Operative Fiction is a pre-positional spatio-textual practice which, in its first steps, is situated in (and operates with) the concreteness and mediality of a digital platform. We begin our exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s text "What the Probes Report" by transposing it from the surface of a printed page (Flora, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. Not the story (conveyed through the text) but the text itself, with its material and operative potential, activate the site of its action, thus becoming "more-than-text": it enables entrances and generates fields of dramaturgical intensities, it entangles itself in the texture of the digital surface. Spatial operativeness is usually linked to the linguistic operativeness of verbs; however, in our exercise, we choose to operate with prepositions, shifting the spatial focus from "location" to "position/positioning", thus activating the relational potential of multiple textual and chrono-topical layers. In addition to a linear reading mode, following the initial chronology of the story, we propose a contingent reading mode activated through time codes. Acting simultaneously as elements of the drawing and as hypertext, the "timelines" (emerging through the time codes) imply the duration of a staged terrain and sometimes activate multiple time zones in a topographic entity. Timelines are also "more-than-texts", intertwining the time aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.
The non-human protagonist evoked through and evolving throughout the text "What the Probes Report" disrupts a subject-centred mode of narration: it is entangled in the word- and land-scape of its development, thus becoming – by means of its procedural logic and functioning – a constituent part of its staging. The line speculatively re-enacting the machines’ functions is the same, which draws the topographic texture of the digital landscape.
Applying a drawing technique, typically involved in the draft process of a performance design work, we explore the friction between staging and spacing: detecting intensities within a given site and inventing/producing spatial narratives. The "text-work" is always in progress; the questionable materialities of digital lines slowly and softly approach realities and their potential. As a result, we enter the aesthetics of a "diminished reality": the techniques of marking, proposing, pre-posing, and positioning elude the recognisable. They do not augment it but diminish it, not by abstracting but by concretely exploring the agency of dramaturgical fields embedded in the medial affordance of the digital surface and digital tools.