In introducing my new novel, author Ryan O’Neill puts it most succinctly:

This is an introduction to a novel you will never read.

He adds hastily that he is referring not to the book in your hands, the one he hopes you’re about to begin, but the novel that inspired his words, the novel he read.

The novel in question is Ex Libris and regardless of which copy you read it contains twelve chapters that can be shuffled into any order. The number of variations possible with such a structure is a little over 479 million. It has been published in both standard paperback and ebook editions, each copy a newly shuffled order of chapters unique to that copy alone. The manuscript that Ryan read in order to create his introduction is different to the finished copy now in his possession, which is in turn different from every other copy ever made.

I have written about Ex Libris previously where I noted that this kind of storytelling has its precedents, the most significant of which all hail from the 1960s. Nanni Balestrini’s Tristano was conceived and written using early computer programming to randomise its content between copies, though it wasn’t published as intended until print technology had caught up in 2007. Other similar books were housed in a box, either as loose leaves (Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta) or as chapter booklets (The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson). Of these, Johnson’s novel provided the most direct influence on the structure of Ex Libris: the fluid pieces of the story are defined not arbitrarily by the size of the page, but by the narrative itself. The story is broken into discrete, meaningful components that combine to form a larger picture.

What Ryan alludes to in his opening statement is that any work structured in this way presents a challenge to critical reading. How can readers universalise their experience if the texts they read are never consistent? You may disagree with someone else’s reading of a text, but you do so on the fundamental understanding that both of you have at least read the same words in the same order. John Bryant’s scholarship on textual fluidity through editions, translations, and adaptations demonstrates that texts are never as concrete as we might assume. But variation between editions is a long way from a narrative that changes by design between individual copies. Although it is possible to arrange Ex Libris in approximate chronological order (some events in the story clearly happen before others), each of the novel’s fluid chapters is a vignette, dependent on the others for context, but not for prior knowledge. I have used the analogy of a jigsaw puzzle to explain this to readers: smaller narratives link together to form a larger picture. The order in which the pieces are placed changes the individual’s progress but doesn’t change the ultimate picture.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

It can be difficult to get past the structure itself and the mathematics behind it as many contemporary and more recent reviews of recombinant works demonstrate. Umberto Eco in his introduction to Tristano, focuses almost exclusively on the novel’s number of permutations with only a cursory nod to the story. This might be understandable for a novel that, though beautiful, has a deliberately tenuous grip on character, plot, and setting. But the same approach is repeated in reviews of Saporta, Johnson, and other similar works. It is as though the flashy acrobatics of the novel’s physical construction obscure what the writers are doing within. And the critics’ resulting performative bewilderment or pithy dismissal of a wacky experiment seem to me like missed opportunities.

When the assumed shared experience of an audience is modified or removed altogether, how does their engagement with a narrative change? Some clues may be found in my own experience on both sides of the reader/writer divide. How I initially read and thought about a fluid novel like The Unfortunates, for example, is very different to how I have come to think about Ex Libris and that change in point of view has been illuminating.

My experience with The Unfortunates suggests that a first reading looms large in one’s perception of story. While reading, I had to keep reminding myself that the clever positioning of two adjacent scenes was attributable not only to the author’s craft but also to sheer happenstance. We’re trained to read stories as linear and it’s a hard habit to break. When I return to The Unfortunates today, no matter how many times I reshuffle its contents, the story is always coloured by that first reading and how the chapters initially unfolded. That first reading has become my definitive version of the novel from which all others deviate.

Readers of Ex Libris may have a similar experience, perhaps moreso given their copy cannot be physically reconstructed. Information that colours the perception of the characters and their actions may come earlier or later and its impact will undoubtedly shift. Readers who see more of a particular character earlier, for example, may centre the story around them in a way others won’t. Several of the fluid chapters also contain crucial pieces of information that change a character’s image or motivation and cast events elsewhere in the story in a different light. Reviewing the chapter order for each copy, I frequently pay attention to where these chapters fall, wondering how their precise location changes the tenor of the story.

