Month: June 2007

In 1980, on a November evening in Los Angeles, pedestrians who walked past the glass windows of the Broadway Department Store noticed something strange…they did not see their reflection. There were other people walking by, just not them. They ended up talking with the alien reflections and realized that they were in two different locations, indeed, on other sides of a country: the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City and the Broadway Department Store in Century City in LA. This work, called Hole-in-Space, was created by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

Last year I was recruited to a group to consult on a project for the Australian communications company Telstra. I recommended that Telstra, given their core brand is (I believe) enabling people to communicate with each other (not tourism!), that they install a contemporary version of Galloway and Rabinowitz’s work. Using their substantial communications infrastructure they could link together two key and important communities: rural Australia with urban Australia; and Australians in the street with people in the streets of the online virtual world Second Life. The project has been put on hold indefinitely and since the future of the project is unknown and I wasn’t compensated for my advice, I’m sharing it here. But recently I came across a different iteration on the theme, and one that bypasses the corporate and art world.

A few years ago Dr. Sugata Mitra, head of research and development at an IT firm in India, installed a computer in the wall of a slum area in India. He put it in to enable the children to use the computer and the Internet for free. He wanted to see what the children would do if they had unlimited and free access to these technologies. He called it the Hole in the Wall experiment. Within minutes, a Frontline segment explained, the children taught themselves computer literacy. Dr. Mitra has installed computers in many areas now and revels in the response. He is quite conscious of the immense impact of his cybernetic seed:

“If cyberspace is considered a place,” Mitra tells FRONTLINE/World, “then there are people who are already in it, and people who are not in it … I think the hole in the wall gives us a method to create a door, if you like, through which large numbers of children can rush into this new arena. When that happens, it will have changed our society forever.”

The segment told the story of the first boy to teach himself the computer and Net: Rajinder. He creates things using paint programs, plays games and browses the Disney website. His teacher notes that ‘he has become quite bold and expressive’.

When Dr. Mitra asks Rajinder to define the Internet, the doe-eyed boy replies immediately, “That with which you can do anything.”

And so, we move from people connecting with each other, to people tapping into possibility. The continuing theme, whether it is enunciated by artists, the corporate world or a single person who wants to heal the rift of the digital divide, is that of creating portals where once there where walls. It doesn’t matter if the wall, the ostacle is financial, cultural, geographic or technological, we’ll find a way to dissipate it. I’m so happy to have front-row seats to one of the most amazing times in Earth’s history.

Check out full Hole in the Wall article and video by journalist Rory O’Connor, and the amazing collection of Social Entrepenuers videos at Frontline/World. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for posting about it.

For the past few months I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring a best-selling UK author through the fabulous De Montfort University Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media program (a course I’ve been a guest lecturer for). Alison Norrington has written many novels that could be described as ‘chick-lit’ (is it still OK to use such a term?). She has also created online works such as Naked HandStand (warning: nudies!). Her latest novel is about a character called Sophie Regan. Sophie has decided, after a bad run of relationships, to stay single for a year. Instead of publishing her story as a book though, Alison set Sophie free on the Net and beyond…

The primary narrative is delivered through Sophie’s blog (which is also delivered via email). She has been  blogging her journey in a first-person manner recently. Alison has also been shifting focus from Sophie to other characters within the blog, which is a gutsy thing to do in a blog which lends itself to a first-person narrative. At times I found it jarring but mostly I actually enjoyed the unconventional form. It is good to be surprised with techniques and it is good to see writers experimenting with expectations. What also works well with this style is that information about other characters is provided in the main pivot point — the blog — rather than at other sites. Fragmentation of stories is an increasingly desired trait in ‘alternate reality games’ and what theorist Jill Walker calls ‘distributed narratives’. But fragmentation is also very inaccessible to the majority of readers. With this mixed-voice style of blogging we are able to find out, for instance, that another character has created a false identity to contact Sophie. And so, when we read about Sophie receiving invites from a person called ‘John Pamenter’ we know the truth behind the avatar! Alison is also having fun creating artifacts of her storyworld: here is a fictional magazine that is run by Sophie’s nemesis (see below). I also got a real thrill when Sophie sent me a postcard when she went on holiday.

Sophie has also been posting humorous videos of pick-up lines she and her readers have to endure at YouTube. It makes for nice light relief, a conversation starter, but also provides another point-of-entry (POE) to Sophie’s world.

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Sophie also has a presence on social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace. The Bebo one is more active, which is interesting — the demographic seems to be young women! To help give people quick updates on what is happening and provide another POE, Sophie also twitters. You can also go clubbing with her in Second Life. I (Lythe Witte) met with her and went dancing with a mate while single Sophie watched. Hehe, we were roleplaying! You can see Sophie in the blue top watching Lythe and my buddy dancing.

In this article for the Philadelphia Inquirer (which talks about another cross-media story), Alison spoke about her aims with the project and her relationship with the protagonist:

“I would like for readers to really engage with Sophie as a real character,” Norrington says. “Although she is fictionalized she is very much a real person in terms of her thought processes and emotions. As a published novelist I am very aware that writing a good book means getting the reader to unpack her bags and settle in for the duration.”

It has been great working with Alison on this project…how the narrative has altered, the ideas she comes up with, and the endless work involved with managing an online persona. It takes alot of work to be all over cyberspace! Beyond some of the cross-media poetics that I’ve mentioned here, it is a good read…watch, dance and click. 🙂

Check out Sophie’s blog

A month or so ago I gave a talk at Sydney University called ‘Multi-Platform Art Versus Commodity Intertexts’. The aim of the talk was two-fold: to explore just what has changed in the object (entertainment) from so-called marketing tie-ins of the past and ‘transmedia’ forms of the present as espoused by Henry Jenkins and myself among others; and also to explore how the study of these objects has changed (the idea being that sometimes it is the researcher that has changed, not the object).

I notice that many people presume that any extension of a storyworld across media platforms is a mere marketing exercise that has no artistic intention. In trying to understand this I’ve looked at just what qualities in an object lends itself to this view. I hypothesized that one of the values people use to make a decision about art is the producer. And so, in my talk I removed the title and producer of a work, described the construction of it — how the elements in each media relate to each other in as neutral way I could — and then asked the students to tell me whether they thought it was marketing or art. They named it art. The work I described was the alternate reality game The Beast — a campaign commissioned by Microsoft and Dreamworks to market Steven Speilberg’s A.I. It is a ‘marketing campaign’ that has, incidently, been described as ‘the Citizen Kane of online entertainment’.

I also looked at what possible qualities there are inside the work that signify a difference from so-called ‘tie-ins’ of the past and the ‘transmedia’ forms of the present. Here are some differences I posited:

• creative control over the extensions either by having the same creator or commissioned creators;
• part of the primary narrative (needed for coherence);
• deals with primary characters and settings;
• conceived at the time of creation rather than after it;
• consideration of the combined experience of the units in each medium for a particular (polymorphic) aesthetic effect;
• cross-media traversal techniques are embedded in the work;
• consideration of relationship between the narrative information, medium, arts type and audiences;
• a sincere representation of the artistic preferences (transliteracies) of the creator;
• targets and is experienced by more than fans;
• ubiquity: employed by many major entertainment corporations, but also by independent artists and writers…

Now, these are just some, and they are not the only factors and are not strictly speaking the only way to identify a work with artistic intentions (which can also have economic ones). But I think these are some of the markers that distinguish works. What do you think?