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.

From Digital Archive to Digital Simulator

This article presents the Book of Disquiet Digital Archive (LdoD Archive, https://ldod.uc.pt/), a free online resource to be published in 2017. It begins with a brief introduction to the textual history of this work by the Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa and then focuses on the dynamic functionalities of the archive. The final paragraphs highlight the challenges of making such a complex textual environment intelligible and useful beyond a community of experts.

1. What is the Book of Disquiet?

And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless, I want to give it away; and because it serves no purpose to want to give it to you, I give it to you…

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet.

Translated by Richard Zenith. (Penguin Books, 2002).

Among several unfinished book projects by Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), there was a prose work begun in 1913 titled Livro do Desassossego [Book of Disquiet]. This work has been translated into many European languages during the past 30 years and is now generally regarded as one of Pessoa’s masterpieces and a major modernist work. What many readers do not know is that the first Portuguese edition only appeared in 1982, almost fifty years after the author’s death. It was only one of several posthumous works that editors have excavated (during the past eighty years) from the 30,000 autograph papers left by Pessoa and which have been in the possession of the National Library of Portugal since the late 1970s. Pessoa’s works continue to be edited (or re-edited) and studied by a new generation of scholars, at the same time that its popularity grows outside the Portuguese-speaking world.

The composition of most texts for the Book of Disquiet has been dated from two distinct periods: 1913-1920 and 1929-1934. During his lifetime Pessoa only published 12 pieces from this ongoing project in literary magazines (1913, 1929, 1930, 1931 and 1932). Currently, the National Library has catalogued 722 sheets as belonging to the Livro do Desassossego, of which 374 are typescripts, while 348 are manuscripts. Some of the documents are written only on recto, others on recto and verso. Witnesses show multiple stages of composition and revision: short annotations; brief paragraphs; multiple-page first drafts; clean corrected typescripts. Texts explicitly assigned by Pessoa to Livro do Desassossego contain the annotation “L. do D.” (hence the name we adopted: “LdoD Archive”). However, there are more than two hundred texts without the “L. do D.” annotation that also belong (or have been ascribed by editors as belonging) to the Livro. The total set of fragments in each of the four major editions has varied either because new texts have been discovered in Pessoa’s Archive, or because editors have decided to include or exclude particular texts. Another reason for variation originates in the fact that some documents have been interpreted as one single text or as more than one text.

Thus, we can offer two distinct answers to the question “What is the Book of Disquiet?”. The Book of Disquiet is an authorial project. The Book of Disquiet is an editorial construct. As an authorial project, it may be described as an unfinished and unorganised work written between 1913 and 1935, whose set of witnesses contains typescripts, manuscripts, and printed texts. As an editorial construct, it is the set of printed editions based on that authorial project. Editions vary in the interpretation of Pessoa’s intentions as inferred from textual witnesses. They vary in terms of selection, transcription, as well as division and organisation of textual units. Editions may vary also in heteronym attribution – Pessoa assigned many of his works to fictional authors, each of which had a particular style, psychology and biography. He used the word “heteronym” to describe such authorial personae. The first heteronym for the Livro (1913-1920) was Vicente Guedes, but the work was later (1929-1934) reassigned by Pessoa to Bernardo Soares, a persona described by Pessoa as a “semi-heteronym.”

When, in 2009, I conceived of the research project “No Problem Has a Solution: A Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet”, my intention was to create a computational artefact that would allow us to examine the Book of Disquiet as both an authorial project (what I referred to as the genetic dimension of the Book) and an editorial construct (what I referred to as the social dimension of the Book). Those two dimensions would be fully integrated through a radial representation that would take any fragment (understood as the minimum textual unit of composition of the Book) as the unit of organisation of the Archive. While the authorial facet would be represented by digital facsimiles and new transcriptions of the autographs, the editorial forms of the work would be represented by the four major editions of the work published between 1982 and 2012. Each version of each text was marked up at an extremely granular level so that all types of variations became comparable across the textual corpus of each interpretation of the witnesses, but also within the structure of each edition.

This way there would be no single dominant hierarchical structure in the Archive, but only a series of dynamic perspectives offered by various possible structures that would allow users to move from authorial view to editorial view or from one editorial view to another editorial view. Users could thus see how the book (as a conceptual and material entity that instantiates a given idea of the work) had emerged from the archive in various shapes, according to specific editorial models of what the Book of Disquiet was or should be. Each edited book could be seen in the context of the authorial archive and in the context of other possible edited forms of itself. The modularity of the Book of Disquiet as a series of discrete texts, which could be assembled and ordered according to multiple criteria, was ideally suited for experimenting with the modularity of digital objects as programmable entities.

