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

A Modern Ghost
By Stef Orzech

My writer-bias is showing in the byline above since this app’s creators take great pains to attribute it collectively to AltSalt, the ‘digital literature studio’ from which it emerged. Indeed, the drive of this short and somewhat tentative story of love and memory comes from the interactions between its text by Orzech, images and animation by Ricardo Morales, and soundtrack by Ethan Steigerwald. A Modern Ghost is at its best in its use of space on the screen, frequently changing its scrolling direction (with cues) and using layering and textures to suggest a three-dimensional space under the glass.

Described as a protoype, A Modern Ghost is as much an exploration of form and technology as it is a narrative and refinements to the platform (especially its overly touch-sensitive scrolling) are likely over time. But it is also a compelling vision for storytelling on a phone and it will be exciting to see where AltSalt takes these ideas next.

A Modern Ghost is available for iOSand Android.

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

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

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

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

34 North, 118 West

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

[Murmur]

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

Urban Tapestries

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

The Silent History

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

My Story

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

These Pages Fall Like Ash

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

Adelaide Road

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

Writer on the Train

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

Missorts

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

Zombies, Run!

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

An email exchange between Stevie Ronnie and Liam Owen reflecting on the making of Four Years from Now, Walking with My Daughter. An animation by Liam Owen inspired by Stevie Ronnie’s poem of the same name.

SR: So Liam, you’re not a big reader of poetry. What made you think about making an animation from my poem?

LO: That is certainly true, I am in fact not a great reader of anything. I struggle with words but have a love affair with imagery.

When I heard your poem I could automatically visualise each line, each moment, I was walking in the same place. This is not common with me but your poem inspired me, and as soon as you had finished reading it I knew I HAD to make it into a animation, I had to bring it to life.

Growing up together in the same wonderful place and meeting your beautiful first baby daughter who inspired you to write the poem in the first place of course helped.

I am interested to know what you thought when I first asked permission to turn it into an animation and how you thought the process was going to work?

SR: I was over the moon when you asked to work on the poem. I was pleased that it inspired you and that you wanted to animate it – knowing your style and work, I knew you’d do a great job. I wasn’t sure how much input you’d need from me but suspected that you’d just get on with it as there was already a connection there throughout mutual relationship with the setting of the poem. I expect I might have had to be more involved if it had been someone else. Collaboration is always different, in my experience and it’s impossible to know how things are going to pan out until you get started.

For me there was a real opportunity to add to my portfolio and to reach a wider audience with the work. Poetry doesn’t get far in the world (the readership is very small). It works well with short film though as poems tend to say a lot in a little space and the animation has reached a much wider audience than the poem ever will in book form. I’d say the Internet has a lot to do with the recent rise in popularity of video poetry. Short works well on the web and there’s a potentially massive audience out there, even for poetry!

Did it change the way you think about poetry at all? Less scary? Would you work with poems again?

LO: I think it’s about the accessibility of poetry that is key. I have never really gone looking for it before and like you said the readership is small so to have a friend who is heavily involved gave me the route in. To be honest I have not expanded upon this route but from reading and listening to your work and others you are associated with has defiantly changed my perception. Of course like with most arts it’s only some that create the spark, lots just go right over my head, but when someone writes something I can connect with, it can visually sing in my head, which is very exciting.

I think of poetry as like pure concentrated fruit juice where every intense drip of flavour is squeezed out so even though its short it’s still full of flavour. I suppose lots of words don’t always mean lots of detail? This short form of writing works really well with animated shorts for obvious reasons and as I am always looking out for great stories I really hope I can do more work with poets and writers in the future.

One of the areas that I felt I could have expanded on was the use of words and the timings and connections between these words and different lines. I feel like my animation is a very simple linear play on your words and I am sure you are doing more with the words than I realised.

Visualising these play with words is something that interests me for future collaborations, is there other areas within animation and moving imagery that you would like to explore?