I say I wonder because, primarily, I must rely on guesswork. My perception of the novel is not of a puzzle but of narrative pieces in constant motion, a true fluid state. As I worked on it, Ex Libris formed a kind of web, a set of interlocking shorter narratives that fed into a larger complex. For me there can never be a definitive version of the story, only discrete narrative chunks that cross-reference, echo, or contrast, but never line up precisely.

Unlike The Unfortunates which can be endlessly reshuffled, Ex Libris is presented to the reader as a single, fixed manifestation of the narrative. But it’s also a window, a viewport through which you might catch a glimpse of what I see. Without the capacity to physically manipulate pages, the reader must instead imagine that fluid state and the differences in emphasis that come with changes in how the story unfolds. With Ex Libris, like with all fluid texts, a critical reading should regard not only the text as it’s presented, but also with the text in every conceivable other version. The success or otherwise of any one version of the narrative is merely a subset of nearly half a billion possible narratives in the aggregate. Though difficult to fully conceive, this is something I suspect many readers instinctively know. A common reaction from those who have finished the novel is to seek out other readers to compare notes.

But what readers who squint to catch glimpses of the author’s view may not realise is that they have experienced the story in a way I cannot. I can cast an eye over any number of versions of my story, but I can never see the flow of a linear narrative, only a single path running through that fluid web of chapters. For better or for worse I can never have the experience I had reading The Unfortunates.

I suspect that’s why the story that emerged turned out far more self-reflexive than I had originally intended. Maybe it was inevitable that a narrative featuring a band of literary misfits reconstructing a library from fragments in a dystopian world would eventually turn in on itself, a comment on how fiction can become a vehicle for revealing how we construct our own truths. In the same way the story’s characters can never truly reach the author, so too a reader’s and writer’s experiences always remain tantalisingly out of reach for each other.

Ex Libris is out now.

Reference

Bryant, J., 2005. The Fluid Text. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

When writers discuss plot and pacing in narrative craft, especially in creative writing classes, we often talk about the curve of stories, the rise and fall in tension that characterises the most common story structures. Now usually, at least in my experience, that curve is not something a writer actively thinks about while composing a work. It’s more instinctive. Manipulating pace is one of the writer’s primary tricks in taking a simple sequence of events and turning them into narrative. But what in retrospect looks deliberate and disciplined, is in the act of writing more like manipulating the feel of the story as you go.

When it came to my current publishing project, all that instinct counted for nothing. An experiment in recombinant narrative structure requires careful consideration and active manipulation of the curve.

Ex Libris is a novel containing twelve chapters that can be shuffled in any order, yet always presents as a cohesive narrative arc. It is being published in a print run that randomises the chapters between each copy. With close to half a billion possible combinations, each copy will contain a unique version of the text, yet all will tell the same story.

The title for ‘Ex Libris’ comes from the nineteenth century fad for bookplates.

The two books that, more than any others, inspired the structure of Ex Libris are The Unfortunates by B. S. Johnson and Tristano by Nanni Balestrini. Curiously, both were written in the 1960s, though Tristano wouldn’t find its true form until 2007.

The Unfortunates is a beautiful but restless story about grief and the intrusion of memories that overlay the banality of daily life. The novel was structured with a fixed opening and closing and with freely fluid chapters between. The first edition and its more recent reproduction was published as chapter-length booklets contained in a box, which the reader was free to arrange in whatever order they desired.

Balestrini envisaged Tristano as a standard bound work with content that was randomised between copies. Sound familiar? The author was unable to realise the work as intended until forty years after its initial publication and with the advent of digital-based print technology. As the title suggests, Tristano builds its text using Tristan and Isolde as scaffold, which frees Balestrini to desiccate the narrative into the smallest of fragments, hints of meaning that only ever briefly come into focus.

