fiction from Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He wrote this essay in Santa Fe, New Mexico, between August and October 2022.

碗