Image by George Margelis, 2019

This article has been adapted from a talk delivered at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol (26/10/18), as part of the Friday lunchtime open talk series.

This book was written in an urge to remember, reflect, mourn, overthink, celebrate, and seek meaning in the transparent, or otherwise irrational dynamics of human relationships; while extending the sense of self and feelings. Please treat it with the greatest of care and respect, it is fragile and alive, it feels and it breathes like any other soul.

In this book, the human hand is as important as love. The words on these pages reflect the way by which the idea of you often haunts corners of my mind, echoing the transition and ephemerality of your effect on me; revealing the diminishing value of words expressed on impulse that vanished into the aether, as they were never intended or belonged to anyone, not even to us. My writing will greet your eyes with the same sensuality as the palm of my hand once gently pressed against your face.

(opening text, To You by Yiota Demetriou)

I have created an interactive artist’s book that combines elements from performance, philosophy, creative writing, experience design, tactile art, science, and pervasive technology. It responds to the reader’s body heat. In it is a series of love letters that were never sent, addressed To You, the reader. It is a quasi-semiotext (e.g. books like I Love Dick), poetry written in prose, interweaving philosophical notions of love, attachment, loss (Sartre, Barthes, Camus,  et al.), with autobiography and fiction. I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactictility/materiality for a while now (thinking postdigital).

The book is presented as an intimate reading experience hidden in the pages of an apparently unreadable book. The content draws parallels between the intense erotic delusions played out in the exchange of love letters, and the dynamics of human relationships. Imbued with warmth from a reader’s gentle touch, its black pages gradually become translucent. The writing becomes visible, and traces of fingerprints are left on its pages. Unlike many reading experiences, this book responds to body heat by inviting the reader to lovingly caress it.

The book’s design and the way it invites the reader to engage with it reflects its very content and the way in which it was conceived. It makes visible all those ritualistic and performative aspects experienced when writing a love letter. If you have never written a love letter, I urge you to write one now and return to this article later.

Image by George Margelis, 2019

Creating a book was not my intention. It became a book. The narrative was born out of something highly personal: love letters, as mentioned, that were never sent. A conversation with myself attempting to rationalise and put into perspective what had happened in a relationship. A mode of healing I suppose, by questioning the human condition, the different dynamics at play, and simultaneously negotiating vulnerability with oneself.

At the time, I was conceptualising my performance project, Love Letters (2012-), which some of you might have encountered through an article that was previously published here on The Writing Platform, or might have even participated in: http://thewritingplatform.com/2017/03/love-letters-performance-creative-technologies-audience-participation/

Whilst writing the former article, I reencountered and refamiliarised myself with schools of thought around the ritual of reflective and reflexive writing, writing letters (not only love letters!), autobiography, attachment theory, etc. These notions influenced my writing, not at least the conceptualisation of my performance project, but also my letters, the way in which I discussed, and wrote about my own situation.

Within the intuitive process of the content itself flourishing into a collection, and further into a book, the content was re-written, re-configured, layered, reconstructed, and interrogated several times. It eventually became something that was less about me, or what had occurred, and instead something about being human; finding a space where so-called ‘vulnerabilities’ can live in their raw form, without having to apologise. In the book, I use a Greek word to describe this experience, Apogymnomeno/(a). I couldn’t find a suitable term in English to deliver the depth of its meaning, another untranslatable viscerality. I suppose it’s because I communicate in English, I think in English, but I feel in Greek.  The challenge was to navigate and distance myself from the content without the writing losing its emotionality or rawness.

Image by Yiota Demetriou

The other challenge was the presentation of the content. I wanted the book’s material form to reflect its content; a love union between form and text that work together, responding to each other through exterior interaction. The book had to be alive. It had to resonate with the erratic eruption of feelings, the non-linearity of life, the difficulty of relationships, the chaos and irrationality of emotions, the vulnerability and rawness of things.

While I was thinking about love letters, particularly how love letters are written and encountered, I was inspired by Sartre:

“Love letters are awaited with impatience: it is not so much for the news they bring (supposing of course that we have nothing special to fear or to hope for), but for their real and concrete nature. The stationery, the black signs, the smell, etc., all these replace the weakening affective analogon […]” (Sartre, p.145).

In a way, the experience of reading To You and engaging with it reflects Sartre’s thoughts. For Sartre, love letters awaken an affective analogue, a physiological or psychological element that is a constituent of a person’s imaginative state. This is the ideal and subjectified reality or imaginary affection of the lover for the beloved. It is the subjective idea that the lover holds of the recipient of the love letter, which serves as a substitute when the beloved is absent. This emerges from within the person engaged in the physical and conceptual ritual of writing the love letter. For example, at the moment when the beloved becomes absent, the lover’s desire transforms into an irreal object – something produced, not by the beloved’s existing image or presence (beloved-as-real), but by the lover’s idea of them, which is trying to fill in the gaps of their beloved’s presence (beloved-as-imagined). As this irreal object becomes difficult to imagine because of the physical absence between the lover and the beloved, it confirms the lover’s desires. Due to the physical absence, the affection and love between the lovers reverts into a type of ‘deprived’ or empty love, “a love for love’s sake, a love that is in love with nothing other than itself” (Kearney, p.68). In this sense, the lover uses their ‘analogon’, their own perception, to make present to themselves that which is absent, the imagined beloved. The very practice of writing love letters makes this emotional process of a relationship between the lover and the beloved transparent.

For both Sartre and Roland Barthes, the lover’s anguish over the beloved’s absence and the longing for their presence is desire, which uses imagination to cover the voids created by an absence. In this sense, it is only the imagination writing love letters to itself, responding to its desire with its own desire. The aspects of presence, absence, and embodiment are central themes that To You engages with, and perpetually returns to and interrogates, throughout its narrative.

First Prints, 2017

The book is printed in thermochromic ink that manifests these ideas and aids their materialisation. Through a lot of trial and error I eventually ended up with an object, “that was less like reading a book and more like handling a precious treasure”, as a colleague has commented. She also said:

Somehow you already feel a personal connection. Pressing your hand to the black pages, your body heat creates a flare of white appearing between the web of your fingers, and you feel as though secrets are being shared in the dark. You see the object you are holding take the impression of your own body, and yet you see only windows onto the words below. Like a lover, there is great intimacy of a hand pressing the page, and yet the text underneath retains its enigma. Zoe Heron (†) Comedian, Multimedia Performance Maker, and Academic.

Another person, who experienced the book during its prototype testing, commented:

What’s fascinating about the overall experience of reading and touching, especially the aspect of covering and uncovering or unraveling thoughts through this type of interaction; and the way the book is put together, in concertina form, is the possibility to connect with the more ‘irrational’ aspects of being human. The moment I pressed my hands onto its dark pages, was also a moment of paying attention to the flow of emotions inside of me: the content becomes transparent from my own warmth; emotionality that is sometimes frowned upon is suddenly allowed. These seize to be dark by my own engagement with it as if reclaiming my own state of being. Like relationships, of any type, the book echoes the effort needed to sustain them – so the book can almost feel comfortable to open up and talk to you.  Francesca Prandelli, Journalist.

The design of the words in the book follows a signiconic approach. Text and image merge to provide the reader with a new perspective that has as much to do with semiology and language as it does with experience and emotions. In this way, the book attempts to materialise the emotions behind words. This emerged through conversations with my co-conspirator, (I think that’s a suitable title), Tom Abba, a well-known book artist/designer (based in Bristol), and fellow erotographomaniac. To You allowed space for collaboration, a space for another voice in the piece, where Tom’s contribution to the visualisation of the text, amongst other things, became highly significant to the work – “much as the work itself is a voice communicating with an (absent) voice”, he says…

Image by George Margelis

All components that make the book what it is, indicate the necessity of affection through touch, and thus the significance of the human hand as an organ both of performance and of perception. As I said in the beginning of this article, “I have been contemplating human contact, communication, closeness, and tactility/materiality for a while now”. For Aristotle, the hand is the “tool of tools”. It is strength, power and protection, generosity, and hospitality. For Quintilian: “The hands may almost be said to speak. Do we not use them to demand, promise, summon, dismiss, threaten, supplicate, express aversion or fear, question or deny? Do we not use them to indicate joy, sorrow, hesitation, confession, penitence, measure, quantity, number, and time? Have they not the power to excite and prohibit, to express approval, wonder, shame?”. I find it interesting reading up on the symbolism of hands, and explaining how this is associated with my overall artistic practice, but this is perhaps a subject for another article.

