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.

Matt Finch is the 2016 Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland, Australia and a project worker at British Library Labs.

In this post, Matt explores how digital literature, facilitated by libraries, can create playful interactive spaces that are truly democratic, responsive to local geography, and open to a wider range of voices.

 See more at www.matthewfinch.me/about

1. Digital Underdogs

Are there still cultural backwaters in the digital age? I’m three months into a year-long stint in Brisbane, capital of Australia’s self-proclaimed Sunshine State. It’s Australia’s third city after Sydney and Melbourne. Years under the deeply conservative premiership of Joh Bjelke-Petersen have given a lingering impression that this place doesn’t have much of a cultural life, despite the fact that Queensland will soon celebrate three decades since he lost power.

Queensland Cultural Precinct

Contemporary Queensland includes many shining examples of people exploring the potential for literature in the digital age. Among them are Emily Craven and her Story City team, Lee McGowan and colleagues at Queensland University of Technology, and Simon Groth who runs if:book Australia out of the Queensland Writers Centre.

In a recent interview, Simon told me:

Brisbane’s culture and how it views itself today is deeply informed by its long hibernation in the 70s and 80s and that’s important in a foundational sense. But today we can be connected to communities anywhere.

Brisbane was the kind of place where artists would have to create something and then tell people about it and cultivate an audience and then set up a venue and get the liquor licenses (or avoid the cops) etc…A great independent scene in music and publishing came out of this, especially once the political fog lifted.

Arts and activism for a long time were intertwined […] An arts infrastructure has built up around us now and that’s a positive thing, but I like to think that the art we create still has a few rough edges, a bit of mongrel about it.

“Today we can be connected to communities anywhere.” As Simon says, the new age of digital opportunity gives us a chance to correct a centralising tendency in Australian cultural life, the lingering sense that culture is made in urban places and broadcast outwards.

This tendency might itself be a reaction to Australia’s still-tense relationship with the postcolonial landscape. Where previous generations romanticised the bush and depicted it through colonial eyes, sometimes it feels as if the Aussie literary scene now consists of Melbournians who wish that they could turn their eyes away from the country and look only instead towards Brooklyn or their fellow UNESCO Cities of Literature overseas.

Recognising this, the Aussie writing community is currently going through one of its periodic bouts of self-questioning, although sometimes the critiques can look a little shrill, as did Luke Carman’s sharply worded piece in the current edition of literary journal Meanjin.

Ben Eltham gives a useful and measured overview of the latest spat at The Guardian, but what’s really telling is Eltham’s opening line: “Sydney and Melbourne are fighting again.” The literary battleground is seen only in terms of the usual suspects, the two warring cities whose rivalry dates back to before Australia’s federation.

Although Carman is Sydney-based and Meanjin is published out of Melbourne, the journal’s name is actually a Brisbane word – derived from an indigenous term for the “spike” or finger of land on which the city sits. This discordant note, a label for Brisbane land, taken from its traditional owners, in the middle of the present-day squabble, returns a sense of place to the lofty debates of the literary mainstream.

Here in the north-east corner of the continent, appearing to be a backwater can be advantageous. Queensland is on the sidelines of the Aussie book world’s urban squabbles. Cultural institutions here have different challenges – like serving a region three times the size of France! – but also different opportunities: Queensland’s regional centres are larger and stronger than those in other states. The city’s international profile is lower and budgets are tighter, too, but the benefit of this is that cultural organisations here can’t ever afford to forget the ground beneath their feet or the wider community they serve.

2. Location, location, location

Mungindi, Queensland / New South Wales border

In his 1957 collection Mythologies, Roland Barthes devotes a chapter to the Guide Bleu series of travel guides. He points out that the Guide “hardly knows the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque is found any time the ground is uneven.”

In short, any time you see the word “picturesque”, what the Guide really means is “hilly”. This identification becomes so strong, Barthes says, that ultimately the Guide is able to state, “The road becomes very picturesque (tunnels)”:

It matters little that one no longer sees anything, since the tunnel here has become the sufficient sign of the mountain.

This is rather like the use of the word “locative” in contemporary literature. For many cultural institutions, it’s really just a buzzword meaning “offsite”. Locative literature could mean slapping Post-It notes on alleyways or writing poems in DYMO tape on bus shelters; it could mean GPS-sensitive apps which share pre-existing content; it could mean a game like Jim Munroe’s compelling Solvitur Ambulando, which spatializes the business of puzzle-solving by counting whether you’ve paced enough steps to merit an additional clue. Fitbit meets the life of the mind.

Connecting with places has to mean more than reading about them. The question is not just whether we add a virtual layer of digital literature to physical spaces, but who gets to create the stories in that virtual layer. People don’t pass through physical places without also passing through social spaces, which are inhabited, mapped, claimed, and disputed by other human beings, whose voices are equally worthy of attention. If writers are having a creative and critical conversation about the world, and in the locative age we are venturing outside of traditional venues, we still need to ask: who are “we” having those conversations with?

