The Digital Fiction Desert

A friend of mine recently described the e-literature/digital fiction scene as a ‘small and marginal field with active people spread across continents.’ This was in response to a rather miserable message I sent to her about feeling – sometimes – like I was ‘working in a bit of a desert’. 

The e-lit scene of course isn’t a desert at all, as a quick glance at this impressive list of authors demonstrates http://elmcip.net/author. There is a lot going on (albeit slowly) and I enjoy regular communication via email and Twitter with a number of brilliant people in the field. My comment was more aimed at the lack of a sense of a central community; of sharing ideas, source code, work in progress and development techniques; of why there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go to experience that on a wider scale.

Having recently switched from producing digital fiction in Flash to developing it using open source technologies like jQuery and HTML5 – a move largely triggered by Apple’s banning of Flash from the iPad and iPhone platforms  – I can see why words like small, marginal and desert might sometimes ring true to others working in this field: creating digital fiction in Flash used to be hard enough in itself, but now the visual tools that at least held some sort of hope seem to have disappeared – as has the consistency of knowing that one file, thanks to the magic of Flash, will look pretty much the same across all Flash-enabled browsers and devices. Now it’s down to hand-coding; back to the unpleasant fundamentals.

Although I haven’t been put off by this adjustment, it does make me feel very sad that the majority of writers without a strong background/intense interest in technology wouldn’t even entertain trying to create work in this way; you’d have to be pretty obsessed (like I am unfortunately) to even begin to tackle the technical barriers. And that’s a great shame, because creating this sort of digital fiction can actually be very exciting.

Thanks to the fantastic efforts of Peggy Riley at East Kent Live Literature, I had the rare chance to run a ‘digital fiction workshop’ for interested writers this month. Spanning two days, the workshop included a brief introduction to the concept of electronic literature before moving on to accumulating resources, finding free (and not so free) software and even attempting to hand code a simple open source page of digital writing. The final few hours were not for the faint of heart: having downloaded my new Digital Fiction Boilerplate (a resource aimed at simplifying things for writers with a bit of scripting knowledge), the group then opened HTML and Javascript files in bare-bones text editors and modified the syntax to achieve minimal but gratifying results. I remember thinking how fantastic it was that these writers were getting their hands dirty and having a crack at this – but also thinking why the hell does it have to be so complex?

Of course, there are many visual tools available for designing web pages. You can also freely build stories online using blogs, content management systems, social networking and online media creation tools – all without touching a line of code. But what about realising imaginative ideas that don’t fit into any of these pigeon-hole software packages or highly branded services? What about trying to create truly hybrid forms of fiction that place the written word onto a new kind of canvas compatible with any sort of popular device or platform? There doesn’t seem to be much out there for that.

For Lyle Skains, a PhD researcher exploring multimodal creativity through print and digital stories and a participant on the workshop with strong technical knowledge, the session was “the first time I've gotten to actually sit down with anyone else who writes this stuff”. On her blog entry ‘Thoughts on @dreamingmethods’ Digital Fiction Workshop’ she continues “I don't know why everyone doesn't do this. This kind of work isn’t going away. These workshops need to happen WAY more often.” 

It would be great if they could. Once the tough curtains of web technology have been poked open a little, it’s not hard to get writers excited by this new form of literary expression. It’s a shame though that there’s no globally compatible drag-and-drop tool for creating imaginative digital fiction, one that would cut out the dreadfully off-putting need to know the HTML code for embedding video or the commands required to make text move, transform, or appear and disappear. This, along with a central community and resource, might form a valuable oasis as it were, where writers relatively new to the practice could freely experiment, see instant results, get a leg up over the technical barriers and truly start to make some digital fiction inroads.

Open Source Projects Launched

Read our latest newsletter to find out about our new open source projects.

Available free for desktop and iPad.

http://www.dreamingmethods.com/newsletters/2/

The Hypnagogic Trenches

"Dreaming Methods is a creepy excursion into the hypnagogic trenches: part waking, part wonder, part abyss. It is also an exercise in sustained stylistic grace and a profound engagement with digital literature. Over a decades`work, Andy Campbell has succeeded in developing a signature that combines sophisticated coding, narrative torque and aesthetic fastidiousness... The work aims not to sell or to shock but to shelter in homage, lost memories, latent dreams, bits and bandwidth, esoteric audio-visuals and intricate code. Swaying between being lost and feeling loss, it iterates (and exits) loops both computationally and emotionally."

Reflections on Dreaming Methods by multimedia poet David Jhave Johnston -
http://glia.ca/conu/digitalPoetics/prehistoric-blog/2011/02/13/2000-dreaming-methods/

Dreaming Methods Labs now open

Nightingale's Playground available in HD resolution

Dreaming Methods Labs is an experimental site which showcases new in-progress works of digital fiction from Dreaming Methods. As well as offering intriguing glimpses of our latest work (currently including Changed and a special edition of Nightingale's Playground at high definition resolution) the site also features free source code (both Flash and open standards), links to a wide range of resources across the web, plus number of bizarre 'lost' projects that never quite made the final grade.

http://labs.dreamingmethods.com

Dreaming Methods Reloaded

Screenshot from the new look website

We've just uploaded a new front end for Dreaming Methods that better reflects the type of fiction/media projects we've been developing for the last ten years.

The re-design sees a return to our customary darker colours and offers links to all our main work up-front as well as showcasing our latest adventures in a wide banner area. A short trailer featuring speedy screen captures is also accessible from the homepage.