The book’s design makes it difficult to read. You need to give it warmth, you need to give it love and attention, you need to make an effort. Sometimes it is not easy, you need to touch it… you need friction… You will put it down, pick up it, make a cuppa and warm your hands up; you won’t read it all in one sitting. That’s what it is really about; physical bodies relating to the work. The letters return to the idea of physicality, tactility, materiality. The book asks to be touched, it seeks intimacy and attention. This is revealed through its very first lines: “In this book, the human hand is as important as love.”

To You, will be made available for purchase soon! To keep updated and find out more about the book, follow Yiota on Twitter @yiota_demetriou, or visit the book’s site: www.to-you.live. Sign up to the book’s mailing list via the site above, to follow its journey.

The project is supported by Dr. Tom Abba (Bristol-based Book Artist and Designer), and Prof. Kate Pullinger (Novelist and Academic) through the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries (@CCCIBathSpa), at Bath Spa University.

Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion, I pitched to James an idea to establish an online space devoted to all things Synthetic Reality based (my umbrella term for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality). This space, called Augmentology 101, intrigued James to the point where a decision was made to sponsor it through the Ars Virtua Foundation and CADRE Laboratory for New Media. What followed was an amazing exploration into the creative potentials of Synthetic Reality – what’s now known as XR (Extended Reality) – and how it might manifest within the realm of electronic literature.  

It’s now been 10 years since the initialisation of the Augmentology 101 project. During this decade, there’s been a major upswing in VR and AR production and development, with impactful XR content such as Firebird – La Péri (a 2016 English/Chinese/French multilingual VR Experience) and Queerskins VR (2018) being standout examples.

Screenshot from the 2016 Multilingual Virtual Reality Project “Firebird – La Peri”

My own attempts at merging digital literature into developing XR fields have been multiple and varied, originating in delving into VR in the 1990’s when VRML was the shiny new thing. Surprisingly enough, the creative and technical challenges that VR creators faced back then are similar to those we face today: high performance requirements, mainstream adoption hurdles (see: Gartner Hype Cycle), and monetisation dilemmas are all relevant. Likewise, skillsets required by VR content creators in the mid 1990’s again parallel XR creators of today, including developing a deep knowledge of spatial storytelling logistics; emotional intelligence; and the ability to formulate story experiences that take into account various hardware and platform limitations such as field of view constraints, tethered headsets restricting natural movements, and hardware specific limitations like the screen-door effect.

In terms of XR projects I’ve produced in the last decade, a brief selection includes conceiving of and co-developing the 2013 anti-surveillance AR game #PRISOM, and in 2015 mapping out with Andy Campbell the (now unfinished) PC/VR project Square Ebony that was to be filled with: “…movement/imagery like huge ‘Panic Room’ landscaped letters…a force field of green…branches intertwined…tangles being text…[that] revolves around an entity…this entity is slowly reconfiguring itself…at the top of a hill/mountain/plateau surrounded by brackish water” (notes from Square Ebony Project Meeting and Documentation, Breeze and Campbell, March 10th 2015). In 2016 I lectured as part of the “Future Possible: Beyond the Screen” Series which centred on how VR can transform creative practice, and which also included a live VR performance walkthrough using one of my Tilt Brush created works. In 2017 I keynoted at the Electronic Literature Conference with a VR performance presented both live at the Conference and simultaneously in Virtual Reality.

“Layering the New real: Tracking the Self in Disembodied [Un] Virtual Spaces” Keynote

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Thorough participation in a high-end VR based experience like Perpetual Nomads hinges entirely on immersion, which is triggered initially through the audience having to don gear that firstly reduces their ability to engage in their actual physical space in standard ways (their vision and hearing being “co-opted” into a VR space). The leap of faith the audience needs to make to establish a valid and willing suspension of disbelief (as Samuel Coleridge so aptly phrased it) is already set in motion by the fact a user is entirely aware from the moment they slip on a VR Headset that their body is in essence hijacked by the experience (haptically, kinetically), as opposed to a more removed projection into a story space via more traditional forms (think book reading, movies, tv). Such body co-opting might lead a user to disengage from the VR experience from the very beginning which will reduce the likelihood of true immersion: alternatively, they may readily fall headlong into the experience with an absolute sense of engagement and wonder (the preferred option as a VR content creator!) if the work has been precisely crafted.

For the most part, XR projects such as those mentioned above currently exist only in the mainstream margins, with a majority of experiences requiring costly high-end VR rigs and expensive desktop computers that demand audiences experience the works in their optimal state. To counteract this selective catering to the exorbitant end of the XR market, in early 2018 I had the idea to create a VR Experience that would reduce the mandatory use of high-end tech. This project would instead cater directly to a range of audiences by crafting a work that could be experienced across a far larger (and much more accessible) range of lower-end tech. This VR Literature work is called A Place Called Ormalcy.

Title Image from the “A Place Called Ormalcy” Press Kit

A Place Called Ormalcy is digital literature designed for, and developed in, Virtual Reality. It was constructed using the Virtual Reality Application MasterpieceVR to craft the 3D models, with each chapter (made up of 3D models, text, and audio components) then combined and hosted via the Sketchfab platform. It’s comprised of a text-based story made up of seven short Chapters which are housed in 3D/Virtual Reality environments. It can be accessed via a wide range (crucial in terms of its social commentary aspect) of mobile devices, desktop PCs and both low-end and high-end Virtual Reality hardware. Audiences using the cheapest type of VR equipment (such as Cardboard headsets) are able to access complete versions of this VR literature experience, as are users of any net connected mobile device with a WebVR-enabled browser.

The story of A Place Called Ormalcy (warning: spoilery parts ahead) unfolds through a series of snapshots of the life of Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding chap who resides in the aesthetically cartoonish world of Ormalcy. Ormalcy exists in an alternative universe complete with its own idiosyncratic language patterns. The storyworld initially presents as a Utopia full of innocent “claymationesque” contented creatures and happy citizens. As the story plays out, however, it soon becomes apparent that in actuality, this VR Experience allegorically traces the makings of a dystopic society, and how such fascist principles can arise in the most benevolent of places. This VR Literature work has social commentary at its very core, commenting directly on and about the rise of current totalitarian trajectories and the contemporary malaise, confusion and accompanying acclimatization patterns.

“A Place Called Ormalcy” Chapter Progression

A Place Called Ormalcy uses a combination of WebVR, 3D, VR, text and audio assets in ways that mirror a slow dystopian creep. In the desktop and mobile versions, each chapter becomes progressively visually cloistered, with dark fog and grainy distortions increasing to finally create a type of gun-barrelled claustrophobic effect. This combines with a gradual leaching of the intense colours found in the free-flowing organic imagery of the initial Chapters which results in a startlingly stripped back, fuzzy palette and model constructions: vibrancy gradually bleaches out to stark black, white and greys. Correspondingly, the 3D tableaus and audio tracks likewise alter from an initial complexity – Mr Ormal begins his story journey waving directly to the audience in “Chapter Wonne” in a bright and blooming space – which incrementally shifts towards the dramatically minimal in the final “Chapter Severn” where Mr Ormal transforms into (…spoiler alert here…) something vastly other.

