In an Arts & Entertainments feature in The Independent, Lisa Gee “explores the unbound possibilities of digital-era fiction” and announces the shortlist for the 2011 New Media Writing Prize. She asked a number of people working in digital writing and/or publishing to nominate their favourite works of digital literature and I’m delighted to say that Tim Wright and Jim Pope both recommended Underbelly, and Sue Thomas picked Fitting the Pattern. Here’s what they had to say in the accompanying video:

Tim Wright, digital writer/consultant, on Underbelly :

It’s a really interesting use of interactivity, Flash animation,  amazing sound and it’s a story about women miners but then also a thought piece about bearing children and motherhood and balancing work and home.

Dr James Pope, academic & judge/co-founder, New Media Writing Prize, on Underbelly :

I still maybe think it’s the best piece I’ve seen in terms of emotional connection to a piece of interactive work.

Sue Thomas, professor of new media, De Montfort University, on Fitting the Pattern:

It’s beautifully designed, but it also has very clever tools within it that you have to learn how to use before you can actually navigate the piece and read the story.

Here are the other recommended works:

• Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph, recommended by Alison Norrington and novelist and games writer Naomi Alderman.
• Welcome to Pine Point by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons, recommended by Sophie Rochester.
• The Golden Notebook Project recommended by Nico Macdonald, chair, Media Futures.
• Souciant magazine recommended by Keith Kahn-Harris, writer and academic.
• Kidmapped by Tim Wright,  recommended by Chris Meade.

New Media Writing Prize 2011 – shortlist

• He Said She Said – Alan Bigelow (USA)
• Loss of Grasp Serge Bouchardon (France)
• 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein David Clark  (Nova Scotia)
• Circle Caitlin Fisher (Ontario)
• Welcome to Pine Point - Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons (Vancouver)

Also announced yesterday on the New Media Writing Prize blog, the shortlist for the student prize:

Student Entries

• Chasing Pandora – Emily Devereux, Allyson Cikor, Trent Redmond, Mathew Vickery  (Alberta, Canada)
• 5 Haitis – Simon Kerr  (Nottingham)
• Maybe Make Some Change – Aaaron A. Reed  (Santa Cruz, California)
• Unravelled –   Spenser Wain, Zac Urness, Kollin Branicki  (Alberta, Canada)

Rememori is a degenerative memory game and playable poem that grapples with the effects of dementia on an intimate circle of characters.

Play-read or read-play, however you approach it and whoever you identify with, you’ll become entangled in a struggle for accurate recall, attention and the search for meaning. Inevitably, it’s a contrary game – there can be no winners.

I began creating Rememori about a year ago, when my father was in the later stages of Alzheimer’s Disease but still living at home, being cared for by my mother. I finished the work this weekend, coincidentally just as my father moved from a hospital ward into a Nursing Care Home. On the face of it, the main reason why it’s taken so long to make is because I took time out to work on other projects. During that period my father had a third massive stroke and the prognosis didn’t look good. So for a while, I think I was reluctant to return to the piece. I’m glad I did. There can be no happy endings in situations like these but, now that we have him settled in our preferred Care Home, there’s a sense of respite. I think the work reflects that, certainly in the later stages of the game.

Having said that, the work is a game – it’s not factual, it’s not autobiographical, but like all works of art, it’s fed by reflecting on one’s experience.

Modified image of brain: source thanks to Wellcome Library, London.

Click white bar to toggle sound on/off

A collaboration for remixworx: concept and roadwork by runran, visualization and code by crissxross, based loosely on animations by babel.

Photograph of Ailsa Dyson by Gordie Agar (Winnipeg), texts adapted from One Million Footnotes by poet Geof Huth, music loop from Palais de Glace by media artist Talan Memmott.

Source files: notesnoir (CS5.5 + SWF) or Noir-10-CS4.fla

In his article, Stefans draws a comparison between Out of Touch and  ”a very early piece of internet poetry by the graphic designer Juliet Martin called ‘oooxxxooo,’ …which took as its subject the apparently desperate need of the artist-protagonist for the computer to ameliorate her loneliness.” About my piece, he goes on to say:

Her use of video, particularly the manipulations that reduce reality to iconic or cartoon-like (which I read as linguistic) simplicity, accentuates some of the horror at the base of this piece, which has a quasi-Expressionist element — I can’t help but see echoes of “The Scream” in here, or perhaps, with a very different valence in relation to time and experience (it doesn’t happen in Wilks’s piece), the blurred faces in the work of Christian Boltanski.

