Christine Wilks – a.k.a. crissxross
I’m a British writer and artist who has been creating electronic literature and digital art for the web since 2004. I mainly work in Flash, but not exclusively. I like to create stories and playable media that the reader can interact with, such as Underbelly, which won the New Media Writing Prize 2010. I have two works, Tailspin and Fitting the Pattern, published in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2. I also make short pieces that simply play, sometimes randomly. Most of the latter I make for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX, an ongoing collaboration in remixing digital art and writing, to which I’ve contributed approximately 100 remixes since January 2007. For highlights, see our selected works gallery. I have presented my personal and collaborative projects at festivals, conferences and live events in the UK and abroad. My work is exhibited at international media art and electronic literature shows and published in online journals and collections of digital art and writing. I have an MA in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University. Before becoming engrossed in the web, I made short films, videos, animations, installations and wrote fiction and screenplays.On 20 May 2011 my playable media fiction, Underbelly, was awarded First Prize in the ‘Maternal Subjectivities: Care and Labour’ Digital Media Competition 2011 by MaMSIE(Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics), an interdisciplinary research network based at Birkbeck, University of London.
On 31 October 2010, Underbelly, was awarded the New Media Writing Prize at the Poole Literary Festival 2010. Here’s how Michael Bhaskar, one of the judges, described it in his article for The Literary Platform:
Underbelly is an intense, educational, visceral experience, that delves deep into new media territory and transforms our expectations of what could be called literature. Exploring the experience of women miners in the nineteenth century the look, sound and writing of the piece are all magnificently distinctive and skilfully designed. I learned a lot “reading” and it hung around for days. This is powerful stuff.
July 2012: I will be presenting and discussing a selection of my electronic literature works at MIX: A Conference Exploring Transmedia Writing & Digital Creativity in Bath, UK.
Autumn 2012: Underbelly will be published in the forthcoming ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature.
November 2012: I will be presenting R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX – selected works at the ELMCIP conference, Remediating the Social in Edinburgh, UK.
January 2013: Rememori will be exhibited at the Modern Language Association 2013 Convention in Boston, MA, USA.
Places where my creative projects are published or exhibited:
Rememori is published in The New River: a journal of digital writing & art, Spring 2012 issue.
Out of Touch is published in Mad Hatter’s Review, Issue 13 (2012), in the Multimedia section.
Underbelly, one of the Featured Works at the ‘Electronic Literature’ Exhibit at 127th Modern Language Association (MLA) 2012 convention in Seattle, WA, USA. See ‘Multimodal Narratives’ in the Works on Desktop section of the scholarly archival website.
Underbelly is featured and reviewed in Studies in the Maternal, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2011, a special issue on Motherhood, Servitude and the Delegation of Care
Out of Touch is published in Third Hand Plays, a series curated by Brian Stefans about electronic literature, commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Aug 2011.
Underbelly is published in Hyperrhiz, Issue 8, Spring 2011.
Tailspin and Fitting the Pattern are published in the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, on the web and DVD-ROM, Feb 2011.
Fitting the Pattern and my parallel lecture about the work, Being Creatively Autobiographical in New Media, published in issue two of Studies in the Maternal, Dec 2009
Fitting the Pattern is exhibited as part of the Kate Pullinger Line of Influence at the online gallery binaryKatwalk:v.02b, from July 2009.
IntraVenus has been on view as part of De Geuzen’s online Female Icons project since 2007.
Alice and the Digital Dump, an article published by trAce Online Writing Centre, 2005.
Dragon, a short story published by Yorkshire Art Circus in the literary magazine, YAC YAC, 2005.
Some of the places where I’ve presented or performed my work in recent years:
May 2012: I gave a live performance of new episodes in my Out of Touch series, including the original episode, at E-literature in/with Performance, an ELMCIP Seminar at the Arnolfini gallery, Bristol, UK.
November 2011: I was invited to present Underbelly at the 17th International Festival of Computer Arts (IFCA) in Maribor, Slovenia.
Underbelly presented at the Motherhood, Servitude and the Delegation of Care Conference, a MaMSIE event at Birkbeck, University of London, May 2011 (UK)
I performed Underbelly at The Shoebox Experiment, a series of live literature events at The Riverside Pub in Sheffield, May 2011 (UK)
I performed and gave a talk about Underbelly at the Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism Conference at Hull University, March 2011 (UK)
On Halloween 2010 I performed Underbelly at Inspace no one can hear you scream, a Language in Digital Performance event which was part of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling 2010 (Edinburgh, UK)
I performed Fitting the Pattern at Ilkley Literature Fringe Festival as part of ‘The Writers’ Group Exposed!!!’, October 2010 (Ilkley, UK)
Underbelly exhibited in the Arts Program of ARCHIVE & INNOVATE: The 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization, June 2010 (Providence, Rhode Island, USA)
Underbelly at PW10 Performance Writing 2010 at Arnolfini Gallery, May 2010 (Bristol, UK)
Underbelly at Transliteracy Conference, Feb 2010 (Leicester, UK)
As a featured author, I presented Underbelly at Writing Bodies/Reading Bodies in Contemporary Women’s Writing, PG CWWN conference, Sept 2009 (Oxford, UK).
Fitting the Pattern and Underbelly (as a work in progress) at Mum’s the Word: The maternal in contemporary literature, Jan 2009 (Leicester, UK).
Fitting the Pattern at Electronic Literature in Europe 2008 (Bergen, Norway).
Fitting the Pattern at IOCT Salon: Creative Writing and New Media MA Showcase 2008 (Leicester, UK).
I took part in Multiversity, a Yorkshire tour of live literature events in Autumn 2005, during which I gave performances of IntraVenus and other works at Ilkley Literature Festival, Sheffield’s Off the Shelf Festival, and Theatre In The Mill, Bradford.
On the web, R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX can be viewed as an online journal of digital art and writing. It is often performed and remixed live as part of VJ events (e.g. Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable), it has been featured in online festivals (e.g. a+b=ba?), and elements from it have been developed into a standalone flash movie Devil’s Rope Journal. There is also a R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX Flickr group.
I design, co-author and create e-learning experiences, using the Moodle open-source platform, with Make It Happen. Our clients are mainly national and regional non-profit organisations.
During Spring and Summer 2010 I was a Dissertation Mentor for one of the students on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, and in March 2009 I delivered a guest lecture for the course. Also, in 2009, I designed and built (in Joomla) the Creative Writing and New Media Archive, containing over 30 online lectures delivered as part of this ground-breaking MA led by Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger.
For the past 15 years or more, I’ve worked freelance as a teacher and facilitator of creative media workshops, as an arts project manager, for various arts/media festivals, as a film/video-maker, as an artist and as a writer, including a commission to develop an original comedy-drama series for BBC television. Going back to the pre-digital era, I spent 10 youthful years learning, creating and working at Chapter Arts Centre (Cardiff) where I ran the Film and Animation Workshop.
Some highlights:
In 2008 I graduated with distinction from the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, UK. My creative life online all started in Spring 2004, thanks to an inspiring Digital Writing course at the trAce Online Writing Centre (now archived). I achieved a LeTTOL (Learning To Teach OnLine) qualification accredited by the Open College Network, UK. I also have a BA Hons and MA in Fine Art from what is now the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff.
I have a wide variety of media skills, from analogue to digital, mostly self-taught, and I’m continually learning new stuff.
To contact me email: crissxross AT crissxross DOT net
