I was beginning to research an article about ARG genres when I came across this interesting tidbit. Without telling the client, an architect renovating an Upper East Side apartment included secret panels, puzzles, poems and artworks that – when they discovered it – led its residents on a scavenger hunt around their own home.
A frequent topic at if:book is the fetishization of the codex in its irreducibly physical qualities. This project – complete with its own fictionalized Da Vinci Code-esque book hidden in the walls of the apartment – takes this to new heights, while arguably gesturing at some of the elitism (the costliness and exclusivity of the postbit atom) implicit in this fetishization.
Monthly Archives: June 2008
printable mini-books revisit eighteenth-century pamphleteers
London-based creative studio and social think-tank Proboscis has put impressive effort into thinking through the incarnations and reincarnations of written material between printed and digitized forms. Diffusion, one of Proboscis’ recent-ish ventures, is a technology that lays out short texts in a form that enables them to be printed off and turned, with a few cuts and folds, into easily-portable pamphlets.
For now, it’s still in beta, though I hear from Proboscis founder Giles Lane that they’re aiming to make this technology more widely available. Meanwhile, Proboscis is using Diffusion to produce Short Work, a series of downloadable public-domain texts selected and introduced by guests. Works so far include three essays by Samuel Johnson, selected by technology critic and journalist Bill Thompson; Common Sense by Thomas Paine, selected by Worldchanging editor Alex Steffen; and Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, selected by myself.
Though the Short Work pieces are not exclusively from the same period, it’s interesting to note that all these guest selections date from the eighteenth century. It can’t be simply that these texts are most likely to be a) short, and b) in the public domain (though this no doubt has something to do with it). But the eighteenth century saw an explosion in printing, outdone only by the new textual explosion of the Web, and the political, intellectual and critical voices that emerged from that Babel of print raise many questions about the ongoing evolution of our current digital discourse.
if:book review 1: game culture
I’ve chosen ‘game culture’ as the theme for this first review post, for all that many of these posts could just as easily be tagged another handful of ways. But games have always hovered at the fringes of debates about the future of the book.
Consideration of serious video games; repurposing of existing games to create machinima, and cultural activities arising out of machinima. Dscussion of more overtly cross-platform activities: pervasive gaming, ARGs and their multiple spawn in terms of commercialization, interactivity, resistance to ‘didactic’ co-optation and more. There’s a lot here; as per my first post on this subject, I’d welcome comments and thoughts.
In February 2005, Sol Gaitan wrote a thoughtful piece about the prevalence of video games in children’s lives, and questioned whether such games might be used more for didactic purposes. In April 2005 Ben picked up an excerpt from Stephen Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You, which pointed to further reading on video games in education. In August 2005, four British secondary schools experimented with educational games; someone died after playing video games for 50 hours straight without stopping to eat; and Sol pondered whether the future of the book was in fact a video game.
Between February and May 2006 the Institute worked on providing a public space for McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory – not strictly a game, but a networked meta-discussion of game culture. Discussion of ‘serious’ games continued in an April analysis of why some games should be publicly funded. In August 2006, Sino-Japanese relations became tense in the MMORPG Fantasy Westward Journey; later the same month, Gamersutra wondered why there weren’t any highbrow video games, prompting a thoughtful piece from Ray Cha on whether ‘high’ and ‘low’ art definitions have any meaning in that context.
Machinima and its relations have appeared at intervals. In July 2005 Bob Stein was interviewed in Halo, followed later the same month by Peggy Ahwesh in Halo-based talk show This Spartan Life. Ben wrote about the new wave of machinima and its relatives in December 2005, following this up with a Grand Text Auto call for scholarly papers in January 2006, and a vitriolic denunciation of the intersection between machinima, video gaming, and the virtualization of war (May 2006). In September 2006 McKenzie Wark was interviewed about Gamer Theory in Halo. Then, in October 2007, Chris mentioned the first machinima conference to be held in Europe.
Pervasive gaming makes its first appearance in a September 2006 mention of the first Come Out And Play festival (the 2008 one just wrapped up in NY last weekend). It’s interesting to note how the field has evolved since 2006: where pervasive gaming felt relatively indie in 2006, this year ARG superstar Jane McGonigal brought The Lost Game, part of The Lost Ring, her McDonalds-sponsored Olympic Games ARG
Earlier, overlap between pervasive gaming, ARGs and hoaxes was foreshadowed by an August 2005 story about a BBC employee writing a Wikipedia obituary for a fictional pop star – and then denying that they were gaming the encyclopedia. I wrote my first post about ARGs and commercialization in January 2007, following this with another about ARGs and player interaction in March. The same month, Ben and I got excited about the launch of McGonigal’s World Without Oil, which looked to bring together themes of ‘serious’ and pervasive gaming – but turned out, as Ben and my conversation (posted May 2006) to be rather pious and lacking in narrative.
Since then, both marketing and educational breeds of ARG have spread, as attested by Penguin’s WeTellStories (trailed February, launched March 2008), and the announcement of UK public service broadcaster Channel 4 Education’s move of its £6m commissioning budget into cross-platform projects.
