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

Screenshot of Underbelly

Underbelly ‘beta version’ launched today!

UPDATE: new version uploaded 26 March 2010

Underbelly is my latest playable media fiction that I created in Flash. I call it a playable fiction because you need to explore it with your mouse to find and play the many voices of the narrator. It’s about a woman sculptor, carving on the site of a former Yorkshire colliery, now landscaped into a country park. As she carves, she is disturbed by a medley of voices, along with her ticking biological clock, and the player/reader is plunged into an underworld of the artist’s repressed fears and desires mashed up with the disregarded histories of the 19th Century women who once worked underground mining coal.

Yesterday I performed Underbelly at the stimulating and wonderfully amplified Transliteracy Conference in Leicester at the new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre. The conference was a rich mix of practitioners’ talks, academic papers and artists’ presentations. I was delighted to share an artists’ panel, classed as Transliterate Practice, with Michael J Maguire, who performed his experimental piece, cameltext, and Steve Gibson, who talked about his game-installation, Grand Theft Bicycle. (Later in the day I took a joy ride on his eponymous bicycle and caused a bit of havoc in game-art shooter land;) To get a flavour of our panel session, see the liveblog: Practice in Transliteracy – parallel session 2

Calling for Underbelly user testers

Taking my cue from another Transliteracy presentation, Kirsty McGill on Remote Audiences, I’d like to engage some remote user testing of Underbelly. As discussed in my panel’s session, one kind of transliterate practice is where an individual artist takes on a number of roles to create a multimedia digital work across what are traditionally considered different disciplines. This is certainly how I made Underbelly – I devised, wrote, designed, programmed, animated, image-edited, sound recorded/mixed and even performed the voices. One thing I didn’t do was carve the sculptures – that’s the work of my sister, Melanie Wilks. I relish working in multiple media on my own, independently, but one of the downsides is that I hardly have anyone around me to grab and say, ‘Hey, have a go at this, does it work for you?’ (other than my hard-pressed partner, Dane Gould, whom I can’t thank enough) and usability testing is essential for interactive pieces.

So I would be very grateful if, after playing with Underbelly, you would leave comments for me here about any bugs or issues you might find, or any improvements you’d like to see to the user interface. Comments on any other aspect of the work would be most welcome too. Cheers.

For a good proportion of this year I’ve been working with Kate Pullinger and Sue Thomas on building a new resource, an archive of all the Guest Lectures given during the four years of the online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University:  www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com.  And now the archive has been selected for inclusion by Intute, the primary UK web resource for academic researchers. See the entry here.

The archive contains lectures from theorists and practitioners as varied as Christy Dena, Rita Raley, Alan Sondheim, Caitlin Fisher, and John Cayley… oh, and me too.  This resource, which is under the aegis of the Transliteracy Research Group, will be of value to practitioners, students and academics with an interest in transliteracy, digital fiction, digital art, e-poetry, and cross-media.  Please feel free to use this archive and discuss it at our Transliteracy Notes Ning community.