7 July, 2023 at the British Library, London

Plus an optional afternoon tea and tour of the Digital Storytelling with the exhibition’s curators on 6 July, 2023

MIX 2023, the biennial conference on where and how creative writing and emerging technologies meet, will be co-hosted by Bath Spa University and the British Library. It will coincide with the British Library’s Digital Storytelling exhibition of digital literature and emerging formats, which will highlight digital publishing over recent years. MIX 2023 will enable scholars and practitioners to come together to explore the exhibition at the British Library as well as share current research and practice in the rapidly developing field of storytelling in immersive environments.

Major themes for MIX 2023 will include text in immersive media, interactive and locative works, digital and film poetry, narrative games as well as digital preservation, archiving, enhanced curation and storytelling with AI.

MIX 2023 is looking for proposals for 15 min papers or presentations and 6 min lightning talks from technologists, artists, creative writers and poets working in the digital realm as well as academic researchers and independent scholars. They are particularly interested in the work and views of creators, audiences and communities currently underrepresented across writing and technology. Papers, presentations and lightning talks focused on teaching and pedagogy are also welcome.

Visit the MIX website or email MIX@bathspa.ac.uk for more information.

We are two academics who met in Cape Town when  our children became friends. Conversations around our shared interests in history, technology and Cape Town’s District Six got us speculating about social justice pedagogies in our respective disciplines. Our preliminary discussions revealed  many parallels in our approaches but also intriguing  distinctions, enough to seed a commitment to collaborate. At the time, Siddique was teaching geomatics students who were studying towards qualifications in land surveying and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT). David, an archivist, was organising immersive professional experiences for University of Michigan (U-M) graduate students with NGOs in Cape Town through his school’s Global Information Engagement Program (GIEP). In this article we discuss our three-plus years of collaboration to enhance social memory through joining traditional primary sources with emerging information technology tools in District Six, with emphasis on our latest effort to integrate Augmented Reality (AR) with GIS, archives, and storytelling.

District Six in Cape Town is perhaps the most well-known site of apartheid forced removals (some 60,000 Black individuals between 1968 and 1983). It was a cosmopolitan, multi-racial and multi-denominational urban community viewed by the government as a slum that violated the edicts of apartheid’s ‘separate development’ segregation ideology. It was also favourably located close to the city centre, nestled in between Table Mountain and the sea. Upon removal of the residents, almost every building (houses, community halls, shops, public amenities, health facilities, cinemas, nightclubs, hotels, factories, businesses) was demolished by bulldozers, except for a few mosques, churches and schools. Today, the site sits largely unreconstructed and its legacy and future remains deeply contested. The last four months of 2021 saw District Six mired in controversies over redevelopment planning, city evictions of the homeless, restitution and resettlement for ex-residents, and increasingly realised fears that many returning claimants will pass away before securing one of the District’s newly constructed homes (Bantom, 2021; Charles, 2021; Lepule, 2021; Thebus, 2021).  

Our collaboration started in 2018 and builds on the surveying and mapping work carried out by Siddique on the site since 2006. As a much-needed decolonising pedagogy in engineering education, Siddique attempted to conscientise students to the socio-political-historical aspects of the site that their university was situated on. The university, which was originally called Cape Technikon, was built on a large portion of the demolished District Six, and was a Whites-only institution during apartheid. In Cape Technikon’s curriculum, District Six’s troubled history was silenced and buried under the technical language of geomatics. Fieldwork tasks were ahistorical – the rubble under their feet was nothing more than land that needed to be accurately measured and represented on a map. This needed to be changed, and Siddique’s students started to dig up the past, linking mapped locations to what (and who) used to exist there before. 

Figure 1: District Six aerial photographs. Top left – 1953; Top right – 1968; Bottom left – 1983; Bottom right – 2019.

Figure 1 shows four GIS maps of the same geographical space. The red line is the outline of District Six, the area that was declared Whites-only in 1968. One can observe the drastic changes on the landscape. In 1953, District Six was fully developed, with narrow streets and dense concentration of buildings. By 1968, the first signs of demolition were observable. In 1983, District Six resembled a war zone, with most buildings destroyed, and in 2019, much of the district was open space, with the CPUT campus a dominant feature.

Our first efforts in 2018 were consciously designed as an interdisciplinary effort to join geomatics, archiving, and storytelling. We sought to virtually reconstruct aspects of District Six in terms of the lost built environment and stories of still living ex-residents and their experiences before, during, and after demolition. We  brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including ex-residents, St. Mark’s Church (one of the few structures that survived demolition), the District Six Museum, GIEP, and the departments of Town & Regional Planning and Civil Engineering & Surveying at CPUT. St. Mark’s then current rector wanted to foreground the church’s history and reached out to Siddique. At an early project planning meeting at St. Mark’s, we pitched the idea of using its baptismal records and integrating them with Siddique’s mapping efforts and the memories and archives of selected ex-resident parishioners.The baptismal records date from the late 1800s and are a potent symbol and source of District Six’s heritage, documenting individuals, families, social networks, livelihoods and how they manifested across space and time. 

We created a prototype demonstrating that it’s possible to accurately plot the addresses extracted from the baptism records and connect them to the life stories of ex-residents. The prototype selected and mapped approximately 2,000 baptisms between 1950-1958. This was a detailed undertaking that involved onerous human and computing efforts of extracting, checking, and scripting to clean the data. CPUT students created a GIS map that geolocated addresses and integrated it with maps of other sites in District Six. This work represents the first comprehensive digital historical spatial record of District Six that contains discrete and granular locations of a diverse range of important sites (such as businesses, public services, streets, and the homes of baptised babies). Figure 2 shows some of the sites, overlaid on the 2019 map.

Figure 2: Geo-location of specific sites in District Six on the contemporary landscape.

A collaborative exercise with the GIEP team confronted the vagaries of deciphering handwritten baptism entries, confirming and normalising street names and addresses and locations. We worked with St. Mark’s to identify ex-residents who were willing to share their District Six experiences through recorded oral histories supplemented by their own personal archives. Six ex-resident St. Mark’s parishioners agreed to participate. Interviews covered a range of community members. Each participant was photographed with their baptismal record, and copies made of any records they chose to bring in to aid their storytelling, such as childhood photographs and/or mementos. All generated materials from this iteration – including the digitised baptism registries, the oral history methodology, permissions, and oral history recordings – was deposited with the District Six Museum under a deed of gift. (Huang, Leal and Rubin, 2018).

