In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly:

This is an introduction to a novel you will never read.

He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he read.

The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made.

I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves (Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets (The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson). Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture.

What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. And the critics’ resulting performative bewilderment or pithy dismissal of a wacky experiment seem to me like missed opportunities.

When the assumed shared experience of an audience is modified or removed altogether, how does their engagement with a narrative change? Some clues may be found in my own experience on both sides of the reader/writer divide. How I initially read and thought about a fluid novel like The Unfortunates, for example, is very different to how I have come to think about Ex Libris and that change in point of view has been illuminating.

My experience with The Unfortunates suggests that a first reading looms large in one’s perception of story. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself that the clever positioning of two adjacent scenes was attributable not only to the author’s craft but also to sheer happenstance. We’re trained to read stories as linear and it’s a hard habit to break. When I return to The Unfortunates today, no matter how many times I reshuffle its contents, the story is always coloured by that first reading and how the chapters initially unfolded. That first reading has become my definitive version of the novel from which all others deviate.

Readers of Ex Libris may have a similar experience, perhaps moreso given their copy cannot be physically reconstructed. Information that colours the perception of the characters and their actions may come earlier or later and its impact will undoubtedly shift. Readers who see more of a particular character earlier, for example, may centre the story around them in a way others won’t. Several of the fluid chapters also contain crucial pieces of information that change a character’s image or motivation and cast events elsewhere in the story in a different light. Reviewing the chapter order for each copy, I frequently pay attention to where these chapters fall, wondering how their precise location changes the tenor of the story.

I say I wonder because, primarily, I must rely on guesswork. My perception of the novel is not of a puzzle but of narrative pieces in constant motion, a true fluid state. As I worked on it, Ex Libris formed a kind of web, a set of interlocking shorter narratives that fed into a larger complex. For me there can never be a definitive version of the story, only discrete narrative chunks that cross-reference, echo, or contrast, but never line up precisely.

Unlike The Unfortunates which can be endlessly reshuffled, Ex Libris is presented to the reader as a single, fixed manifestation of the narrative. But it’s also a window, a viewport through which you might catch a glimpse of what I see. Without the capacity to physically manipulate pages, the reader must instead imagine that fluid state and the differences in emphasis that come with changes in how the story unfolds. With Ex Libris, like with all fluid texts, a critical reading should regard not only the text as it’s presented, but also with the text in every conceivable other version. The success or otherwise of any one version of the narrative is merely a subset of nearly half a billion possible narratives in the aggregate. Though difficult to fully conceive, this is something I suspect many readers instinctively know. A common reaction from those who have finished the novel is to seek out other readers to compare notes.

But what readers who squint to catch glimpses of the author’s view may not realise is that they have experienced the story in a way I cannot. I can cast an eye over any number of versions of my story, but I can never see the flow of a linear narrative, only a single path running through that fluid web of chapters. For better or for worse I can never have the experience I had reading The Unfortunates.

I suspect that’s why the story that emerged turned out far more self-reflexive than I had originally intended. Maybe it was inevitable that a narrative featuring a band of literary misfits reconstructing a library from fragments in a dystopian world would eventually turn in on itself, a comment on how fiction can become a vehicle for revealing how we construct our own truths. In the same way the story’s characters can never truly reach the author, so too a reader’s and writer’s experiences always remain tantalisingly out of reach for each other.

Ex Libris is out now.

Reference

Bryant, J., 2005. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Matt Finch writes and helps communities, companies, and institutions around the world to do useful and surprising new things. His latest digital work is the interactive narrative, The Library of Last Resort.

You have a varied background including a Ph.D. in Modern Intellectual History. How did you arrive at this nexus of strategy, storytelling and technology?

I wrote a Ph.D. about people who fled the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe and how they adjusted to live in their host countries, including the stories they told about their pasts. At the same time I did work with asylum-seeking children and then a stint as a kindergarten teacher in England. I also wrote travel guides, magazine articles, and worked in local government and the tech sector. Increasingly, people asked me to work with them on high-level strategy, or getting a wider community involved in conversations they were having. 

