The Writing Platform bursaries have come to a close. We caught up with Laura Grace and Caden Lovelace, creators of Invisible Islands.

Caden and Laura applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. You can read their project diary entries here and here.

You can hear from Writing Platform Bursary winners; actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about the development of their mobile app Fabler here and here, and read their project wrap interview here.

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What did you make and where can our readers try it out?

Visit http://invisibleislands.com/ on your mobile device of choice!

CL: We made an entire other world. It wasn’t easy, but at least we have somewhere to go now when we’re through with this one. It’s in the form of an app, though, which makes me hope that the apocalypse isn’t too wet. In any case — it’s a web-app that, with the aid of your phone’s GPS, positions you on a map of some alternate world populated by small islands with diverse cultures. It’s a travel-guide, too, so you won’t feel lost even if in fact you are.

LG: I like to call it “A fanciful real-world journey across an imaginary archipelago.” It’s a browser-based app that works on location-enabled mobile devices. The central interface is a map, overlaid on your current location, populated with mysterious islands. To visit one, you need to physically walk there. We don’t specify a route, we just tell you the distance (as the crow flies) – the idea is that you explore your location in a new way, see your environment a little differently. Think of it as a quest, an adventure.

When you reach your destination, you unlock that island’s travelogue. Each one is a self-contained narrative, a land that buffets against your real-world location, and might make you look at the world anew, transport you somewhere else, or spark your imagination.

How did you come to the idea for Invisible Islands?

LG: Well, I’m an islander (my family’s lived in the Outer Hebrides since Viking times), and I’ve always been a little obsessed with islands and, more abstractly, the idea of being islanded – by pain, by love, by isolation. Invisible Islands actually began as a self-imposed writing exercise, inspired equally by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree books (with the ever-changing magical land at the top of the titular tree).

I wrote a list of fantastical islands – The Island of Regrets, The Island of Lost Socks, The Island in the Stars, The Island of Everlasting Night, etc, and wrote 500 or so words every morning exploring what you might find if you visited each place.  As it grew, I began to see it as an interactive fiction of some kind – I liked the idea of a reader navigating a text in an unfamiliar way, stumbling across a fantastical place in an unlikely location. When Caden and I began talking about areas to explore as part of The Writing Platform bursary, the project struck a chord with both of us, and it became something even more exciting.

Laura you applied as a writer, Caden you applied as a technologist, how did you allocate the work? Were there clear delineations for who did what?

CL: Someone — I think possibly one of my art teachers at school — told me that when I was drawing something I should be spending 90% of my time with my eyes on the subject and only 10% on the paper. I don’t know about that as a rule — but in terms of collaboration it has always seemed to me that the conversation that is the bulk of the useful work, rather than the actual making. Laura and I stuck to our respective ‘making’ roles (her writing, my coding), but we shared the direction, in every sense of the word.

The most important role of the technologist is to say ‘yes, this is possible’ rather than ‘no, this is too hard / too much work’ (almost always meaning ‘I don’t know how’) — upon this hinges the quality and power of the result. I’m certainly not claiming to have never said the latter in the course of this project! But hopefully I’ve said ‘it’s possible’ enough to have brought out the idea.

LG: We spent a good while throwing around ideas and points of inspiration – writers we liked, shared interests. That made narrowing in on a shared vision much easier. I work with technologists on a daily basis so we had plenty of common ground when it came to mapping out the user experience, but Caden was definitely the voice of reason when it came to defining what was achievable within our limited timescale (working around day jobs, etc).

 You didn’t know each other before the bursary, how was it collaborating with a stranger? Did it differ to your previous experiences of collaboration? And would you work together again?

CL: Certainly. In my experience many collaborative projects fizzle out before they even get started! To take this one to some degree of ‘completion’ is certainly exciting and valuable, and no small amount due to knowing that The Writing Platform were keeping track of our progress (in a benevolent way, of course!)