In the VR version of A Place Called Ormalcy, additional effects mark the dystopic “boiling frog” dilemma that Mr Ormal faces. Each VR tableau subtly increases in size and scale as the Chapters progress, with the audience finding themselves in the climatic Chapter in a looming monochromatic set surrounded by huge windowless block-shaped buildings devoid of detail – except multiple, and menacing, “88” shaped logos (and the awfully transfigured Mr Ormal). In the VR version, the text becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, with the audience having to teleport, twist and turn in the VR Environment to read each annotation, echoing the “fake news” proclamations of our contemporary Western world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access truth over relentless propaganda.

Although A Place Called Ormalcy may seemingly convey a message of hopelessness or helplessness, the ending does contain clues that all is not lost in this particular dystopian scenario – the final soundtrack offers hope, with protestors chanting and proclaiming resistance as key. Just as VR Literature can work to extend the creation of accessible electronic literature beyond the text-centric to truly encapsulate the haptic and the spatially-oriented, A Place Called Ormalcy illustrates how XR projects can act as relevant social commentary at a time when it is sorely needed. I look forward to continuing to promote, create, and experiment with stretching the limits of VR and AR while producing XR projects that are openly accessible, as well as socially relevant.

There was nowhere to park. As if it wasn’t daunting enough to throw myself into the alien world of tech-heads and program-people, now I was late. I found the Loft – a boutique entertainment venue on Plymouth Sutton Harbour – and launched myself up the stairs, down a deserted corridor and towards the sound of confidence and mingling.    

Members of Digital Plymouth meet every quarter – three meet-ups and one conference per year – and they are, according to their website, a “diverse and talented community of digital businesses and organisations, sharing knowledge and celebrating achievements throughout the South West digital industry.” Each meet-up has three speakers, and once I’d traversed the deserted corridor and heaved open the creaking door, I faced a frowning crowd listening to the talk that had already started, a crowd clearly following what, to me, sounded like a recipe for cerebral soup; equally impressive and baffling, like how grandparents are with smart TVs. I found the nearest corner to hide in and counted around a hundred guests. And then there was me, the only humanist at the party; sweaty and breathless and creeping in late.

So what was a humanist – a creative writer, associate lecturer and practice-led researcher, to be precise – doing at a tech-industry networking event?

Believe it or not, I wasn’t there by mistake. I was on a mission: to explore the vanguard of digital excellence and seek out the digital in Digital Humanities (DH). According to U.S. English Professor & Digital Humanist, Gerald R. Lucas, “DH stands at the intersection of art and science; it makes technology explicit in our understanding and interpretation of culture. DH makes clear that the humanities and technology are inseparable.” An instrumental concept then, and one that, until recently, had been totally absent in my world.

Turns out I’m not alone in this digital blindness. Considering our tendency to elevate scholarly endeavours over industry outputs – a trend that is explored by Zoe Bulaitis in her excellent 2017 article – it is surprising that so many humanists, myself included, are oblivious to Digital Humanities; the term, the area, the field. Are we ‘doing’ Digital Humanities, or DH, without actually realising it? Or is this a product of systematic technophobia? How had I navigated my entire doctorate without discovering or being introduced to this world? Just like Minecraft and Furbies, how had I missed yet another hot trend?

And it’s everywhere if you know where to look.

People are doing it in libraries. People are doing it in labs. They’re doing it in colleges and airports, cafés and pubs, museums and science parks, hotels… bedrooms. Anywhere there are people, actually, or even just web access. And only some of these folks are humanists, the rest aren’t even academics. Instead, we’re talking technologists, creative industries and start-up companies, volunteers at local heritage centres, or 3D design students combining physical and digital mediums.

And I only came across it by accident. Upon completing my PhD in December, life went from nursing an all-consuming word-baby, to chasing down indistinct whiffs of potential collaboration. A few months later, I came across the term Digital Humanities. It was mentioned in a job spec: This module will contain a particular focus on collaborative work, presentation skills and the Digital Humanities.

Upon learning of my deficit I reacted just like any other decent academic. I spent hours (and hours) stumbling through an electronic maze of links, videos and reports, I impulse-bought books, signed-up for vaguely relevant events, and I made an online survey. Mercifully – as any fresh-faced and contract-less PhD graduate would attest – such impassioned efforts have blossomed into PROJECTS.

As such, this article preempts a series that will examine the hopes and ambitions, fears and barriers, successes and shortcomings of everything DH. Although I maintain a primary focus on Creative Writing and the South-west UK, the survey – Hands Up for Digital Humanities – is open to input from any country, discipline or background, and so in taking the survey as the catalyst for all this, my research questions aim to be both extensive and comprehensive:

1.Do discrepancies exist between the current provision for DH at universities, in terms of space, equipment and expertise, and the interests / activities of students being expressed / conducted on-the-ground?

• What are the needs / interests of students? Is there a need that isn’t being met?
• Who is actually engaging with facilities when they are actually provided?
• How much of the student body feels their work would be/have been enhanced by increased digital focus?

2.What best practice guidelines can be set out by carrying out a review of DH provision in UK and international Higher Education environments?

• What are the top 3 UK universities for DH provision and engagement?
• How can we judge this?
• What are the first things individuals and institutions should implement to improve DH?

3.Where else is DH being ‘done’?

• What enterprises exist outside universities?
• How can activities be streamlined? What lessons can be shared?
• How can industry professionals and academics work together to strengthen DH practice?

4.What types of projects are DH departments working on and what percentage of these is related to English or Creative Writing?

• Who is involved in these projects?
• Is DH better suited to undergraduate or postgraduate study? Why?

5.How appropriate are DH resources for Creative Writing educators and practitioners?

• Is it a case of inaccessibility, or unsuitability?
• Are creative writers engaging with digital resources and if so, what are they producing?

6.What does the future look like for Digital Creative Writing?

• How does existing DH practice fit in with Creative Writing theory and pedagogy?
• How can better understanding of DH enhance scholarly opportunities for digital publishing?
• If engagement with DH is embedded as a fundamental element of English and Creative Writing research projects, in line with methodologies or outputs, could it ensure a more coherent career trajectory?

So far, the survey has had some fascinating responses from individuals across academia, industry and tourism, including views throughout the education and career spectrums. From undergrads and apprentices, to professors with experience of twenty-plus years, to even those ditching the desk in favour of code, circuits and science. In the forthcoming articles, I will outline some of the more surprising responses, and highlight some common issues already surfacing at this early stage. We will delve deeper into these issues as I conduct interviews, visit DH centres and labs, and hold workshops with Chatbots. What is emerging at the frontier of creative writing, interdisciplinary research and pioneering digital technologies? How can humanists and technologists combine digital interests and work better together to benefit others? Ultimately, the purpose of this investigation asks whether DH can positively impact wider society by improving quality of life, and if so, I intend to showcase realistic pathways for making this happen.

As for my first foray with Digital Plymouth, it was more successful and productive than I could have imagined. I met founder Garry Hunt, a WordPress specialist and freelance digital designer who works with TEDxPlymouthUniversity and Women In STEM Plymouth. I cornered Tony Edwards, an exuberant educator with Software Cornwall who was one of the speakers at the meet-up.

Digital Plymouth – Group selfie with Tony

Tony managed to make voice-recognition software accessible even to me. How did he do this? By performing rap, of course. And, as it happened, I wasn’t the only humanist at the party. There was a Plymouth University English undergrad with an incredible story. Lana Dalby has co-founded an app, especially for women. According to the website, Babble is a “safe-space where you can ask questions, be inspired, share knowledge and exchange experiences. Most importantly, it’s a platform where we women can support each other.”

Lana Dalby

Babble Smartphone app

So far, I have only had a subsequent meeting with Tony, catching-up with him the very next day – well, I did say ‘cornered’ – and hearing about his exciting collaborative work with Harvey’s Foundry Trust in Hayle, Cornwall. But we’ll learn more about that next time when I hope to feature all three Digital Plymouth members, showcasing their ground-breaking work at the borders of Industry and Academia; the exact site from which DH is seemingly emerging.

