Output details

anovelexperiment

Funded by UWE’s Early Career Research Programme (‘Digital narrative archiving’, £17,000, 2009-10) this output began a cycle of practical work building on Abba’s PhD on Interactive Narrative form and content, critiquing the eBook as a marketing revolution and exploring the affordances of digital media (hypertextual, networked) for the curation of audience participation in emergent stories. The project comprised a writing experiment encompassing 60,000 words, fifteen minutes of video, four digital prints, and three websites.

In February 2011 cardboard tubes containing a 1m2 print on handmade paper, with a short story encoded in each artwork, were mailed to 120 recipients. Respondents to the invitation (typewritten on a library index card) for ‘more?’ received an SD card with fragments of text, video and images, and a roadmap to how to find the rest.

The ‘book’ comprised a metaphysical detective story with 167 separate fragments - strands of cut up fiction forced together to provoke connections and challenge story’s mandatory meaning. Drawing on work by BS Johnson (1969), Danielewski (1999) and Safran Foer (2010) and reconciling traditions of practice with the work of Janet Murray and Katherine N Hayles’ advocacy for the materiality of reading, the piece explores an assembling of meaning from dissolute story fragments. Each reader participated in reassembling the narrative, which could be restored in almost any order.

Offering a model for content development, the work was presented to a publishing and creative industry audience (Hachette, Bloomsbury, Faber & Faber, National Theatre, BBC, Google) as a provocation regarding form and content in digital writing. A concluding event at the Wellcome Trust (May 2011) drew an audience from The British Council, Random House, ifBook, Granta and The Royal Opera House. Read individually and as a collective experience (through reader-curated social media), the work was ‘live’ over three-months in Spring 2011.