I’m not going to attempt a summary of the above, except to say that everything and nothing has changed: cross-platform entertainment has edged towards the mainstream, didactic games continue to plow their furrow at the margins of the vast gaming industry, and commercialization is still a contentious topic. It’s not clear whether gaming has come closer to being accepted alongside cinema as a significant art form, but its vocabularies have – as McKenzie Wark’s book suggested – increasingly bled into many aspects of contemporary culture, and will no doubt continue to do so.
if:book review update
Whew. I expected my review of the if:book archive to take me a few days, and selecting/commenting on posts to be a quick job requiring at most a handful of posts. Wrong. It took me a week of digging to get through the archive. As for reviewing what’s there, it is hard to know how to do justice to it.
In the process of reviewing, it became clear that while a whole category of post reads more like extended, thoughtful essays many of which are as relevant now as they were three or four years ago, others tell the story of developments in the world of discourse online in a more journalistic style. It makes no sense to privilege one kind of post over the other; to foreground ‘newsy’ posts would be to imply that nothing stays the same long enough to merit commentary, and to privilege ‘thinky’ ones would be to suggest that if:book is merely a collection of arcane musings with no relationship to the world at large. Then of course, much of the time the ‘newsy’ and ‘thinky’ strands are inseparable, complicating matters still further.
In any case, I’ve chosen to break the posts down thematically as well as chronologically, and in this way attempt to trace developments both in the fields the posts describe, and also – where relevant – in the Institute’s thinking on different topics. Though I’ve worked closely with other if:book folks on the period before I arrived at the Institute, this tracing, collating and commentary is naturally a partial activity that will to a large extent reflect my personal taxonomies and interests. But arguably archiving will always be somewhat guilty of this.
So over the next while I’ll be posting my take on if:book past and present, along with whatever thoughts about linkrot, Web entropy, digital archiving and so on occur along the way. All help gratefully appreciated. First post to follow shortly…
bkkeepr
Popping out of review and archiving mode for a quick mention of bkkeepr, a new project recently out of stealth mode. Based around Twitter and ISBN data, it creates a timeline of who’s reading what.
The feed provides intriguing browsing, even in its current relatively sparsely-populated state. As usage picks up, I love the idea of individual books getting timeline pages.
A project of James Bridle‘s lit-futures endeavor booktwo, bkkeepr is one of a new crop of technologies weaving together real-world and digital media: neither pushing the transhuman agenda of uploading us all to a mainframe, nor agitating for a return to the analog past. It’s still a bit fiddly for lazy bookmarkers such as myself to update (you have to send the ISBN number to bkkeepr, which is tricky if your edition is older than 1972) but promises an appealing, if skewed, map of what Twitter’s compulsive lifebloggers are reading in paper form.
the doctor the salon
Well, I don’t want to give away much about what was a blindingly brilliant episode of Doctor Who, but suffice to say the library survived, though the whole collection had been backed up on the biggest mainframe in the universe. The Doctor also met a mysterious future friend whose diary was a reassuringly dog-eared notebook, not a wafer thin superblackberry.
Thanks to those readers who have been introducing themselves below – and I agree with not-so-snarky James that the writing finds the audience, but it is intriguing to discover a bit more about who finds us.
UK readers of if:book living near Leicester are very welcome at a Salon event at the Institute of Creative Technologies to find students of the Creative Writing and New Media MA (that includes me) showcasing their work. It’s on Wednesday 18th June 2008, 5.30pm – 7.15pm (doors open at 5.00pm for drinks)
at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK (see http://www.ioctsalon.com/directions.htm for map and directions)
if:book london… tomorrow the stars
We’ve now launched a website for if:book london, the British iteration of the Institute, at http://www.futureofthebook.org.uk, and that links both to this blog and one which will focus on UK activities and in particular our work with the literature sector following a very positive reception by Arts Council England to the report by Mary and I: read:write – digital possibilities for literature and the imminent launch of another report, digital livings, how new media writers do, can and could make their way in the world , commissioned by the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University. We will be making both reports available to download as soon as possible.
I think this if:book blog is wonderful, stimulating, challenging, brilliant – and so somewhat daunting to post on. It has a strong sense of itself and, tell me if you disagree, but it doesn’t feel right to me to start bombarding this space with discussion of very specific issues to do with the UK literary scene and the organisations which work around it. Which isn’t to say that some posts shouldn’t appear in both places.
One reason I’m hesitant about writing here is uncertainty about who I’m talking to.
I would love to know more about if:book readers and wonder if some might be prepared to step forward and tell us briefly about themselves and why they keep an eye on this place.
I would love to see an anthology of if:book’s best bits, in print on page or screen. People have been writing serious, lengthy essays here, some of which quickly stimulate much attention, others drift by unnoticed like leaves in the blogflow and deserve fuller consideration.