Academics have a reputational reluctance to engage with creative industries, an issue explored in-depth in that same 2017 article where Bulaitis highlights how academics’ defence of innate value placed on arts and humanities is met with “accusations of snobbery”. Despite this, I made relevant connections at Digital Plymouth with overwhelming speed. Is this testament to the output efficiency that creative industries are well-known for? Is it down to my individual talent for networking, my charm, my candid approach? Or should we be thanking these industry professionals who seem to be so welcoming and enthusiastic, so open to collaboration?

I don’t know. I’m a humanist. Surely that’s enough for now. Perhaps I’d better go lie down for a while and think about it.

Lauren Hayhurst

Take my survey: Are you connected to the Humanities? I need your help! I am researching the awareness and provision of Digital Humanities throughout Higher and Further Education settings. Please take my 10-minute survey – Hands Up for Digital Humanities! Your responses will help to highlight knowledge gaps and improve partnerships between academia and industry. Thank you so much.

If you are interested in receiving updates on this research, please email me at lahayhurst.writer@gmail.com or follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrSmartlolly

You can find out more about me and my research at: http://eprofile.exeter.ac.uk/laurenhayhurst/

‘Breakdancing Jesus’ mural by artist Cosmo Sarson, Hamilton House, Bristol, UK.

The great Festival is in two days. The weary pilgrim, teasing her larchwood beads through her fingers and fearing that she will never see the Temple hung lousy with banners, or smell the grilling of sacred cat-meat, wonders whether to take the lonely and ill-kept track through the deep-cut hills, or instead continue along the ceremonial avenue that runs, sanctioned and leisurely, across the floodplain.

The waiter, not remembering precisely what the racist senator had ordered, stands with the bottle of bleach in his hand, hovering above both the abalone pâté and the asparagus soup.

The motorist sees the crippled, squeaking gull semaphoring from the roadside in her brake lights; in her boot is a heavy carjack that she has never used, and perhaps still won’t.

As he mutely waits for the kettle to boil, his knuckles held hard as calcium against his sides,  James knows that forgiving her would be the easier choice.

There persists a tendency amongst many people, particularly those who are not authors themselves (though authors are not immune) to see stories as impregnable and rather forbidding objects. They can feel like something revealed, rather than something constructed: a conclusive piece of excavation that an author has performed, discovering a pure, foregone seam of one thing after another. However, it is in moments such as those above – the fleeting, pregnant pauses of a character’s indecision before things plunge on in the customary steeplechase – that a fundamental fact about fiction comes clear. Storytelling is not the mining of a strip of monolithic truth. In those spaces where a choice has to be made we can see that, instead, a story hides an intricate machinery behind it: a fictive, thrumming world of pressures, influences, places, peoples, coincidences, syzygies, causes and effects that have their own logic, and their own obscured authoring.

This machinery, the construction of which is probably the vast majority of any author’s work, is like a Rubin’s Vase only perceptible in the negative: as readers, we have to look for it in those places where it is most obvious. When the dusty pilgrim decides to turn left, the corresponding possibilities of turning right spark into life; and even if, as readers, we only get to study one particular readout of the machine – one particular passage of events and decisions – it doesn’t mean that the machinery stops its rustling operations. The world it represents, no matter how small, goes on turning, and could certainly turn differently next time. That’s the thing about machines, and worlds: you don’t always know what is going to happen when you turn them on.

At different times in history, but particularly in recent decades, this sort of truth – that the work of an author is less a feat of writing and more a feat of engineering, or even programming, of a fictive space – has made some literary scholars very queasy. A specific, and historically blind, the definition of technology still holds sway over the popular imagination, despite the fact that a book has more moving parts than most smartwatches, and the Latin alphabet, like any writing system, is as digital as the Python programming language, and much, much harder to compile. If the Guardian videogames editor Keith Stuart is a technology journalist, then the Telegraph’s literary critic Tom Payne has to join him at that particular, overcrowded desk: their beat is essentially the same. Both are interested in the diagnostics of fictional worlds, and the calibration of their workings. Even words like ‘diagnostic’ and ‘calibrate’ set a gunmetal panic in most writer’s guts; barren, rod-backed words that have no place in the eely shamanism of their work.

The still-uncomfortable confluence of these ideas can be plumbed back to 1945, when the American engineer Vannevar Bush wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think; which served as a peephole into a world, and its attendant machineries, where a union between modern science and art might become possible, and even desirable. In particular, he invited his readers to consider a machine that, as yet, he could not build. He called his machine the Memex and described how he thought it might operate: storing and linking all human information and allowing its operators to move between works, individual texts, without any authorial prescription. This core concept – what came to be called the hypertext in the 1960s – was not a revolutionary one. The marginalia of medieval psalmbooks leading you to other works in the monastic library, are as effective as any link on a webpage. However, it was the medium that became, wholly, the computer – consistently shrinking, cheapening, civilising and naturalising throughout the twentieth century into something approaching the printed word in terms of cultural invisibility – which superseded Bush’s original fancy and provided us with a bedrock on which not only to display our existing written culture, but upon which to create new artforms which exploited the machinery of the computer to mirror the machinery of the worlds that lie beneath the surfaces of every story.

In 1976 Will Crowther, an engineer for a US military contractor, built such a functional fictional world, which he called Colossal Cave Adventure, while time-sharing on his employer’s mainframe computer. Based on his weekend spelunking in the Mammoth Cave National Park of nearby Kentucky, it is considered the first example of interactive fiction and has come, unavoidably, to triangulate the very contours of the form. While undoubtedly a written text, Adventure was also, quite literally, a functioning contraption: a set of instructions for the computer to calculate its bounded world as happily as it calculated the physics of nuclear brinkmanship. Performing from the 700-line script which Crowther had written, the mainframe presented the reader with a text whose machinery was, at least partly, accessible. Readers could type instructions and the computer would, in return, narrate the opening of locked doors, the avoidance (or not) of bottomless pits, and the acquiring of unruly MacGuffins. Their choices of what to type, thanks to the procedural attention of the computer itself, reverberated through the corridors of Crowther’s imaginary grotto, reforming it as they went.  In exploring Crowther’s world, and in fiddling with its mechanisms, those pregnant pauses became longer and wider: vulnerable to cave-ins, collapses, redirections and opened shafts.

Interactive fiction has since accreted a rich literary culture of its own, along with all the accompanying furniture. It has its own polemics, schisms, discourses and honours. It has its own well-trod norms and weird, deep-cut deviations. At its best, it is a culture, and most importantly a technology, which has allowed me, as a reader, to experience many striking, complex and thoughtful worlds, and the stories implicit within them. In Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, I rifled through the cabinets of one family’s discordant, hoarded memories of the first Gulf War. In Emily Short’s Galatea, I attended a gallery opening for Pygmalion’s famous living statue, questioning the work on its own artistic merit as I became drunker and more unpleasantly flirtatious: boorishly and unwittingly activating the trauma that Short had encoded into Galatea’s every gesture and word. In howling dogs, I cycled between the same three, featureless cells for simulated day after day like dank air; each night contenting myself with falling asleep in the visored chair of the Activity Room and tinkering with the settings of my dreams.

howling dogs, created by the writer and digital artist Porpentine, is both distant and near to Crowther’s efforts over forty years ago. Though it shares some of its heritage, it has little of the infamous inaccessibility of even later interactive fiction works. For Porpentine to build it did not require a proprietary level of programming knowledge prohibitive to writers who, like myself, had never received any formal schooling in the subject beyond Excel macros and unlocking the secret pinball game in Microsoft Word. It was not the project of a senior software engineer,  working close to the tinplate of some of the most complex machinery on the planet. Instead, it was the product of a single artist working, like all artists, with a technology. In Porpentine’s case, this technology was called Twine: a tool which has done a huge amount to narrow the gap between the work of worldbuilders, in whichever department they might sit. Based entirely online,

Twine lubricates the interactions between the machine and the author almost to invisibility. The creation of a passage-bound world like Crowther’s, full of glimpsed opportunities, is as simple as writing Passages of text and linking them together, like web pages, by [[putting double brackets around a word or a phrase]]. Clicking on these links represent a conscious choice: do I take the [[left fork]], or the [[right]]? Twine even generates a map of the author’s growing mental topology, represented as a blueprint cartography of boxes of text and the routes between them. It is a map equally suited to physical space, such as that of Adventure, or more allegorical landscapes, as in Zoe Quinn’s seminal Depression Quest. Publishing one’s work is as simple as uploading a single file, a few kilobytes in size, to Dropbox or any of the several free Twine hosting services.

