As I find myself thinking about Maintaining Artifice, it is probably a good time to revisit this post on Douglas Rushkoff’s Exit Strategy.

His technique of annotating a faux-historical text is an ingenious way of introducing a new narrator, and somehow makes both seem more real. Sort of like in Spinal Tap or The Office, in which one genre is aped by another. In Rushkoff’s work, we have a novel posing as anthropology, while Spinal Tap and The Office ape documentaries.

Similarly, War of the Worlds was successfull in maintaining its artifice because it was perceived to be another genre in Radio - the newsprogram - while it was actually a fiction. Hi-res! are the first folk I remember seeing bring this concept to the web, making a faux-website for an inspirational speaker, which slowly devolved into a strange, abstracted movie website.

Related wiki page: Digital media: Levels of Reality

And while we're looking at old posts, check out this Story of Net Art.