In 2019, we built upon this work with a second GIEP and CPUT cohort. The District Six Museum hosted this effort. In this iteration, we sought to strengthen our oral histories, identify and plot key landmarks on the GIS map, and integrate all of this as a publicly accessible interactive multimedia website. We re-interviewed five of the six 2018 storytellers and added two new ones. We mined the District Six archives to locate archival images and supplementary primary sources of twenty-nine landmarks: eight social centres, a hospital, nine places of worship, seven schools, and 4 cinemas/bioscopes. Finally, we integrated all of this information onto the museum’s website as an online experience that enables visitors to overlay historical District Six with the contemporary landscape, learn storytellers’ biographies through geolocated photographs, documents, and audio, and identify, locate, and learn about historically significant landmarks (Cox et al, 2019). This effort is now hosted by the District Six Museum’s website as the ‘St Mark’s Memory Mapping Project’ (Figure 3). Siddique’s follow-up work, a 21 minute video provides vivid evidence of the fruits of joining geomatics and archiving to tell the story of erased pasts (Motala, 2019). 

Figure 3: Snapshot of the St. Mark’s Memory Mapping Project website.

Over the past two years, Siddique developed a ‘Haunted Walks of District Six’ walking tour, using analog printouts of the GIS map and historical images of the tour’s stopping points. To date, this analog version of Haunted Walks has been delivered to some 200 individuals – academics, students, artists, filmmakers, and ex-residents. The goal is to provide walkers with a deeply affective and transformative experience by integrating the primary sources described above with real time traversing of the contemporary landscape. This approach deploys the ‘counter-surveying’ methodology, which combines land surveying and mapping to find and mark the locations of sites on the physical landscape that no longer exist (Motala and Bozalek 2021). This method can identify the exact locations of demolished homes in the present day for the benefit of ex-residents, as well as to locate other sites to reinforce and graphically illustrate the gravity of what was lost during demolition. 

We now believe that the current analog version of the walking tour needs to be reimagined, strengthened, and experientially enriched with the thoughtful incorporation of digitised and digital content via AR technologies. As an interactive technology that runs in real time and registers and co-locates contemporary and virtual historical objects with one another through handheld devices such as mobile phones and tablets, AR is a logical next step in our collaboration. We are now recasting the Haunted Walks tour as an AR enhanced experience. Users will be directed to the precise locations of important demolished sites in District Six and be shown what used to exist at that location through stories, superimposed archival images, documents, videos and sound clips. AR will enable walking tour participants to immerse themselves simultaneously in both the contemporary and historically erased landscape, essentially co-geolocating themselves across time. 

To continue this work, in 2021 we received a collaborative faculty seed grant from  U-M’s African Studies Program’s African Heritage and Humanities Initiative, running through 2022. This work is directed towards a decolonial praxis based on connecting developments related to our scholarship in social justice geomatics (Zembylas et al 2021) and archival social justice (Wallace et al 2020). It will explore new heritage-related theoretical and praxis directions for engineering, archiving, information technology (AR and GIS), and their intersections in social justice memory work. Work is proceeding along three axes, 1. Theoretical (joining counter-surveying and social justice archiving to probe the intersections of ephemerality, affect, and non-institutionalized memory making); 2. Methodological (development of counter-surveying and memory making and transmission praxis) 3. Socio-technical (incorporation of AR to transform the Haunted Walks experience). We will reinvent the embodied experience of the Haunted Walk, with prospect for application to other contexts of forced removal, recovered and contested memory, and ongoing justice-seeking and activist efforts (acknowledgment, memorialisation, restitution, and reparations). 

However, we also take seriously the advice of Tuck who warns against such work as being solely aimed at the documentation of damage. Whilst damage-centred narratives are often collected and deployed benevolently, the resulting work provides a one-dimensional view of Blackness and disenfranchised communities (Tuck & Yang, 2014). We seek to meaningfully contribute both to more fine-grained understandings of apartheid planning practices and the experiences of those subjected to them. Instead of solely focusing on the documentation of damage, we are equally ‘concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives’ (Tuck, 2009, p. 416). We also want to attract a younger generation of technologically adept South Africans, which is especially critical in light of the nation’s ongoing efforts to decolonise its curricula and grapple with its apartheid past and its afterlives. Through this community-based work, we seek to leverage creative technologies, stimulate affective responses in walker-users, and assist students and researchers in reimagining the historical remnants of the ex-apartheid city and its continued effects on the contemporary urban landscape.

To date we have laboured to reimagine and reconstruct the walking tour as an AR app by plotting out specific notable and not well known points of interest. We are  collaboratively working with the District Six Museum’s archives to identify photographs that can be precisely located and superimposed onto the contemporary landscape. We have ideated and envisioned the user experience via a 2.5km walking loop and how that will manifest as virtual content delivery and interactivity via historical narratives and stories and locational positioning in the real world. We have identified necessary pragmatics of pre-tour set-up (route and tour points, disclaimer and liability waiver, operationalising the tour on users’ devices, interface design, location awareness, and toggling between the historical and contemporary landscape), user orientation to and experience at tour points (navigation, multimedia content display of text, audio, visual and moving image, overlaying historical photos on the contemporary landscape), and ending (feedback, sharing on social media, contact information). 

The biggest early challenge has been identifying and evaluating the tradeoffs on alternative AR platforms, given due consideration of the constraints facing prospective users in District Six: device requirements and operating system; navigation; data usage, and; feasibility to realise the completeness of our vision. We want a user to be able to use an Android smartphone or tablet to download our app and be empowered to take a self-guided tour. Project staff have explored AR possibilities mindful of these needs. We have evaluated the status and capabilities of available AR tools / applications along the following parameters: functionality; usability; learnability; incorporating multimedia content and geolocational data; content management; open source vs proprietary; costing; editability, and; prospects for persistence (longevity). After carefully reviewing nine alternative possibilities, we are using Unity3D as our AR authoring environment. It will allow us to integrate our GIS maps, develop our own user interface, activate the user device’s GPS for navigation and camera for transposing historical photographs onto the contemporary landscape.

Parallel to the AR effort, project staff are modifying the current analog version of the tour by developing a curated digital repository of existing and new archival and other supporting primary source materials. This will strengthen and expand walking tour content. This will be supplemented by the development of new and expanded tour narratives / storytelling. For example, we envision that one of the points that will be visited through the app will be Horstley Street (Figure 4), which was an important street in the history of District Six. The buildings of Horstley Street were completely razed, but the original cobblestone street remains.

Figure 4: Horstley Street before demolition (left, District Six Museum archive) and today (right).