We're now offering a more honed-down selection of resources including self-executable versions of some of our projects (Windows only so far), the original scripts from The Virtual Disappearance of Miriam and a 10mb ZIP file containing our entire Amiga archive for use with an emulator.

Within the next week or so we'll be launching Dreaming Methods Labs where our latest experiments can be freely downloaded and explored.

www.dreamingmethods.com

No going back

As readers move away from print-based conventions and habits, they inevitably begin to engage in a different process of reading and meaning-making. The role of the visual in the rendering of written texts is taking on new possibilities and transforming how literary fiction itself can be created and experienced.

Whilst many visual techniques have already been applied to fiction in print (House of Leaves, Only Revolutions, Filth, to name a few) the potential of the written word physically changing over time in the context of a story is much less explored.

But is it wrong, lazy, indecisive, gimmicky, or even downright superficial to time-manipulate the very language used in a story? Should the written word ever be "placed on a timeline" in the manner of video and audio and made to perform in this manner? Does it make the reading experience far too difficult, broken, distracting - even totally unnatural?

Dreaming Methods uses the idea of blurred out/barely-readable bits of writing in Capped, the story of a half-remembered childhood memory. There, fragments from the protagonist's recollections hang around in and amongst trees, bushes and bits of weeds as though on the fringes of consciousness. When the project was first launched back in 2006, some readers complained that they simply "couldn't tell what it said" - one person remarking that he thought it must be an error with his computer or within the project itself. Others - thankfully - got the idea that you weren't meant to be able to read it.

We used text fragments that animated/changed over time in The Diary of Anne Sykes (2003) (along with maths-generated text "sculptures" reflecting the protagonist's bizarrely ordered thoughts) but its clearest use is in Dim O'Gauble, where the voices of a young boy and an elderly woman ponder over a series of mysterious apocalyptic visions. Words within sentences physically transform into others without warning - sometimes polarising their meaning; at other times, running through lists as if the exact phrases can't quite be found. In this project there are no interface mechanisms in place that reflect the experience of "turning a page" or being able to leisurely return to re-read anything; once the writing has disappeared - and it does, quite quickly, over time - that's it, there is no going back.

The use of such techniques in literature may be so alien to readers' usual habits of having a steady flow of pages and the ability to control their reading pace that the immediate reaction is likely to be one of disruption and frustration. For many, there is something highly unsettling about the physical movement or transformation of writing. The written word with its history of having been honed down to high quality and published in a fixed and 'final' manner tears up its own roots and wanders a good distance out of its comfort zone when introduced as a transient/changeable/unreliable form.

Yet surely this is a powerful reflection of how human memories and personal histories fluctuate; how perceptions mutate and adjust; and how sometimes, painful as it is, there is no going back in quite the same way to that original relationship, memory or experience.

Perhaps this is one way in which future literary fiction might realise itself? Writer/s threading powerful, well-crafted, digitally enhanced/manipulated texts through a tapestry of other media forms that provide engaging new worlds for new kinds of readers - readers undaunted by the fact that going backwards or reading/understanding every word may not be possible, and who are prepared for the very fabric of the text to come alive.

jQuery and Digital Fiction

Changed, a digital fiction project for desktop and iPad

Dreaming Methods is concerned as much with the visual appearance and manipulation of its digital words as their actual meaning. For us, being able to apply graphical styles and time-related effects to the very writing we produce is of extreme importance, which is why we've started building up an interesting toolkit that explores what it's possible to do with jQuery  - an open source javascript framework - when it comes to creating digital fiction.

We've been using jQuery in commercial web design projects for a long time now, but it's only recently with our experimental move towards developing a 'web app' for the iPad that it's come into our minds as one potential solution to creating electronic literature.

Basic jQuery and HTML/CSS isn't rocket science. Although it requires learning some syntax and 'going under the hood' rather than clicking a few buttons in a visual editor, it's a long way from deliving into hardcore programming and you can see quick, rewarding results with very little effort.

Example scripts and tutorials are everywhere on the web. There are 'extensions' galore available - most of them free to download - and, in contrast to working in Flash, there is no compile/publish procedure required to generate an end result. jQuery is free; no 3rd party plugins are needed; it's generally cross-browser friendly; and it even works, with some processing speed limitations, on the iPad.

So far, through pure experimentation and using a combination of relatively simple jQuery and HTML/CSS, we've managed to achieve the following:

- blurring of text, either static or over time
- glowing text effects, static or over time
- narratives that trigger others to appear or disappear 
- click (or touch) areas to show/hide narrative segments 
- slow fading of narrative segments over time 
- transformation of sentences (adding or removing words) on click/touch
- draggable graphic or text objects
- rotatable graphic or text objects (via jQuery Touch; iPad only)
- plugin-free video and audio playback 

Whilst the above may seem like a relatively simple technical checklist (almost all of it is incredibly easy to do in Flash), it is in fact an indicator that the Dreaming Methods 'canvas' onto which we can write purely digitally - outside of Flash - is being slowly primed.

Once we have built up our skills and resources enough produce work in an environment that takes our existing techniques and principles further (rather than forcing them backwards), we will undoubtedly start to assemble new stories in this manner.

Should any digital writers be interested in mixing their own work with the same kind of approach/technology, we would be happy to share our findings and, who knows, maybe even strike up a collaboration.

It would be good to create forum/hub for digital fiction writers - particularly those interested in breaking away from their central reliance on Flash into open source technologies - where discoveries such as these can be posted and scripts and tutorials sought and freely downloaded.

Please do contact us if you think this is a good idea. If we had enough interest, Dreaming Methods would be more than willing to open up some kind of 'digital fiction writers resource' for all to share.