Making Out of Touch

Despite my background in film-making and scriptwriting, I rarely set out with a written script, storyboard or a wireframe design, a blueprint that I execute. I start with a collection (or network) of ideas that I want to explore. Then I experiment; manipulating text, code, images, sounds, video fx, animation, narrative elements… until something meaningful emerges.  To me, it seems a very hands-on, even tactile approach, like that of a sculptor or collage artist – although what is there to actually touch? A keyboard, a mouse, a digital drawing tablet. It’s a far cry from handling messy art materials or tussling with camera, tripod, lights on location and reels of celluloid in the cutting room. And yet there’s a strong sense of the haptic in what I do. This preoccupation with touch and its absence is a recurring feature in my work – e.g. the handiwork of the dressmaker in Fitting the Pattern and the sculptor in Underbelly – so I find it interesting that, in relation to Out of Touch, Stefans describes Juliet Martin’s oooxxxooo piece as “linguistic sculpture.” It also highlights how digital synaesthesia is a key expressive quality of digital media arts. And while I’m on the subject of cross-wiring… from crissxross to R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX and more xxxooo…

More Third Hand Plays

See my last post for a list of the previously published works of e-literature in the Third Hand Plays series and Brian Stefan’s accompanying articles. Also keep checking the SFMOMA blog throughout August for more posts in the series.

MaMSIE* Study Day

Birkbeck, University of London, 20 May 2011

My playable media fiction, Underbelly, will be exhibited throughout the Study Day, which concludes with the presentation of the winners of the Digital Media Competition 2011: Maternal Subjectivities, Care and Labour - and I’m delighted to announce that Underbelly is the overall winner!

The other winners are:

• Marie-Josiane Agossou and Esther Jones for ‘The Order of Things‘, an 8 minute video
• Hester Jones, ‘Call Yourself a Mother’:  2 photos
• Hollie McNish – ‘Push Kick‘ audio poetry collection
• Marina Velez – two photographs, ‘My Family 1′ and ‘Strowis Motherhood’.

About the Study Day

MaMSIE is an international network of scholars, artists and activists working in the emerging interdisciplinary field of maternal studies. Our 6th event focuses on the interrelations between labour, capital, care and the maternal. In particular, it will consider the diverse ways ‘maternal care’ has been, and continues to be delegated and shared, and the implications for our understandings of maternal subjectivities and the labour of care.

The study day will open up ‘maternity’ as a term that includes the paid and unpaid work of a diverse range of social actors. It aims at generating a dialogue between two rich and substantial bodies of feminist scholarship; work on the social histories of domestic labour, service and servitude and current debates about globalism, migration and the care industries, recasting existing scholarship through the lens of maternal studies.

The Keynote speaker is Stella Sandford. Other speakers include: Rosie Cox, Lucy Delap, Alison Light, Mirca Madianou,Daniel Miller, Jenny Mitchell, Kate Pullinger, Rachel Thomson, Imogen Tyler, and Helen Wood.

Many thanks to the MaMSIE network and the organisers of both the Study Day and the Digital Media Competition. For more information see MaMSIE events.

*Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics

Wednesday 4 May, 7.30pm

The Riverside, 1 Mowbray Street, Neepsend, Sheffield, S3

Signposts, South Yorkshire, presents the second in a series of performance experiments – three pieces in three different mediums.

The Shoebox Experiment (3 x 3)

Quint and Jow

Quint and Jow share a common goal: to prove that there’s more to the average pub quiz than meets the eye. Forming a team called The Venns, they spend improbable amounts of time in the pub… testing their theories, of course.  Through charts, graphs, and (their favourite) Venn diagrams, Quint and Jow will bring you exciting and unexpected findings from their not-entirely-serious research project. The Venns: A Quest for the Perfect Pub Quiz is created and performed by Chella Quint and Richard Jow

Underbelly

Underbelly is an award-winning work of digital fiction about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former colliery in Yorkshire. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, from when women used to work underground mining coal. Created for the web, Underbelly is a playable story with multiple endings determined by choice and chance. Lurking within the dark regions of its map-like narrative terrain, are hidden voices, animated elements and grotesque imagery, which Christine Wilks will unearth in her live performance of the work.