Ultimately we value the expansion into AR not as technology for its own sake but rather as a tool to create powerful affective embodied experiences for walkers-users. It is one thing to see the remnants of District Six as pins located on digitised historical and contemporary aerial photographs, as was done with our previous work. We believe the embodied and embedded process of walking across the contemporary landscape to visually ‘see’ what used to be there provides a more tangible, meaningful, and moving experience that will create a lasting impact. We anticipate launching the app in 2022.

Bibliography

Bantom, K (2021), ‘D6 ‘caretakers’ named,’ news24, 14 September [online]. Available at: https://www.news24.com/news24/SouthAfrica/Local/Peoples-Post/d6-caretakers-named-20210913 (Accessed 13 December 2021) 

Charles, M (2021), ‘City of Cape Town evicts homeless in District Six during massive operation,’ news24, 20 September [online]. Available at: https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/news/watch-city-of-cape-town-evicts-homeless-in-district-six-during-massive-operation-20210920 (Accessed 13 December 2021) 

Cox, V, Dall, V, Qui, V and Yelk, J (2019) ‘St. Mark’s memory capture and interactive mapping.’ (Global Information Engagement Program, School of Information, University of Michigan)

Huang, J, Leal, M and Rubin, M (2018) ‘Final report: St. Mark’s community heritage and baptismal record project.’ (Global Information Engagement Program, School of Information, University of Michigan)

Lepule, T (2021) ‘Claimants dying off before ever returning to District Six,’ Weekend Argus, 28 November [online]. Available at: https://www.iol.co.za/weekend-argus/news/claimants-dying-off-before-ever-returning-to-district-six-b8f3ed06-866c-4185-82eb-a9ac13c67d0c (Accessed 13 December 2021) 

Motala, S (2019) “District Six and CPUT: a carto-story.” Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEzydbcVWV4 (Accessed 13 December 2021) 

Motala, S and Bozalek, V (2021) ‘Haunted walks of District Six: propositions for counter-surveying,’ Qualitative Inquiry [online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211042349 (Accessed 13 December 2021)

Thebus, S (2021) ‘Plan to resettle District Six claimants plods along,’ Cape Argus, 16 September [online]. Available at: https://www.iol.co.za/capeargus/news/plan-to-resettle-district-six-claimants-plods-along-113c2d18-f4b8-48f4-a6fe-eefa89235742 (Accessed 13 December 2021)

 Tuck, E (2009) ‘Suspending damage: A letter to communities’. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–427. Available at:  https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15 (Accessed 14 December 2021)

Tuck, E and Yang, KW (2014). ‘R-words: refusing research’ in Paris D and Winn, MT (eds.) Humanizing Research: Decolonizing Qualitative Inquiry with Youth and Communities. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 223–248. Available at:  https://doi.org/10.4135/9781544329611.n12 (Accessed 14 December 2021)

University of Michigan (undated) ‘Engaged learning,’ [online]. Available at https://engaged.umich.edu/engaged-learning/ (Accessed 13 December  2021)

Wallace, D, Duff, W, Saucier, R, Flinn A (eds.) (2020)  Archives, recordkeeping & social justice. London: Routledge

Zembylas, M, Bozalek, V, and Motala, S (2021) A pedagogy of hauntology: decolonising the curriculum with GIS. In Bozalek, V, Zembylas, M, Motala, S, and Hölscher, D (eds) Higher education hauntologies: living with ghosts for a justice-to-come Oxon: Routledge, 11-28). DOI: 10.4324/9781003058366 

In 2021, I attended the 10 Days on the Island festival in lutruwita/Tasmania as part of a research project exploring the social impact of the creative arts in Regional Australia. On my second day at the festival, I went to a small workshop Reaching Global Audiences with Local Storytelling led by Catherine Pettman from Rummin Productions and Rebecca Thompson. After an hour, it was clear that these two filmmakers were creating, producing and sharing some of the most interesting and community-led stories I had seen in a very long time. Their approach to respecting the communities and individuals they are collaborating with is centred on meeting participants where they are: emotionally, creatively and physically. This was challenged in 2020, and their extraordinary film There is No ‘I’ in Island demonstrates their innovative solution to enforced isolation. This short documentary series weaves the fears, dreams, reflections, and songs of the island community of lutruwita/Tasmania into a fantastical, animated landscape. Every voice heard in the series was self-recorded in May 2020, during Tasmania’s COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, and reflects in a personal way on the experience. Catherine Pettman reflects below on the process of collaborative storytelling and its potential to create change.

Tell us a bit about who you are and how you came to be working in film and documentary filmmaking?

In the southeast of lutruwita/Tasmania there’s a unique meeting of two saltwater bays, divided by a narrow isthmus with high coastal mountains that dip their wooded toes into the icy Southern waters. It was a remote place to grow up and our family activities were completely dictated by the climate and what needed to be caught or grown for the dinner table. I played in the ocean, and on the ocean. I walked through the temperate rainforest to find the waterfalls. Mostly, I rode for hours on my single speed bike, travelling here and there, exploring every nook and cranny. They were fearless years full of freedom and adventure. teralina/Eaglehawk Neck was a magical environment, which hosted a complement of curious visitors and unique local characters full of news of their adventures out there in the wilds. Listening to these storytellers, particularly my parents, was a wonderful way to spend the time. Perhaps this is where my love of story began.

I left home in my late teens. Not an unusual occurrence as we tend to leave the Island early on. It’s a migration really. For me, it was to gain higher education in the Dramatic Arts and beyond, and traveling and exploring other cultures. Journeying through the Northern Territory and then living and working with the Yolngu community in NE Arnhem Land had a huge impact on my life, and for which I will always be grateful. Filmmaking started on the other side of the camera as through my performance studies I saw myself as an actor and theatre maker. Eventually, my heart brought me home to Tasmania where I began crewing on commercial productions, gaining experience through a variety of roles, and eventually began to produce my own content for the screen. I’ve particularly loved documenting stories of exemplary people sharing their life’s passion. Oftentimes, there are themes that relate to the wicked issues that we face as a society. Funnily enough, there’s a collective interest in making and sharing these kinds of stories that build community capacity, and quite a few of my shorter documentaries have resonated in places far removed from our little island at the bottom of the world. 

How would you describe your approach to finding the stories you want to tell?

