Invisible Islands: Diary Entry #3, Bursary 2013

Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. Read the project wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about the development of their mobile app Fabler here and hear, and their project wrap interview here.

Caden Lovelace, gives us an update on his and Laura Grace’s locative app which now has a name: Invisible Islands. The mystery deepens…

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Did you know that, when you open your browser on your smartphone or tablet, the odds are that it is able to find out what direction you are facing? It doesn’t even have to ask you. It would be possible, perhaps even necessary, to create a text that is different when facing east than facing west. Combined with assessing the local time, it is possible to create a text that can only be read alongside the sunset, or the sunrise.

That is not what we are making. The simplest ideas transfix me at the moment, as I am working with the most complex. Laura and I have decided, from our island paradise, to create something big. We long dreamed of a writing as large as the world, and I hope that with this project we come a degree closer to this eventual goal.

This is a map of Falmouth, Cornwall, where I live. I am where the arrow is. I believe this map to be approximately 2.5 miles from corner to corner. The map extends, beyond the boundaries of the screen, to the limits of the world. To your house, to abandoned villages in South America, to every mile of anonymous ocean. Every point on earth has its corresponding point in this imagined map; somehow either above, below, or through our own. It is perhaps like the internet now is; passing right through us, omnipresent, ready for us to tap in.

The problems I am grappling with now are the problems of vastness. Absurd problems, like: what happens in Antarctica? Who can hold this giant map? How can our map best match the real world?

What does this have to do with writing? You can find out at the Bath Spa MIX Making Day. I am looking forward to telling you.

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Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. Read the project wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about their mobile app Fabler here and hear.

The final projects from both Bursary teams were showcased Wednesday the 17th July at our Making Day for writers at the MIX Conference 2013, a day of experimentation, collaboration and play for writers looking to learn new skills and develop their creative practice.