The Headless Seven: A Live Hydraen Field Experiment
Proposal Type
Experimental Track
Location
Algorithms & Imaginaries
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
This experimental session stages a live, distributed writing environment in response to institutional contraction, platform capture, and the increasing supervision of knowledge by funding bodies, metrics, and aligned AI systems. Rather than presenting a paper, the host convenes a temporary knowledge ecology through the networked storytelling platform Tapestries (https://tapestries.media), a web-based environment that allows multiple participants to co-create and link textual nodes in real time.
The session is framed by a speculative researcher-figure known as the Raveler: an extragalactic archivist who studies knowledge systems as expressed through storytelling. The Raveler does not moderate or summarize. She pulls a thread and records its connections in the fiber.
Seven initial provocations appear as nodes:
- What would you build if no one watched?
- Your knowledge is a story. Who taught you how to tell it?
- What have you learned in secret?
- Describe the room where your ideas are allowed to exist. Who holds the key?
- If your discipline were a species, what would it be evolving toward?
- What do you know that you cannot publish?
- If your work were unsupervised, what harm might it do?
Participants may add nodes, link them, contradict them, fork them, or fragment them. Each contribution must connect to at least two existing nodes, encouraging relational proliferation rather than isolated testimony. Entries are constrained in length. Large language model–generated contributions are permitted but must be clearly marked and include the prompt used, foregrounding the presence of supervised machine systems within an otherwise minimally governed space.
There will be no panel hierarchy, no centralized synthesis, and no imposed conclusion. The network will accumulate as an archontic sprawl—a Hydra that multiplies under pressure. The experiment asks: when formal oversight recedes, what forms of knowledge production emerge? What patterns of dominance or silence reassert themselves? Does “unsupervised” mean liberation, abandonment, or both?
The session acknowledges that supervision is not purely oppressive; it can also function as care, containment, and collective responsibility. By reducing direct moderation while retaining structural constraints, the environment tests the difference between control and form. It also confronts a practical tension: as federal and public research infrastructures destabilize, can electronic literature model adaptive, distributed knowledge-making without collapsing into noise or replicating existing hierarchies?
The live interaction will be ephemeral and time-bound. The resulting networked text will be archived publicly as both electronic literature artifact and research object—a map of distributed authorship produced under conditions of partial institutional withdrawal and mixed human/AI generativity.
This session requires only a web browser and stable internet access. It privileges text-based interaction to support accessibility and low-bandwidth participation while inviting attendees to consider not only what they know, but how knowledge survives, mutates, or proliferates when no single authority is fully in charge.
The Headless Seven: A Live Hydraen Field Experiment
Algorithms & Imaginaries
This experimental session stages a live, distributed writing environment in response to institutional contraction, platform capture, and the increasing supervision of knowledge by funding bodies, metrics, and aligned AI systems. Rather than presenting a paper, the host convenes a temporary knowledge ecology through the networked storytelling platform Tapestries (https://tapestries.media), a web-based environment that allows multiple participants to co-create and link textual nodes in real time.
The session is framed by a speculative researcher-figure known as the Raveler: an extragalactic archivist who studies knowledge systems as expressed through storytelling. The Raveler does not moderate or summarize. She pulls a thread and records its connections in the fiber.
Seven initial provocations appear as nodes:
- What would you build if no one watched?
- Your knowledge is a story. Who taught you how to tell it?
- What have you learned in secret?
- Describe the room where your ideas are allowed to exist. Who holds the key?
- If your discipline were a species, what would it be evolving toward?
- What do you know that you cannot publish?
- If your work were unsupervised, what harm might it do?
Participants may add nodes, link them, contradict them, fork them, or fragment them. Each contribution must connect to at least two existing nodes, encouraging relational proliferation rather than isolated testimony. Entries are constrained in length. Large language model–generated contributions are permitted but must be clearly marked and include the prompt used, foregrounding the presence of supervised machine systems within an otherwise minimally governed space.
There will be no panel hierarchy, no centralized synthesis, and no imposed conclusion. The network will accumulate as an archontic sprawl—a Hydra that multiplies under pressure. The experiment asks: when formal oversight recedes, what forms of knowledge production emerge? What patterns of dominance or silence reassert themselves? Does “unsupervised” mean liberation, abandonment, or both?
The session acknowledges that supervision is not purely oppressive; it can also function as care, containment, and collective responsibility. By reducing direct moderation while retaining structural constraints, the environment tests the difference between control and form. It also confronts a practical tension: as federal and public research infrastructures destabilize, can electronic literature model adaptive, distributed knowledge-making without collapsing into noise or replicating existing hierarchies?
The live interaction will be ephemeral and time-bound. The resulting networked text will be archived publicly as both electronic literature artifact and research object—a map of distributed authorship produced under conditions of partial institutional withdrawal and mixed human/AI generativity.
This session requires only a web browser and stable internet access. It privileges text-based interaction to support accessibility and low-bandwidth participation while inviting attendees to consider not only what they know, but how knowledge survives, mutates, or proliferates when no single authority is fully in charge.
Bio
Dr. R. Lyle Skains (she/her) is a creative practitioner and researcher in digital writing, publishing, and practice-based research. Her work investigates how narrative functions across platforms and disciplines as artistic expression, research method, and mode of public engagement. She specializes in interactive and transmedia storytelling, with a focus on how digital forms reshape the ways we write, read, and disseminate knowledge. Her recent research explores the intersections of creative practice, feminist epistemologies, and postdigital authorship. Projects such as Seven Sisters Unmet experiment with narrative form, reader agency, and hypertext to challenge conventional models of creativity, publishing, knowledge production, and academic storytelling. Her published works include Digital Authorship (Cambridge UP), Neverending Stories: The Popular Emergence of Digital Fiction (Bloomsbury, winner of the 2023 N. Katherine Hayles Award), and Designing Practice-Based Research (Intellect). She has published in Media Practice & Education, Digital Creativity, Computers and Composition, and more. Lyle directs the New Media Writing Prize, co-edited Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 4, and is a director of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her research and creative practice span science communication, feminist digital storytelling, and experimental publishing. More at lyleskains.com.