It was quite interesting, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t also slightly intimidating, to be doing the whole ‘getting to know’ process simultaneous with the idea forming and building processes. When I’m acting in a ‘technologist’ role I am very eager to please — perhaps even too eager at times, and trying to work out what sort of ideas Laura would be interested in without knowing her at all was certainly challenging! But I feel like we came to a mutually interesting idea, which is positive.

LG: It was a great experience – I think we were well-matched in terms of interests and approach. I actually found that getting thrown in the deep end – in terms of getting stuck into collaborating together – was a really effective away to get the project moving. Working with friends, or even colleagues, can be tricky – an existing relationship brings a certain amount of baggage, and it can be harder to negotiate ownership of a project or an idea. With the bursary, we were both bringing very different skills to our project, and making something that scratched a creative itch for both us was very much the focus. I think it worked really well. And I’d be happy to work together again, particularly in developing Invisible Islands beyond the MVP it is now.

The period the bursary covered is over, do you have further plans for developing Invisible Islands?

CL: The next step from my perspective is to put it into the form of an app rather than a website-for-phones. There’s very little difference really, but I suppose it is similar to the difference between paperback and hardback books — a feeling of ‘value’ or ‘quality’. Aside from this, there’s plenty of edge-cases to be taken care of and bugs to be ironed out. One of the tricky things about working with locative media and also with mobile devices is that it’s difficult to test it yourself — chances are all of the people who use this will be using it in situations that I haven’t!

LG: As Caden says, I think native app functionality would bring a lot to this project – for example, a thoughtful implementation of unobtrusive push notifications would work really well. In terms of the narrative, I’d really like this to be a project that evolves over the longer term. The possibilities for island destinations are pretty much infinite! Also, from the start it’s been an ambition of mine to include a collaborative element to the narrative itself – I love the idea of anyone being able to contribute island reports, and incorporating that into the text as it grows.

What’s next for each of you – any projects we should be keeping our eyes peeled for?

CL: Always, too many! I’m currently working on a project for a week long ‘tumblr-residency’ at the Internet Archive early next year (you can follow here) involving archaic MS-DOS interfaces. As well as this I’m planning the next phase of my avant-publishing project $5 Words and performing with Jerome Fletcher at the Electronic Literature Organisation conference, Paris, in late September.

If you like ‘weird twitter’ you can follow me at @neoeno and if you like ‘weird facebook’ you can follow me at fb.me/neoeno.

LG: Loads! But, most recently I’ve been working on a cross-platform TV pilot (with Doctor Who writer Stephen Greenhorn), funded by Creative Scotland and Playwrights’ Studio Scotland. It’s about hackers and rural murders and is pretty action-packed.

I’m also delving into something a little different at the moment – a line of bath products (really) that have been developed around the idea of brand storytelling as non-linear narrative, products that tell a story and offer a shared sensory experience. This was a personal project that has become an internal venture with Mint Digital. I’m really excited to see how it evolves!

I’m on that Twitter too – I’m @usherette.

Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. Read the project wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about the development of their mobile app Fabler here and hear, and their project wrap interview here.

Caden Lovelace, gives us an update on his and Laura Grace’s locative app which now has a name: Invisible Islands. The mystery deepens…

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Did you know that, when you open your browser on your smartphone or tablet, the odds are that it is able to find out what direction you are facing? It doesn’t even have to ask you. It would be possible, perhaps even necessary, to create a text that is different when facing east than facing west. Combined with assessing the local time, it is possible to create a text that can only be read alongside the sunset, or the sunrise.

That is not what we are making. The simplest ideas transfix me at the moment, as I am working with the most complex. Laura and I have decided, from our island paradise, to create something big. We long dreamed of a writing as large as the world, and I hope that with this project we come a degree closer to this eventual goal.

This is a map of Falmouth, Cornwall, where I live. I am where the arrow is. I believe this map to be approximately 2.5 miles from corner to corner. The map extends, beyond the boundaries of the screen, to the limits of the world. To your house, to abandoned villages in South America, to every mile of anonymous ocean. Every point on earth has its corresponding point in this imagined map; somehow either above, below, or through our own. It is perhaps like the internet now is; passing right through us, omnipresent, ready for us to tap in.