In 2011, this project was selected for funding by our national research agency (FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology), and it has been developed by a team of literary and computer scholars since then. Close collaboration with António Rito Silva, who designed and programmed the system, was essential for giving technical expression to the conceptual development of the model as our research advanced. In 2012, I realised that the dynamic features of the LdoD Archive could be expanded beyond the initial concept of comparing multiple versions of the Book in order to turn the archive into a participatory and socialised space for editing and writing. This was the moment when the technical and conceptual development of the archive gradually morphed into an experimental textual environment. From the original intentions of using Pessoa’s work as a research probe into the modernist imagination of the book, we came to this innovative notion of the Book of Disquiet as a textual place for literary simulation.

Because the editorial process of constructing the Book of Disquiet by its editors (which we had represented through its four major editions) could continue in the virtual space of the archive itself, we added a virtual editing functionality. Because the writing process of the Book of Disquiet could be not only observed at a very granular scale but also expanded as a writing process, we added a virtual writing functionality. The possibility of experimenting with the processuality of editing and the processuality of writing through actual editing and writing acts emerged as a reconceptualization of the digital archive as a model of literary performance in which interactions could take the form of role-playing. So the self-description that future users of the LdoD Archive will find on the website sums up the history of the project briefly outlined in the previous paragraphs.  

2. What is the LdoD Archive?

   The current description of the Archive reads as follows:

The LdoD Archive is a collaborative digital archive of the Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It contains images of the autograph documents, new transcriptions of those documents and also transcriptions of four editions of the work. In addition to reading and comparing transcriptions, the LdoD Archive enables users to collaborate in creating virtual editions of the Book of Disquiet. It also includes a writing module which, in the future, will allow users to write variations based on fragments of the Book. Thus the LdoD Archive combines a representational principle with a simulation principle: the first is expressed through the representation of the history and processes of writing and editing the Book; the second is embodied in the fact that users are given the possibility of playing various roles in the literary process (reading, editing, writing), using the flexibility of the digital medium for experimenting with the Book of Disquiet as a literary machine. (https://ldod.uc.pt/about/archive)

As you can see, the simulation function has been explicitly articulated as one of the guiding principles of the archive. The inadequacy of the “Archive” designation was already clear in presentations and articles about the project written in 2013. I now believe that a more appropriate designation would be LdoD Simulator, since we have gone beyond the remediation rationale that has determined digital archival projects developed during the last twenty years, such as the Rossetti Archive, The William Blake Archive, Dickinson Electronic Archives, The Walt Whitman Archive, Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project or the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which we took as our initial models. Providing a combination of documentary editing with critical edition, integrating image and text in the same environment, often with the added value of aggregating many invaluable resources for the study of the remediated texts and books, those archives had redefined scholarly editing in digital media as a complex hypermedia network.

In its current textual, socialised and dynamic instantiation, the LdoD Archive would be more accurately described as a textual collaborative environment, where reading, writing, editing, collaborating and publishing are theoretically and functionally integrated. I have decided to retain the name LdoD Archive, because of the familiarity of the concept “archive” in digital scholarly editing, but I am well aware that the categorization implied by the established form of the concept is partially inadequate for the ensemble of functionalities that we have implemented. So our insolvable problem has turned into a problem of communication: how can we convey a new concept and new technical construct using familiar concepts but without submitting it to earlier frames of perception?

This question takes us to what is perhaps the most challenging aspect of any project that attains this level of complexity: how can we make it understandable and usable by different kinds of users – from the layperson who knows nothing about the Book of Disquiet, to students of Pessoa’s work at various stages of their experiencing the work, and to scholarly experts in the Book of Disquiet itself? These are questions that have to be addressed by any digital scholarly editing project, but which are often impossible to solve in any satisfactory way – either because the complexity of the digital textual apparatus is impenetrable for beginners and general users alike, or because the editors have not designed interfaces that avoid making the initial approach a daunting task.

We have tried to address this problem by structuring the archive into six different interfaces, each of which encapsulates only one dimension of the LdoD Archive, allowing access to functionalities related to that particular dimension:

1. Reading: reading the work according to different sequences;
2. Documents: listing of all fragments and information about sources;
3. Editions: visualising autographs and comparing transcriptions;
4. Search: selecting fragments according to multiple criteria;
5. Virtual: creating virtual editions and their taxonomies;
6. Writing: writing variations based on the fragments [functionality under development, which will only be available in a later release].

We have also carried out several usability tests for each set of functionalities using mixed groups that included both users with no knowledge of the Book of Disquiet and users with various levels of knowledge and expertise. These tests have provided invaluable insight into strategies for designing the interactions with the textual database, but also about the need for various levels of granularity in the meta-information provided about each menu and each set of tools (from short mouse-over prompts to detailed explanations of the editorial principles by means of FAQs). A step-by-step guide (with video aids) is being made for the virtual editing function, which was the most difficult concept for beta users to grasp. Of course, even these strategies are no guarantee that the LdoD Archive will become the multipurpose collaborative textual environment that we wanted it to be: available for leisure reading, for teaching and learning, for creative writing experiments, and also for advanced research, including future critical editions of the work.