I have a strong suspicion that stories find me. At least it often feels that way. I hear or read about something intriguing, or a colleague shares an experience or an idea, and, suddenly, we’ve been talking for an hour together, building on what’s fascinating or why it’s compelling and how badly we need to capture it, and share it with others. If activities within the story are time critical then there’s extra pressure to try and solve the puzzle of how to develop the idea, how to finance the production, and how to find a pathway to an audience. That was certainly the case with There Is No ‘I’ In Island. It was developed in response to our COVID-19 lockdown and the reality of not having capacity to film live interviews. Hence, the idea to ask participants to self-record their responses was born. 

All of a sudden, we found ourselves pouring over hours of intimate stories, which we collated into story threads for our five episodes. It was a humbling experience, opening each recording full of stories gifted to us during such a poignant moment in time. There are hours of stories I’d love to share but there’s not enough time to make them all into films. Although this creates tension, I also recognise it’s a privileged position to be in. Overall, the stories that rise to the surface are more often than not those that have a strong community of collaborators and supporters all the way along. There’s an authenticity within the story, the process and the community of storytellers, which eventually translates to an authentic film that hopefully connects with the intended audience. Authenticity is probably the most fundamental aspect in choosing the story I want to tell. Truth mirrored back through story has the power to challenge our values and beliefs and, just possibly, transform the way we see the world – perhaps even offering up a renewed perspective on how we can be better citizens within it. We can but try.

What innovations in the ways that community stories can be made and shared are most exciting for you?

The There Is No ‘I’ In Island series was a break away from the conventional, and I suppose we considered it innovative as it was new ground for us as creatives. Myself and co-creator Rebecca Thomson prompted experiential responses from the community by asking specific questions around a particular subject, and participants self-recorded their answers rather than having a filmmaker present to guide the narrative – quite an untraditional method. By doing this, the authority transferred across to the individual and already we can see the impact of community ownership of their ‘voices’ in the way There Is No ‘I’ In Island  has been embraced and joyously shared through physical space and online. The production most likely felt innovative as it occurred during a very uncertain time during lockdown when we were all unsure how production could continue. It became this very nimble and explorative way that we could keep producing content and share human experiences and stories from our own community, with community participation being at the core of the process. 

Everything about the project made perfect sense and the community responded in kind with openness and enthusiasm. We could sense that the community were feeling ‘seen’ and ‘heard’, which gave their stories even more weight as it was clear how valued they felt being involved. It was hugely exciting to develop from the ground up using this pool of natural, charming, exotic, and relatable characters who were completely anonymous to us, yet who also became extraordinarily familiar throughout our production process. 

As There Is No ‘I’ In Island was conceived during lockdown in May 2020, it was also designed so that we could pair five visual artists each with an experienced animator.

It was hugely satisfying to match these creative teams with an episode that best suited their tone and style, creating a rich and valuable opportunity to build their skills, push themselves creatively and to form new professional collaborations. This network of participants and creatives has resulted in a multi-faceted cross-section of community participants, artistic collaborators, supporters and viewers.  

Do you think stories can create change?

One of the most beautiful things about stories is they have the power to open us up to new perspectives. The question I tend to ponder is how exactly is the story creating change in a person? Is it conscious? Or are these archetypal themes resonating with our subconscious selves, shifting our deepest values and beliefs in a new direction? What happens when new concepts and ideas settle in and relax our learned perspectives and prejudices? Do stories somehow deliver intangible meanings that nurture us and provide sustenance for personal growth? Stories deliver such rich meaning to our lives, they connect us to higher ideals whilst, at the same time, they also connect us to our own hearts. 

Stories have the capacity to make us care deeply about the world and the wicked issues that we face in society. Stories help us understand how to tackle the challenges around us, they inspire us, and remind us we are not alone. Stories provide a pathway to express our emotions and our dreams, which is the perfect combination when you think about it. When stories create change in people, they become empowered to make change. A story that communicates a call to action is probably the most powerful tool in making change. We need to get active to see the changes we want beyond talking, listening and sharing as these activities aren’t enough by themselves. But they are a fantastic start to the conversation towards meaningful action.

Which are your favourite or most impactful projects and why?

Doing it Scared was one of the most beautiful projects I’ve produced, it was a deeply meaningful story featuring rock climbing legend Paul Pritchard and his attempt to finally conquer the ‘Totem Pole’, a “fearsome sea-stack”, which 18 years prior had almost cost Paul his life. Paul was one of the world’s leading climbers and mountaineers of the 1980s and 90s, renowned for his hard and extremely bold first ascents. In 1998, Paul was abseiling in to climb the Totem Pole in Southeast Tasmania when he dislodged a rock, which hit him on the head, causing a severe head injury that he was lucky to survive. The aftermath of the accident left him with hemiplegia, which means he has little feeling or movement in the right side of his body. Despite this disability, Paul continues to live a life filled with adventure. So much so that when Paul decided to return to the Totem pole to finish the climb and asked us to film this extraordinary attempt, we leapt at the chance to support his ambition and help document the final chapter of this remarkable story. 

The resulting edge-of-your-seat film is just 12 minutes in length. It has been seen all over the world in every major outdoor adventure festival, and still continues to screen in cities throughout Europe, China and the US. Paul has been invited to speak at many of these festivals and uses the film within his own presentations to large NFP and Governmental organisations, and within smaller classroom settings, sharing his story and demonstrating his physical and spiritual experience of life through leading practical activities with a goal of breaking down prejudice with empathy, education and inspiration. 

You can find There is No ‘I’ in Island here:

www.rummin.com

https://www.facebook.com/rumminproductions

https://www.facebook.com/TasmanianVoices

2020  and 2021 have left all of us (except, perhaps, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos) living with more uncertainty and vulnerability than we have allowed ourselves to admit previously. Like many, I have the very strong sense that a veil has been lifted, and we are in the midst of a series of societal reckonings that reveal how broken many of the systems we rely on are and that change is needed on a large scale. In 2014, I wrote two pieces about transmedia storytelling and activism for The Writing Platform. One outlined the form and processes and one put forward some examples of projects I thought were especially inspiring and innovative. Over the past seven years, technology has advanced exponentially and profound social movements have emerged across the globe. It feels like time to revisit the role and relevance of transmedia storytelling in activism, advocacy and social change, and to consider the ways traditionally under-represented cohorts have innovated the form of transmedia storytelling to create inclusive stories to agitate for change.