Both works experiment boldly, not just with structure, but also with the language itself. The result is intoxicating: as a reader you feel like you’re having fun, even as you stumble around the text, constantly trying to find your footing. Tristano is one of the best examples of what I call ‘narrative drift’, the sense that, as a reader, you must let go of any sense of structure or meaning and allow the pages to take you wherever they lead. The Unfortunates is more focused, a narrative that initially drifts, but tightens as more of its pieces fall into place.

When I began writing what would become Ex Libris, I didn’t have a particular structure or publishing method in mind. What I wanted to do was write a work with fluid text without sacrificing a reader’s sense of plot or narrative arc.

I started with much more complicated mechanics and elaborate concoctions of fixed and fluid chapters. I ground my way through three drafts of the story, never completely satisfied, trying to find some magic key that would unlock how the story should work.

Eventually, I abandoned these versions of the story altogether. After a break from the manuscript, I returned and found myself back at first principles. Finally, I contemplated the curve.

I created a storyboard of sorts in Scriviner—movable lists in dot points—obstinately refusing to write anything resembling finished prose until a supporting structure had been mapped in sufficient detail. Slowly, a new structure began to take shape. The story begins in media res, at the beginning of the climax. Then it backtracks. It fills in details and circumstances that led directly to the opening scene. Then it jumps to the rest of the climax and conclusion. This means Ex Libris, like Johnson’s The Unfortunates, opens and closes with fixed chapters that frame the narrative. I had hoped not to invite such direct comparisons with Johnson, since clearly I would come off a distant second best. But the structure he pioneered, with its parallels to classic storytelling technique, is compelling in its simplicity.

Beyond the framing device, the fluid or recombinant chapters in Ex Libris primarily concern themselves with exploring character and world. These chapters exist in a weird state of semi-independence. A fluid chapter is episodic, with its own miniature arc. It cannot rely on prior knowledge. That doesn’t make it a short story. Although it shares traits with the short story form, a fluid chapter’s raison d’etre is to contribute to a greater whole. Detached from their surroundings and the framing of the novel, these little stories might struggle to pass a ‘so what?’ test.

Story and the structure developed in tandem. Part dystopia, part satire, with doses of paranoia and farce, and a self-reflexive bent, the novel is set in a hyper-networked surveillance state that has abandoned and almost forgotten the book. It focuses on a small band of subversives who collect the fragments and scraps of stories left behind. Calling themselves the ‘free readers’, they are attempting to rebuild a grand library they know must have once existed. A fragmented book about fragmented books, Ex Libris both feeds off and contributes to its own structure, a virtuous cycle of knowing winks.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience.

I was very conscious of the reader’s experience, signposting and orienting the text at every opportunity to counter and minimise the sense of narrative drift. I maintained strict upper and lower word limits for each chapter. Too long indicated waffle that needed to be broken up. Too short pointed to a lack of substance. Often throughout the long planning stage of the project, I would stare at a dot-point breakdown for a chapter and think ‘but where’s the story?’.

I also avoided working on chapters in any particular order. Instead, I jumped around. From its initial use as a storyboard, Scrivener became a kind of reference tool as I wrote, a way to maintain a wide-angle view of the story, while moving the chapters around. The texts themselves were composed in separate documents, organised by character name and working title. Early printouts were separated into chapters, each one held together with a bulldog clip, so that I could shuffle and reshuffle while reading.

When I finally created the first complete manuscript, I used a random number generator and manually combined the chapters into a single file. I’ve never considered putting together a preferred or canonical order. The thought of it seems a bit…wrong to me. The chronology of the story can be reconstructed in part—some events clearly happen before others—but a grand overarching chronology would be impossible to determine. That’s not how this story works.

At the end of an exhaustive process, I wasn’t sure if I’d succeeded. It wasn’t until the first feedback from beta readers (each of them with their own unique random shuffle) that I suspected maybe this was working as intended. A good indication was that some of these early readers did their own reshuffling to see if I had cheated.

