childhood

USA-based computer engineer and innovator PJ Sanders returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda: to close the place down and sell it. But not before he employs an experimental device he’s been working on, primed to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood.

(Source: Author)

WALLPAPER is an interactive and immersive piece of digital fiction that has been exhibited in the UK at Bank Street Arts Gallery in Sheffield as a largescale projection and as part of the Being Human Festival of the Humanities 2016 in Virtual Reality. Funded by Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it forms part of the Reading Digital Fiction research project led by Dr Alice Bell at Sheffield Hallam University. Reading Digital Fiction aims to raise public awareness of and engagement with digital fiction by analysing the way that readers respond, applying empirical methods and cognitive theory. Through its accessible storyline, strong visuals and immersive atmosphere, WALLPAPER has engaged non-academic audiences online, through live events and within gallery settings.

A work of short fiction, it follows the story of PJ Sanders, a USA-based computer engineer and innovator who returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda is to close the house down and sell it. First though, he wants to trial an experimental device he’s been working on to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood. WALLPAPER can be shown on a modern gaming PC, through large-scale digital projection and in Virtual Reality on the Oculus Rift.

To see a short film of its reception in the UK at the Being Human Festival of the Humanities, please visit http://wallpaper.dreaming-methods.com/being-human/ For more information about the work, the storyline, its development, screenshots, in-project footage and downloads, please visit: http://www.dreamingmethods.com/wallpaper http://wallpaper.dreamingmethods.com http://www.readingdigitalfiction.com

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

A short story told from the perspective of a young girl named Stella, who is lying in the grass in the summer sunshine when she realises that she cannot move. She finds that in order to escape from this immobility she can change herself into a series of other things and creatures: a stone, a fish, a house - and she finally finds that she in fact wants to be herself again. This is a lyrical story raising questions of identity and the transition from child to adult.

The story is displayed as a series of pages with a paragraph on each page and graphical elements beneath. It is entirely linear, but designed to be read on an iPad.

An anonymous parcel containing a small, bright orange plastic fish arrives one morning triggering a frightening, unexpected memory in the mind of the protagonist. Glimmer is a short mouse-responsive work of digital fiction that uses ambient sounds and rich-textured video effects to compliment the writing. There is a scene of a turbulent imaginary ocean in the middle of the work which was entirely rendered using 3D software.

Inspired by John Christopher's The White Mountains, a children's science fiction novel, Capped is a mouse-responsive digital fiction about half-remembered childhood memories and a possible alien invasion. Created using black and white photography with embedded film clips, animations and sound. 

The Doll Games is a hypertext project that documents a complex narrative game that Shelley and Pamela Jackson used to play when they were prepubescent girls, and frames that documentation in faux-academic discourse. In “sitting uneasily between” different styles of discourse, the work enlists the reader to differentiate between authoritative knowledge and play. Although the dolls in question are “things of childhood,” the project reveals that in the games the authors used to play with these dolls, one can find the roots of both Pamela and Shelley’s “grownup” lives: Shelley’s vocation as a fiction writer, and Pamela’s as a Berkeley-trained Ph.D. in Rhetoric. Throughout, the project plays with constructions of gender and of identity. This is a “true” story that places truth of all kinds in between those ironic question marks. The Doll Games is a network novel in the sense that it uses the network to construct narratives in a particularly novel way. The Doll Games is also consciously structured as a network document, and plays in an ironic fashion with its network context.

"These Waves of Girls" is a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play and sexuality. The piece is composed as a series of small stories, artifacts, interconnections and meditations from the point of view of a four year old, a ten-year old, a twenty year old.

Winner of the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 Award for fiction.

Andy Campbell and Judi Alston’s The Nightingale’s Playground is a digital fiction work that was created with Flash in 2010. The main character is Carl Robertson, who tries to figure out what has happened to his lost high-school friend Alex Nightingale. The piece leads the reader/player through a world experienced from Carl’s perspective. It consists of four individual parts, the first section “Consensus”, an interactive point- and click game that can be played online, downloadable “Consensus II” which transports the reader into a dark 3D flat with text snippets , the “Fieldwork book” is a browser based grungy sketchbook with puzzling notes and the last part is a PDF version of the story.

CityFish is a hybrid word, title of a hybrid work, tale of a hybrid creature. Part classical parable, part children’s picture book, CityFish is a web-based intertextual hypermedia transmutation of Aesop's Town Mouse Country Mouse fable. Winters, Lynne freezes in Celsius in the fishing village of Brooklyn, Nova Scotia (Canada), a few minutes walk from a white sandy beach. Summers, she suffers her city cousins sweltering in Fahrenheit in Queens, New York (USA).  Lynne is a fish out of water. In the country, her knowledge of the city separates her from her school of friends. In the city, her foreignness marks her as exotic. CityFish represents asynchronous relationships between people, places, perspectives and times through a horizontally scrolling browser window, suggestive of a panorama, a diorama, a horizon line, a skyline, a timeline, a Torah scroll. The panorama and the diorama have traditionally been used in museums and landscape photography to establish hierarchies of value and meaning. CityFish interrupts a seemingly linear narrative with poetic texts, quotations, Quicktime videos, DHTML animations, Google Maps and a myriad of visual images. Combining contemporary short fiction and hypermedia storytelling forms creates a new hybrid, a lo-fi web collage cabinet of curiosities.

Publisher's catalog copy:

In A Dream with Demons, Edward Falco invents a world where bruised adults attempt, over and over, to rewrite the violent scripts of their childhood.

Preston Morris is an accomplished lawyer and novelist who writes painful, provocative stories to shore up fragments of his own desperate life. One of Preston's works, which forms the core of A Dream with Demons, tells of a sadly streetwise adolescent named Missy who struggles to come of age during the short space of a weekend when her mother finally leaves her tortured, brilliant lover, the artist Val Rivson.

Preston's genius -- or is it Falco's? -- is the accuracy with which he portrays the sublime compulsions of several tortured yet resilient people. Holding everything together is the unique hypertext structure of A Dream with Demons, which dramatizes a theme evident throughout: how the past can compel the present, through the fragmentary, unreliable, but ultimately persistent medium of memory.

(Source: Eastgate catalog copy)

Originally written under the auspices of the Xerox PARC Artist in Residence Program, and published in 1996  by Eastgate Systems, Forward Anywhere is a hypertextual narrative written by new media poet Judy Malloy and then Xerox PARC hypertext researcher Cathy Marshall. Created when Malloy was an artist in residence at PARC, beginning in 1993, the collaborative narrative -- an exchange of the details of the lives of two women who work with hypertext -- unfolded via email over a year or so and then was somewhat fictionalizd and recontextualized into Forward Anywhere.  "...each emerges from a particular history and sensibility, Malloy's from the postwar suburbs of Boston, Marshall's from California and the sixties. To pass from one of these moments to the other is to recognize the almost-repetition of emergent or autopoetic pattern, an experience that touches something very deep in the instinctual repertoire, perhaps demonstrating that software does speak to human identity after all," Stuart Moulthrop wrote in "Where to?", Convergence 3:3, Fall, 1997: 132-38. Forward Anywhere was also detailed in two papers: Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, "Notes on an Exchange Between Intersecting Lives", in: In Search of Innovation - the Xerox PARC PAIR Experiment, Craig Harris, ed., MIT PRESS, 2000 and Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall, "Closure was Never a Goal in this Piece", in: Wired Women. Seal, 1996 ed.  Cherny and Weise.pp. 56-70. It was exhibited at Xerox PARC as part of PARC's 25th Anniversary Celebration in 1995 and at Artemisia Gallery in Chicago in 1996