Every interactive fiction writer has their own gateway into the form, usually outside of any institution. Twine happened to be my own and constituted its own curriculum: a curriculum I both wish that I had encountered at school and am glad that I did not. It remapped my own conception of storytelling, not by any great thunderclap, but instead with a furtive, creeping realisation. As I pottered about with the tool, I uncovered more and more advanced techniques, orbiting the most fundamental concepts of computer science. Soon enough, I was not just building networks of static paragraphs for my readers to explore, but using the tenets of formal logic, the bread-and-butter grammar of the digital computer, to observe whether my reader chose to take the hill road or the busy highway; whether they had poisoned the soup or the pâté; whether

they unclenched James’ knuckles or tried to compress them tighter; whether they had had the fleeting, momentary courage, or cruelty, to put the gull out of its misery. After many years of writing, and both supervised and self-led schooling, I had discovered an actual vocation: the jalopying of engines of consequence, a grease monkey in my own imagination. Though my mum would never have wanted me to be a gearhead, I couldn’t have been prouder of myself.

I have seen similar, ratcheting ascents of realisation in many others attending the Twine workshops I teach; in the faces of both 7-year-old schoolchildren and 70-year-old academics. From initial scepticism, they pass to clumsy experimentation and then a burst of pure, combinatorial joy as they start to extend the horizons of what these techniques might accomplish.

For those who have not played at building worlds since they were very small, this process can be more tentative, and freighted with all sorts of prejudices about the fripperies of play, about the disappearances of the author, and about the fragilities of one’s own creation. Happily, this most often gives way to a positive impatience: a busy urge to begin eroding out passages, and sounding depths.

Twine won’t single-handedly combat the queasiness and snobberies that artificially segregate the work of computer programmers and writers. I still regularly hear the protestations. What happens to the author when a reader has the agency to change the path of their narrative? If all choices are equally valid, are any of them truly significant? How can a machine that performs brittle, unyielding logic have a place in the creation of art? What if – like Victorian idealists in the age of steam – comparing fictive worlds to computer simulations is just a case of historical relativism? How can I talk about a Tolkienesque gewgaw, written by a bored computer programmer to distract his daughters when they visited him every other weekend, in the same breath as works of ‘true’ literature? Writing a single, static perspective on this issue here does luckily afford me the luxury of not answering these questions. I can pretend, as we all do, that the narrative is already written, and the conclusion is foregone. If I stood by my own evangelism I should have written this essay as a Twine story, made its workings vulnerable, and let you make up your own minds. In lieu of this, I can only counsel some direction; some passages to follow. Go and read the work of Keith Oatley, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Read Merritt Kopas and Anna Anthropy and Emily Short. Come to the Interactive Fiction Summer School that I am curating at the British Library this July. More than anything, go to http://twinery.org and furtively, creepingly, tinkeringly, convince yourself.

Origins

The Poetry Map has its origins in a feature on Facebook’s homepage by which users could list countries they had visited and see these appear as pins on a map. While this was a good way of ‘showing off’, it also got me thinking about the places I had lived in the course of a peripatetic teaching career. Google Maps was in its infancy at this time, and people had just begun creating their own maps with details of campsites in Cornwall and the like. I created my own Google Map, dropping pins into places where a poem was composed or set (often one and the same) and then typing the poem into the ‘information box’ which opened and became readable when the cursor hovered above it.

These poems tended to be orphans left over from my first collection, Boxing the Compass (itself arranged by compass point) and they weren’t always complete. By dint of the Google Map format, the poems did not follow any sequence. You moved the mouse and a poem appeared. You would often read the same poem twice. Some poems (and pins) were lost behind others. It was impossible to enter prose poems as there was no right-hand justification. The font was uniform. There was no bold or italic option. However, this map-page became a portable journal in which I could revise and develop these poems. After a while, it held about 45 poems.

There was a counter built into the program, and I was amazed to see that the page clocked up 6,000 hits in no time at all. This far exceeded the readership of most collections. The potential to reach new international audiences by making my poetry available through this channel was clear when I saw that most of the hits came from Canada and China. Some poems were set in Toronto, and I had previously translated poetry by the Taiwanese poet Yao Yun, but apart from these two facts, I cannot explain why those two countries, in particular, took an interest.

An early version of the Poetry Map

So I approached Jon Munson II, a programmer from Maryland. He found a way to link one poem to another, and for the page to refresh rather than opening a new window for each poem. By trial and error, we honed the user experience. To start with, we threw the kitchen sink at the text. There were accompanying videos, occasionally unrelated, such as my performance of a song on guitar at the site of one of the poems. This was evidently both distracting and indulgent, so we pared back to a minimal accompaniment. What was, and is, important for me about the map is the poetry first; the interface is there to augment the experience. Having said that, where relevant I included things culled from other projects. For example, the video accompanying the reading of ‘The Westbury Horse’ was made for Creative Wiltshire in 2014. As we progressed, I decided to incorporate work from two pamphlets-in-progress: a sequence of poems set in Poland and the Czech Republic, with a short diversion to Germany, tentatively entitled Ahoj! (this became the third path, Czech Film); and a sheaf of teaching poems I had compiled over the years (which became path two, A Discipline). Normally, I would not have trusted so much writing to the internet, preferring hard-copy publishing channels, but I came to trust the interface we developed.

Whistles and Bells

In the Poetry Map, digital accompaniments come in the form of clickable ‘Magic Tickets,’ bonuses to be opened as one progresses through the poems. One of the concerns of A Discipline (path two) is the different languages with which we communicate. So the magic ticket in ‘Half Term’ reveals a Polish saying about recovering from the common cold, while ‘Preston’ is written in Phonetic Script (an aid for teaching pronunciation) only to be rendered into conventional English with a click of the magic ticket. However, the photos detailed in ‘Group Portrait’ and ‘Two Photos’ actually detracted from the poems. So they had to go. The only remaining photo is accompanied by a newspaper article whose headline provides the last line of a poem (‘Leanings’).

An example of a Magic Ticket

The poem appears

The ticket is visible

The ticket reveals something linked to the poem

Choice of Content

As we worked on the map, improving sequence and interface and dividing the poems into four distinct paths, the sheer number of times I re-read the poems allowed me to hone them into better shape and create an order strong enough to withstand the leap from place to place. Strangely, once the project had become a ‘publication’ in my mind – and I had decided that these poems would never be published together in hard-copy – I found I could not add newer, perhaps stronger, work to them. There was a specific type of poem which worked on the screen. A poem had to read ‘fast’ – not lay too many roadblocks in the reader’s way requiring re-reading and unpuzzling. Where there was a sequence (‘Entries’), each section is revealed with a click, so the reader only entertains one section at a time, rather than seeing the full poem and perhaps being dissuaded from persevering. Jon and any other programmer I spoke to felt that the interface should display as much white space as possible around the words, but I disagreed. I felt that the frame of the map, often telling in itself, created an atmosphere for the poems.

