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Christine Wilks, PhD

Writer, artist, developer of creative web apps and interactive digital narratives, and practice-based researcher.

Christine smiling

About me

I like to write, design, code and animate digital stories and art experiences for the web. In my creative practice and research I specialise in character-driven interactive digital narratives that adapt to reader choice and have the potential to move people and, in some instances, benefit their well-being. This involves developing original ludonarrative techniques (where story and gameplay entwine) to model convincing characters with apparent psychological depth.

Current projects

My latest creative work is Voices, an interactive digital fiction for body image bibliotherapy, which I made for Writing New Body Worlds, an international, transdisciplinary research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I was the postdoctoral researcher-creator on the project.

I’m also the digital narrative creator for another international, interdisciplinary research project, The intimate technology shaping millions of lives, which explores the effects of menstrual tracking apps for people with diverse embodied experiences. The project is supported by the Marsden Fund (New Zealand/Aotearoa). Once we have the findings from the research phase, I’ll start work on the story-driven app.

Currently, I’m working on a personal project, an interactive psychological thriller narrative called Stitched Up. This work-in-progress began life as part of my creative practice-based PhD in Digital Writing at Bath Spa University. During which, I also built an early prototype version of my original interactive narrative engine, the Conversengine, and my custom-built authoring tool, the Convowriter. My PhD thesis is entitled: Stitched Up in The Conversengine: Using Expressive Processing and Multimodal Languages to Create a Character-Driven Interactive Digital Narrative.

Past work

I created the majority of my earlier works of interactive storytelling and playable media in Flash (a technology that the web no longer supports). My digital fiction, Underbelly, won the New Media Writing Prize 2010 and the MaMSIE Digital Media Competition 2011. My work is published in online journals and anthologies, including the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 and the ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, and has been presented at international festivals, exhibitions and conferences. You can also see these Flash works in my Archive. From 2007 to 2013 I was a core member of the digital arts remixing collective, Remixworx, and contributed over 100 remixes. Before working in digital media and web technologies, I made short films, videos, animations, installations and wrote fiction and screenplays.

Qualifications & skills

I have a PhD in Digital Writing from Bath Spa University, an MA in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University and an MA in Fine Art from Cardiff Institute of Higher Education.

I’m a member of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Creative tech skills

I’m based in the north of England but do most of my work remotely.