SR: Aye, I’m definitely interested in working within the various forms of video poetry that are currently emerging (and growing in popularity). As well as the benefits of reaching a wider audience, the format has endless possibilities in terms of enhancing the poem.

I like your description of poetry as ‘pure concentrated fruit juice’. I think there’s a lot to that analogy that rings true for me in the way I think about writing poems. And you are right too about the detail coming from what is missing. I think the reader connects more strongly with a poem if they create the details in their own head. I have a poem called Mammy’s Dress that begins “There’s comfort in the fading of her dress / each picnic folded into each pelt / of rain that’s laundered it simple – / like infinity accepted as true.” Once, after I’d spoken it out loud, a member of the audience came up to me and said that his mother also owned this same dress. If you look over my words I don’t describe the dress at all. He’d invented it himself and therefore he owned the image. I’m convinced that this personal ownership of the image by the reader / listener / viewer is part of the reason that poetry can be so memorable and moving. Perhaps the skill is in deciding what to leave out.

Ambiguity is important in poetry – the same word can mean several different things. Often in a good poem, there’s a tension between the littoral interpretation of the words and their other possible meanings. This can create layers of meaning to a piece, adding depth and creating something which repays re-reading. Adding a visual element to the poem means that there’s another device that can add layers of meaning to the words. I’d like to play with this idea – how far can the visuals be pushed from the words without it breaking.

The great thing about moving images is their hypnotic quality and the number of digital platforms that are available for distributing moving image works. Screen based media is definitely the predominant form of communication in our age and I think there’s an opportunity for literature to embrace this by crossing into new digital forms. Animation should be able to work particularly well with poetry as both forms seem to be comfortable with the impossible.

Firstly, what are poetry films? One thing they are not (although they can be) is films of people reading or reciting poetry. Confused? Even the name of the genre is disputed. Poetry films appear under different guises as ‘poetryfilms’, ‘filmpoems, ‘video poems’, ‘multimedia poetry’, ‘e-poetry’ and ‘screen poetry’. Broadly speaking they are a combining of poetry/words, displayed as text or spoken, with accompanying images and viewed on a screen.  They can be created by the poet but they are usually a collaboration between poet and film maker. This is not a new subject. Some of the earliest films, created by the Dadaists, were what we would now call ‘poetry films’. In more recent years, with easier access to new media technology, more poetry films are being created and shown to audiences in festivals dedicated to this art form. Alastair Cook, who hosted the recent Filmpoem event in Dunbar, describes his interest as ‘a bit like gardening’. This is a good analogy. The fervour and intensity of the audience and practitioners was indeed like those gardeners who devote their time to growing auriculars. Film poems are tiny, exquisite and mesmerising.

The largest gathering of this dedicated crew is the Zebra poetry film festival held bi-annually in Berlin. The next one will be in 2014.

More than a thousand poets/film makers send material to this festival which has three days of film screenings. It has an international cohort and accepts films in all languages and in all styles. Recently the winning selections have been high production.

Canada hosts a film poetry festival, Visible Verse, created by Heather Hayley and there is a long standing one in Argentina, Video Bardo.

In the UK there are new festivals emerging.

In Bristol, myself and Sarah Tremlett have created ‘Liberated Words’, which ran the first UK screening of film poetry at the MIX Conference in 2012 and this year will host a full day at the Bristol poetry festival with screenings and discussions and Alastair Cook’s Filmpoem event will surely run again .

So what do you want to do if you want to create a poetry film? I would suggest that you investigate what is already out there. Theorists and practitioners have created manifestos and styles. As in any art form there is plenty of debate. Tom Konyves defined poetry films as having five ‘categories’; kinetic text, sound text, visual text, performance and cin (e) poetry. He coined the term ‘video poetry’ in 1982. More about him here.

The Moving Poems site, created by Dave Bonta, hosts a huge collection of poetry films  and information about world wide poetry film events.