Once the LdoD Archive is published,  we will work closely with two reading-editing-writing communities (one at a secondary school and the other at university level) to learn more about the actual uses of the textual environment and about how we can improve its design and make the concept of digital literary simulator intelligible for everyone. We also want to expand the archive into a multilingual textual space, but this will take a few more years of development. In the first release of the LdoD Archive (scheduled for September 2017), Pessoa’s text will be only in Portuguese, although the interfaces for the various sections of the archive as well as all meta-information are already presented in three languages: Portuguese, English, and Spanish. In future releases, we intend to include a multi-language version of the Book of Disquiet itself in which a selection of fifty texts will be translated into as many languages as possible.

If successful, the LdoD Archive will facilitate the construction of multiple reading paths that explore the modularity of the Book of Disquiet; it will enable the construction of narratives about the composition of the Book of Disquiet, based on the observation of images and transcriptions of the autograph documents; and it will also enable the construction of narratives about the editions of the Book of Disquiet, based on the comparative analysis of four critical editions as possible versions for this work. More importantly, it will create a collaborative textual environment that models literary processuality through the simulation of the acts of reading, editing and writing as dynamic constituents of the literary experience of text and language. Once this digital experiment goes live, only time will tell if it will catch the imagination of readers and scholars of the Book of Disquiet, or if it will become one more future evidence of a failed solution to an imaginary problem.

“[…] the special dialectic of the love letter, both blank (encoded) and expressive (charged with longing to signify desire)” (Barthes, p. 157)

I am a performance practitioner and researcher, interested in archives, personal collections, and spoken histories. My work is immersive and allows for audience participation through using audience stories as the main focus of the piece presented. It further employs creative technologies and sound art installation to exhibit and present the stories collected during each performance. In this article, I will be concentrating on one of my performance projects called Love Letters; while touring this work  I have collected 200 love letters written by audience members. In this article I will describe  the diverse narrative/storytelling ‘interfaces’ used in the performance  as well as how we aim to redevelop Love Letters by making the costume/dress, used in the piece, a storytelling object that will narrate past audience letters from the collection to present day audiences.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.

Love Letters is a live, durational performance with a performer wearing an interactive dress, a station for writing love letters, and an installation of letters. It is a performance project that has toured international performance festivals and art-related events since 2012: Performing Documents (2012), Performance and Live Art Platform (2012, 2014), Tempting Failure (2013, 2014), Latitude (2015), and iDocs (2016). Reviews about the piece have been published both in online and print media, in Vice Live Art Almanac Vol. 4 and EXEUNT magazine.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

The piece invites participating audiences to write letters that capture platonic, familial or lustful emotion, to share other audiences’ letters and to interact with the performer’s costume by attaching the letters to her dress in addition to documenting memories and streams of consciousness onto both the costume and the performer’s body. The collection of letters contains audience love letters about moment in time, letters to old friends, old lovers, family, about falling love, or even love that can never work. At the end of the performance, the dress I wear is full of audience love letters. In each performance past audience letters are revisited and new love letters are added to the collection.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Through a collaboration with creative technologists and interdisciplinary artists we aim to redevelop the dress as a storytelling object using creative technologies,  as explained below. This will enable us to build upon the audience-led experience of the love letters collection encountered in the performance.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

Inspirations

I have been living away from ‘home’ for the past 11 years in order to pursue my academic research and artistic practice which includes developing interactive approaches to curating and exhibiting oral histories as well as  new ways of storytelling with and for the public. Within this timeframe, I have moved between 3 countries, 4 cities, and 13 houses. The process of unpacking each time is not only mundane but sometimes painful, as I often find myself, as one does, going through boxes and boxes of old photographs, reading strips of paper,  dwelling on postcards and letters. This memorabilia  – remnants of relationships long past, traces of intimate relationships that no longer exist, recollections of desperate apologies –  is too precious to discard. Thus, it ends up hidden in the depths of my wardrobe or roughly preserved in suitcases under my bed.

The process of self-archiving – unpacking, reading, labeling and preserving my own collection of love letters and emotional luggage – made me think about how, if I consider my memorabilia  important enough to keep, then other people may share similar emotional attachments to such tangible traces. This prompted a further question: is the practice of writing love letters vanishing because of technology? Surely, the love letter  hasn’t disappeared, but rather it has been democratised and made commonplace by technology. However, what about the actual ritual, the analogue procedure, the aesthetic, conceptual and emotional value that is found in the very act of handwriting a love letter, the physical artifact that lives on?  Does the digital form of the love letter share the same value as its material form? Is it able to capture the emotional registers (anguish, longing and desire) that make the performance of writing love letters so powerful?

“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).

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, lover uses their ‘analogon’ 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 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. As discussed further on, absence and presence are themes that my performance project, Love Letters, plays with strongly; for the reason the performance employs creative practices that encourage human expression and therefore evoke emotions such as grief and loss. Hence, does typing a love letter, faxing it, emailing it, coding it, posting it, sharing it – have the same effect, even if its purpose is to communicate via written word the same raw emotion of human pathos?

Love Letters at Wickham Theatre, 2013. Image by YD.