‘Imagine a Forest’ screenshot

Not just this, but (with three exceptions) no poem was visible as a whole. The text screen is a visor, keeping the reader in the immediate present of the current section of a poem. This makes the experience interactive. The poem hasn’t already happened, it has to be unfurled.

Each path was arranged to be readable in one sitting. If it became over-extended, the tautness was lost and a reader might be tempted to check their mail or see what was happening in the outside world. Jon added flags in the top-right of the screen and a map in the bottom left-hand corner locating each poem’s position in its country.

Weirdly, despite all our best efforts, the map is not a static thing, but subject to changes in Google’s map technology. In this way, the woozy out-of-focus shots of the Czech Republic streets have been sadly lost through an upgrade. No doubt, as cliffs erode and shorelines advance, this will also be recorded on the map. The viewing experience is dependent on device and screen-size, determining whether you see, say, the Westbury Horse appear improbably white against its background before the text window opens over it with a poem of the same name. As David Lynch said about TV – everything is wrong with the medium: adverts interrupt you, you have no control over screen definition, a thousand interruptions incur. But despite everything…

Sequencing

The sequencing of poems required even more scrutiny than in the compilation of a book, where poems can immediately ‘sit right’ on a page beside each other. The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett describes a road trip listening to her new album in ten or fifteen different orders ‘until it felt right.’ This was the approach we took. With online distractions one tap away, the sequence had to be compelling.

Reading it now, I can draw a link between each poem and explain it logically, though I doubt these reasons were explicit when I ordered them. For example, the first path begins with a poem about finding a dead deer. This is followed by a poem about the delivery of dead lambs from a dead sheep, which is then followed by a poem in which umbilical cords and afterbirth are visible in the grass. The next two poems deal with depictions of life – one of the Wiltshire white horses carved into the chalk hillside, and a life-drawing class. There follows the burial of a pet cat, before a number of poems featuring a life-line of some kind – a safety harness hung from a helicopter lifting people from a flash flood in Boscastle, a Rayburn at the heart of a house, a pilot light leading the cyclist safely home along a canal path in darkness, and a statue of a harvest maiden in Warminster. Continuing the theme of life, ‘lungs of water’ crossed by cattle lead to a swimming pool, which leads to poems considering ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, claims and possessions and finally letting go of a relationship.

I thought carefully about the beginning and end of each path. The second path is concerned with teaching, and the poems occupy the liminal spaces familiar to many teachers – a college hallway after dark, squash courts serving as classrooms – not to mention encounters with students of different nationalities. It opens with a non-teaching poem in which a drunk teenager stumbles behind a car and relieves herself. I had in mind a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which this physical action serves to draw a line between past and present, so it seemed apt to use it as a sequence-opener. It also touches upon the teacher’s vantage into private lives. Some of the poems are quite ‘minor’ (‘An Acquaintance’) – things scribbled on buses – but together they add up to a sense of glimpsed faces. The poems jump from Bath to Greenwich to Wandsworth before ending up in Exeter where I was a student myself.

Developing a Teaching Resource

When I received e-mails from teachers telling me that the map had been used on World Poetry Day in California and Taunton, I immediately became gravely concerned. It seemed so naked. Not just that, the poems mentioned labia, condoms, and dead lambs. So I developed a downloadable teacher’s guide (including a recommended age-range) and downloadable student worksheets, while Jon made improvements to the navigation (including a drop-down menu of poems on completion of each path). In the worksheets, I used the classic pedagogic trick of creating an information gap and putting students in the position of detectives on a trail. Some responded to the fact that the resource was online, and so in a sense were encouraged to read poetry by stealth. I saw immersion in the map as a way for students to learn to navigate ‘negative capability’, a skill required by the GCSE English Literature ‘Unseen Poem’ section. To my mind, one of the strengths of the sequences is that since the poems weren’t written with teenagers in mind, they don’t pander or patronize. The downside of this is that the poems can’t be used as an introduction to specific forms (such as sonnets and sestinas) as they are generally in free verse.

I imagine the site as something to be stumbled upon, like a map in an old desk. As long as people are drawn to the promise of a way to navigate, and rise to the challenge of cracking a code, then the Poetry Map will be relevant and the poems will mean something to someone somewhere. At least, that’s my hope.

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What happens when a story comes to you where you are reading? What new types of storytelling are made possible when narrative accesses technology to personalise itself to you?

Breathe is a digital ghost story to be read on your phone. It tells the story of a young woman, Flo, who can communicate with the dead. As Flo attempts to make contact with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. The ghosts that disrupt Flo’s search for Clara recognise your surroundings and begin to haunt you, the reader, in the same way they haunt Flo.

For the past two years, I’ve been participating in a research project called Ambient Literature. With colleagues from the University of the West of England, University of Birmingham, and my university, Bath Spa, we’ve been investigating the locational and technological future of the book, scoping the field of digital literature and thinking about what urban data flows and the smartphone as a reading and listening device can bring to storytelling. At the heart of this research lie questions about how literature can make use of novel technologies and social practices to create evocative experiences for readers. The funding for the project (provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) has allowed for three creative works to be commissioned as practice-as-research and Breathe is my response to that commission.

Breathe is a collaboration with the digital book space Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Labs Sydney and the London-based publisher Visual Editions. What we’ve created is a literary experience delivered using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and context recognition technology that responds to the presence of the reader by internalising the world around them. The story uses place, time, context and environment to situate the reader at the centre of Flo’s world as the book changes in ways that we hope are both intimate and uncanny. It’s a book that personalises itself to you.

The story takes about fifteen minutes to read; it is available for free and can be read on mobile devices via www.breathe-story.com.

The two other commissioned works, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, take diverse approaches to the challenges set by the research project; each of these works was created with a different set of collaborators. Along with the three creative pieces, the Ambient Literature project is producing a range of publications, from a how-to toolkit for writers and makers to a scholarly book co-written by the research team. As a creative writer, it’s been fascinating to work on Breathe, which builds on my own work in the field of digital fiction. With Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab Sydney, I couldn’t have asked for a better team of collaborators to bring this personalised locative ghost story to life.

As Anna Gerber, Creative Partner at Visual Editions, says, “Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read and experience a personalised book. Here, the book knows where readers’ are, the street names around them, the cafes nearby – and will give them a chill when they see their digital and real worlds combine. Breathe plays with readers’ minds as it explores what books can be like when you marry technology, literature, readers’ physical spaces and their everyday worlds.”

One final note – The Ambient Literature Project is looking for participants to try out Breathe and talk with us about their experience. If you are interested, follow this link to the sign up form.

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We publish at the intersection between technology and writing and support sharing knowledge that is underrepresented in traditional academic publishing.  TWP connects you with your community of scholars and provides the capacity for high impact publishing outside academia.  Contributors include well-known writers and thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, Philip Hensher and Naomi Alderman, and industry heavyweights like Porter Anderson and Richard Nash.

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What follows is the text of a talk given by Dan Franklin for a seminar called Reading the Data: Informatics and Contemporary Literary Production, co-hosted by the Ambient Literature research project and Bath Spa University’s Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries

The title of this talk is ‘Should a Great Writer ever feed the dolphins?’

There’s a follow-up question: if they do, should they make and then eat the meal together?

Let me explain.

The questions I’m concerned with are: what roles can data play in the act of writing, in editorial workflows, and how can (or should) any data gleaned from audiences flow back into the act of literary production?

Or more fundamentally: Should a ‘great’ writer pay heed to their audience? Should they then go further and collaborate with that audience in the act of creative production?

There are numerous perils of writing in the age of audience development and amidst the new metrics of media consumption, such as the four-episode rule on Netflix (which is their benchmark as to whether a viewer will persist with a series until its conclusion).

In 2006, in an interview on NPR, the musician Tom Waits said: “I try to keep my audience a little hungry, you know uh, ‘Don’t feed the dolphins’ is my word. Next time you go out they’ll poke a hole in your boat.”

