if:book:group

if:book:group 25/10 - introduction

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:25:51 +0000

Chris Meade: I'm Chris Meade, co-director of if:book in London. At if:book we look at how the locus of culture has shifted from printed book to the screen. As a group, we have a variety of approaches. I've spent the last 12 years promoting books: poetry, children's literature and fiction. Recently, I've also become involved in creative writing and new media.

I'm interested in story and play: are there completely new ways of making narrative in the modern world? Or does it take us back to essential forms of narrative? How can we best have a deep impact, using the creative possibilities of new media?

I'm addicted to story. Even low-grade TV drama: I want to know what happens next. But if I get into a multimedia new fiction space, I get tetchy: I want something to happen quickly. Then in children's books there's talk about the importance of closure, the 'happy ever after'. But then looking at how kids play, they dip in and out of narrative all the time with no great need to reach a conclusion. I'm interested in all these things, how they play out online and off.

james bridle:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:18:10 +0000

I was an editor at small publishing house - so small I did everything - we were trying to work out how to get books out there with no budget. So I used the internet a lot. Gradually I became more absorbed in that, and as well as blogging I now work for a digital publishing organisation. We look for ways to help traditional publishers get to grips with the internet. I'm generally interested in pushing literature everywhere possible: for example we did a festival this year around creative commons and open source.

simon fox:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:15:03 +0000

I've been fascinated with words, stories (plot is the most accurate) since I was very young. I've also always been interested in computers and games. I'm involved with lots of projects: probably the most relevant to this gathering is 'The Written World', a collaborative writing project that we're launching in the new year. We want to create a world around the act of writing a story, make that world persistent, and find ways to make act of writing in the world as intuitive as playing a game.

lucy allen:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:13:50 +0000

I'm a producer of arts organisation Foolish People. We create art, ritual theatre and meta-events using immersive, interactive, open-source myths.

john harrigan:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:13:28 +0000

I'm a director of the theatre group Foolish People. Foolish People is about the missing link, the piece that's always left out. Hermetica, esotericism, gnosticism. When people connect with the word, we're interested in how and what that connection is. The numinous. If people come away from our events without fundamentally changing, we've failed.

We work with open-source myths: for example, Terra Incognita brought 50 artists from all over the world together using a source code of myths to connect the work. They all contributed work, and each work linked into the narrative which Foolish People manifested via actors.

We've just finished a short run of Dead Language at the ICA. It's a show about how entertainment is used to overlay reality with a layer of filth that prevents people having a numinous connection with their own narrative.

cindy osmond:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:10:21 +0000

I'm a theatre maker. I've been involved in experimental theatre since the 60s, and I'm now making a history of experimental theatre from the 1960s to '80s (more about this here). I believe it's important for theatre audiences and artists to know where they came from, so I've been interviewing contemporaries, and now have 40 hours of intimate conversations. They'll all be housed in the British Library archive - but I don't want them to languish there. I want to do something with them.

sebastian mary:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:09:32 +0000

I work with Bob and Chris at the Institute, and mostly write about new online literary forms, alternate reality gaming and the like. I'm also co-founder of a web startup and run an experimental London art event called arthouseparty.

noga applebaum:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:08:40 +0000

Six years ago, I was writing a novel for young children. Part of the story took place on the internet. I got quite a lot of people to look at it while I was writing it, but most of their reactions were very negative. People didn't understand it. At the time, I was doing a degree in children's literature; I decided to do my dissertation on the presentation of computers in children's literature.

I've since done a PhD in children's literature, and I've found that there's a real ambivalence there. Most of these texts are very technophobic. The technology we see today empowers children in a way that adults find threatening, and my thesis is that adults write these things out of fear of losing control and upsetting the power balance between children and adults. You can find a lot of factual evidence for this in the ways adults deal with children's internet use.

I find this frustrating - children are so good at moving between spaces, yet the books written for them don't reflect that. So I'm interested in seeing more stuff aimed at children that uses their different abilities – after all, maybe the reason so many children stop reading at 12 is that they find it frustrating to try when the books produced for them don't reflect the skills they have or the things they're interested in.

bob stein:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:06:26 +0000

I work with Mary and Chris at the Institute. On the surface, I'm interested in how discourse is changing as it moves to networked screens. But fundamentally I'm interested in what it means to be human in the age of machines.

kate pullinger:

admin — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 14:06:01 +0000

I'm a print novelist. I also write digital fiction. I have one ongoing digital fiction project, Inanimate Alice, and just got funding from the Arts Council for new project, 'Flight paths', which will launch soon. It's a networked novel: an attempt to open up the process of writing to ongoing dialogue around both how we write, and also the subject matter of the novel.I also teach at De Montfort University, where I helped to set up the MA in digital media and writing.