I suppose all of those jobs were to do with relationships, and questions, and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives: where we’ve come from, who we are now, where we’re going next. 

For potential clients you describe your work as “scenario planning and foresight, policy consultation and strategic direction, plus facilitation and professional development”. How would you describe it for a broader audience, or for people who might take part in one of your sessions?

I help people, communities, and organisations to make better decisions about what they want to do in the future. Sometimes that involves imagining the futures which might await, in order to expand our understanding of what’s going on in the present. That’s what people call foresight, as opposed to forecasting, which is the traditional notion of trying to correctly predict the one future which will definitely occur.

Most recently, I’ve worked with Energy Consumers Australia to imagine the energy sector of 2050 and with the University of Oslo exploring the future of digital technology in schools. I’m currently advising a project called IMAJINE on the future of regional inequality across the European Union. It’s fun and rewarding to help people explore their strategic blindspots.

What are the creative works that have most inspired you?

I could and probably should reel off a whole bunch of writers and artists who have stayed with me and who I want to be associated with, but really I think that everything you take in inspires you. Right now I’m absorbing a bunch of Gail Simone’s glorious comics; José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, about queer identity and the future; and the catalogue from an exhibition of works by the surrealist Dora Maar. All of those are massively feeding my head.

The story of inspiration I most want to tell comes from my kindy teaching days. One afternoon, out of the blue, this kid Josh said, “I love melon. My mum says if I eat too much melon, I might turn into one. I could become a superhero…Melon Boy!”

He started laughing, absolutely killing himself with laughter, crying, doubled up, the whole thing. I think it was the first time he had ever made himself laugh in his whole life; he was almost surprised at the reaction he’d triggered in himself.

It was so cool. We stopped what we were doing and ended up making a Melon Boy comic together as a class, piecing together the story one image at a time. (A malevolent witch tricked Melon Boy into losing his powers by feeding him so much cake he became Cake Boy). Everyone had so much fun and was so into it; and it all came from this first moment of Josh surprising himself. I find those moments, those sparks, inspiring.

You work a lot with libraries, notably as creative in residence at the State Library of Queensland and Creative/Researcher at British Library Labs. What is it about libraries that has made them particularly receptive to your work?

In the information age, it’s fascinating to see libraries change with the times. Libraries are about discovery, not instruction; it’s a different power dynamic to other knowledge institutions, more open-ended and exploratory. There are also some significant tensions as our notions of the public and private shift. But even in the shelfiest old library of the past, the user went in, chose a book for themselves, opened it, made meaning for themselves as they read. That’s what I hope we can take with us into the future from the library tradition.

A library should be a place where communities connect with knowledge, information, and culture on their own terms, and that could even mean a place where the professional gatekeepers abdicate their power or are radicalized, letting themselves be surprised and led by the community they serve. There are things to learn from Ludi Price’s work on fanfiction archives, Audrey Huggett’s immersive play experiences in libraries, and grassroots “fugitive libraries”.

From your observations around the world, do you see trends or outliers today that may point the way for libraries to thrive into the future?

The world is changing so much and so fast, it’s difficult to make predictions. I also don’t think that you can necessarily copy-and-paste what works in one context to somewhere else. Good strategy is about making a diagnosis specific to your circumstances and then taking a smart bet on what you ought to do next. I think that great libraries now and in the future will be deeply attentive to the current and emerging needs of the communities they serve and which fund them.

How are libraries adapting to an environment where staying at home and social distancing are essential for the public good? Do you see these adaptations remaining in place beyond the pandemic?

Martin Kristoffer Bråthen, a Norwegian librarian, has written and spoken about this, asking, in an age of lockdown, “What is the library’s value if they focus on being the middleman between digital content and an online consumer?” 

I suspect that the changes libraries are making to adapt to the pandemic will be like those being made in wider society; some of them will stick because they are more desirable or more efficient. When there was a strike on the London Underground a few years back, researchers tracked the journeys made by commuters when their usual journey to work became impossible. A significant number of travellers stuck with their alternate routes after the strike ended; the crisis had actually shown them a more efficient way to get from their home to work and back each day.