Tom Waits concert, July 2008, Prague.
Photo by Anna Wittenberg

For a twenty-first century example of this dilemma, Game of Thrones has deviated from the storylines laid out in the books, and publication of the next installment is stalled, but the television marches on as relentlessly as a White Walker.

George RR Martin finds himself in a fascinating 21st Century bind. It’s a bind defined by IP, exploited across multiple platforms and channels. Some characters are dead and some remain alive in his fractured universe, sections of the audience clamours for certain storylines and then reacts venomously when they are actually delivered.

How does data-informed storytelling worry the idea of “canonical” literature? Where fans’ wiki pages are sources of authority there is a strange reversal at work. In some cases, a book from an author might not be considered truly canonical if it doesn’t adhere to the strictures the fanbase places on it. Authors become a hostage to their own data and the way their audiences have interred it.

Here’s a mid-twentieth century example of why you might not want to do what your readers want: as related in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Lowell Lee Andrews finished reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, put the book down, shaved, put on a suit, took a .22 calibre rifle and a revolver, went downstairs and executed his mother, father, and sister. If that’s what your reader does after finishing your novel what element of that dataset do you want to carry forward into the act of literary production? How’s that for feedback?

The adjacent problem we are squaring up to is that we are seeing the advent of the mobilising and weaponising of robots that can write.

On Twitter, a platform which has achieved an Ouroboros-like characteristic of eating its own tail (a tail lately composed of vitriol, Brexit and Trump, and all the associated bots that whip up such fury), games writer and book editor Laura Michet proffered a pleasingly counter-intuitive argument against worrying about robots that write.

She said: “I am not convinced that total automation of written content will happen anytime soon in any industry. The biggest reason for this is that content automation takes time and effort, and written content is already practically worthless. The value of written content in and of itself has fallen so rapidly and so far that it is becoming almost impossible for most people to make a career of it.”

Conversely, in book publishing, break-out bestsellers are now few and far between – we often have one break-out new fiction title a year (if that). Arguably, we should not be asking whether the robots are a threat but whether the robots can save the industry.

Michet continues: “In the end, total content automation will be most interesting to people who want computers to say what no human would be willing to write or capable of writing. That is: words of immense brutality and unpopularity, words that are incredibly repulsive or boring to write, or words that no one will ever read, that exist only to trick or poke some other automated system or metric.”

She concludes: “This is even more disappointing and upsetting to me than the idea that writers will be completely replaced by robots.”

***

How about when a reader’s experience of a work is co-created with the author by inputting data in some way. Real-time thrillers in the forms of apps (and sometimes ebooks) have been around for some time, but will they ever ascend to become must-be-part-of-it cultural experiences? Do they need to?

A recent example is stopamurder.com, a new project from JA Konrath, who is a thriller and horror writer who had a lot of success as a self-published writer in the heady days of 2011-2016. He blogged prolifically about his experiences, his sales and income, and greatly successful career. He was also generous and even-handed about the experience and disadvantages of publishing this way.

It’s a symptom of the slowing down in the area as a whole that he’s largely stopped blogging for the last six months, but he did fire it up again to announce the new project last month.

Here’s the blurb:

This is unlike any mystery or thriller book you’ve ever read before. You play the sleuth, and as the story unfolds you will be tasked with solving puzzles to prevent a murder from happening.

In this five-book series, you’ll uncover the mind and motivations of a nefarious killer who is plotting to commit an unspeakable crime.

Each book contains an epistolary collection of emails, texts, and letters, delivered to thriller author J.A. Konrath, by a serial killer. This psychopath is sending detailed, cryptic puzzles and brain teasers that lead to clues about who will be murdered, why, when, where, and how.

Some of the puzzles are easy to figure out. Others are much more devious.

Do you like solving mysteries? Do you enjoy brain teasers or escape-the-room games? Are you good at spotting clues?

This series works best with an internet connection, using a color e-reader or app to enter answers on the killer’s website. A black and white e-ink device will work, but the interface will be smoother if used in conjunction with a computer or smartphone.

While each book in this series can be read and enjoyed on its own, the experience will be richer if read in order, and if the internet is used.

Over the five book series, you’ll need to answer more than seventy puzzles. When you answer correctly, you are rewarded with more clues that can stop a murder and reveal the killer’s identity.

Still paying attention?

Participating in this project requires flipping from the ebook (the body of the content, and where you find the emails and your riddles) and the website the murderer has set up for inputting your answers: http://www.stopamurder.com. The ebook is a series of exchanges that could be read as a standalone text, though played this way, you won’t know the final set of numbers that allows you to ultimately ‘stop’ the murderer.

It has clunky writing and is not brilliantly edited together. But there’s an interesting concept underpinning it. What’s intriguing is seeing a cross-platform experiment from the self-publishing scene like this, albeit one built on a solid track record of commercial success selling “regular” ebooks. Overall, the project is pretty absorbing and good fun. But it’s my job to find things like this engaging, so I don’t know how reliable I am as a critic.

One of my favourite ploys from Konrath is dropping in some of his other books in the serial killer’s emails to the fictional “JA Konrath”.

For example, the killer quotes a sample from Konrath’s own novel Whiskey Sour which forms the basis of a clue. There’s also this excellent comment in one of the earliest missives: “Your Jack Daniels novels (named after drinks, and I must say that’s a clever way to brand) all involve your sleuth outwitting the most depraved and heinous of criminals.” And then there’s this: “Do you prep, Joe? I read about it in one of your books. The one where Jack Daniels runs and hides in Wisconsin. Rum Runner, I think it was.”

If anything this kind of interactive, co-created thriller ‘where you are the detective’ is an amusing cross-marketing vehicle. It’s telling how often I’ve seen (and been involved with) ambitious paid-for digital product ideas re-engineered to become free, bolted-on lateral digital marketing initiatives. See also the pivot from product to services which so many book-based start-ups undergo.

There are some core questions lingering around this project. Do readers want to fuss switching between the browser and the ebook (which is essentially a website in a wrapper)? Do readers really want to break the box when ultimately it can be read as a standalone experience?

Why does this multi-platform stuff still feel so impenetrable and difficult to parse after all these decades of trying to integrate it into the conversation and data now allowing a flow-through of information. It’s STILL not obvious how to read any of this stuff. It requires patient explaining and even more patient understanding as the lengthy how-to blurb suggests. There’s not much room for patience nowadays.

***

The content data absorbed from reading a book (in print or digitally) and the environment in which you read it – content and context – amounts to an experiential cocktail.

I remember going to a production of The Winter’s Tale where an audience member was reading along with the play text in the front row and one of the actors jumped down and read his next line from it.

Scripts are interesting like this – the programme is the text of the play you’re about to see but the performance might include variants and glitches that deviate from the canonical version. Scripts are often products of teams in writers’ rooms, amended onstage or on set, and actors can improvise dialogue (famously in some cases). The ultimate, definitive version is slippery and its exact authorship can be questioned.

At this point, I should say something about the data we could be using when we track how people are reading. There are controversial editorial possibilities for authors willing to change what they’re doing in response to feedback gathered from digital devices.

Effectively the literary equivalent of test-screening, if you let a consumer panel read some books in advance of publication and they send you their reading data, it opens up lots of avenues for more mercenary plot-driven writers or instructional non-fiction authors to refine what they’re doing. (Business books are known to struggle to sustain their big ideas beyond the opening chapters.) What about corporate book clubs where business teams can read together and share comments inline, whilst the boss monitors everyone’s progress? You can’t pretend to have read the book if you haven’t anymore.

This is happening all over the web, and in contrast print books are perceived as more of a ‘black box’ technology where nothing enters and nothing leaves a dumb object.

But author practice is changing in this regard. Yuval Noah Harari, author of massive global bestsellers Sapiens and Homo Deus, has published drafts of his writing online in Hebrew for feedback, to create the marginal improvements that make his work better. Another example is (also massively-bestselling) Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, who in 2013 posted a passage of his work-in-progress on the origins of the personal-computing age first on Livejournal, then Scribd, then Medium where it blew up.  Authors have the vision, their audience the revisions.