The love letter has been cherished for centuries, written by: Beethoven and Embry, Napoleon to Josephine, Jean Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir; Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Leo Tolstoy to Valeria Arsenev, Allen Ginsburg to Peter Orlovsky; Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera, Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf; John Keats to Fanny Brawne, Voltaire to Olympe Dunover, and the list goes on. Throughout history, love letters have taken a biblical tenor, literary forms (early Renaissance, evolving in the Enlightenment), going beyond being written as literary device for romance and affection. Instead emerging into a political act of wisdom, an opportunity for self-reflection and introspection.

Love Letters at iDocs (2016). Image by OP.

For instance, Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey’s computer-based, automated love letter generator is well-known as one of the the first attempts to humanise the computer by digitising emotive writing, exposing the mechanical nature of romance. Frantic and random love letters started appearing on the notice board at the University of Manchester’s computer lab in August, 1953. This was the outcome of Strachey’s programming for the Manchester Mark I computer (M.U.C.), a Ferranti Mark 1, the world’s first general-purpose and commercially available machine of its kind. The love letter generator was among this early computer’s many programmes. In Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts (2016), David Link maintains that Strachey’s program was one of the first experiments in producing text-generating softwares or electronic combinatory literature created from Alan Turing’s random number generator. “Ultimately the software is based on a reductionist position vis-à-vis love and its expression,” Link writes. “Love is regarded as a recombinatory procedure with recurring elements.” The computer would insert nouns and adjectives of endearment randomly selected from its database and through this the computer would become the author of a one-sided epistolary romance. All the letters were variations on a basic syntactic template: “you are my [adjective] [noun]. my [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] your [adjective] [noun].” And the signatory was always the same: “M.U.C.”

I used an online interface that uses Stratchey’s code to produce a computer-automated love letter:

FANCIFUL DEAR,

   YOU ARE MY CRAVING FERVOUR, MY PRECIOUS FERVOUR. MY LOVE EAGERLY LUSTS AFTER YOUR LOVING FONDNESS. MY PASSION PINES FOR YOUR ENTHUSIASM. MY SYMPATHY FERVENTLY HOLDS DEAR YOUR HEART.
YOURS ANXIOUSLY,
M.U.C.

The chaotic remix of sentimental words indicates an ‘ache of longing’ which journeys “beyond the one that already accompanies the genre: one can almost sense M.U.C.’s thirst, as if the computer were struggling to speak from the heart but discovered that its vocabulary had been arbitrarily limited to the language of clichés”  (Wardrip-Fruin, 2011).

Returning to my initial point, the value and beauty of this ritual of writing a love letter lives in the passionate and intentional desire to capture the message in writing, turning the praxis of writing a love letter into a performance of composition and reflection with the recipient at the heart of this action.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.  

The symbolic actions engaging audiences in the performance project, Love Letters, do not only intervene in the idea of keeping memories private by compelling the audience to participate in an exchange of memories, but also creates a second level of intervention by compelling the audience to witness other people doing the same. This is realised by ‘exposing’ their intimate and personal testimonies (with their consent). The audience accounts – composed and narrated during the performance of Love Letters – make evident how narrative is a vital component of the human mind, key to making sense of the world around us. Thus, the collection of these letters acts as a type of candid cultural artefact or resource that carries  ‘intangible’ personal heritage – the letters tell stories that are sometimes profound and intense, and at other times superficial and trivial, and are then given existence through their mediation within a performance setting. The action of writing a letter is  used in the piece as a tool to evoke memories. This is achieved by having the audience engage with the performer by addressing and dressing her in particular ways so that the shared memories become attached with new environments, connotations and other ways of telling. These modes of engagement occur through two strands of audience – performer interaction: (1) writing the letter and reading an other letter aloud; (2) pinning the narrated letter onto the dress and writing on the dress and on the performer’s body, which in the performance act as narrative interfaces.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

The dress worn in every performance is the same. It is ‘stained’ with past and present audiences’ contributions, playing with the notions of presence and absence. As described, the audience makes notes on the garment and or the performer’s body, ‘memo’-type messages left on it, for others to see and perhaps to not see. In consideration of this, the dress/the costume used in the performance is a crucial component of the piece. It becomes part of the audiences’ recollections, not only for its traces of past written and narrative acts, but also as an in-between, a mediator, of what was said and what was lost. It most importantly becomes a vessel that embodies audience members’ intimate stories. The dress witnesses the different tellings and shares a different type of intimacy with each and every audience member who  has interacted with it. It is a technology that is physically embedded with their memories, as well as the cultural connotations it carries because of its material form.

Love Letters at Performance and Live Art Platform, Cyprus (2013). Image by PM.  