The coding to compile finished print-ready files is done in Automator, the computer equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine.

The long process of conceiving, planning, and writing Ex Libris has led me to a different way of thinking about raising tension in a narrative arc. The behaviour of the characters introduced in the opening sequences is gradually becomes clearer as their background is revealed. It doesn’t matter in what order those revelations happen.

The best analogy I’ve found is that it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The order in which you place the pieces doesn’t change the final picture, but it does change how you experience the journey towards it. Adjacent chapters might flow or they might juxtapose. A character might disappear from the story for a while. A particular piece of key knowledge might be revealed earlier or later. The story has a different rhythm between copies. If the traditional narrative arc is the linear curve, this is more two-dimensional.

So does it work? That remains my burning question as I finalise editing and prepare to publish. It’s impossible to speak for every possible combination. There are 479,001,600 of them so I can’t check. It’s something every individual reader will have to determine on their own based on the version of the text they receive. I’ve always hoped that the story might be good enough to transcend its construction. I imagine a reader happening across a copy of Ex Libris, with no prior knowledge of its creation, who will read from cover to cover and enjoy it.

Is that even possible? I guess we’ll see.

The crowdfunding campaign to publish Ex Libris is live until 25 November 2019.

Excited by the possible storytelling functions and forms that digital technology enables, I set out to foster meaningful encounters between author and audience in a digital narrative project titled We See Each Other. I had never considered the possibility of an invisible third party shaping these encounters, but they were there, ever-present and impossible to escape.

Pictured: We See Each Other home page

For many storytellers working online, large companies providing web services, like hosting or searching, play a constant mediating role which can shape stories in subtle but significant ways. This ‘mediation’ byweb services often requires users to participate in the reduction and over-simplification of people and concepts in order to easily present or index content. I refer to this as ‘totalising’, which can be challenging for practitioners concerned with fostering more democratic narrative experiences or challenging narrow and stereotypical representations of people, places or issues .

Many scholars (Morozov 2011; Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013; Noble 2018) highlight how structural inequalities and totalisation manifests on the web. For instance, Jenkins Ford and Green (2013) point out that meaningful participation online is ‘linked to educational and economic opportunities’ and Noble (2018) outlines the insidious ways in which search algorithms promote racist and misogynistic representations of people . But I want to provide a creative practitioner’s insight into how these power relations play out in digital narrative practice and examine some of the ways we can negotiate these issues.

The first encounter many creative practitioners will have with the underlying political structures of the web will happen early in the lifespan of a storytelling project. To create artwork online, creators must engage with some sort of intermediary service. In my case, during the construction of We See Each Other I set up the project domain and hosting through a leading web host provider. It seemed fairly innocuous at the time, but powerful intermediaries such as search engines and hosting providers shape how the Internet is used and who uses it. Morozov (2011, 209), for example, explains how people from countries such as ‘Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Zimbabwe and certain areas of Sudan’ can face various unfair sanctions on the Internet simply because a large proportion of intermediary companies reside in the USA. For instance, the US government has a targeted policy to sanction particular former government officials and organisations in Zimbabwe (Morozov 2011, 209). This means American Internet companies should vet all their Zimbabwean customers, but because this ‘is so expensive and time consuming’ many companies end up banning all ‘Zimbabwean nationals’ (Morozov 2011, 209).

One company caught unfairly excluding a Zimbabwean organisation is BlueHost (Morozov 2011, 210): the very same hosting company I used to set up my digital narrative project. Because of the privilege I have of living and working in Australia I was able to use this competitively priced hosting service without interruption, but this may not be the case for all digital narrative practitioners.