In the long run, while some changes will stay, others could revert, and yet others will shift into even more novel and unfamiliar configurations. It’s nice to imagine life “beyond the pandemic” but I suspect we have a sustained season of turbulence ahead of us, not just COVID-19 but all the other social, economic, environmental changes which might now shake up our way of life.

Your most recent creative work is an old-school branching narrative, set—of course—in a library. Why did you choose a branching narrative design for this particular story?

I think a lot about the balance of power between author and audience. We talk about interactivity, but mostly it’s just inviting people to make choices from a set that has already been devised for them. Library of Last Resort was an experiment in finding the limits of that framework, and then trying to jump beyond those limits to a place where the person who starts as the reader can do something which the author couldn’t see coming, enlisting them as a creator and someone who can surprise others, forcing them to confront the blank page.

I’d previously written a “choose-your-own book review” in a similar vein for an Aussie arts journal, and through them I met the excellent and assiduous editor Adalya Nash Hussein, who worked with me on the Library of Last Resort. Her insights improved the text and structure, making the Library a better, richer place to visit.

The Library of Last Resort occupies that very blurred space between “game” and “narrative”. Do you lean towards one or the other label when framing the piece? Are such labels even helpful?

I like a good blur! 

If you approached it as a story, it’s probably quite frustrating because there’s a lot of wandering around and extraneous material in there – I wanted people to have the sense of getting lost in a collection, overstuffed with reading, before they made their escape. I think that happened to you when you first entered the Library, Simon – you had to ask me if there was a point to it all, or the point was just to get lost!

If you approach it as a game it’s probably equally frustrating because there’s only a token sense of mission or victory! I’m not really into keeping score. There is a hidden ending where you can escape from the Library in a hot air balloon; one of my playtesters found it on his first playthrough, just by making the choices that he would make if he was really in the Library. Some people’s brains are just wired that way, I guess.

Maybe the Library of Last Resort is an experiment in frustration and release…I think one of the hard things about trying something new is figuring out how to work with people’s expectations. When you click that link, do you want to be told a good story? Do you want to be given a good puzzle, with the satisfaction of finding the “right” solution? How much effort should you be expected to put in? How much uncertainty should you experience?

You present The Library of Last Resort as a form of escapism, but the story contemplates fundamental ideas around the nature of play and narrative, as well as truth and objective reality. How important is it for you to strike a balance between having fun and addressing some of the deeper complications of contemporary life?

When you’re a kid, the world is so new to you that you’re constantly exploring surfaces and probing the depths, asking the big questions, where do we come from, why does this happen. It’s also an emotional journey: losing your teddy bear can feel like cosmic despair, but jokes about eating too much melon can conjure sheer delight. All of that – the deep stuff, the superficial, and the make-believe – mixes with the everyday and apparently trivial. That’s a cool place to be.

I’m not pretending the Library of Last Resort gets anywhere near what Josh achieved with “Melon Boy”, but it’s nice to have something to aim for.

Find out more about Matt at mechanicaldolphin.com.

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

The Library of Last Resort
by Matt Finch

The Library of Last Resort is a ruse.

You’d be forgiven at first for thinking this is a standard text-based branching-narrative game, a multiple-choice point-and-click that harks back to thousands of works across the web and earlier to those ubiquitous children’s books from the 70s and 80s.

(Not sure what books I mean? Turn to page 32).

Gameplay and strategic navigation are not my forte, but despite getting lost on more than one occasion, I was able to delve deeper into the story, exploring its setting and absorbing the philosophies that inform its design. The Library of Last Resort charms and intrigues in equal measures, unfolding in an organic and almost accidental way: whims lead to questions that coalesce into mysteries that draw you further in.

But story and simple interactivity proves merely an entrée into something far more profound when The Library of Last Resort essentially rejects its own premise, breaks out from the screen, and demands you interact with the real world. Getting to the end of this game means visiting some unexpected places while contemplating the nature of play, narrative, and reality itself. That it manages to do this while never losing its sense of escapism and fun makes it all the more remarkable.

https://mattfinch.neocities.org/Roadhouse%20Garden.html

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Gothic Body
by Eda Gunaydin

Published to the web by Australian literary journal Voiceworks, Gothic Body is divided into two parts. The first concerns itself with guilt and the author’s relationship with her mother, as well as the impact of that relationship on her body. The second part takes a wider view of the casual racism that infects everyday interactions in Australian life.