A lot of predication and claims have been made about transmedia storytelling since it first appeared on the media studies scene via Henry Jenkins’ blog in 2003. However, in my effort to update my previous articles it became clear that there has been a stagnation in the field of transmedia storytelling, and perhaps a lack of impact in regard to transmedia activism, at least in the mainstream understanding and discussion of transmedia. Outside the mainstream, transmedia storytelling still has the potential to create profound projects that seek to challenge the status quo. These projects use the capabilities of transmedia to amplify under-represented voices and make stories that suggest a more inclusive future, and consequently contemporary transmedia activism looks much more diffuse and diverse than it did seven years ago. 

An often overlooked aspect of transmedia storytelling that is most potent is its capacity to illuminate the relationships between people, places and practices that can influence social change, which is precisely what creators and activists have continued to strive to harness in projects. As we grapple with issues of representation of under-represented groups and environments across all forms of media, the question of how transmedia storytelling can continue to evolve in ways that are inclusive and ethical continues to be relevant. One of the issues that could hold transmedia back is that still so little of what is written about transmedia explores the subjects, the content of the stories, the place and the purpose of the story. The focus continues to be the purpose of the platform, the design or the fan interaction, rather than the purpose of the story itself: who is the story about and who is telling it? Why are they telling this story and where are they telling it from? Do the media and platforms chosen reveal new aspects of the story? Are they authentic and meaningful for the subjects and creators of the story? Does place, not simply location, contribute something profound to the story? Is the story being told from the outside, about someone else? Or is it one of the rare stories that is told from inside a place, rather than about the people whose story it is? What unique contributions can transmedia make to the futures of storytelling? 

We cannot afford to continue tinkering around the edges. With that in mind, I reviewed the projects I presented as examples in 2014 and sought out new examples. What became clear is that place has become a central element to successfully crafting stories that might just be able to shift our perspectives. How place might be used and embedded in transmedia storytelling requires other ways of thinking about storytelling which are not necessarily common in the fields that currently inform transmedia storytelling, such as media studies, games studies, narratology or film studies. As an element of transmedia storytelling, place is best understood through the lived experiences of those who inhabit it.

The interactive, transmedia project Hollow, from 2013, continues to exemplify what is possible in transmedia storytelling to promote social change and was an early leader of how to centre place and voice in the story. The multiple methods that are deployed to create the environment in which the project is set are examples of not only the impact that attention to cultural, physical and economic environment can have on non-fiction projects, but also the consideration of how particular media and platforms can be used to best portray particular aspects of that world. Perhaps the greatest achievement of Hollow is the ways it has captured the ‘feel’ of McDowell County while also telling a universal story. At the centre of the project are around 30 stories made about and by the residents of McDowell, using video, stills, text and voiceover that are reminiscent of traditional digital stories. McMillion claims that ‘the stories are encountered within this landscape so that the people featured emerge from a context of place and community’ (Rose, Mandy. 2013 “American futures: Hollow & question bridge” Collabdocs, July 1).

This approach is also used in the current outstanding transmedia story Neo Learning created between 2010 and 2020 by Big hART.  Big hART is an Australian arts media and social change company that works intensively in marginalised communities to co-create multifaceted arts events that reflect the stories and the creativity of the participants, and raises awareness about the urgent social issues facing these communities. Both Hollow and NEO-Learning are multi-year projects that relied on multiple media and forms to extensively represent communities and to connect with as large an audience as possible. These projects foreground story and the lived experiences and expertise of the communities as the cohering element. Further, all aspects of the projects and Hollow and NEO-Learning privileged the communities ahead of audiences. Instead of asking what audiences want to see, they asked the communities what was not being amplified or shared about them? What counter-narratives were there to the dominant stories about these places and the people who call it home? What frameworks needed to be used to facilitate the community being able to lead the storytelling? 

NEO-Learning is many things – storytelling, a learning resource, comic, a platform, training, an expression of culture, a reclaiming of place, and an imagining of futures. It is one big project, with discrete parts that can be enjoyed (by audiences, creators and community) on their own but has a particular purpose as a large project. There are a number of elements that make up the NEO-Learning project: NEOMAD comic, Future Dreaming VR film and the educational platform for teachers. NEO-Learning as a suite of educational tools began development in 2018, but was preceded and inspired by the award-winning sci-fi comic NEOMAD, also created in collaboration with Big hart. The NEOMAD comic was co-created with over 40 young people in the Roebourne community, through workshops in scriptwriting, literacy, Photoshop, filmmaking and sound recording. 

The result is an entirely original and innovative view of Indigenous young people, who are so often represented across the commercial media in Australia in negative and racist ways. As a transmedia project, NEO-Learning is a tantalising glimpse of what is possible: 

• each element is  unique and purposeful; each aspect amplifies the strengths, the creativity of the participants; 
• the technology is used to support and share traditional knowledges;
• representation is determined by the people being represented and reveals complex and creative ways to share approaches to positive representation between marginalised groups.

 As an educational tool, it is focused on what non-Indigenous Australians can learn and benefit from Indigenous culture and people and is grounded in strength rather than focusing on any challenges the community may face. The community owns the project, and it is about how they see themselves and what they want to communicate about themselves in the ways they want to communicate. 

Our world is made up of stories, and transmedia storytelling has a real and important role to play in creating a world that is made up of different stories, because it has become frighteningly clear that the same old stories, the same old voices and the same old ways of communicating have little to offer when the world falls apart.

The ‘digital turn’ brings opportunities and challenges for creative writers. One of the few things we can be sure of is ongoing change. This article is about how to navigate that change.

New technologies and corresponding new genres emerge apace, social media platforms and conventions morph and mutate. We can get caught out. We can’t anticipate what the next set of transformations will be. Take book publishing.

Previously, the publishing model was stable. From the eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century, it remained basically the same: authors submitted manuscripts to literary agents or publishers, then the publisher did pretty much all the work of producing, marketing and distributing the books. Today, authors can by-pass publishers completely. They can self-publish cheaply and quickly and promote their work easily using social media, potentially reaching readers across the globe at the click of a button. Yet, seismic though these changes are, they may not be the most significant changes that writers face now.

The cliché of what it is to be ‘a writer’ generally involves two things: solitude and a favourite writing tool. Works including Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own helped perpetuate the idea of ‘a writer’ as someone who struggles alone, most likely in a garret (in poverty), with a carefully sharpened quill pen or a battered typewriter. The cliché has held strong because periods of quiet focus and attachments to particular writing tools remain important for writers.  

However, today, even if a writer chooses to use only a particular pen or typewriter to produce a manuscript, once that manuscript goes into production, digital processes will be involved. Whether a writer is self-published or signed to a mainstream publisher, there is an expectation that authors will post messages directly to readers via blogs, Twitter, Facebook and so forth, perhaps several times daily. Software updates can feel relentless, so too the need to upgrade phones, tablets, laptops. Thus the chance of a writer being able to work alone using a favourite writing tool over substantial periods of time possibly spanning several years to develop a creative project is fundamentally challenged. 