The problems I am grappling with now are the problems of vastness. Absurd problems, like: what happens in Antarctica? Who can hold this giant map? How can our map best match the real world?

What does this have to do with writing? You can find out at the Bath Spa MIX Making Day. I am looking forward to telling you.

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Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for The Writing Platform bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey. Read the project wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about their mobile app Fabler here and hear.

The final projects from both Bursary teams were showcased Wednesday the 17th July at our Making Day for writers at the MIX Conference 2013, a day of experimentation, collaboration and play for writers looking to learn new skills and develop their creative practice. 

The second of the two teams awarded The Writing Platform bursary fill us in on their progress: Caden Lovelace and Laura Grace applied for the bursary individually and have been paired together by the selection panel who felt that their shared areas of interest, along with their enthusiasm for working with a new, previously unknown, partner would make for an exciting creative journey.

Read their second diary entry here and their final wrap interview here.

You can hear from actor and writer Ben Gwalchmai and poet and developer James Wheale, about their mobile app Fabler here and hear, and read their final wrap interview here.

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As briefs go, The Writing Platform Bursary’s remit is a broad and exciting one: we’re tasked with creating something that makes use of existing digital tools, and brings “new ideas and solutions for the wider writing community.” Daunting, but full of possibilities. Together with technologist, Caden Lovelace, I’ve spent the last six weeks digging deeper into this challenge, throwing around concepts of varying degrees of terribleness (in the firm belief that quantity beats quality in brainstorming), drinking plenty of coffee, and generally enjoying that magical first stage of making things – coming up with crazy, impossible ideas. And then, of course, you’ve got to actually make something. That part’s harder. As I write this, we’re just about at the half-way point in the Bursary timeline, on-track to reveal our hideous progeny/delightful creation at Bath Spa University’s MIX Conference in July. We’re excited.

One of the most enjoyable parts of this whole process has been the experience of creative matchmaking, as facilitated by the wise judges of this year’s Bursary. Caden and I had never met prior to winning but, as we’ve discovered, our literary interests and touch-points are rather scarily simpatico. Equally, our individual points of focus have proved nicely complementary: Caden tackling the problem from a technologist’s point of view – with an awareness of both the possibilities and restrictions available to us. Leaving me to both indulge some flights of fancy with the narrative side, and explore the product’s user experience from an author’s point of view – something I’ve found really inspiring. It’s interesting to think of a piece of fiction as a ‘product’. Who will use it, and why? How will they use it, and where? It opens out a narrative experience beyond text, into something to be used, prodded, played with. Something that can fit into a reader’s life in a new way, and can exist more concretely in the ‘real world’.

Living in different cities has meant that, for the most part, we’ve had to collaborate remotely – with long email threads forming the basis of our process. As we’re still at the delicate building-and-refining stage, we’re not quite ready to reveal specific details of what we’ve come up with (sorry!), but here’s a taster of the points of inspiration that our emails have covered (hint: what we’re working on is hidden in there somewhere…):

–        Stories for mobile devices

–        Italo Calvino

–        unresolved detective stories

–        narrative-led lucid dreaming

–        shape-shifting/responsive stories

–        Richard Linklater

–        social media as one vast intermeshed narrative

–        conversations with future selves

–        Borges

–        stories that take years to be told

–        Umberto Eco

–        location based stories

–        macro-locative stories

–        archaeologists of the future…

–        (We’ve also discovered a mutual love of lists.)

For this first blog post, we were asked to describe “the journey so far”. The experience of story as a journey, and as a destination, is something we’ve been particularly interested in – we’ll be expanding on this in later posts. More abstractly, the Bursary’s brief of exploring “new ideas and solutions” has been an invitation to set sail, to take a risk on creating something that might work, and might not. Whatever the result, we’re enjoying exploring an exciting territory – the place where stories meet technology, and anything can happen. And, as Henry Miller put it, “one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”