The piece consists of a series of images—family snapshots and scraps of handwritten messages—with accompanying text appearing on mouse over. It’s a simple application of technology that nevertheless creates a powerful effect, linking text and images inextricably and demanding the reader engage with both.

And with these elements, Gunaydin constructs a remarkable work of memoir so honest and unflinching, it has moments of real discomfort. The effect is like being given access to an intimate family album, images and thoughts that weren’t meant to be made public.

https://www.voiceworksmag.com.au/all/gothic-body

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

A Poem Floats
by Pascalle Burton

How much can you say using only thirteen words? What if you could animate those thirteen words across 793 frames? Contributing to the long tradition of works that blur the boundary between literary and visual art, the words that make up A Poem Floats do not move at random, but in patterns, combining and recombining.

Pascalle Burton’s poem-in-a-gif-file takes time to fully realise its texts and requires active engagement from the reader to make meaning from its playful approach to language. In its coiling and uncoiling spirals, A Poem Floats piece makes reference to 2005 work deadsee by Israeli artist Sigalit Landau, a work that suspended a spiral raft of watermelons in the Dead Sea.

It packs a lot into those thirteen words.

https://pascalleburton.wordpress.com/2019/04/03/gif-poem-a-poem-floats-published-in-photodust/

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

The Book of Hours
by Lucy English

A book of hours describes an anthology of illustrated sacred and devotional texts, popular in the middle ages. Divided into the canonical hours, they contained psalms, prayers and gospel extracts and were designed not to be read in sequence, but rather to be consulted as per the calendar. These were books developed for lay people who wished to incorporate elements of monasticism into their devotional life.

The Book of Hours is an anthology of poetry films, collaborations between poet Lucy English and filmmakers from around the world. Thanks to handheld devices and the ubiquity of internet connectivity, it can be carried in a reader’s pocket and consulted at any time of the day. Divided (roughly) into the canonical hours, it serves the current film based on the time in the reader’s location. Though very much secular, the structure of The Book of Hours recalls the same contemplative mood that its sacred counterparts no doubt inspired.

Being film-based means that such contemplation can never be silent, though, and there is no option to read the texts, either independently of the films or inline as closed captions. However, this does not ultimately detract from The Book of Hours as a beautiful and reflective experience. Its navigation and design are never intrusive and the poems are well matched to the accompanying visuals.

https://thebookofhours.org

When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a work. It’s more instinctive. Manipulating pace is one of the writer’s primary tricks in taking a simple sequence of events and turning them into narrative. But what in retrospect looks deliberate and disciplined, is in the act of writing more like manipulating the feel of the story as you go.

When it came to my current publishing project, all that instinct counted for nothing. An experiment in recombinant narrative structure requires careful consideration and active manipulation of the curve.

Ex Libris is a novel containing twelve chapters that can be shuffled in any order, yet always presents as a cohesive narrative arc. It is being published in a print run that randomises the chapters between each copy. With close to half a billion possible combinations, each copy will contain a unique version of the text, yet all will tell the same story.

The title for ‘Ex Libris’ comes from the nineteenth century fad for bookplates.

The two books that, more than any others, inspired the structure of Ex Libris are The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson and Tristano by Nanni Balestrini. Curiously, both were written in the 1960s, though Tristano wouldn’t find its true form until 2007.

The Unfortunates is a beautiful but restless story about grief and the intrusion of memories that overlay the banality of daily life. The novel was structured with a fixed opening and closing and with freely fluid chapters between. The first edition and its more recent reproduction was published as chapter-length booklets contained in a box, which the reader was free to arrange in whatever order they desired.

