[Creative Writing and New Media MA Showcase]

Another event - 2 in 1 day! - at the IOCT. Following Andrea Saveri's talk on Amplified Individuals we have the Online MA's showcase of the first two years that the course has been running.

Along with the presentations is a pamphlet giving a bit of a context of the first two years of work as well as bios of all the students. Disclosure: I wrote the essay. Tomorrow this will be downloadable from the course website: http://www.creativewritingandnewmedia.com/

From the IOCT Salon blurb:

"The Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University is designed for writers interested in experimenting with new formats and exploring the potential of new technologies in their writing. This first annual CWNM Salon is a unique opportunity to enjoy the best work from the first two years of the course with installations and talks from some of the students."

Note: Check out Chris Meade's "Digital Livings" booklet which takes a look at how to make money as a writer in the new media world. There is a downloadable version which will be available soon.
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First Up
Chris Meade - "Drumming Becoming: The Role of Percussion"

Chris's presentation with drumming is here.

An excerpt:
"In the 90s in Birmingham libraries we ran a project about Silence.
A brilliant young percussionist
whose name now escapes me
played in the Central Library, built up more and more sound
around the ambient hum
of escalators, footfall,murmurings, phone bells.
How much could he enhance the sounds of a place that's thought of as silent
without rupturing the hush?"


After the presentation on drumming Chris "reads" his song on the future of the book. Although he knows the words by heart and the rhythm is his own, still while reading live and aloud the rhythm is slightly different from the recorded version. So at times we can hear the live version slightly before the recorded one. It's like a long-distance telephone call.

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Toni Le Busque on "Miffy Johnston's Toenails and Other Stories - a combination of fiction and non fiction 100 word stories using Sophie ( http://www.sophieproject.org ), an open-source platform for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment, created by The Institute for the Future of the Book."

Early on in the MA Toni decided to start writing stories of 100 words. Enough to get her points across but still easily digestible for the web.

Toni's "America" video used free archive.org images. The music is also copyright-free. Check out lebusqe.com for links to all of Toni's work.

Interestingly with Toni's work with flash page-turning software (Sophie from the Future of the Book) a lot of people "had a go at her." Some suggested she was a proponent for the death of the book. Interesting. If anything this kind of tie to print books suggests a respect/awareness of tradition? As a defense to this Toni says she has to pay a lot of attention to design. She is not the "poor man's" novelist.

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Kirsty McGill - Discussing her ongoing project to develop a next-generation rich-media tour for the UNESCO World Heritage city of Bath.

Realised that existing virtual tours are pretty bland, mostly text and hardly any narrative, just read the wikipedia definition:

A virtual tour (or panaramic tour) is a simulation of an actually existing location, usually composed of panoramic images, a sequence of hyperlinked still or video images, and/or virtual models of the real location. They also may use other multimedia elements such as sound effects, music, narration, and text. As opposed to actual tourism, a virtual tour is typically accessed on a personal computer or an interactive kiosk.

Rather different from a *real* tour guide is the inability to ask the guide questions. Kirsty has been creating a question-and-answer facility with a chatterbot with pandora: http://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/home.

Read Kirsty's blog for updates on her project: Custard Ether.

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Claudia Cragg
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ccragg/ "If you build it, they will come". To what extent does this apply to Facebook and MySpace sites and, if no one comes, just exactly what can you do about it? Claudia will discuss this and other questions in relation to her Aung San Suu Kyi (Burma) Lab research Participatory Media project: http://108presentsforsuu.googlepages.com/home .

Been a journalist since last '70s and asked to help collect signatures and raise awareness for Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi. How to raise awareness? Well the world is suffering from "charity fatigue" so a new media way might be the "sexiest" way to get the word out. First do a vast amount of reading! Second: how do you actually crowd source, how do you get to the crowd?

Note: web 2.0 basically makes the printed word and journalism more "dynamic." Interesting.

If the message isn't enough, need to generate and maintain interest - keep people there more than 10 seconds.

Following Howard Rheingold, it's not enough to just have a website, need to have other ways of sharing info such as Facebook , Twitter and a blog. (link frontline sms as used by Obama).

Background findings - older people won't join Facebook to add their signatures to the petition.
Learnt a number of lessons - thought enthusiasm and demonstrable results would be enough to convince old media journalists - nope, they just don't get it. A blog is absolutely essential. Twitter has been successful but not as successful as Claudia thinks...despite coverage in the Wall Tweet Journal. So telephony based communication is essential for the future of any collaborative projects. Claudia says most of what she has learnt isn't exactly technical but human - she needs a team to create the project.

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Christine Wilks
http://www.crissxross.net

Fitting the Pattern: or being a dressmaker's daughter -
a memoir in pieces (embroidered)

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

Christine reads out exerpts but there's a bit where she talks about being bullied for her "softly tailoured outfits" and does this fantastic "northern" accent.

"How we were turned out was more important than how we turned out."

"In her outfits I didn't fit in I stuck out and felt stuck up."

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Alison Norrington
http://www.alisonnorrington.com Showcasing Staying Single, Alison's first cross-media work of fictional blogging which gave readers a variety of ways to engage, participate with and receive the story, including fragmented chapters emailed to subscribers, SMS alerts through Twitter, mini documentaries of real-life stories, meet-ups in Second Life and Machinima films. She will also offer a sneak-preview of her plans for her second cross-media fiction I love NY.

For Alison's dissertation project she wanted to give her readers ways of interacting with the story (if they wanted to) and "be more immersed."

Realised that although she had 15 chapters ready (for Staying Single) but it wasn't current or "punchy" enough. By writing it every day instead of uploading before hand she was able to pull from current events (Jordan and Peter Andre) and create more bite-size bits.

Offered:

Daily posts on blogger, e-mail to subscribers, podcast chapters, sophiedilemma.com, youtube documentaries, social networking (bebo, myspace, facebook), twitter, second life, forum, micropoll - with hindsight this was way too much to run.

On MySpace was a bit seedy - the people who approached Alison (as Sophie) were all about not staying single...While Facebook attracted more of the mid 30s-40s crowd.

When Alison went on holiday she wasn't sure how that would work with the story. So decided that Sophie would go on holiday too. Alison then asked if readers would like a postcard from her holiday, 85 real people responded so Alison spent a good part of her day sending out real cards.

Participation: asked readers to send in their best and worst chat-up lines which then appeared online. Some hilarious ones that I'm not blogging here....

Three most popular ways to get to the story: youbtube, second life meet ups and e-mails from sophie

New Story: I Love NY

long distance relationship between and American stoke-broker who is quite laddish and society-like and the fiance who is based in London and is more Bohemian. Right now there is a Facebook profile and youtube. But wants to add an interactive sticker project/game, wedding inviations and justin (product launch of "just in case" special bag with sleep-over necessities like toothbrush etc...). Interestingly for Alison, what all these other outlets provide is more of the "background" story.