One year, I wasn’t quick enough with a computer upgrade. I lost all my work. The man in the computer repair shop told me that there was no way of saving it. At the counter, we stared at my boxy, off-white computer. It had looked so space-age when I bought it the previous year.  Perhaps to make me feel better, he said he thought I might be able to sell it for a tenner to a local artisan who was converting that particular line into fishbowls. Ever since the moment I saw a computer with all my work on it become less use to me than a fishbowl, I have been looking at the role of creative flexibility in how we tackle a digital world that can feel exciting and unnerving in equal measure.  

What are the constants? Can a toolkit of skills be identified that will apply across technologies, platforms and genres; is there a single model of creativity that can help writers negotiate our increasingly fast-paced 21st century writing and publishing landscape? That is what my book, The Multimodal Writer, is about.  

With change as a constant, transitions gain particular significance. Any transitions – between technologies, between types of writing – have to happen more quickly and efficiently, because, with social media and regular technological change in the equation, such transitions occur more often. Perhaps the shift is between writing a novel and posting a tweet, or, perhaps it’s between a handwritten poem and a script for a game on an Excel sheet. To research The Multimodal Writer, I looked back at my own experience of writing and publishing novels, creative non-fiction and radio and print journalism. I also interviewed eight writers who each had long-standing experience of moving between different types of writing.  Kate Pullinger shared her experience of shifting between writing traditionally published long form fiction and short stories for smartphones, for example. Rhianna Pratchett talked to me about shifts between writing games and screenplays, Simon Armitage about shifts between writing poetry and libretti. I also worked extensively with my Creative Writing students in order to help identify what skills help writers survive and thrive in our digital age and how to teach those skills.

Perhaps the book’s most important research finding is that we each have a significant proportion of the answers already. We can re-use (or, ‘remediate’) our own experience and apply it in current and future contexts. All technology is new at some point. The pencil was once new; the typewriter was once radically different technology. A writer can, by paying close attention to the details of his or her own creative practice, draw on his or her own resources. How has the problem of approaching something new been tackled in the past? What previous experience can be drawn on for the task of identifying a solution? 

Maybe something as simple as a brisk walk or stiff cup of coffee will help you clear your head so you can think ‘outside the box’, as the saying goes. Maybe an earlier stint writing promotional strap lines means you already have the experience of writing snappy dialogue that you need to write the short lines of background dialogue, or, ‘barks’ for a video game.  

The nature of ‘digital literacy’ is hard to pin down. ‘Digital literacy’ can be viewed as a set of functional skills (the ability to turn on a computer and ‘surf’ the Web, for example).  Alternatively, cognitive skills such as critical thinking can be considered key. Indeed, there is debate regarding whether it is possible to provide a single definition of ‘digital literacy’ at all. Many now consider it more accurate to talk of ‘digital literacies’. The paperclip icon that denotes an email attachment might be baffling to one person, while for another, working out how to use Excel to draw a bar graph might be the issue that’s causing a headache. There are a large number of variables, such as what technological skills we have already and how we want or need to apply our digital skills (to what ends, in what contexts). ‘Digital literacy’ means different things to different people at different times.  

In recent months , at talks about The Multimodal Writer (in London, York and Estonia; via video calls during COVID-19 lockdown), I invited attendees to give their personal definitions of ‘digital literacy’. A wide range of people were at the talks (Creative Writing students who were just starting out and established novelists, administrators and managers, composers and film-makers). The definitions of ‘digital literacy’ were correspondingly diverse. One person defined ‘digital literacy’ as ‘Using technology to read and write and speak and listen’, another as ‘Facility with hypermedia as a mode of cultural and literary consumption’; one said ‘Keeping up, keeping up, but it’s tiring’, and yet another said simply ‘To be frank no idea’. However, there was one word that recurred: ‘navigate’. The digital arenas described were very different from person to person, but through all the events, the ability to ‘navigate’ effectively was considered key.  

We ‘navigate’ stormy waters. We have to have some knowledge, of course, and practical skills too. And we have to be quick off the mark and ready to deal with difficulties. Certainly, dealing with difficulties can be hard. The experience can be tiring and undermining. Navigating stormy waters requires stamina and agility. Adrenalin starts pumping. When a particularly tough patch has been navigated successfully, we can feel satisfaction or even excitement.  Storytelling is not merely about selecting a set of words. Writing has always involved challenges, and sparks of joy. To be fully immersed in the task of telling a story – finding the right metaphor, the right piece of dialogue, the right narrative arc – is to forget everything around us. Storytelling is a complex, exhilarating experience. If we can each identify a set of internal resources that will give us the necessary stamina and agility, we can navigate digital waters in ways that leave space for those invaluable sparks of joy.

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.

Storytelling forms an integral part of our understanding of the world. Historically, traditional literary forms saw us give entirely to the storyteller as a submissive listener, but with the rise of technology and an ever-growing experience economy we are leaning more and more towards active consumption. Theatre, traditionally seen as a passive experience, is rapidly embracing more experiential and personalised forms whilst gaming is seeing record growth. Immersive events, such as Secret Cinema, have pushed the boundaries of cinematic interaction. This emerging market means we increasingly expect to have more agency and interaction in our experiences – with the recent Olafur Eliasson exhibit at Tate Modern being a strong example of this. How could this type of interaction benefit readers and augment stories?

Whilst demand for experiences is rapidly increasing, research from the National Literacy Trust has shown that reading for pleasure dramatically decreases in young people after they leave primary school. In this transfer to secondary education, the gap between students’ reading ability and their age grows wider each year and reading enjoyment levels in children and young people decreased in 2018. At the same time, findings from The Centre for Longitudinal Studies showed that reading for pleasure has a four times greater impact on academic success than one parent having a degree, as well as finding a link to young readers being more likely to succeed after education and have more robust mental health. What is the potential for short-form narrative and how can storytellers innovate the format to create captivating content for readers?

Last month, we launched Alternarratives, a new £15,000 prize for short story told in an innovative format – in its pilot year, the prize will focus on helping young people re-engage with reading. So what sort of ideas are we looking for? There are brilliant examples out there of writers exploring this territory. Breathe, created by Kate Pullinger in collaboration with Editions at Play and Ambient Literature, is a ghost story that personalises itself for every reader through APIs (application programming interfaces) that pull data from your phone, including place, weather and time, into the narrative. Back in 2011 the writers of The Thick of It created Malcolm Tucker: The Missing iPhone. The idea was that Malcolm Tucker had lost his phone, you’ve now found it and can hack into his emails, messages and voicemail to unravel a scandal. It became the first app to be nominated for a BAFTA, showing the true potential of this emerging platform.

