“Is the smartphone – always with us, always on – the perfect reading device?” – Kate Pullinger (Writer and Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University)

The newly launched Beyond the Book commission is for digital writers with a connection to the South West of England who want to answer this question.

Developed by creative writing incubator Paper Nations and The Writing Platform’s editorial director Kate Pullinger, this newly launched commission has been created to challenge writers to develop innovative models for writing and publication and promote dialogue between writers, technologists and publishers.

A commission of up to £5,000 is available for three writers with a connection to Somerset, Wiltshire or Gloucestershire (in the UK) to spend six months experimenting with the possibilities of using a smartphone to tell stories. This might involve paying a creative technologist to help you bring an idea into reality, to help develop your own digital skills, to buy tech or pay for writing time.

The commission is looking to support text-based works, which could include text shared through audio (but not films that focus only on visual images, scripts, or plays). Projects could look at how text is experienced on a screen, or how the functions of a smartphone, such as sensors, cameras, or GPS, can be used to tell a story. Digital writers might want to develop a work of ambient literature, an experiment in augmented reality, or a poetry film. Or something completely new.

Beyond the Book’s selection panel brings together experts in the field; Maja Thomas (Hachette Publishing’s Chief Innovation Officer and Director of the Innovation Program), Louisa Adjoa Parker (Writer and Immersion Fellow in the South West Creative Technology Network), Steve Hollyman (Programme Coordinator and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University) and Andy Wood (Creative Technologist at Kaleider, Exeter).

Paper Nations will support commissioned writers to create a finished digital work, which will be showcased at a premiere in Bath, UK, in spring 2020, and at Bath Spa University’s MIX 2021 – a leading conference on writing and technology. Writers will also create a series of short articles for The Writing Platform.

This commission has been developed as part of Paper Nations’ 2019-21 Writing for All programme, which works to increase innovation and diversity the the South West of the UK.

Writers can apply at www.papernations.org and until 1st September 2019. Successful applicants will be announced in October 2019.

Email writers@papernations.org for more information.

I first went to MIX in July 2013. It was the second MIX and the first conference I had ever attended. When I arrived, I stood at the bottom of Corsham Court’s long driveway and looked up at one of  the grandest houses I had ever seen; an Elizabethan mansion that houses Bath Spa University’s graduate courses. The grounds had been designed generations ago by Capability Brown and there were peacocks wandering across the lawn.

The conference – which is all about creative writing and technology – was special. At that time I was an independent researcher and gave a paper on collaborative forms of digital authorship. I had never presented at a conference before and didn’t really know the conventions of what was expected. Everyone was supportive; they asked questions about my research, they prompted me to think about my subject in new ways and I met people that I still know today.

Over the years, I have kept coming back to MIX for conversations about digital writing, for the keynotes and workshops, for insights from writers who have worked in the field for decades and from new researchers. Held every two years, this year is the fifth MIX conference. I have now been to dozens of conferences but MIX is still special to me. This year, the conference is returning to Corsham Court, to the peacocks and one of the grandest houses I have ever seen; where I now work.

Returning to Corsham Court means that the conference will be an intimate, single strand version, curated for a smaller audience. We want to bring an international audience to a beautiful corner of Wiltshire for the time to think and the space to talk about the intersections between writing and technology.

This year, I’m  producing the conference, along with Professor Kate Pullinger, Lucy English and Dr Helen Goodman. We are focusing on experiential storytelling, including immersive technologies and new forms of publishing, from transmedia and poetry film to virtual reality to AI in storytelling. We are proud to an announce a packed programme of six panels and our speakers; Guy Gadney, CEO of To Play For and Charisma.ai, a storytelling platform powered by artificial intelligence; Dr Donna Hancox, transmedia and digital storytelling scholar at Queensland Institute of Technology and editor of The Writing Platform; Thomas Zandegiocomo, Artistic Director Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin; and writer Nikesh Shukla.

We think we have curated a MIX that will appeal to new scholars, writers and practitioners attending their first conference and those who have given keynotes all over the world.

We hope you’ll book your ticket and join us. There will be plenty to talk about.

Can we shape a digital literary form using the world around us?

What happens to literature when a reader is mobile and engaged in a narrative both spatially and temporally?

How can a writer use ubiquitous computing, available using a smartphone, to situate readers in a literary work?

Such questions brought together researchers from three universities in the UK (the University of the West of England, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham) to think about the intersections between place, technology and literature.

The resulting Ambient Literature project is a two-year AHRC-funded research collaboration investigating the potential of situated literary experiences delivered by pervasive computing platforms, which respond to the presence of a reader to tell stories. Such stories take place both in time and space; the reader is brought into contact with a physical location as part of a narrative.

Works of ambient literature can be shared with the reader in different ways, including through text and audio, and the reader is asked to also read situation and context. They may read text on the screen of a smartphone and listen to audio through headphones but also read the physical environment around them, walk along city streets or experience the sights and sounds of a single location. For example, in work resulting from the StoryPlaces project at the University of Southampton. This has both the potential to offer both an immersive literary experience as well as a reframing of the everyday world.