The next encounter many creative practitioners may have with the underlying political structures of the web is when attempting to distribute their work. Making a work accessible to audiences means engaging with search engines, and in particular engaging with the most ubiquitous search engine, Google. Navigating this process can be difficult to negotiate for creative practitioners. Noble (2018, 100) explains, ‘what shows up on the first page of search is typically highly optimised advertising-related content, because Google is an advertising company and its clients are paying Google for placement on the first page either through direct engagement with Google’s AdWords program or through a grey market of search engine optimisation products that help sites secure a place on the first page of results’. This search engine optimisation (SEO) process can not only be expensive, but can also shape the work itself, as I discovered whilst constructing We See Each Other.

Currently, Google (2018) describes their algorithm as analysing ‘hundreds of different factors to try to surface the best information the web can offer, from the freshness of the content, to the number of times your search terms appear and whether the page has a good user experience.’ While Google’s algorithm uses hundreds of factors to determine page ranking, and it is not clear what the weight of each factor is, Google does highlight a few key factors; website speed, backlinks, keyword relevancy, submitting an xml sitemap, and editing page metadata. Backlinks and keyword relevancy are two SEO tasks I will explore in more depth because they are particularly hard to negotiate as a creative practitioner.

Google (2018) explains backlinks by stating that ‘if other prominent websites on the subject link to the page, that’s a good sign the information is high quality.’ This part of Google’s algorithm means the more that high ranking popular websites share links to creative practitioners’ work, the better the work will rank in Google, and the more traffic it will have. This can be problematic because it relies upon creative practitioners having connections to other influential and experienced  webmasters with high ranking websites, thus entrenching the same power structures present in the analogue world. Apart from the exciting storytelling possibilities, part of the reason I had (naively) turned to online platforms as a means for the creation and distribution of my work was because creators appeared to be able to make works that were directly accessible to huge audiences. But, the notion that online distribution is a democratic utopia obscures the wealthy companies shaping the Internet. In my case, because of the lack of connection myself and my co-creative team had to influential and wealthy domains, We See Each Other remains a low-ranking website resulting in a digital narrative that is less accessible to audiences.

Pictured: ‘We See Each Other’ search dominated by viral video from Real Housewives series

The second potentially challenging SEO task for creative practitioners worth discussing is identifying and using keywords. Identifying keywords that are most relevant to the content of the project is important to ensure that the website ranks highly when people search these terms. However, using these keywords is a highly rigid task. It involves using the keyword phrase in the title of the work. The title of the work must employ a header html font tag to be recognised by the algorithm, and the keyword phrase must appear frequently enough in the body text of the page or post (but not too many times as Google may penalise the site’s ranking for keyword spam) (Patel 2018). For artists trying to dismantle dominantrepresentations which define people, places and issues in totalising and stereotypical ways, moving away from definitive phrases is key. Therefore, researching popular keywords and optimising the content to match these phrases can undo some of the work towards less stereotypical and narrow representations. I have faced this struggle with keywords in my own work. The overall aim of We See Each Other was to move away from limiting and totalising representations of people from refugee backgrounds and towards more ethical encounters between people from refugee backgrounds and audience members. I asked myself what keywords might apply to the stories on the website. ‘Australian stories’, ‘refugee stories’, ‘stories about family’, ‘stories about war’ and ‘stories about choices’ all seemed somewhat relevant. But no matter how many phrases I came up with, none of them truly seemed to capture the project or the stories. Privileging a few words seemed absurd given the diversity of the stories and the storytellers, and using popular keywords  would have forced me to resort to privileging words and labels I was actively attempting to resist.

Even for creative practitioners whose work was not created with the specific goal of dismantling dominant or stereotypical representations, their engagement with SEO contributes to the way stories and people are found and framed. Noble (2018, 13) points out that:

the near-ubiquitous use of search engines in the U.S. and perhaps worldwide, demands a closer inspection of what values are assigned to race and gender in classification and web indexing systems, and warrants exploration into the source of these kinds of representations and how they came to be so fundamental to the classification of human beings.