In fanfiction, comments are currency. When an author willingly shares a work-in-progress they submit it up to the crowd, often one installment at a time. They hone their craft emulating others’ work in the same way bands develop by doing cover versions until (maybe) “They’re even better than the real thing”.

But ultimately this crowd-edited experiment has to end somewhere. In this case, the buck stops with the traditional figure of the author: “You can take this too far,” Isaacson said at the time. “There has to be someone in charge.”

This is a compelling refiguring of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’. (Yes, I’m dredging up this first year English literature undergraduate degree text in front of this audience, but forgive me). His theory posited that the meaning and import of a book is how it is received by its readers. Barthes expressed this pithily: “a text’s unity lies not in its origins, but in its destination”. But in the case of the feedback-influenced book, the book is shaped by the readership in the form of the crowd – sometimes editing and often responding to the text – but it is ultimately realised by the unifying figure of the author. Or, to put it another way, the buck stops with the showrunner.

***

The story we tell from raw data is more conclusive than the data itself. This is as clear as ever in the fractured, post-digital period we now occupy. Not only is the reliable, evidence-based story known formerly as the “truth” hard to grasp but all kinds of data about an intended audience can be targeted at will (notice how the language of online advertising borrows heavily from that of warfare) by bots and any and all forms of Artificial Intelligence.

Algorithms sharpen each other up, Artificial Intelligence improves by way of adversarial networks (effectively overseeing and vetting each other’s work) and their aim is to improve their output to the point where the role of editor – one which has always scored highly in surveys of the kinds of employment work that AI is unlikely to supplant – seems to be in peril.

But algorithms get it wrong all the time. The Bestseller Code, subtitled ‘Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel’ sorted bestsellers by an algorithm created by the authors and determined that The Circle by David Eggers perfectly fitted the criteria to be the ultimate bestseller – this was a book which in reality had middling sales and provided a box office flop despite the film adaptation starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson.

The proliferation of social media and use of digital platforms has probably narrowed and homogenized the culture we consume in western society. It’s like the iceberg is cracking so we group together on outcrops of ice, reaffirming each other’s possible survival and shared experiences. To slightly re-engineer this metaphor, the mainstream is becoming more main, while its tributaries and divergent passages become more various and less sustainable.

This means, in turn, a recycling in literature as much as in other forms of culture and media. All of this torrential data and how it might shape, inform or reflect culture is bearing down on us and it feels like we react by retreating back to known ground. Simon Reynolds put it beautifully in his book Retromania: “We’ve become victims of our ever-increasing capacity to store, organise, instantly access, and share vast amounts of cultural data” he writes. “Not only has there never before been a society so obsessed with the cultural artefacts of its immediate past, but there has never before been a society that is able to access the immediate past so easily and so copiously.” Data’s very capaciousness itself drives us to ration our intake and fall back on what we know, what feels comfortable.

***

Data overwhelms, it overflows. Perhaps this also accounts for the retreat back to the material world. In the face of all of this data is it coincidental that the publishing industry has rekindled its love for “beautiful books”?

Data is also manipulated and coerced, and what we are currently experiencing is a reckoning where non-human actors (for example bots) controlled by nebulous forces are influencing the discourse online. This moves from the spreading of misinformation, the derogation of honest, robust debate and the generation of crass and damaging content on platforms such as youtube.

There is useful data that flows and enriches like oil, and data like a monstrous sewer-bound fatberg which clogs up information systems. If writers are expected to make sense of the world by telling stories and truths about it, then unclogging this data blockage will be one of those challenges.

And then we come back to the audience. How real is the “audience” likely to be going forward? Are we in danger of creating artificial intelligence which makes authentic critical opinion, or simple and authentic audience feedback, impossible to glean? Is the future fake audiences posting fake reviews for fake books by fake authors?

There is a fast approaching, intertwined crisis of authorship and audience which we must face down. We are only just beginning to see the impact of data on the act of writing and how it is consumed, and the feedback loop that follows.

The crisis might become so grave that we cannot identify what is real and what is true – writers trade in truths and a corollary of that truth is the authenticity of the authorial voice. In this way, the teeming data of the ecosystem around our online selves threatens to stymie the development of literature in the digital realm. It is far simpler for the merchants of literary culture to adhere to the old ways: to grasp as tightly as possible to the boards of their hardbacks, inhale deeply of that delicious Vanillin scent and avoid the problem altogether.

We are left with the troubling possibility that data does not facilitate but instead slows and halts the development of literary culture itself.

But we shouldn’t give in to fear of what might occur, and instead, I’d urge us to continue to make work that shows the creative possibilities of new forms of literature. Show, by example, that the cultural benefits outweigh these potential risks.

Long live the author.

Thank you.

There were a lot of things to like about the Episodic conference that took place in London in October. Run by the Storythings team, it featured a range of interesting speakers working in podcasts, games, comics, and TV, an engaging host in Anna Higgs, and a lovely, friendly audience. I hope they do another one.

Here are five things I learned:

1. Sarcasm is over: For those of us who came of age in the time of Gawker and associated online snark, the message was clear: sarcasm is dead and sincerity rules supreme. That goes for both connecting with audiences and with interviewees. Naomi Alderman and Adrian Hon talked about their game Zombies Run, designed for people like themselves, who might not enjoy running, aren’t competitive or aren’t expecting to improve, and who shouldn’t be patronised when doing something good for their health. Sincerity is working well for them, as shown by the millions of people who regularly use the app. Starlee Kine’s taped interview with someone working at a Ticketmaster call centre, shifting from practical questions to winding conversations about what matters in life, was a delightful example of how this approach can also result in unexpected and interesting stories. And it also illustrated her argument that you should “record everything, because you don’t know what you’re going to get.”
2. There’s a difference between what you do for love and what you do for money. Making a living from episodic storytelling means you need to look after both your emotions and practicalities.Having different levels of emotional investment in the work you do for love, and the work you do for money helps with that. Or, as Jamie McKelvie suggested, use an “emotional contraceptive” for the work ones. And make sure you have clear agreements about things like intellectual property rights and expectations, especially if you’re going to try and get advertisers to pay for it, as Imriel Morgan explained.
3. Structure your content to fit the medium. As Starlee Kine says: don’t just arbitrarily create a cliffhanger because you feel like you’ve decided on the right length of an episode. It needs to feel right and make sense. That said, I enjoyed how honestly Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie spoke about structuring the storylines of their comics to fit into their publishing sequences. If you’re publishing both every month, and then also combining six of those into a half-year compendium, have a good think about where you put the cliff hangers. In this day in age, do we even really need cliffhangers to get readers/listeners/viewers to come back? Probably not.
4. Be ethical in how you tell stories. Ask people permission beforehand, because nobody wants to be caught out. Let them have a say in how they’re presented, even, for example, giving them the tools to do some of the original recording themselves, as Jane Merkin showed in her powerful documentary “Exodus” about refugees coming to Europe. Don’t toy with your readers’ emotions and have horrific things happen to your fictional characters (especially ones that are different to you) as a cheap way of building suspense. And be ethical in how you work with people. Part of that? Don’t ask people to work for free.
5. Understand what your chosen medium does well. Podcasts are intimate, direct to someone’s ear. As Naomi Alderman pointed out, telling stories using only voice depends on having a reliable narrator about place: “If they say it, it’s real”. Comics can be online, but then they become something else, so chasing new technology doesn’t necessarily make your work better. Have matrices for success if you’re looking to make a living from it and sell it to advertisers, but know that competition is fierce for podcasts, for example, and that making good ones takes a lot of time and money. This pretty much summed up one of the main themes of the day for me: make sincere work, that’s as good as possible. Not a revolutionary concept, perhaps, but one worth following.