Marc Neys displays his film poems on his site Swoon and these are shown frequently at poetry film festivals. There is a strong connection between Dave Bonta, Alastair Cook and Marc Neys and they encourage and influence each other. They use archive or found footage and create visually arresting films.

The South American film poets, such as Javier Robledo, are more experimental  while practitioners such as Martha McCollough use animation.

When you have decided on a style and approach do you find a fellow film maker or do you go it alone? For me the most interesting aspect of poetry film is the collaborative process. As a poet it can be challenge to ‘let go’ of control of the final outcome. A good poetry film is not just an ‘illustration’ of a poem, it is the melding of word and image which creates a separate experience. Or you can attend workshops in filmmaking skills such as those run by Adle Myers in Manchester.

Poetry films need not be difficult to make. All you need is access to an i-phone and i-movie or movie-maker software. This year I asked my performance poetry class to create a poetry film in week. Here is what Anna Twizell came up with.

Poetry film makers share their work on Facebook, Youtube and Vimeo. It is a supportive and encouraging community. Liberated Words welcome members of their Facebook group to share and discuss each other’s work.

In 2006 Chris Joseph and I were commissioned to create a series of interactive stories for a marketing campaign for a feature film that didn’t exist.  From that inauspicious beginning, Inanimate Alice has gone on to become one of the most popular digital stories for educators around the world, from primary to doctoral level.  How and why did this happen?

The publishing story behind Inanimate Alice is a tale of mistakes, bad ideas, good ideas, dead-ends, lucky accidents, and spectacular success.  Inanimate Alice consists of four episodes that reside online, with a further six episodes planned.  Created by myself and web artist Chris Joseph, Inanimate Alice was commissioned and financed by Bradfield Ltd producer Ian Harper.  The stories are told through text, music, games, images, sound effects, and video and are available for free.

Inanimate Alice tells the story of a girl called Alice, growing up in the near future, surrounded by technology.   Ian Harper had written a screenplay for a feature film and had the idea that he could generate interest in the script by publishing a series of short, interactive, online multimedia stories that provided a backstory to the script itself.  Harper was also involved in a company that had created a gadget, for domestic use, that could detect electronic emissions, the Electrosmog Detector; the sound made by the detector when it picks up electronic emissions is used as background noise in all the episodes.  To date, the screenplay has not been made into a film, and the gadget has not sold in vast quantities; however, Inanimate Alice continues to grow and thrive.

In 2006 there was so little of this kind of storytelling around – accessible, screen-based, digital stories – that Chris and I had no idea of what to call it.  We used the term ‘webvid’, which, thankfully, hasn’t survived. Our budgets were very small; we considered using photos of actors to represent our characters, Alice and her parents, and we considered animating the characters, but we couldn’t afford either option.  This was our first lucky accidents: one important aesthetic feature of Inanimate Alice is that Alice herself is never represented visually on screen.  This practical decision had large creative ramifications:  the fact that Alice remains off-screen throughout renders this hybrid form of storytelling closer to that of reading a book, where it falls upon the reader to imagine the main character’s appearance.  This aspect, combined with the first person narrative voice, draws readers into Alice’s world, allowing readers to identify with Alice, to place themselves in the story.

Lucky accident number two was that Chris Joseph and I did not initially consider the fact that a work about a child might appeal to children, an aspect of the project that seems obvious with hindsight.  Children have been among our most passionate readers.

Lucky accident number three: our character, Alice, wants to be a games designer when she grows up, and it was this aspiration that allowed us to embed games into the stories in a way that made narrative sense. In each episode the games included are representative of what a talented child Alice’s age might be able to create herself.   Accordingly, the level of interaction and gaming skill required by the reader increases with each episode as Alice reaches age 8, 10, 12, and 14.  This gradual increase in interactivity through the episodes has meant that the work functions well as a primer or introduction to digital fiction.