In this statement, Noble highlights that classifying and labelling human beings and creative works, is a fundamental part of the way the web operates presently. Noble (2018, 1) contends that this is harmful because it can ‘reinforce oppressive social relationships’. Noble (2018, 14) goes on to describe her experience of searching the key terms ‘black girls’ on Google and discovering that ‘hotblackpussy.com’ was the first hit. Noble is clear that Google has a role and responsibility in this algorithmic oppression, but content creators like me looking to distribute through Google also have a role to play in constructing the way humans are classified and the ways content is framed. As creative practitioners we must examine the ways in which we choose to classify our authors, characters and subjects in order to rank highly in Google. It not only frames the way audiences interpret our creative work, it also has an effect on the way certain groups of people are represented and found in search engines.

Not all SEO tasks are so restrictive though. For example, editing the metadata or descriptions displayed on Google, Facebook and Twitter can provide opportunities to extend the way audience members might experience their encounters with the authors or narrative and make the experience more meaningful. Without editing the metadata, words from the titles and body text of a URL are selected by a bot to create a short description of the page. These descriptions appear on Google search lists and underneath Facebook or Twitter hyperlinks. Taking control over this element of SEO allows creative practitioners to rewrite and reshape how their work is framed. In my case, writing a few sentences of description allowed the authors and I to frame the work in a way that challenged narrow representations of people from refugee backgrounds.

Pictured: The metadata for We See Each Other as it appears on Google

Editing metadata is also an opportunity for creative practitioners to extend the interactive functions of their work beyond the domain of the site. During the construction of We See Each Other, manipulating the metadata allowed me to frame the encounter between author and audience from the moment someone found the site via social media or search engine. It also allowed me to construct further meaning  and metaphor for the audience to interpret when they shared the work over social media. So, when sharing a particular link to We See Each Other via Twitter or Facebook, the user’s friends or followers will see a link which reads, ‘I chose to see the authors of We See Each Other.’ The description underneath this link is then targeted toward their friends or followers, asking them directly if they will choose to see the authors too.

Pictured: ‘Screenshot of backend of seeeachother.com whilst editing metadata’

Editing metadata is not only an opportunity to continue to shape the creative work, it is an opportunity to shape how people (authors and characters) are represented and classified, rather than ceding agency to bots created by a powerful company, like Google.

Through my own experience, I have observed some of the challenges creative practitioners face when working in digital spaces to foster more democratic narrative experiences or challenge dominant stereotypical representations in their work.This is by no means a comprehensive list of these challenges, but it is my hope that by outlining these challenges, this part of the digital narrative construction process will become more visible. Other creative practitioners will have much to contribute to this conversation, particularly as the challenges we face will grow as algorithms and digital tools continue to evolve at a rapid pace. By observing and critiquing the political context of the digital tools and services we use, together we can make more informed choices about how we engage with them and gain more control over the effect they have on both our work and society more broadly. In particular, I believe that negotiating our engagement with these tools and services more critically can assist us to foster more democratic narrative experiences and challenge dominant stereotypical representations more comprehensively.

References:

Google. 2018. ‘How search algorithms work.’ Accessed February 1, 2018. https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/algorithms/.

Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford and Joshua Green. 2013. Spreadable media: Creating value and meaning in a networked culture. New York: New York University Press.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The net delusion: The dark side of Internet freedom. 1st ed. New York: PublicAffairs.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. 2018. Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. New York: New York University Press.

Patel, Neil. 2018. ‘SEO copywriting: How to write content for people and optimize for google.’ Accessed February 1, 2018. https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-copywriting-how-to-write-content-for-people-and-optimize-for-google-2/.