Meanwhile Sara Lloyd, Head of digital publishing at Pan Macmillan in the UK quotes if:book in a fascinating book publishers manifesto for the 21st century. You can download it from http://thedigitalist.net/?p=155. It’s more evidence that the future of the book may be arriving shortly in the NOW and, having led the way up to this point, now is a good moment for the Institute to reflect further on what role(s) it wishes to play in a rapidly changing landscape, whether it should be looking much further ahead for next big futurethings or focusing on specific interventions in distribution and creation in the digital here and now.
However on the ‘it’ll-never-catch-on’ front, Doctor Who, Britain’s favourite time traveller, is trapped on a gigantic planet-sized library on BBC 1 this week. Electronic librarians oversee rows of very conventional looking dusty tomes and death lurks in the shadows. The Doctor has already told us how, despite all the advances in technology, future life forms still love nothing better than the smell and feel of a proper old book. No sign of the great grandchildren of Kindle here yet then, but it is only episode one. More next week!
if:janus
It’s been pretty quiet on the blog for the last few weeks. This is partly because there’s a lot of work going on backstage. But it’s also symptomatic of the fact that the research, writing and blogging element of the Institute for the Future of the Book is in the process of serious self-examination.
My first encounter with the Institute for the Future of the Book was via if:book. I posted a comment, received an email from Bob, wrote back, and found myself having tea with him at the Royal Court Theatre in London a week or so later. In my naivete, I hadn’t fully taken on board that it was the output of a think tank, a dedicated group of people whose full-time job it was to think about these things. Because most of the online creative work I was involved in at the time was part-time, voluntary and unpaid, I assumed that if:book worked the same way and asked how I could go about acquiring posting rights.
But the Institute has always been very open-sided. I got my posting rights. Then, shortly after making a first post, I was invited out to NYC to hang out with the team. What had begun as a playful, remote interaction of ideas suddenly took on form and force.
While the Web can often seem more divisive than social – a culture of mouse potatoes unable to interact with other humans save through keyboard and avatar – there are times when it can throw extraordinary, life-changing things your way. The Institute has been one of those for me.
But a lot has changed since I appeared on the scene a year and a half ago, both within the Institute and across the worlds of technology, digital arts and academia in whose cross-fire the Institute found its groove. With Penguin running ARGs, e-readers in the news every second week, and Web2.0 less a buzzword than an enabling condition of contemporary life, thought, debate and activity around discourse and the networked screen has exploded in all directions.
For a blog that explores these things, this poses a challenge. How to keep up with it all? Should it be curated? Should we commission content, generate content, or simply aggregate it and moderate discussion around this? And central to this are still deeper questions. What is such a space for? Who reads if:book? And, more profoundly yet, what will – or should – the Institute be in times to come?
From conversations with Institute members who’ve seen – as I did not – the space evolve from a blank canvas to a phalanx of ideas, an influential position and a series of projects, it’s my understanding that the mood and mode has always been exploratory. One thing might lead to the next, a chance meeting to a new project; a throwaway remark to a runaway success. But it’s not enough to say it’s been an exploration, and that the time for exploration is over.
We’re currently seeing the first shoots of an extraordinary flowering of digital culture. As the Web mainstreams, creators of all kinds – and not just the technologically adept – are finding a voice in the digital space. Let’s say this is no longer the future of the book but its present – a world where print and digital texts interact, interweave, are taggable in Twitter or rendered in digital ink.
One might say that the research, thinking and writing that’s taken place on if:book since late 2004 has helped plow the ground for this. Let’s ask then: when the question is less one of whether books or screens will win, but of (say) best practice in collaborative authorship or the best way to render multimedia authoring programs indexable in search engines, does this world need a think and do tank to lead the way? And if so, what does it think, and what does it do?
We don’t have answers to these questions. But they’re at the core of my task over the coming weeks, which is to delve into the archives of if:book and, from my Johnny-come-lately position of relative naivete, review the story so far. And, hopefully, gain some sense of where it might go next.
A year and a half on, I’m out in NY hanging out with the team again. Over the course of my stay I’ll be exploring the back catalogs, and talking to people in and around the Institute. When I did my first collaborative writing work, I learned that the best way to filter text down to bare bones for Web reading was to send it to a friend and then ask that friend to tell you what they remembered of it without looking at it again. I want to know which of if:book’s posts stuck in that way: which acted as turning points, which inspired some new event or project, which sparked debate or – as in my case – brought new contributors to the team.
Clearly, also, this cannot be confined to if:book personnel past or present. The blog has had a dedicated readership over the last years, occasional guests, and a wide community of support. We welcome suggestions – whether one-liners or paragraphs long – of ideas or articles that have been particularly memorable, fruitful, inspiring – or the reverse. For me, this exercise will be a chance to educate myself about a significant body of work that’s helped shape the conversation around writing and the Web; and hopefully to begin a conversation, review and summary process that can help take that body of work towards its own future.
Comments on the blog are welcome, as always – or if you’d prefer, send them to smary [at] futureofthebook.org and I’ll add them as guest posts.