Roy Ascott (2004), 'Orai, or How the Text Got Pleated: A Genealogy of La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairytale,' in Leonardo, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 195-200.

La Plissure du Texte was one of Ascott's first distributed authorship artworks that used telecommunications networks - or what he calls 'telematic art' (as opposed to being dubbed 'terminal art' by the British press) (2004: 197). The project extended his interest in cybernetics to the use of emerging pre-internet network technologies that seemed to exemplify 'connectivist' thinking mixed with post-structuralist references. In this context, connectionism stands for 'order-emerging-out-of massive-connections,' an approach to artificial intelligence that became known as neural networks. (Kelly, 2003: 360-1) The key cultural reference for the work is of course Roland Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text (1975) in which text is taken as tissue behind which lies the realm of meaning. Ascott quotes Barthes: 'the generative idea that the text is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving; lost in the tissue - this texture - the subject unmakes himself, like a spider dissolving in the constructive secretions of its web.' (2004: 198)
In the case of La Plissure (1983), Ascott presented a distributed nonlinear narrative or improvised 'planetary fairy tale' as the first large-scale telematic artwork. Meanings were generated over the network in the manner of weaving a textile with multiple authors. To many, this is the beginnings of interactive art.