Universe Creation 101

Well, not quite ‘death’ but an indefinite hiatus. I’m powering down this blog for a few reasons, one of which is my desire to finish my PhD. I’ve tried for the last year and a half to do PhD writing and work and this blog, but found the mindsets are somewhat incompatable. I’ve decided therefore to close this blog down. I don’t know if I’ll bring it up again and if I do when, or whether I’ll start another one. But I do know that I have thoroughly enjoyed blogging here these past few years. I have especially enjoyed meeting many of you because of the blog, and seeing ‘cross-media’ (etc) projects become ubiquitous. Thankfully, the area has alot more people looking at it now, from alot of different perspectives. Here are some blogs that will keep you informed:

• Networked Performance: research blog that posts about emerging network-enabled practice;
• You can read and listen to news about alternate reality games and just about any online extension of a film, TV or book property on the ARGNet blog and ARG Netcast (podcast);
• Henry Jenkins personal blog and the Convergence Culture Consortium blog has lots of goodies from a media studies perspective about ‘transmedia storytelling’ and ‘convergence culture’ in general;
• DeMontfort University share their investigations into what they term ’Transliteracy’ at their PART blog;
• Jeff Gomez, the CEO of Starlight Runner and longtime practitioner of ‘trans-media’ projects, is now blogging regularly about his insights and experience over at the Producers Guild of America blog;
• Monique de Haas blogs about ‘crossmedia communication’ occasionally;
• Tony Walsh posts semi-regularly on alternate reality games;
• Valentina Rao blogs about crossmedia games and anything related to that at Games Across Media, and will hopefully be starting her PhD on the subject soon;
• Johnathan Gray, Derek Johnson and Ivan Askwith are blogging about everything around TV and film at The Extratextuals;
• Crossmedia Dialog is a group blog that post regularly on crossmedia in Amsterdam and worldwide;
• Faris Yakob, Adam Crowe blog about ‘transmedia planning’ and other changes to the marketing industry;
• Jak Boumans posts every single day about stuff happening in the Netherlands and worldwide at Buziaulane; 
• Max Giovognoli runs everything to do with cross-media in Italy;
• MobileCrossMedia is a blog that looks at the different ways mobile phones can network with different devices and the real world;
• If you don’t already get it, the Convergence Newsletter has regular interesting newsletters about convergence in journalism and has been my favourite newsletter for the past few years;

I don’t plan to be blogging here about events or publications I’m involved in, instead I’ll pop them on my bio site. But for now, here are some events I’m involved with, in the not-too-distant-future:

• I’ll be on the ‘expert panel’ with Mark McCrindle and Tim Flattery at Mitchell Communications Group ’s launch of ‘While You Weren’t Watching’, a documentary on changes to branded entertainment etc in which I was interviewed. The launch is private but the documentary will be put online I believe in Nov; 
• I have my own panel on ‘Designing, Experiencing and Analysing Games in the Age of Integration’, and I am a panelist in Darren Toft’s panel on ‘What Happened to New Media Art?’ at the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment in Dec;
• I’ll be on the panel on ‘Cyber-Born Film’ at Megan Spencer’s Destination Festival (or DestFest) in Dec;
• In Jan 08, I’ll be a guest lecturer again for Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media, De Montfort University, UK;
• In Feb 08, my essay on ‘Tiering in Alternate Reality Games’ will be published in the special issue of Convergence edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze.

For now though, I will continue to be online in a different way. I’ve started a podcast, a podcast where I’ll interview talented people working in this area. My ‘birth’ podcast is a bit awkward, but the second is a great one: an interview with Stitch Media’s Evan Jones. At the site, I also provide sneak preview information about Stitch Media’s latest project.

That is it for me here, thankyou all for sharing this time with me. I’ll see you on the other side of my PhD.

Check it out: www.ChristyDena.com  

Check it out: www.UniverseCreation101.com

In 2004, well-known academic Jill Walker Rettberg (who among other things did a great piece a few years ago about the online drama Online Caroline by XPT) published a great paper called Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks:

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in.

Although I argue that a distributed narrative can be a total artwork, Walker nevertheless provides some canny observations about the phenomenon. For instance, these forms are explained according to three values:

1) Distribution in Time (can’t experience in a single session)
2) Distribution in Space (cannot experience in a single location or single medium)
3) Distribution of Authorship (collective, emergent authorship)

Among the works Walker discussed to illuminate the theory was Nick Montfort’s and Scott Rettberg’s Implementation, a sticker novel that I’ve referred to in my talks many times. It is novel that has each paragraph distributed across stickers all over the world. It is described on their site as follows:

Implementation is a novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. The text was written collaboratively by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg with some contributions from others. Its initial incarnation was as a serial novel printed on sheets of stickers that were distributed in monthly installments.

Ludologist (game theorist) Dakota Reese Brown mentions a recent project that adds to Walker’s genre: a stencil story called She Loves the Moon. I cannot find any info about the creators, just the info and pics they provide at flickr:

The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of text.

Its a love story with 2 characters who start in different locations. His story starts at 16th and Valencia, in front of the Crown Hotel / Limon Restaurant with the text “He Leaves his Lonely Apartment.” Her story starts at 21st and Guerrero in front of a stunning mansion with the text, “She Leaves her Lonely Apartment.” Eventually their paths merge, at the point where they meet, and their paths travel together until drama pulls them apart.

Their are two possible endings, happy and tragic, and two other points where the story can end unexpectedly if the viewer chooses the wrong ending. All in all, there are 4 possible endings.

Looks like fun!

• More info on Walker’s ‘distributed narratives’
• Implementation site
• Jon Bauer’s Google Maps rendering of She Loves the Moon
• Mission Stencil Story at flickr

I was very happy to see this, a multi-place commission:

AVENUES OF INVESTIGATION: we are looking for works that (1) bridge multiple realities while maintaining autonomy; (2) engage the user as a participant; (3) include the dynamics of both one-to-one and one-to-many communication within the work; (4) require collaboration between artists, programmers, scientists, and others; and, (5) encourage dialogue.

CRITERIA: (1) ability to conceive the project for three spaces-a synthetic, 3-D rendered environment, the Internet, and physical space; (2) intellectual and artistic merit; (3) degree of programming skill and technological innovation; and (4) extent of collaborative and interdisciplinary activity.

And the results:

MIXED REALITIES was an international juried competition that resulted in the commissioning of 5 networked art works to be exhibited/performed in 2008 at Turbulence.org; Huret & Spector Gallery; and Ars Virtua, a gallery in the online 3D rendered environment, Second Life. Each commission is $5,000 (US).

 The winners are:  

1. Imaging Beijing by John (Craig) Freeman
2. Remotely Coupled Devices (working title) by Usman Haque, Georg Tremmel and Neill Zero
3. No Matter by Scott Kildall and Victoria Scott
4. The Vitruvian World by Michael Takeo Magruder, Drew Baker and David Steele
5. CATERWAUL by Pierre Proske, with technical assistance from Artem Baguinski and Brigit Lichtenegger

Being in Australia, I can only experience 2 of the 3 parts. But that is exactly the point of these works, and the challenge for the creators: to manage the different points-of-entry.

Check it out: http://transition.turbulence.org/comp_07/awards.html