Part of my job as Creative in Residence at the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) is simply to notice things. That could mean spotting opportunities for new partnerships and programmes, but it also incorporates a sense of place which I try to share each week via an email newsletter, Marvellous, Electrical.

A road trip to Mungindi on the Queensland-New South Wales border led to encounters with a sunburned, swearing, “typically Strine” butcher, but also the gay, adopted, Aboriginal acrobat who is now ringmaster of our national circus.

A long walk down a historic Brisbane road – “who makes a pilgrimage to the Australian Tax Office at Easter?” – was a chance to look at the anonymity of postcolonial suburbs.

And discovering that TV chef Bernard King was a Queenslander led to an exploration of what his fallen stardom tells us about Australia’s attitude to gay rights.

These kind of ventures are part of the business of listening and noticing which underpins any writing which purports to link to the real world. Spotting the unusual and provocative corners of a locale is part of the work which Alasdair Gray’s characters described in Lanark:

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”

“Because nobody imagines living here…. think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.”

But paying attention to a neglected setting, as Marvellous, Electrical does, isn’t enough, because it still draws a heavy line between “the artist” – individual, special, “using” the city – and the mere inhabitants who live there, supposedly incapable of imagination without that special someone to engage them.

A truly locative literature would embrace the voices of a place, past, present, and future. It would probably dethrone the author in favour of a facilitator’s role, helping locals to speak with one another and outsiders.

In fact, it would look very much like the work of a 21st-century library.

3. Start a riot, make a comic

You know the great strength of libraries?

They don’t have audiences.

Unlike other arts institutions, libraries think of the communities they serve as users, not mere spectators. This is the great and lasting benefit of libraries’ long association with the book: back in the old shelfy days, a library only came to life when someone stepped inside and began to read. Books are always a collaboration between the reader, the writer, and many other intermediaries who play a part in publishing and distribution.

Nowadays, libraries are less concerned with shelves and silent reading – but they are still the place you come when you want to learn and explore on your own terms. Neither teachers nor preachers, librarians’ agenda is simply to facilitate and protect your freedom of access to information. Increasingly that also means taking their programmes off-site, outside of the walls and into every space they can possibly reach.

Is this what it really means to be locative?

One of the digital initiatives which is part of this library-led drive to truly democratise culture emerged from the international Fun Palaces movement.

This invites communities to come together and offer people the chance to try their hands at the arts and sciences on the first weekend of every October. The motto of these community-devised and -delivered events is “Everyone an artist, everyone a scientist”, but the underpinning ethos is even more radical than that. The original manifesto reads:

Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.

What might this look like to the digital writing community?

Last year I worked with SLQ to create the Fun Palaces Comic Maker, a simple browser-based way for people to create drag-and-drop comics which were then published via Tumblr.

Built at short notice and for a minimal budget, the Comic Maker was by necessity basic, but simply offering people the opportunity to tell stories on their own terms released a lot of creativity. People used the tools we gave them in sophisticated, unpredictable ways.

There were non-narrative comics:

and comics in languages other than English:

Users spotted a clever workaround to the limited set of drag ‘n’ drop images available, by typing emoji into the text captions:

And the “just for kids” vibe of the Fun Palaces design was undercut by adult users who offered tongue-in-cheek references to Lovecraft, among others:

Comics as a medium are intimately entwined with the politics of space, consisting as they do of words and images which gain meaning through juxtaposition. Digital projects extend this exploration of space by inviting people located around the world to take part in comics creation and experimentation.

Creating an opportunity for people worldwide to tell their own stories through a simple mechanism was an experiment in this kind of local connection and now that the basic engine has been built, SLQ and its partners are exploring new ways to use the Comic Maker to support people’s creativity.

You can see a full report on the project from the Electricomics conference here (PDF download).

4. Fun Palaces and the Fury Road

So what does all this mean for a “Creative in Residence” in an Australian library?

SLQ’s mission is to “inspire Queensland’s creativity forever”. It’s amazing that such cosmic language was secured within the bureaucratic bounds of a state government. It raises interesting long-term questions too… In some post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road future, where, God forbid, the state of Queensland had ceased to exist or even been forgotten – would the library’s duty to inspire locals forever still be in force?

That might sound fanciful, but the 21st century is full of great examples of libraries going above and beyond their remit in the name of doing the right thing, whether that’s Ferguson Library during the recent civil unrest or Christchurch Libraries during the earthquakes in New Zealand.

At precisely those moments of crisis or natural disaster which we normally experience through apocalyptic fantasy, libraries have proven themselves to be resilient, inventive, and utterly committed to the public. This relationship to place and sense of duty to a broadly understood community is also part of being “locative” and something which makes libraries stand out from many other arts institutions.

So my duty as Creative in Residence is to respect this library ethos and ask: How do we take this dream, of truly democratic access to culture, its production as well as its enjoyment, into a digital space that is truly interactive and available to the general public – understood as users, not just audiences?

We’re sure to stumble along the way – we’re the underdog, after all – but that doesn’t mean we won’t give it an amazing go.

You can follow what we get up to during my residency at @drmattfinch and tinyletter.com/marvellouselectrical.