Further research has posed new questions for the project: what if the performance’s dress narrated letters written by its past audiences, as a response to its interaction with present audiences? To explore this I put together an interdisciplinary team of creatives, including artistic practitioners and technologists with experience of developing interactive technologies for storytelling and immersive performance purposes. Together we aim to concentrate on redeveloping the letter writing engagement and technological interactions of the dress, making it a storytelling object or device. To achieve this we plan to create a technological speaking attachment to the dress using electronics and by augmenting the dress with recordings of the existing collection of letters. This will allow it to speak its past audiences’ letters to present-day audiences, as part of a narrative exchange in the performance. Following the original live performance process – writing love letters, depositing these in the space, reading other letters aloud and attaching these to the dress – the audience’s engagement with the costume will trigger a reaction where the dress narrates another story from the collection as a response. The dress will become an interactive storytelling object and a type of ‘worn’ sound installation, which will give the audience a further creative agency and shared ownership over their letters and the entire collection. The primary importance is not the technology itself but the pervasive effect it has on the storytelling process. This work makes use of technology, whilst offering audiences agency/ownership allowing for creative expression and imagination, while not drawing the attention away from the performance and storytelling aspects of the piece.

Love Letters at Latitude Festival (2015). Image by MM.

To undertake this project we recently launched a crowdfunding campaign. We need the public’s support to redevelop this piece. Our aim is to raise enough funds to develop the technology for the piece to build on an audience-led experience of sharing memories. We have planned two public events to showcase this work: in the UK at Centrespace Gallery (Bristol) and in Zagreb at the Museum of Broken Relationships (Croatia), where we intend to donate the entire audience love letters for collection once the project is completed. It is important to us that the letters audiences have entrusted us with in each performance are preserved in a safe and loving space, for other people to read and appreciate.

You can check out our pitch here: https://spsr.me/FxkW.

We appreciate any kind of support, If you don’t feel like contributing financially, maybe you would like to send us a love letter instead. Send love letters (addressed to a significant other) to p.demetriou@gmail.com, subject line “love letter donation”.

Supporters of this project include:

• Museum of Broken Relationships
• Pervasive Media Studio
• Centrespace Gallery
• The Writing Platform
• Making Books: Creativity, Print Culture, and the Digital Research Centre (BSU)

Find us here

@yiota_demetriou

http://yiotademetriou.com/

https://www.bathspa.ac.uk/projects/love-letters/

p.demetriou@bathspa.ac.uk

References

• Barthes, R., (1977), A Lover’s Discourse, (London: Random House, New ed. 2002).
• Demetriou, P. A., Pappas, O. and Kampylis, S., (2017) “Love Letters: Wearing Stories Told – a performance-technology provocation for interactive storytelling”, Body, Space & Technology Journal, 16. ISSN 1470-9120, <http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol16/>.
• Kearney, R., (2006), Poetics of Imagining, (New York: Fordham University Press).
• Link, D., (2016), Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, (Minnesota: Univocal Publishing).
• com, (2017), Love Letter generator, [online] Available at: <http://www.gingerbeardman.com/loveletter/> [Accessed 13 Mar. 2017].
• Sartre, J., Elkaïm-Sartre, A., Webber, J., (2004), The Imaginary, (London: Routledge): 145.
• Wardrip-Fruin, N., (2011) “Digital Media Archaeologies: Interpreting Computational Processes,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press): 302-322.

]]> https://thewritingplatform.com/2013/04/collaboration-writing/ Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:28:39 +0000 http://www.thewritingplatform.com/?p=470 Reading Time: 12 minutes When The Writing Platform asked me to discuss how working collaboratively – as I do from time to time – might have influenced my writing process, I wasn’t immediately sure. To give some examples of the kind of projects in question, last year Dicky Star and the Garden Rule, my novella reflecting upon the 25th... Read more »]]> Reading Time: 12 minutes

When The Writing Platform asked me to discuss how working collaboratively – as I do from time to time – might have influenced my writing process, I wasn’t immediately sure. To give some examples of the kind of projects in question, last year Dicky Star and the Garden Rule, my novella reflecting upon the 25^th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, was published alongside a series of works by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson, and I wrote a script for their film The Toxic Camera. I created a GPS-triggered work of fiction called Missorts that was commissioned as a public sound work for the city of Bristol and launched at the end of the year, while in April 2013 the Science Museum publish my new novel Shackleton’s Man Goes South. An apparent flurry of activity, although of course all of these projects have been developed over periods of up to several years, and involved differing degrees and types of collaboration, but they were often written to slightly crazy deadlines and – last year at least – published with little space or time for reflection, so the question was a welcome one.

Working collaboratively? Of course much of being a writer and of the publishing process is collaborative even if it is not usually called that. Research and work done with other writers or with agents, commissioning editors, copy-editors, typesetters, proof-readers, designers, photographers, all the way down the line to readers; all of these can perhaps be thought of as collaborations of one sort or another. If you are starting out as a writer and think that you don’t like collaborating with other people, then you probably need to have a rethink and get to like it, as it is a fact of life even in what – to borrow a term from particle physics – might be called ‘standard model’ trade publishing. But in publishing as in physics the standard model is no longer the whole story. The book trade is changing fast, as are the ways that people read and engage with writing, and the book trade is not the only place where such changes – economic as much as technological – are being felt.

