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)

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.

We’re used to seeing print writers give readings on the literary festival circuit. Electronic writers need to do this kind of thing too. Self-publishing and submitting work for online publications and exhibitions is fine, but you can’t just rely on an audience finding your work on the web – like musicians and print writers, it helps to go out on the promotional trail, make a live appearance, give a performance.

Later this month my transliterate abilities as an e-lit performer are going to be tested – at Ilkley Literature Fringe Festival, with a great group of poets and fiction writers, and at Inspace in Edinburgh, with a fabulous line-up of digital writers and artists, as part of the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2010).

In Ilkley, I’m performing with a group of creative print writers who came out of the Yorkshire Art Circus writer development programme some years ago. It’s a kind of reunion and to give ourselves an angle, we’re staging it as The Writers’ Group Exposed!!! We’ll be simulating a typical meeting – well, maybe not so typical because there will be an electronic writer in the group. It’ll be interesting to see how my e-lit (Fitting the Pattern) is received in this context.

For any writer, it’s seldom as simple as giving a reading, as the Ilkley gig demonstrates, but for the electronic writer, inevitably, there’s even more to consider. You’ve got to sort out the tech (computer software/hardware, digital displays/projection, sound, etc.) and more than likely you’ve got to be able to operate your tech and read/perform at the same time. Those are the practicalities, but there are also aesthetic and dramaturgical considerations too. How will your live self, your bodily presence, affect or interact with the virtual presence/s, visually, sonically and kinetically? Should work designed for the web be repurposed for live performance?

Canadian electronic writer Jim Andrews has an interesting take on this. Here’s his plan for a work he intends to perform at e-Poetry 2011:

Basically, the idea of the project is to scream my fool head off while playing Jig-Sound and dbCinema as instruments.

You’ve seen musicians play an instrument while they sing. Well, this is similar. Only I’ll be telling a story between (or perhaps during) screaming bouts. And the instruments I’ll be playing are Jig-Sound, which is sonic, and dbCinema, which is visual.

If live gigs are part of the process of reaching an audience, then should one build that potential into the design of the work from the outset (or at least somewhere along the way during the process of creation)? Should one consider it an opportunity for transmedia storytelling rather than promotion and networking?

In Edinburgh I’m performing Underbelly – playing it like an instrument – in an evening dedicated to Language in Digital Performance and, as such, the occasion will give me scope to explore these potentialities. For the most part, Underbelly presents a diegetic story-world that explores a psychic landscape where the predominance of spoken word exploits the intimate relationship between voice and the body, voice and interiority. I designed the piece as a work of playable media but not particularly for live performance so I’ll be adapting it for the Inspace show, mixing my live voice with the multiple voices on the digital soundtrack.

The ICIDS Language in Digital Performance event is billed as Inspace no one can hear you scream and, since it’s taking place on Halloween, we’ve been invited ‘to engage the spirit of this festival’… so, who knows, I might end up screaming too.

Article cross-posted from Transliteracy.com

Here’s how Lisa Baraitser and Sigal Spigel describe the work in their editorial:

Christine Wilks’ wonderfully quirky interactive digital media work: Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter… is a memoir about her mother, a skilled dressmaker, whom Christine grew up with in Leeds. Christine makes use of biographical minutiae at their intersection with cultural representations for exploring the emergence of subjectivities within mother-daughter relations. The work invites the reader/viewer to take part in the exploration and mediated construction of perplexed yet intimate mother-daughter relationship.

About Studies in the Maternal

Studies in the Maternal is an international, peer-reviewed, scholarly online journal. It aims to provide a forum for contemporary critical debates on the maternal understood as lived experience, social location, political and scientific practice, economic and ethical challenge, a theoretical question, and a structural dimension in human relations, politics and ethics.

The e-journal publishes “articles, essays and reviews from academics, writers, artists and clinical and cultural practitioners who engage with the maternal from diverse perspectives,” including multimedia work that “falls outside of the textual tradition.”

Here are the contents of the current issue:

remixed for R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX from: dr ted orion morrow’s business card + Worx + Fitting the Pattern

flash8 source: sizingUp_fl8.fla (204 KB)

Being Creatively Autobiographical in New Media

My lecture takes the form of a micro-site that explores the creative process of writing, designing and building my interactive memoir, Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker’s daughter, in Flash.

I offer the lecture here as a kind of sneak preview of the forthcoming Creative Writing and New Media Archive of Online Guest Lectures, which is a project of the new Transliteracy Research Group based at DMU. But more on that later.

In the meantime, I was thrilled to learn recently that Rita Raley, Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, is teaching Fitting the Pattern in her course on Electronic Literature in the section on Cybertext: interactivity & playable texts. It’s quite an honour to be included amongst “some of the most technically and intellectually compelling works on the web”, to quote the Course Overview. I’d love to hear what the students make of it.

Indeed, I’d love to hear any feedback about my creative work so please feel free to email me (crissxross at crissxross dot net) or leave a comment.

Kate Pullinger's 'Line of Influence' at Binary Katwalk

Binarykatwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, curated by locative media/new media artist and writer, Jeremy Hight, and this month sees the launch of the Kate Pullinger section of The Line of Influence, which is:

…a series of a few artists selected to show their work alongside who influenced them and those they see as kindred spirits coming up. This is not an ordinary exhibition, but instead a chance to show how ideas and works progress over time and how no artist is a solitary force out there.

I’m honoured that Kate has chosen to include my own piece, Fitting the Pattern, alongside Flight Paths, the networked novel she co-creates with Chris Joseph, These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher and Renee Turner’s She….

Fitting the Pattern in the Binary Katwalk open-gallery-network

Christine Wilks Demonstrating “The Dressmaker’s Daughter” at the Electronic Literature in Europe Conference from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

There’s also video documentation of readings/performances by Renee Turner; Maria Mencia; Noah Wardrip-Fruin; Talon Memmott; Judd Morrissey, Mark Jeffery and Fanny Holmin; Ian Hatcher; and also Robert Coover’s keynote speech.

This was a great conference organised by Scott, who in his report says:

In putting together the conference, I had a few specific goals in mind. The first was to bring together the critical, theoretical, pedagogical, and infra-structural thinking that might typify an academic conference with the creative writers who are actually producing the works on which the field is based. I think that in electronic literature we are really privileged in that the scholars and creative writers are not divided into two separate communities, but are part of one coevolving community. To this end, I thought it would be important to present both academic papers, and to do so within the framework of a peer review structure, but also to present readings of electronic literature, in environments suited to performance of digital works.

The majority of the stimulating academic papers that were presented are available on the conference site here: elitineurope.net

Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past – an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother.

Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions… haphazardly, in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. Fitting the Pattern attempts to replicate this experience, hence it’s a memoir in pieces for you to explore…

I gave a live performance of this piece last month at the Creative Writing and New Media MA showcase at the IOCT Salon at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. That was fun!