Way back in the wilds of the year 2008, artist-extraordinaire James Morgan and I engaged in an animated discussion about Augmented and Virtual Reality. At that time James and I were collaborators-in-crime in the Third Faction Collective, a group of digital artists intent on constructing game interventions in Massively Multiplayer Online Spaces. During this discussion, I pitched to James an idea to establish an online space devoted to all things Synthetic Reality based (my umbrella term for Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality). This space, called Augmentology 101, intrigued James to the point where a decision was made to sponsor it through the Ars Virtua Foundation and CADRE Laboratory for New Media. What followed was an amazing exploration into the creative potentials of Synthetic Reality – what’s now known as XR (Extended Reality) – and how it might manifest within the realm of electronic literature.  

It’s now been 10 years since the initialisation of the Augmentology 101 project. During this decade, there’s been a major upswing in VR and AR production and development, with impactful XR content such as Firebird – La Péri (a 2016 English/Chinese/French multilingual VR Experience) and Queerskins VR (2018) being standout examples.

Screenshot from the 2016 Multilingual Virtual Reality Project “Firebird – La Peri”

My own attempts at merging digital literature into developing XR fields have been multiple and varied, originating in delving into VR in the 1990’s when VRML was the shiny new thing. Surprisingly enough, the creative and technical challenges that VR creators faced back then are similar to those we face today: high performance requirements, mainstream adoption hurdles (see: Gartner Hype Cycle), and monetisation dilemmas are all relevant. Likewise, skillsets required by VR content creators in the mid 1990’s again parallel XR creators of today, including developing a deep knowledge of spatial storytelling logistics; emotional intelligence; and the ability to formulate story experiences that take into account various hardware and platform limitations such as field of view constraints, tethered headsets restricting natural movements, and hardware specific limitations like the screen-door effect.

In terms of XR projects I’ve produced in the last decade, a brief selection includes conceiving of and co-developing the 2013 anti-surveillance AR game #PRISOM, and in 2015 mapping out with Andy Campbell the (now unfinished) PC/VR project Square Ebony that was to be filled with: “…movement/imagery like huge ‘Panic Room’ landscaped letters…a force field of green…branches intertwined…tangles being text…[that] revolves around an entity…this entity is slowly reconfiguring itself…at the top of a hill/mountain/plateau surrounded by brackish water” (notes from Square Ebony Project Meeting and Documentation, Breeze and Campbell, March 10th 2015). In 2016 I lectured as part of the “Future Possible: Beyond the Screen” Series which centred on how VR can transform creative practice, and which also included a live VR performance walkthrough using one of my Tilt Brush created works. In 2017 I keynoted at the Electronic Literature Conference with a VR performance presented both live at the Conference and simultaneously in Virtual Reality.

“Layering the New real: Tracking the Self in Disembodied [Un] Virtual Spaces” Keynote

Press Image for “Our Cupidity Coda”: VR Literature

Thorough participation in a high-end VR based experience like Perpetual Nomads hinges entirely on immersion, which is triggered initially through the audience having to don gear that firstly reduces their ability to engage in their actual physical space in standard ways (their vision and hearing being “co-opted” into a VR space). The leap of faith the audience needs to make to establish a valid and willing suspension of disbelief (as Samuel Coleridge so aptly phrased it) is already set in motion by the fact a user is entirely aware from the moment they slip on a VR Headset that their body is in essence hijacked by the experience (haptically, kinetically), as opposed to a more removed projection into a story space via more traditional forms (think book reading, movies, tv). Such body co-opting might lead a user to disengage from the VR experience from the very beginning which will reduce the likelihood of true immersion: alternatively, they may readily fall headlong into the experience with an absolute sense of engagement and wonder (the preferred option as a VR content creator!) if the work has been precisely crafted.

For the most part, XR projects such as those mentioned above currently exist only in the mainstream margins, with a majority of experiences requiring costly high-end VR rigs and expensive desktop computers that demand audiences experience the works in their optimal state. To counteract this selective catering to the exorbitant end of the XR market, in early 2018 I had the idea to create a VR Experience that would reduce the mandatory use of high-end tech. This project would instead cater directly to a range of audiences by crafting a work that could be experienced across a far larger (and much more accessible) range of lower-end tech. This VR Literature work is called A Place Called Ormalcy.