Reaching readers interests me, and going where readers are, and that may be partly why I also find it very useful to collaborate outside of the trade, to work with artists, composers and musicians, technologists and others, but this may not simply be a strategic response to a changing world. Thinking about it now, I have been working this way for much longer than I have been a published author. Perhaps it is something to do with the fact that I went to art school, catching the tail-end both of a post-punk DIY scene, and of a kind of multimedia ‘arts lab’ ethos in art schools that saw artists working with emerging technologies like sound and moving image, or with their own live presence. For a few years in the early 1990s I commissioned live works, screenings and readings at a gallery called The Showroom in London, working with visual artists and writers including Caroline Bergvall, Tim Etchells, Aaron Williamson and a Swallowing Geography-period Deborah Levy (‘Swallow this!’ she wrote on the title page of my copy after the gig). In 1994 I founded Piece of Paper Press, a samizdat imprint used to publish limited edition, 16-page, A7 books by artists and writers. I’m just about to publish the twenty-seventh title in the series: an exclusive new Jerry Cornelius story by the great Michael Moorcock, who has been a supporter of the press for a few years now. Between 1999 and 2007 I also worked for Arts Council England’s then Interdisciplinary Arts Department, supporting emerging practice in art and science collaborations, sound art and new forms of distribution across the arts. These days I pretty much write fiction for a living, but perhaps it is not surprising if I have brought some of those ways of working into what I do as a writer.

Sometimes collaboration is about needing to ask for help; wanting to do something different or needing to bring other kinds of knowledge, expertise or processes into a piece of writing. In my own work this might include a musician composing an accompaniment to one of my short stories for a particular gig. Other times, someone might know or be a fan of one of my novels and, because of that, approach me with the idea of developing something new together. That is how more than a decade ago I ended up on a remote Scottish island with art and science duo London Fieldworks, composer Kaffe Matthews and a world champion stunt kite team amongst others, contributing to an interdisciplinary project called Syzygy. Come to think of it, that did demonstrably shift my writing process: I haven’t written a review, per se, of a visual arts project or exhibition since then, instead choosing to use fiction as a way of writing about art, but in the spaces that are normally given to reviews or catalogue essays.

More recently I was commissioned to work with the brilliant Blast Theory on an interactive drama for mobile phones, commissioned by Channel 4 and broadcast in October 2010. Ivy4evr, as it became known, was a very complex writing project, but before any real writing began we had to do audience research. The brief had been to produce a drama for young people that would be delivered on mobiles, but rather than simply jump into the app market, or assume that this would be delivered by video onto iPhones, we needed to know what kind of technology our target audience had access to, and how they behaved with it. Perhaps surprisingly we found that among the sample groups we worked with there was almost zero use of so-called ‘text-speak’, so we gladly threw that cliché out straight away. A more important discovery was that only a tiny percentage had smartphones. Most young people at that time had old or hand-me-down Nokia hand-sets, usually with big bundles of free text messages on their contracts. We also found that being in a lesson at school or college was no barrier to our potential audience reading or replying to a text message. Ivy4evr would have to be delivered by SMS: a one-to-one, text messaging conversation taking place in real time and at any time of day. The mobile developers who joined the team were used to coding SMS engines with a large enough capacity to run real-time, interactive quizzes for prime-time TV audiences; technology that we stretched and pushed as far as it would go.

In addition to the story itself, and the considerable ethical and legal implications of facilitating intimate conversations with a fictional character, there were many interesting and challenging things about writing Ivy4evr. For all the apparent simplicity of the 160-character text message format on a basic mobile phone screen, the drama itself would be completely automated, and ‘the script’ was in fact a huge series of spreadsheets where each apparently discrete message from ‘Ivy’ to the reader/player brought with it a host of coding preconditions (what the reader might need to have done to be receiving this message now, rather than any of a myriad other), and needed to incorporate fields into which user profile data could be fed back, things that ‘Ivy’ remembered about you or wanted to tell you, or that related to how you had responded to a particular question, maybe days ago. Thus a single message might need to be instantly compiled from numerous sources on the project’s highly secure database without compromising either privacy laws and Ofcom regulations, or the ‘natural’ feel of a 160-character message.

Through early work with small groups, to paper tests, and on to a final, week-long, real-time systems test prior to the actual broadcast, we quickly found out what worked and what didn’t, and also that our initial ‘guesstimates’ about response times – how quickly users might reply to Ivy and how quickly she should reply back – were wrong. During the tests, texts were flying back and forth in a matter of seconds, taking minutes to burn through whole story-lines that we had initially thought might last hours or days.

