IOCT Salon – 18th June 2008

 

 

 

The recent IOCT Salon was a great opportunity for students from the Online MA in Creative Writing & New Media to show case their most recent work. It featured inspirational performances from Chris Meade and Christine Wilks, fascinating talks from Toni Le Busque, Claudia Cragg and Alison Norrington – and a bit of waffling from me!

The event was organised by Chris Joseph as his last salon at the IOCT, as his time as digital writer in residence nears its end. Both past and present students were invited to show their work to a public audience, showing the range of artistic endeavours covered by the course and where these can lead.

Chris Meade has recently published a report commissioned by Sue Thomas titledDigital Livings, examining how digital writers, like us, might be able to monetize our work. Together with launching the report, he gave a performance of his creative non-fiction piece “drumming – becoming – forgetting”. I had only previously seen this piece as a blog with YouTube clips of drumming which could be left playing whilst one scrolled down to read the text. In the live performance, Chris read the text whilst playing a small drum. This interlocked with the audio and visuals from the YouTube clips to create far more complex texture. I have to say that this was quite a surprise for me – not because I didn’t enjoy Chris’ writing on its own previously, but because I had not considered how much a live performance like this could enhance a piece of new media writing.

In a similar way, Christine’s performance of her piece “Fitting the Pattern” brought the text element to life. Again, I had seen this during the workshop stages and enjoyed the tactile nature of the user engagement with the piece, which is built in Flash and requires the user to mimic dressmaking processes such as cutting, pinning and unpicking to reveal sections of the story. I remember that I was totally absorbed by the themes of fabric and family, but in the live performance I got a much stronger sense of place. This was particularly apparent when dialect terms arose such as “let’s bray her”, which Christine put across with far more expression than my internal voice could have managed.

In contrast, Toni gave a talk about her work throughout the course and some of the factors she considered when developing her creative practices – specifically with regards to copyright and fighting the battle against the “you’re out to destroy the book” gang. She showed us her final dissertation piece “Drunkalogue” as well as some of her more recent work using the Sophie software developed by The Institute for the Future of the Book. She gave us a quick demo of the software, showing how easy it is to create multimedia projects and share them with others. She made the very valid point that there are lots of emerging platforms that enable writers to create media-rich work without learning Flash or other complex programming skills.

Claudia also picked up on this theme in several of her observations throughout her talk about her Laboratory project “Twitter Suu”. She noted that beautifully designed websites alone are not the key to getting real involvement in a project, and programming skills are not necessary when using new media. Claudia spoke of the resistance she experienced from journalists who did not understand the role social networking tools like Twitter can play in generating support for a cause, and of her findings when researching where to focus her efforts to attract people most likely to rally in support to a cause. Her insights were particularly relevant in context of theNLab Social Networking Conference the next day.

Alison also spoke about the use of social networks in relation to her work – particularly the lessons she learnt from her Staying Single project, where she attempted to use a very wide range of social media to generate interest in her blog-based fiction. Alison gave us a sneak preview of her latest project “I ♥ NY” and how the lessons of Staying Single have informed her plans for this story. She is very enthusiastic about the ways that new media can be used to bring people into a story from different places, but also realistic about the amount of time that this type of promotion and networking can involve. She aims to be more focussed in her future efforts, rather than spreading herself too thinly across lots of networks – again, relevant to many of the discussions which followed at the NLab conference.

My own talk was a slightly waffly account of my current dissertation project to create an online tour of Bath – informed by an analysis of live guiding techniques. I demonstrated a couple of examples of existing virtual tours and talked about the importance of narrative when guiding an audience around a physical space. The project is in the early stages of development, but I was able to show the draft design, which features a chatterbot programmed to answer simple questions (although a failed wifi connection made this impossible to show). I also showed a clip of the tour itself, complete with animation.

In addition to the range of presentations, Dr Jess Laccetti had produced a critical essay considering the work of all the MA students. You can read is essay here. Greetings also came from many of the students who were unable to be present, including Janine, who despite being on her honeymoon was with us in spirit in the form of copies of her fanzine, produced as part of her Laboratory project and available for sale throughout the salon.

Many thanks have to go to Chris Joseph for organising this great showcase, and to Sue Thomas, Kate Pullinger and Jess Laccetti for all their efforts. It was a fascinating evening!

translating reality into the virtual

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is really quite odd to consider what elements of real life people choose to translate into their virtual existence on the Internet.

 

We have translated the “Christmas card” – a symbol of former friendship and regard – into the badge of appearing on someone’s “friends” list, receiving cursory updates and greetings from acquaintances/former friends who are no longer part of our current lives via tools like Facebook.

 

We have taken advertising with us into the virtual world, but done away with ad breaks, which force us away from the box to make a cup of tea.

 

We have translated our forums for chat – our coffee bars and our high school reunions – but we have not translated our quiet spaces to ponder.  The Internet is a doing place, afterall…

 

The reason I have come to consider this odd division of things we have translated and things we have not is because I am currently trying to improve on a standard online system by translating real world values into a virtual format.

 

I am trying to create an online tour.  If you look at most online tours, they can look pretty neat… you can usually swivel round a 360^o picture until you feel sick and click on a few hotspots to get some information in the form of text.  No problem there!  A virtual equivalent of a real world activity – taking a look around a place and getting some contextual information about it…

 

But is that what a real, live-guided tour does?

 

Very often, we get so wrapped up in the idea that our lives have a virtual parallel dimension that we forget to compare the virtual with the reality to see whether we are really achieving this dream.

 

In the case of virtual tours, they generally miss out so much of what a real tour guide is doing that aside from giving a visual experience of a place, they can hardly be said to be “guides” at all. 

 

I analysed the role of a tour guide and compared this with a survey of the variety of virtual tour variations available.  I was surprised by the number of recommendations I could make for improving existing standards and concepts of “virtual tours” based on this comparison.  It was almost as if the designers and standard setters, whoever they may be, had devised a way of doing a really cool thing, called it a tour, but never really thought about what a real tour does at all. 

This sounds like a harsh analysis, but when I started to look deeper, I found that this was often the case.  Virtual equivalents to reality are being developed all the time without much reference to the actual reality that they are trying to represent. 

 

Sometimes this is a good thing.  We can improve upon the reality we have in our virtual world in a kind of utopian fashion.

 

But in other ways we risk missing out skills in our new world which would enable and facilitate users greatly.  The skill that the virtual tours miss out is narrative – none of them provide you with an overall narrative for the place they are exploring in the way a real tour guide would, and so we have a virtual world where spaces – physical or otherwise – are described with nuggets of information and connected by hyperlinks, rather than being connected by a narrative that could enhance understanding and contextualise the information.  It is almost as if the virtual world is a stripped down version of reality in this sense: dispensing with the subtleties of connections whilst claiming to make links and connections between things clearer. 

 

If this is the world we are supposed to be bringing storytelling into, we need to be thinking not just about places we can locate stories, but rather the whole attitude and design of this virtual reality and how it could be altered to enable storytelling in all its forms – just like the real world does.  Basically, we need to think more about how and what we are translating into our virtual realm from our real world, and how it all hangs together, rather than just trying to blindly create a utopian equivalent in flat pack form.