In 2007, I was teaching part-time at De Montfort University, where a PhD student, Jess Laccetti, was researching multi-modal fiction.  Jess was very interested in digital pedagogy, and was in contact with a number of educators at primary, secondary, and HE level. We’d already begun to have interest in the project from teachers, so Ian Harper commissioned Jess to write a set of teacher’s notes, and this was part of what kick-started Inanimate Alice as a tool for digital literacy in schools and universities.  As well as that, Jess is an Italian speaker; she offered to translate the text of the work.  From the web analytics it became apparent early on that Inanimate Alice was drawing readers from many non-English speaking countries and we decided to provide translations of the text in French, German, and Spanish as well. These multilingual aspects of the project fuelled further growth in its readership.

From early on, Inanimate Alice won prizes, including awards in Italy, South Korea, the USA, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. It featured in digital arts exhibitions as well as being promoted by countless teacher-advocates, desperate for engaging digital content suitable for use in the classroom. All of this meant that our audience continued to grow and expand.  Other factors contributed to its success as a title, not the least of which is that all four episodes are available to view for free.  Episodes three and four have two versions:  ‘read-only’ and ‘full version’.  In the full version readers need to complete games before they can move on in the story; in the read-only version the games are by-passed.  Early and anecdotal reader response showed us that our audience is split evenly between those who enjoy the games and those who do not; we took a decision to accommodate both types of readers throughout the remainder of the series.

For me, a pivotal moment came in March 2009, when my Google Alerts first picked up multiple versions of Inanimate Alice: Episode 5;Chris and I had not yet created a fifth episode.  Following the links I discovered that an American high school English teacher, Ms Aronow, had been using Inanimate Alice with a group of ‘hard to reach’ teenagers, encouraging them to create their own versions of episode five using Microsoft Powerpoint, which Ms Aranow published on her class blog.  Discovering these episodes gave new meaning to me for the potential of ‘interactivity’, a term often heralded at the time as the new paradigm for reading and writing.  It was flattering to discover a text I’d written disseminated and reconstructed in this manner, of course, but more importantly, these new episodes are a true indicator of the potential for reader-writer, reader-text interaction, as well as for digital fiction in the classroom.  New episodes have continued to appear online regularly, from around the world; for example, a New Zealand teacher, Mr Woods, encourages his Samoan students to use their own language and culture in their versions of the stories.  Ian Harper has continued to expand the project as a pedagogical tool, making links throughout the large education market; our most recent commission, from Education Services Australia, was a series of twelve photo-stories describing a year Alice and her parents spend living in Australia.  This is where the still developing business model for the project is emerging; the fact that there hasn’t been a new episode since 2009 has not hindered the growth of the project.

It’s been a fascinating process to watch a work like Inanimate Alice, which was not intended, originally, as an educational title, being adopted, adapted, and augmented by educators.  We’ve been able to capitalise on that interest by creating pedagogical tools and spaces for discussion specific to Inanimate Alice and have collaborated with Promethean Planet, Edmodo, and Everloop to create bespoke materials. 2012 saw two big developments:  the American Association of School Librarians named our site as a ‘Best Website for Teaching and Learning’ and the Mozilla Foundation Webmaker project used Inanimate Alice to develop their online remix tool, X-Ray Goggles.

In conclusion, the sizable audience of children for Inanimate Alice has redefined the work as children’s literature, while its popularity with teachers has repositioned it as a classroom resource. Neither of these outcomes were anticipated by us when we set out to create our first ‘webvid’ back in 2006.  

A few examples of new episode fives:

Aronow’s English 10 blog:  http://aronowsenglish10.blogspot.com/

http://6cathie.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-itUTAlahrw&feature=related

Alice and Friends – Digital Literacy wiki built around IA, created by two teachers in Australia: http://aliceandfriends.wikispaces.com/

Mr Woodz NZ class lesson plans:  http://inanimatealice-aperspective.wikispaces.com/

Mozilla Webmaker, ‘Make Your Own Episode of Inanimate Alice’: https://webmaker.org/en-US/projects/make-your-own-episode-inanimate-alice/