Ultimately, we believe writers hold the key to good stories. We’re looking for bold ideas that push the boundaries of writing to find the most exciting examples of short-form narrative that can help inspire young people to read for pleasure. The focus of Alternarratives is written word, but we’re asking writers to consider what tools they could use to elevate the experience. Could a reader access stories online at the site of the scene? Could multiple contributors help change the ending for a character? We want to hear your ideas. Entries do not have to be digital, but any technology used should be easily accessible and distributable – think phones and computers, not VR and headsets!

Interested in applying or want to know more? Find out more details and submit your proposal before 13 January 2020. You can also follow the conversation @nesta_uk #Alternarratives

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

17776
by Jon Bois

“What football will look like in the future.” It looks at first like just another opinion piece by just another American writer for sports-focused site SB Nation. But, very quickly into the story, it becomes clear that something is terribly wrong. The text itself warns you of this shortly before the page disintegrates. The opinion piece falls away from the page before it can really begin, nothing more than a ruse that deposits you into the world of 17776.

Distant satellites pointing back at Earth bring you the story of a generation of people who have not died or even aged, a generation that must find ever more elaborate ways to occupy its time. What football looks like in 17776 is a game with neither time nor physical boundaries. It’s a fascinating premise that leads to an extended mediation on immortality, boredom, and the deeper meaning of games: a strange brew that Bois handles with deft assurance.

The tech behind it uses simple html and embedded YouTube videos, with only a little javascript trickery, which has already given it a reasonable shelf life. Originally published serially in 2017, it’s a story worth revisiting or discovering.

https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

‘Breakdancing Jesus’ mural by artist Cosmo Sarson, Hamilton House, Bristol, UK.

The great Festival is in two days. The weary pilgrim, teasing her larchwood beads through her fingers and fearing that she will never see the Temple hung lousy with banners, or smell the grilling of sacred cat-meat, wonders whether to take the lonely and ill-kept track through the deep-cut hills, or instead continue along the ceremonial avenue that runs, sanctioned and leisurely, across the floodplain.

The waiter, not remembering precisely what the racist senator had ordered, stands with the bottle of bleach in his hand, hovering above both the abalone pâté and the asparagus soup.

The motorist sees the crippled, squeaking gull semaphoring from the roadside in her brake lights; in her boot is a heavy carjack that she has never used, and perhaps still won’t.

As he mutely waits for the kettle to boil, his knuckles held hard as calcium against his sides,  James knows that forgiving her would be the easier choice.

There persists a tendency amongst many people, particularly those who are not authors themselves (though authors are not immune) to see stories as impregnable and rather forbidding objects. They can feel like something revealed, rather than something constructed: a conclusive piece of excavation that an author has performed, discovering a pure, foregone seam of one thing after another. However, it is in moments such as those above – the fleeting, pregnant pauses of a character’s indecision before things plunge on in the customary steeplechase – that a fundamental fact about fiction comes clear. Storytelling is not the mining of a strip of monolithic truth. In those spaces where a choice has to be made we can see that, instead, a story hides an intricate machinery behind it: a fictive, thrumming world of pressures, influences, places, peoples, coincidences, syzygies, causes and effects that have their own logic, and their own obscured authoring.

This machinery, the construction of which is probably the vast majority of any author’s work, is like a Rubin’s Vase only perceptible in the negative: as readers, we have to look for it in those places where it is most obvious. When the dusty pilgrim decides to turn left, the corresponding possibilities of turning right spark into life; and even if, as readers, we only get to study one particular readout of the machine – one particular passage of events and decisions – it doesn’t mean that the machinery stops its rustling operations. The world it represents, no matter how small, goes on turning, and could certainly turn differently next time. That’s the thing about machines, and worlds: you don’t always know what is going to happen when you turn them on.

At different times in history, but particularly in recent decades, this sort of truth – that the work of an author is less a feat of writing and more a feat of engineering, or even programming, of a fictive space – has made some literary scholars very queasy. A specific, and historically blind, the definition of technology still holds sway over the popular imagination, despite the fact that a book has more moving parts than most smartwatches, and the Latin alphabet, like any writing system, is as digital as the Python programming language, and much, much harder to compile. If the Guardian videogames editor Keith Stuart is a technology journalist, then the Telegraph’s literary critic Tom Payne has to join him at that particular, overcrowded desk: their beat is essentially the same. Both are interested in the diagnostics of fictional worlds, and the calibration of their workings. Even words like ‘diagnostic’ and ‘calibrate’ set a gunmetal panic in most writer’s guts; barren, rod-backed words that have no place in the eely shamanism of their work.

The still-uncomfortable confluence of these ideas can be plumbed back to 1945, when the American engineer Vannevar Bush wrote a piece for the Atlantic Monthly, entitled As We May Think; which served as a peephole into a world, and its attendant machineries, where a union between modern science and art might become possible, and even desirable. In particular, he invited his readers to consider a machine that, as yet, he could not build. He called his machine the Memex and described how he thought it might operate: storing and linking all human information and allowing its operators to move between works, individual texts, without any authorial prescription. This core concept – what came to be called the hypertext in the 1960s – was not a revolutionary one. The marginalia of medieval psalmbooks leading you to other works in the monastic library, are as effective as any link on a webpage. However, it was the medium that became, wholly, the computer – consistently shrinking, cheapening, civilising and naturalising throughout the twentieth century into something approaching the printed word in terms of cultural invisibility – which superseded Bush’s original fancy and provided us with a bedrock on which not only to display our existing written culture, but upon which to create new artforms which exploited the machinery of the computer to mirror the machinery of the worlds that lie beneath the surfaces of every story.