During the complex rewrites that resulted from each test, and the long days in the Blast Theory studio, I was reminded of the old Burroughsian saw about collaboration: ‘The third mind is there when two minds collaborate.’[1] In the book The Third Mind, Gerard-Georges Lemaire elaborates: this ‘is not … a literary collaboration but rather the complete fusion in a praxis of two subjectivities […] that metamorphose into a third; it is from this collusion that a new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the silence […] the negation of the frontier that separates fiction from its theory. It is, finally, the negation of the book as such – or at least the representation of that negation.’[2]

‘Complete fusion’? Well, maybe not, and we weren’t negating the book but proposing – in effect – a new kind of book, but I was only half-joking when I said once or twice to Matt, Ju and Nick during our collaboration that I felt more intelligent when we were all in the same room.

It was brain-fryingly complex stuff at times, but Blast Theory’s experience of creating interactive and augmented- or mixed-reality dramatic experiences – through their own long-term collaborations since the mid-late 1990s with computer scientists on seminal, large-scale works like Desert Rain, Can You See Me Now and Uncle Roy All Around You – meant that they had ways of analysing and understanding what we were doing. They quickly found new ways to describe the kinds of story structures that we were creating – we talked of ‘stubs’ and ‘story ladders’, of ‘calls to action’, ‘triggers’, ‘pre-requisites’ and ‘response settings’ – and looked for ways to reinforce the reading experience not just through an unprecedented degree of personalisation but also by being explicit about when Ivy needed something, when she was asking a question that needed a reply: ‘Q.,’ she might say at such times. ‘Am I right to worry?’

Importantly, readers’ replies to such questions weren’t falling into a vacuum. The drama was not running on tracks like some old ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ book. The story unfolded much more organically than that. But neither were their messages to ‘Ivy’ being read and responded to by us (nor by a warehouse full of ‘work-experience students’ as one critic suggested!), it really was completely automated, with readers’ respective experiences of the drama being both dependent upon and defined by the fact that they were each having a unique and two-way conversation. So the final collaboration here was with the reader, who was supplying as much as half the text of their own private version of Ivy4evr. For a writer of stories this was and is fascinating. As ‘Ivy’ might say: Q. Where is the actual story located in a piece of writing that is being produced in such a way?

The experience of collaborating with Blast Theory on Ivy4evr throughout 2010 immediately informed development at the beginning of 2012 of what became Missorts, my public artwork for Bristol. The brief was open and the commission, from Situations and Bristol City Council, was for a site that I know well: a square mile immediately to the west of Bristol Temple Meads station that follows the line of the city’s mediaeval Port Wall, bounded to the east by a massive, derelict, former Royal Mail sorting office, and to the west by Phoenix Wharf and Redcliffe Bridge: an anonymous-seeming corridor of dual carriageways and roundabouts. Flanked as it is by the amazing Gothic architecture of St Mary Redcliffe and the house where poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was born, this part of Bristol is also associated with radical literary practices. Not only with the Gothic revival via Thomas Chatterton’s amazing and metafictional ‘Rowley poems’, and his legacy among the Romantics and with William Blake, but also with the earlier mediaeval heresy of Lollardy, and associated texts such as the alliterative, satirical and revolutionary Middle English poem The Visions of Piers Plowman.

Rather than simply plonking some new cultural artefact directly into this part of Bristol, I wanted to learn from the kinds of cultural behaviours that already existed in the area (just as with Ivy4evr we had taken time at the outset to find out what kinds of technology our target audience used). With the help of a group of Fine Art students from UWE we surveyed culture/media use in various parts of the site and at different times of the day. As with Ivy4evr, the results were surprisingly ‘trailing edge’: people weren’t playing with iPads or Kindles, tapping smartphone screens or even reading the Metro, they were – most of them – listening to music or other content (audiobooks? radio?) on headphones. Also, once a week, a surprising number and range of people attended a Thursday lunchtime organ concert at St Mary Redcliffe.

It was only after collating this research that the idea for a geo-located and fictional audio work that could draw upon the area’s radical heritage but be set within an experience of walking and listening to music was born. That was when Situations and I approached Clare Reddington of Bristol’s groundbreaking Pervasive Media Studio to begin the process of identifying a developer to collaborate with (i.e. to ‘ask for help’, as above).

I knew the area well because I had already done a lot of research towards – and had written an early draft of – a much more ‘linear’ work of fiction that orbited the derelict sorting office, a novella entitled Missorts Volume II (which has now been published by Situations in Kindle and EPUB editions alongside the finished sound work). Rather than adapt that novella, once finished, for distributed audio, I felt strongly that it should remain ‘a book’, but that the new work might create opportunities for new writers and new writing. I also wanted to bring St Mary Redcliffe’s organ music out into the street, if I could find a composer who could do justice to their celebrated, one-hundred-year-old Harrison and Harrison pipe organ. From a private shortlist of two or three, I brought in Jamie Telford, a composer with whom I had collaborated once before; in the late 1990s he regularly played a live, improvised accompaniment to some of my readings. Jamie has a pop background and is a classically trained composer, but most important in this context was the fact that he had played church organ as a child – his father had built a replica pipe organ for the church in his hometown.