The technology used by the Ambient Literature project is often not new. For many years, artists, writers and performers have experimented with locative storytelling and used GPS tracking to tell stories through tagging locations. There is a long history of this type of media and creative production; in arts and performance by artists such as Janet Cardiff, who creates audio walks, the writer Eli Horowitz, who in The Silent History^⁠ tagged stories to locations using GPS so the reader had to move between spaces to access story with the use of a smartphone and, working at the intersection between performance and games, Blast Theory , an artist group that uses interactive media to engage audiences.

Countless others have explored this terrain and experimented with the idea of the situated participant who engages with a physical location through their movements in time and space. To add to the work of these artists, writers and performers, the Ambient Literature project wants to experiment with how ubiquitous technologies found within smartphones, such as sensors, can be an opportunity to access the data that is all around us to produce literary works.

To help us understand what ambient literature might become we have commissioned writing projects from writers Duncan Speakman, James Attlee and Kate Pullinger . The first of our commissioned works, It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman, launched in May. It is a book and audio experience that uses music, narration and field recordings from three places in the world experiencing rapid human and environmental changes; the swamplands of Louisiana, Latvian villages and the Tunisian Sahara.

During this work, the reader is asked to physically seek out, by walking, types of locations in their own environment, such as elements of the natural world and human-made feature, and, in response, are given sounds and stories from remote but related situations.

At each location, the reader is invited to make connections between places and, in the process, create a map of both where they are standing and places that may not exist in the future. As the reader is encouraged to walk along city streets, there is space around the narrative for interruption, unpredictability and serendipity and this is a potentially exciting feature of ambient literature. A writer is unable to know exactly what a reader will encounter and so must think about their experience. For example, there may be an interruption from a passerby, an unexpected encounter or a strange sight in the physical environment.

This experience of being part of a narrative but staying open to these uncontrollable parts of a real-world space can resemble the visual art and performance art practices of participation and improvisation. The reader may be reading a text and listening to audio but, at the same time, they are part of an immersive experience that includes everything around them. It Must Have Been Dark by Then encapsulates this idea. In the experience, a reader is asked to navigate city streets through walking but there are physical boundaries and borders in place. The city controls their movements and they cannot pass entirely freely from one place to the next. There are rivers, commercial and business areas, fenced off areas and unsafe places. You can’t get to certain places and this becomes an interesting metaphor in the work. You experience a work about physical global borders while experiencing the borders in front of you.

In ambient literature, as an emerging form with its roots across media and literary production, there are opportunities for writers to play with the physical material of the city to shape a story. Technologies that have become a part of our everyday lives can be used to build narratives that are immersed in places. Through a carefully orchestrated experience, a writer can draw a reader’s attention to different aspects of the environment, highlight what is usually unseen or distract them from the familiar. This involves a re-thinking of what we understand as literary, what we mean by reading and how we can use the technologies all around us to tell stories.

You can follow the progress of the Ambient Literature project on our website [www.ambientlit.com] or on twitter @ambientlit.

Our second work of ambient literature, The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee, will be launched in September followed by our third, Liquid Continent by Kate Pullinger.

All images by Mark Lawrence capturing It Must Have Been Dark by Then. 

Imagine a narrative woven through a city street. As a reader you can access fragments of story by navigating a physical space using a digital device such as a smartphone or tablet.  As you walk past a library, you might be told about the history of the books inside. Walking part a church might trigger the sound of a congregation singing together. An abandoned building might tell you about all the generations of people who have lived and worked inside. You might even be encouraged to contribute something in response to what you experience.

Location-based or geo-locative writing connects a reader directly to a story as their movements through a physical space allow them to access pieces of narrative. These don’t have to be read as words on a screen. They can be audio, visual or take the form of interactive games. The possibilities of this site-specific digital form are endless. Stories can be created, worlds can be built and we can be encouraged to look at the world around us in new ways.

Such location-based narratives, which are born from experiences of physical spaces, can be participatory. Using GPS technologies, a reader’s movements can be mapped. The story they are told can be influenced by the direction they take. The reader can be invited to take part by interacting creatively with a story. They might be prompted to contribute a piece of text, a memory, a snapshot. The experience is typically non-linear as this is an experience across real-world locations.

By setting a narrative in the physical world, a reader pulled in two directions. What they see in front of they and the story they are told brings a rich new perspective to navigating space. The real and imagined are brought together and begin to overlap and blur. This adds a new element to storytelling, which writers have begun to explore. Several projects have been developed over the past ten years to experiment with the potential of this digital-born form;

34 North, 118 West

34 North 118 West was created by Los Angeles artists in 2003. They took users on tours of areas of Los Angeles, focusing on the fringes of the city. As abandoned areas were explored, users received fragments of audio to their headphones via GPS.