Title Image from the “A Place Called Ormalcy” Press Kit

A Place Called Ormalcy is digital literature designed for, and developed in, Virtual Reality. It was constructed using the Virtual Reality Application MasterpieceVR to craft the 3D models, with each chapter (made up of 3D models, text, and audio components) then combined and hosted via the Sketchfab platform. It’s comprised of a text-based story made up of seven short Chapters which are housed in 3D/Virtual Reality environments. It can be accessed via a wide range (crucial in terms of its social commentary aspect) of mobile devices, desktop PCs and both low-end and high-end Virtual Reality hardware. Audiences using the cheapest type of VR equipment (such as Cardboard headsets) are able to access complete versions of this VR literature experience, as are users of any net connected mobile device with a WebVR-enabled browser.

The story of A Place Called Ormalcy (warning: spoilery parts ahead) unfolds through a series of snapshots of the life of Mr Ormal, a happy-go-lucky law-abiding chap who resides in the aesthetically cartoonish world of Ormalcy. Ormalcy exists in an alternative universe complete with its own idiosyncratic language patterns. The storyworld initially presents as a Utopia full of innocent “claymationesque” contented creatures and happy citizens. As the story plays out, however, it soon becomes apparent that in actuality, this VR Experience allegorically traces the makings of a dystopic society, and how such fascist principles can arise in the most benevolent of places. This VR Literature work has social commentary at its very core, commenting directly on and about the rise of current totalitarian trajectories and the contemporary malaise, confusion and accompanying acclimatization patterns.

“A Place Called Ormalcy” Chapter Progression

A Place Called Ormalcy uses a combination of WebVR, 3D, VR, text and audio assets in ways that mirror a slow dystopian creep. In the desktop and mobile versions, each chapter becomes progressively visually cloistered, with dark fog and grainy distortions increasing to finally create a type of gun-barrelled claustrophobic effect. This combines with a gradual leaching of the intense colours found in the free-flowing organic imagery of the initial Chapters which results in a startlingly stripped back, fuzzy palette and model constructions: vibrancy gradually bleaches out to stark black, white and greys. Correspondingly, the 3D tableaus and audio tracks likewise alter from an initial complexity – Mr Ormal begins his story journey waving directly to the audience in “Chapter Wonne” in a bright and blooming space – which incrementally shifts towards the dramatically minimal in the final “Chapter Severn” where Mr Ormal transforms into (…spoiler alert here…) something vastly other.

In the VR version of A Place Called Ormalcy, additional effects mark the dystopic “boiling frog” dilemma that Mr Ormal faces. Each VR tableau subtly increases in size and scale as the Chapters progress, with the audience finding themselves in the climatic Chapter in a looming monochromatic set surrounded by huge windowless block-shaped buildings devoid of detail – except multiple, and menacing, “88” shaped logos (and the awfully transfigured Mr Ormal). In the VR version, the text becomes increasingly difficult to navigate, with the audience having to teleport, twist and turn in the VR Environment to read each annotation, echoing the “fake news” proclamations of our contemporary Western world where it is becoming increasingly difficult to access truth over relentless propaganda.

Although A Place Called Ormalcy may seemingly convey a message of hopelessness or helplessness, the ending does contain clues that all is not lost in this particular dystopian scenario – the final soundtrack offers hope, with protestors chanting and proclaiming resistance as key. Just as VR Literature can work to extend the creation of accessible electronic literature beyond the text-centric to truly encapsulate the haptic and the spatially-oriented, A Place Called Ormalcy illustrates how XR projects can act as relevant social commentary at a time when it is sorely needed. I look forward to continuing to promote, create, and experiment with stretching the limits of VR and AR while producing XR projects that are openly accessible, as well as socially relevant.