Balestrini envisaged Tristano as a standard bound work with content that was randomised between copies. Sound familiar? The author was unable to realise the work as intended until forty years after its initial publication and with the advent of digital-based print technology. As the title suggests, Tristano builds its text using Tristan and Isolde as scaffold, which frees Balestrini to desiccate the narrative into the smallest of fragments, hints of meaning that only ever briefly come into focus.

Both works experiment boldly, not just with structure, but also with the language itself. The result is intoxicating: as a reader you feel like you’re having fun, even as you stumble around the text, constantly trying to find your footing. Tristano is one of the best examples of what I call ‘narrative drift’, the sense that, as a reader, you must let go of any sense of structure or meaning and allow the pages to take you wherever they lead. The Unfortunates is more focused, a narrative that initially drifts, but tightens as more of its pieces fall into place.

When I began writing what would become Ex Libris, I didn’t have a particular structure or publishing method in mind. What I wanted to do was write a work with fluid text without sacrificing a reader’s sense of plot or narrative arc.

I started with much more complicated mechanics and elaborate concoctions of fixed and fluid chapters. I ground my way through three drafts of the story, never completely satisfied, trying to find some magic key that would unlock how the story should work.

Eventually, I abandoned these versions of the story altogether. After a break from the manuscript, I returned and found myself back at first principles. Finally, I contemplated the curve.

I created a storyboard of sorts in Scriviner—movable lists in dot points—obstinately refusing to write anything resembling finished prose until a supporting structure had been mapped in sufficient detail. Slowly, a new structure began to take shape. The story begins in media res, at the beginning of the climax. Then it backtracks. It fills in details and circumstances that led directly to the opening scene. Then it jumps to the rest of the climax and conclusion. This means Ex Libris, like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, opens and closes with fixed chapters that frame the narrative. I had hoped not to invite such direct comparisons with Johnson, since clearly I would come off a distant second best. But the structure he pioneered, with its parallels to classic storytelling technique, is compelling in its simplicity.

Beyond the framing device, the fluid or recombinant chapters in Ex Libris primarily concern themselves with exploring character and world. These chapters exist in a weird state of semi-independence. A fluid chapter is episodic, with its own miniature arc. It cannot rely on prior knowledge. That doesn’t make it a short story. Although it shares traits with the short story form, a fluid chapter’s raison d’etre is to contribute to a greater whole. Detached from their surroundings and the framing of the novel, these little stories might struggle to pass a ‘so what?’ test.

Story and the structure developed in tandem. Part dystopia, part satire, with doses of paranoia and farce, and a self-reflexive bent, the novel is set in a hyper-networked surveillance state that has abandoned and almost forgotten the book. It focuses on a small band of subversives who collect the fragments and scraps of stories left behind. Calling themselves the ‘free readers’, they are attempting to rebuild a grand library they know must have once existed. A fragmented book about fragmented books, Ex Libris both feeds off and contributes to its own structure, a virtuous cycle of knowing winks.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience, signposting and orienting the text at every opportunity to counter and minimise the sense of narrative drift. I maintained strict upper and lower word limits for each chapter. Too long indicated waffle that needed to be broken up. Too short pointed to a lack of substance. Often throughout the long planning stage of the project, I would stare at a dot-point breakdown for a chapter and think ‘but where’s the story?’.

I also avoided working on chapters in any particular order. Instead, I jumped around. From its initial use as a storyboard, Scrivener became a kind of reference tool as I wrote, a way to maintain a wide-angle view of the story, while moving the chapters around. The texts themselves were composed in separate documents, organised by character name and working title. Early printouts were separated into chapters, each one held together with a bulldog clip, so that I could shuffle and reshuffle while reading.

When I finally created the first complete manuscript, I used a random number generator and manually combined the chapters into a single file. I’ve never considered putting together a preferred or canonical order. The thought of it seems a bit…wrong to me. The chronology of the story can be reconstructed in part—some events clearly happen before others—but a grand overarching chronology would be impossible to determine. That’s not how this story works.