With commissioners Situations bringing a huge amount of expertise and experience to the project, and offering a perceptive and hands-on production team, and with hosting and other support from Bristol Record Office (including invaluable work from their archivists Julian Warren and Alison Brown on the transcription of a letter from William Blake, which forms a central theme in the novella), I devised and ran a series of short story workshops that attracted writers from around the country. We used William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s ‘cut-up technique’ to create completely new stories from Piers Plowman and other texts. As the workshops progressed, the writers started to gravitate towards potential locations on site, with each writer also quickly asserting their own voice and practice in the stories being written. These were rich and diverse works of fiction but they began to interact across the site in unpredictable ways – architectural and other motifs recurring in an unusual combination of Gothic, psychedelic and quotidian topographies. Because all of the stories drew from similar, limited sources, markers like characters’ names began to echo and recur across all ten of the pieces chosen for development into the final work. Editing and abridgement brought these connections – in stories by Sara Bowler, Holly Corfield-Carr, Thomas Darby, Jack Ewing, Katrina Plumb, Jess Rotas, Hannah Still, Helen Thornhill, Isabel de Vasconcellos and Sacha Waldron – into a sharper focus.

As with Ivy4evr, iterative testing from as early a stage as possible was also urged by Calvium, the app developer, who have a very robust GPS-based audio app-building template that has been road-tested on some quite high-profile factual and local history projects, including the Guardian newspaper’s King’s Cross Street Stories. Missorts is a work of fiction, but the coding and locative principles were the same. However robust the engine though, it was only through dozens of iterations, countless person-hours spent by the team tramping around the site, doubling back, testing and re-testing boundaries, knowing every inch of it, that final edits and mapping of the work’s constituent parts could be reached. Interaction design – if I’m using the term correctly – was important here, too. For example, challenges emerged around the duration of the stories, where 400-500 words turned out to be about the maximum workable length in a noisy street environment. Then there was the question of how Jamie Telford’s music might give way so that a story could begin. Would it fade out? What would be helpful to the listener learning how to use the work? Should we include a tell-tale intake of breath in the split second before each story started, or a particular short musical phrase? Who would do the readings? Would everything loop? How would you listen again or access information? What would the map need to look like? How about the icons on the map? All such questions could only be resolved by a period of intense collaboration, of testing the work, re-testing it and then re-testing again.

Quite what impact these large-scale collaborative projects will have on my future writing I am not yet sure. My latest novel, Shackleton’s Man Goes South, is published in April. Some of the work that has gone into the novel was begun while I was writer in residence at the Museum in 2008, with further early research and writing undertaken through a wider series of conversations and collaborations. Now I am again collaborating with the Museum – an entity of about the size and population of a small town – on a publication of the novel as their Atmosphere Gallery commission for 2013. I was just about to say that with Shackleton’s Man Goes South being a more or less traditional literary novel there wasn’t really space for anything like user testing. Except that actually in this case there was. What now appears in slightly different form as the opening chapter – ‘Albertopolis Disparu’ – was first published as a chapbook for free giveaway in the Museum in 2009. I was reliably informed at the time that our chapbook had passed the Museum’s informal but stringent ‘litter test’: none of the 5,000 copies given away during that week or so were found dumped in stairwells, on windowsills, under benches or in litter bins around the Museum! It was also tested in live readings, while further feedback came from reviews on 3am and Londonist. Following that early ‘rapid prototype’ publication of ‘Albertopolis Disparu’, as the novel started to take shape I tested the basic structure and early drafts in the form of a lecture with readings at the Free University of Glastonbury, then later on presented other elements of the near-final draft as part of the Biotik programme at the Eden Project.

Now we are planning for a publication where alongside the print edition, ebook formats of the novel will be available exclusively (and later, as part of the same fixed-term license, non-exclusively) free and DRM-free on the Museum website, and for visitors to email themselves from a touch-screen within a dedicated display that will be up for a year. The Science Museum’s own detailed user-based evaluation has been more than just an interesting backdrop: audience breakdowns, dwell-time and visitor statistics around movement and interaction within the galleries have directly informed how the novel is being published, even if these were unknown quantities when it was being written.

From being unsure what impact working collaboratively might have had on my writing, it is clear that it has contributed enormously, and that lessons-learned and ways of working developed in projects like Ivy4evr or Missorts are transferable to more traditional literary forms. Perhaps this is also a useful reminder that the production of narrative is not always so seamless or unitary as the reading of it might suggest.

Writer Kate Pullinger, Editor of The Writing Platform, is also a professor at Bath Spa University, co-sponsors of The Writing Platform. At Bath Spa, Pullinger runs a series of lunchtime talks, aimed at all the postgraduate writing students who study at the Corsham Court Campus. These talks, Digital Corsham, are given by writers, academics, publishers, and pundits, all of whom are interested in writing and publishing in the digital age. The talks are filmed for The Writing Platform.

This second short film in the Digital Corsham series features Philip Hensher, a novelist, critic and journalist. Here Philip talks about the positive and negative impacts of digital on writing.

Further viewing: Naomi Alderman and Charlotte Abbott Digital Corsham talks.