The Nose!

Gogol’s “The Nose” represents one of the pioneering triumphs of the early absurdist movement; transcending satire, narrative and common sense. Locally  based storyteller Tim Ralphs transports the Shoebox to St Petersburg’s prospects in this hilarious and enticing re-imagining of the tale as a live performance. A drunkard barber, a womanising Major, a buzz of rumours and the inconceivable disappearance of The Nose!  Originally conceived as a series of podcasts, ‘The Nose’ is recomposed for the Shoebox Experiment.

Audience Feedback from the First Shoebox Experiment:

“Was brilliant. So different to anything I’ve seen before!

“Stunning”

“I enjoyed the atmosphere, mellow attentiveness, intimacy, surprise, voices, passion, stories, HEART, writing!”

Tickets: £4 (£3 concessions) are available at the Shoebox on the night and can be reserved in advance by email. Plus a fully stocked bar to whet your whistle and the company of a warm, welcoming audience ready for something new! Contact naomi.wilds@ntlworld.com or 0775 352 8919 to reserve your space. Map and directions.

See you there!

Underbelly

A splendid new edition of Hyperrhiz, the peer-reviewed online journal specializing in new media criticism and net art, is now published. And I’m delighted to announce that Underbelly features in the Gallery. Here are the full contents:

HYPERRHIZ.08

Issue 8
Spring 2011

Essays

Century of change? Media arts then and now
Darren Tofts

The Avant Garde Doesn’t Give Up
McKenzie Wark

The Brautigan Library: Questions and challenges of archiving electronic literature
John F. Barber

This is not that kind of library. This is another kind of library.
Nicholas Schiller

Computational Narration of Inner Thought: Memory, Reverie Machine
Jichen Zhu and D. Fox Harrell

Gallery

Underbelly
Christine Wilks

Speak Far and Wide
Hazel Smith and Roger Dean

Narrative Multiplicities + Pack Media: re-reading the reader into Dracula
Whitney Anne Trettien

Review

Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco, Reading Hypertext
Marvin E. Hobson

Read more at www.hyperrhiz.net

So much history is buried beneath our feet, and histories buried in other ways, by forgetfulness or disregard. If you live in a former mining area in Britain, that history is deep underground. Evidence of the coal mines have been erased from the landscape, swept away in less than a generation. Deeper still in the past there’s a buried history of women working underground too. When I found out about the women miners, I thought of my sister, the sculptor, Melanie Wilks, working on the site of a former colliery turned into parkland, hand-carving stone on the very ground above where those pasts are buried.

Such fragments of contemporary life and shards of history I hauled together to build Underbelly in digital media, collaging a rich and often grotesque mix of imagery, spoken word, video, animation and text. It’s an interactive story about a woman artist who, while sculpting on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, is haunted by a medley of voices.

Melanie Wilks carving on site of former power station, picketed during 1984 Miners’ Strike

It includes video of my sister carving and the voices are performed by me. The historical content is drawn from the testimonies of 19th Century women miners collected by Lord Ashley’s Mines Commission of 1842, which exposed working conditions in the pits.

Sisters

My sister and I were raised in Morley, a Northern industrial town, whose prosperity in previous centuries was built on shoddy mills, coal mining and quarrying. Our family has lived in this area for generations and, although we both moved away, we found ourselves returning to Morley to live.

When we were growing up here, the place was black, black with soot from the mill chimneys and heavy industry. Pollution clings to carboniferous sandstone and almost everything, apart from the modern housing estates, was built from the local sandstone. It felt like the coal-black of the pits had risen above ground, as if the back-to-back houses, the chapels, the pubs, the civic buildings were built from coal. I even remember, as a baby, my sister used to like eating the stuff. We had coal fires, of course, and there was warmth, but I wanted to escape all that blackness and the weight of the Victorian heritage bearing down on us.

'The Miner' in Woodkirk Quarry where Melanie carved it in 2007

So it’s ironic that I ended up back in my old hometown, Melanie too, both of us creating artworks that are rooted in the locality, which Underbelly clearly is if not my other works. As for my sister, well, most of her creative output is located in the area. She carves it from the local sandstone, often working in the local quarry (where she met her husband, Neil, an ex-miner). She is quite literally a local artist. Whereas, in some sense, I’m not really present in Morley. I’m in my computer most of the time, in virtual space, roaming the internet, connecting, conversing and often collaborating with other people, geographically far away, in other countries.