In 1976 Will Crowther, an engineer for a US military contractor, built such a functional fictional world, which he called Colossal Cave Adventure, while time-sharing on his employer’s mainframe computer. Based on his weekend spelunking in the Mammoth Cave National Park of nearby Kentucky, it is considered the first example of interactive fiction and has come, unavoidably, to triangulate the very contours of the form. While undoubtedly a written text, Adventure was also, quite literally, a functioning contraption: a set of instructions for the computer to calculate its bounded world as happily as it calculated the physics of nuclear brinkmanship. Performing from the 700-line script which Crowther had written, the mainframe presented the reader with a text whose machinery was, at least partly, accessible. Readers could type instructions and the computer would, in return, narrate the opening of locked doors, the avoidance (or not) of bottomless pits, and the acquiring of unruly MacGuffins. Their choices of what to type, thanks to the procedural attention of the computer itself, reverberated through the corridors of Crowther’s imaginary grotto, reforming it as they went.  In exploring Crowther’s world, and in fiddling with its mechanisms, those pregnant pauses became longer and wider: vulnerable to cave-ins, collapses, redirections and opened shafts.

Interactive fiction has since accreted a rich literary culture of its own, along with all the accompanying furniture. It has its own polemics, schisms, discourses and honours. It has its own well-trod norms and weird, deep-cut deviations. At its best, it is a culture, and most importantly a technology, which has allowed me, as a reader, to experience many striking, complex and thoughtful worlds, and the stories implicit within them. In Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, I rifled through the cabinets of one family’s discordant, hoarded memories of the first Gulf War. In Emily Short’s Galatea, I attended a gallery opening for Pygmalion’s famous living statue, questioning the work on its own artistic merit as I became drunker and more unpleasantly flirtatious: boorishly and unwittingly activating the trauma that Short had encoded into Galatea’s every gesture and word. In howling dogs, I cycled between the same three, featureless cells for simulated day after day like dank air; each night contenting myself with falling asleep in the visored chair of the Activity Room and tinkering with the settings of my dreams.

howling dogs, created by the writer and digital artist Porpentine, is both distant and near to Crowther’s efforts over forty years ago. Though it shares some of its heritage, it has little of the infamous inaccessibility of even later interactive fiction works. For Porpentine to build it did not require a proprietary level of programming knowledge prohibitive to writers who, like myself, had never received any formal schooling in the subject beyond Excel macros and unlocking the secret pinball game in Microsoft Word. It was not the project of a senior software engineer,  working close to the tinplate of some of the most complex machinery on the planet. Instead, it was the product of a single artist working, like all artists, with a technology. In Porpentine’s case, this technology was called Twine: a tool which has done a huge amount to narrow the gap between the work of worldbuilders, in whichever department they might sit. Based entirely online,

Twine lubricates the interactions between the machine and the author almost to invisibility. The creation of a passage-bound world like Crowther’s, full of glimpsed opportunities, is as simple as writing Passages of text and linking them together, like web pages, by [[putting double brackets around a word or a phrase]]. Clicking on these links represent a conscious choice: do I take the [[left fork]], or the [[right]]? Twine even generates a map of the author’s growing mental topology, represented as a blueprint cartography of boxes of text and the routes between them. It is a map equally suited to physical space, such as that of Adventure, or more allegorical landscapes, as in Zoe Quinn’s seminal Depression Quest. Publishing one’s work is as simple as uploading a single file, a few kilobytes in size, to Dropbox or any of the several free Twine hosting services.

Every interactive fiction writer has their own gateway into the form, usually outside of any institution. Twine happened to be my own and constituted its own curriculum: a curriculum I both wish that I had encountered at school and am glad that I did not. It remapped my own conception of storytelling, not by any great thunderclap, but instead with a furtive, creeping realisation. As I pottered about with the tool, I uncovered more and more advanced techniques, orbiting the most fundamental concepts of computer science. Soon enough, I was not just building networks of static paragraphs for my readers to explore, but using the tenets of formal logic, the bread-and-butter grammar of the digital computer, to observe whether my reader chose to take the hill road or the busy highway; whether they had poisoned the soup or the pâté; whether

they unclenched James’ knuckles or tried to compress them tighter; whether they had had the fleeting, momentary courage, or cruelty, to put the gull out of its misery. After many years of writing, and both supervised and self-led schooling, I had discovered an actual vocation: the jalopying of engines of consequence, a grease monkey in my own imagination. Though my mum would never have wanted me to be a gearhead, I couldn’t have been prouder of myself.

I have seen similar, ratcheting ascents of realisation in many others attending the Twine workshops I teach; in the faces of both 7-year-old schoolchildren and 70-year-old academics. From initial scepticism, they pass to clumsy experimentation and then a burst of pure, combinatorial joy as they start to extend the horizons of what these techniques might accomplish.

For those who have not played at building worlds since they were very small, this process can be more tentative, and freighted with all sorts of prejudices about the fripperies of play, about the disappearances of the author, and about the fragilities of one’s own creation. Happily, this most often gives way to a positive impatience: a busy urge to begin eroding out passages, and sounding depths.

Twine won’t single-handedly combat the queasiness and snobberies that artificially segregate the work of computer programmers and writers. I still regularly hear the protestations. What happens to the author when a reader has the agency to change the path of their narrative? If all choices are equally valid, are any of them truly significant? How can a machine that performs brittle, unyielding logic have a place in the creation of art? What if – like Victorian idealists in the age of steam – comparing fictive worlds to computer simulations is just a case of historical relativism? How can I talk about a Tolkienesque gewgaw, written by a bored computer programmer to distract his daughters when they visited him every other weekend, in the same breath as works of ‘true’ literature? Writing a single, static perspective on this issue here does luckily afford me the luxury of not answering these questions. I can pretend, as we all do, that the narrative is already written, and the conclusion is foregone. If I stood by my own evangelism I should have written this essay as a Twine story, made its workings vulnerable, and let you make up your own minds. In lieu of this, I can only counsel some direction; some passages to follow. Go and read the work of Keith Oatley, and Marie-Laure Ryan. Read Merritt Kopas and Anna Anthropy and Emily Short. Come to the Interactive Fiction Summer School that I am curating at the British Library this July. More than anything, go to http://twinery.org and furtively, creepingly, tinkeringly, convince yourself.

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

Sleepless
By Natalia Theodoridou

What happens to dreams if no one sleeps? That’s the question explored in Natalia Theodoridou’s dark and unsettling short story built on Twine. Based on the premise that human sleep has suddenly become a thing of the past, the story follows its characters—never quite asleep, never quite awake—through all-night coffee shops, nightclubs and call-in help lines.

Maintaining a tight focus on the text, the story makes sparing and sometimes subtle use of visual and audio accompaniment to reinforce its mood. Sleepless is at its best though in its use of dynamic text and arrangement on the screen, capturing all too well a liminal state of consciousness. Like many Twine stories, it can feel a little slight depending on the choices made by the reader, though it is worth repeating for a fuller experience.

Sleepless is available online.