[Murmur]

Launched in 2003, [Murmur], is a location-based audio project, was developed by a Toronto based collective. A person’s location triggers stories collected from other users and residents. The experience is one of accessing multiple layers of stories embedded in the city streets.

Urban Tapestries

Urban Tapestries was designed to help people to create their own annotations of a city. Social knowledge is shared, stories are told and an archive of collective memory is built. These fragments can be accessed while walking through a city’s streets using hand-held devices.

The Silent History

Launched in 2012, this novel, written for the iPad and iPhone, offers readers a chance to immerse themselves in a story. It includes hundreds of location-based stories, which can only be accessed when a device’s GPS matches the coordinates of a specified location.

My Story

Launched in 2013, MyStory takes users on a self-guided literary tour of Melbourne. Stories are experienced in the locations where they were set, building a literary map of the city.

These Pages Fall Like Ash

This project, launched in 2013, invited an audience to participate in a narrative experience by accessing, altering and writing a locative story.

Adelaide Road

Using Shakespeare’s As You Like It as inspiration, the Royal Shakespeare Company created a journey along Adelaide Road in London in 2013, which explored the themes of love, betrayal, exile and home in the 21st century. Users could interact with the project through an iPhone app and a web map.

Writer on the Train

This project, launched in 2013, explores the potential of using a train journey to tell location-based stories. An app responded to the readers’ train journey in real time, delivering elastic pacing, video, audio and new writing relevant to the train’s location.

Missorts

Missorts is an urban soundwork delivered directly to a smartphone as a mobile app as a user walks though Bristol, UK. It combines ten location-triggered stories with a newly composed soundtrack.

Zombies, Run!

Launched in 2012, this app combines elements of game and storytelling to create an epic zombie adventure.

Digital technologies have given writers countless opportunities to experiment and play. New forms of digital writing are possible online and writers are embracing their potential. They give us a chance to reconsider our roles as writers and provide us with unexpected ways to connect with our readers.

The networked novel has emerged over the past six years as a form of digital book that is written, edited and published online. Whereas a printed book is closed, the networked novel is open.  It exists online and can include text, audio, video, links to other online sources and anything else you can imagine. Picture a piece of fiction that is constructed in the same way as Wikipedia and you begin to see how a networked novel can be possible. It is not written in isolation by a single writer. Instead, several writers work together to produce a more fluid form. As with Wikipedia, the networked novel actively asks its readers to become its writers and take part in the writing process. It is an opportunity for collaboration and innovation and a new form of narrative is possible.

In this open structure, the traditional view of who is a writer and who is a reader is challenged. A writer can potentially take on a role of editor or facilitator and support a piece of fiction to take shape. It can be a challenge, as a writer, to let go of control over the narrative but what is produced can be brilliantly unique.

The experience of both reading and writing the networked novel is a social one. As readers can actively collaborate, it turns reading from a solitary act to a social experience. What we think of as a book is challenged. It becomes a place for readers and writers to work together, a platform for invention and a space for collaboration. As this form of novel can be linked to other places online, the boundaries of what we know as a book are stretched.

Several writers and organisations have experimented with this form of digital literature – here are some you might like to explore.

The Silent History

Launched in October 2012, The Silent History is a serialised collaborative novel available as an iPhone/ iPad app. Readers are able to access elements of the story both through their digital devices and in specific physical locations and contribute their own writing.

 www.thesilenthistory.com

A Million Penguins

 Launched in 2007, A Million Penguins was a raucous and riotous experiment. Using a wiki format, a novel was written collaboratively and anyone could change it as it was being written.  It was a challenge for its editors, from Penguin and De Montfort University, to hold control over what was produced.

A Million Penguins is no longer online but has been archived by the Way Back Machine. It can be found by searching the archives of www.archive.org for www.amillionpenguins.com from 2007.

Flight Paths

In 2007, The Writing Platform’s editor, Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph launched Flight Paths, a networked novel that used stories, videos and audio to tell a story. Its aim was to make the writing process collaborative. Readers were invited to contribute their ideas and these contributions were used to shape the digital novel.

 www.flightpaths.net

Songs of Imagination and Digitisation

Songs of Imagination and Digitisation was launched in 2009 by IF:Book. Inspired by William Blake, this book contained moving images and interactive elements. It offered readers the experience of interacting with digital text, audio and video and the opportunity to contribute their ideas as comments.

www.songsofimaginationanddigitisation.net

The Golden Notebook Project

The Golden Notebook Project, designed and run by the IF:Book, ran for five weeks from late 2008 to early 2009. It documented the experiences of seven readers as they read the novel The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing while a virtual community of readers to discussed the text. These discussions became a form of networked book, one which explored the nature of collaborative reading.

www.thegoldennotebook.org

Let us know what you think about networked novels – and any favourites we’ve missed – in the comments section below.