And where does my work exist? It’s digital, conjured up out of code – just zeros and ones when you get down to it – it’s nowhere and anywhere and all over the place, scattered or drifting, packets of data being pulled and pushed in cyberspace. Whereas Melanie’s stone sculptures are unequivocally present, rock solid in a geographical location. We’re at opposite ends of the scale – sisters, so similar and yet so far apart in terms of the materials and processes we work with. But both of us, in our different ways, working with the past in the present.

Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism

'The Miner' being installed outside Morley Town Hall

Recently I gave a talk about Underbelly, and performed it too, for the Neo-Victorian Art and Aestheticism Conference at Hull University. My aim was to explore the connections between the digital fiction’s vernacular Victorian representations and its 21st Century sculptor, whose art practice is based on that of my sister, hand-carving in what could be viewed as a traditional and vernacular figurative style. It’s no coincidence that Melanie’s work is often commissioned by local communities in West Yorkshire to commemorate the passing of their traditional industries or, more particularly, the passing of those working lives. There’s a poignancy to the sculptures but they also evoke a strong sense of Neo-Victorian civic pride – for example, The Weaver and The Miner, two sculptures by Melanie sited in front of Morley’s grand 19th Century Town Hall.

The unveiling of 'The Weaver' outside Morley Town Hall, 2007

For my presentation, I tried to unearth some of the rich ironies, contradictions and correspondences between our almost diametrically opposed art forms, our experiences as working women, our uses of the past, and also how and where our artworks are situated in the (past)present. You can see the images I talked about and draw your own connections in my Underbelly Cabinet of Curios, which is a digital collection of some of the sources, influences and catalysts that gave rise to Underbelly. There’s also a peek at one stage of the process of writing and structuring the digital story. In another compartment of the ‘Cabinet’, I’ve collected some creative works by others that struck a chord with me in relation to the themes I explore in Underbelly. Speaking of which, here’s another…

Neo-Victorian Folk Song

Another instance of a vernacular Neo-Victorian aesthetic in a traditional artform, The Unthanks sing the testimony of a girl miner. I used some of Patience Kershaw’s testimony in Underbelly too.

Thanks to James Pope, one of the judges for the New Media Writing Prize 2010 (which was awarded to Underbelly) for drawing my attention to this moving Neo-Victorian folk song (originally by Frank Higgins) on The Unthanks album, Here’s The Tender Coming.

Introducing the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, an electronic literature database documenting works, critical writing, authors, publishers, organizations, events, teaching resources and more…

Currently in public beta, it’s sure to be a fantastic resource for anyone interested in electronic literature in Europe and beyond. Readers, writers and researchers are encouraged to actively participate. I’m also delighted to note that the Knowledge Base includes some of my e-lit works too.

*ELMCIP is a 3-year collaborative research project running from 2010-2013, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation.

The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2, launched on the web last week, is an anthology of works by an international group of authors “that pushes through the boundaries of literary forms, creating new kinds of experiences for interacting readers.”  And, I’m delighted to say, it includes two of my works – Fitting the Pattern and Tailspin.

Published by the Electronic Literature Organisation, and edited by Laura Borràs, Talan Memmott, Rita Raley, and Brian Kim Stefans, Volume 2 picks up where the first volume, ELC1, left off.

The new collection includes 63 works drawn from (and extending beyond):

• Countries: Austria, Australia, Catalonia, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Israel, The Netherlands, Portugal, Peru, Spain, UK, US
• Languages: Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish
• Formats: Flash, Processing, Java, JavaScript, Inform, HTML, C++

Like ELC1, the collection can be browsed by author, title, or keyword.

ELC2 speaks to both the continuity as well as the bright future of electronic literature. The works include many of the emerging categories of e-lit: mash-ups, geolocative, codework, as well as “traditional” and evolving forms such as hypertext, chatbots, and interactive fiction. The authors list presents readers with both veterans and newcomers to the field.

The collection is also available on DVD for free on request from the ELO.

ELC2 is published under a Creative Commons license, which means the collection can be freely shared, non-commercially, between individuals, libraries, and schools, provided that appropriate attribution is maintained and the works are unmodified.