If there is to be a zeitgeist going forward, i imagine it to be focused on attempts at immortality, and the ways we erase ourselves for immortality, and the ways we record ourselves recording ourselves: a correspondence

During the month of December, 2010, James Tadd Adcox and I traded selves: I sent James every written word on my hard drive, and he sent me every word on his. This trade-off included not just fiction & poetry, but personal correspondence, notes, journal entries, everything. During the month, he wrote using only my words (rearranged however he saw fit), & I wrote using only his words. Each weekday we posted the results, he on my website, I on his. By the end we had a series of pieces that oscillate between prose poetry, flash fiction, and confession. The whole, it seems, becomes a sort of a novel in correspondence. At the project’s beginning, I asked James not to use proper names of people other than myself, because I don’t especially love the idea of libel. But for the purposes of the project, this was not considered a "hard constraint." At some point, all of the information that makes up a "self"— our fears, unconscious motivations, decision-making processes, etc—will be accessible electronically. At that time it will be possible to trade and remix selves in a much more thorough and literal way than we have during this project. But we present our experiment as, if nothing else, a first step. It is worth noting, perhaps, that I have never actually met James Tadd Adcox. —Robert Kloss