At the end of an exhaustive process, I wasn’t sure if I’d succeeded. It wasn’t until the first feedback from beta readers (each of them with their own unique random shuffle) that I suspected maybe this was working as intended. A good indication was that some of these early readers did their own reshuffling to see if I had cheated.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The long process of conceiving, planning, and writing Ex Libris has led me to a different way of thinking about raising tension in a narrative arc. The behaviour of the characters introduced in the opening sequences is gradually becomes clearer as their background is revealed. It doesn’t matter in what order those revelations happen.

The best analogy I’ve found is that it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The order in which you place the pieces doesn’t change the final picture, but it does change how you experience the journey towards it. Adjacent chapters might flow or they might juxtapose. A character might disappear from the story for a while. A particular piece of key knowledge might be revealed earlier or later. The story has a different rhythm between copies. If the traditional narrative arc is the linear curve, this is more two-dimensional.

So does it work? That remains my burning question as I finalise editing and prepare to publish. It’s impossible to speak for every possible combination. There are 479,001,600 of them so I can’t check. It’s something every individual reader will have to determine on their own based on the version of the text they receive. I’ve always hoped that the story might be good enough to transcend its construction. I imagine a reader happening across a copy of Ex Libris, with no prior knowledge of its creation, who will read from cover to cover and enjoy it.

Is that even possible? I guess we’ll see.

The crowdfunding campaign to publish Ex Libris is live until 25 November 2019.

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

A Place Called Ormalcy
by Mez Breeze

Meet Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding citizen of Ormalcy, a Utopian world full of contented creatures and happy citizens. Happy, happy citizens.

Right from the beginning, something is off in A Place Called Ormalcy. Its nonsense  language, garish colours, and warped illustrations might come across as camp if not for the clear sinister undertone that becomes more overt as the story progresses. Each chapter is presented in its own VR environmentand the technology adds to the unsettling nature of the piece. These three-dimensional spaces, suspended in a void and frozen in time, enable the reader to zoom, rotate, and deconstruct. You’re left with the feeling you can access parts of a picture book that should be hidden from view.

Told in a storybook style over seven short chapters, A Place Called Ormalcy is a clever allegory using a child-like sensibility to evoke a chilling tale of authoritarianism and conformity.

http://mezbreezedesign.com/vr-literature/a-place-called-ormalcy/

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

This is a Picture of Wind
by J. R. Carpenter

Gales from westward. Sharp depression. Late summer thunder.

Removed from their context, the language of weather reports has its own poetic lilt, something observed by many poets and songwriters over the years. J. R. Carpenter contributes to this tradition with a poem that matches its language to some clever and refined web design.

This is a Picture of Wind is a poem that expands, with each stanza attached to a calendar month. Limitless horizontal scrolling is not often a successful design strategy, but here, where the same year rolls around again and again, it makes perfect sense. The scrolling mechanism is layered under hand-drawn weather map elements and gives this piece an almost tactile quality, like you could reach behind the screen and hold the map in your hands.

The text itself is a conversation, an exchange between two characters from different places. Drawing from live weather data, its subtly changes with each visit to the site.

This is a Picture of Wind is an exploration of the language of weather, but also a response to its limitations. Written in the wake of a flood, it highlights how our descriptions cannot match the reality of the weather’s sometimes destructive force.

http://luckysoap.com/apictureofwind/

Screenshots is a regular feature by Simon Groth, highlighting a project, app, or other resource of interest.

Black Room
by Casssie McQuater

Described by its creator as ‘a game about falling asleep on the internet’, Black Room comes across as a mashup of game styles and characters with a meditative bent. What begins as a 2D platform featuring an all-female cast of video game sprites from the past metamorphoses into an exploration of the ‘black room’, a visualisation exercise for an addled and over-tired imagination.

Its pixelated aesthetic draws heavily on nostalgia for early console gaming. But the game’s text is tight and evocative and its recontextualising of female game characters— lounging with flamingos, riding fantastic beasts through dayglo fantasy lands—gives it a bite it might have otherwise lacked. This is not just a longing for the past, but a recasting of it through a contemporary lens.

For a reader unfamiliar with old console and arcade games, Black Room’s gif-based visual assault and use of the web browser itself as a game mechanic brought to mind a Geocities web site. Nostalgia, after all, is highly personal thing.

https://cass.itch.io/blackroom