dolls

Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a generative, permutational graphic novel which engages themes of ethics, fashion, artifice and the self, and presents a re-examination of systems and materials including mohair, contagion, environmental decay, Perspex cabinetry, and false-seeming things in nature such as Venus Flytraps.

Why Some Dolls Are Bad was originally launched on the Facebook platform but has been adapted for the iPhone and relaunched in 2010. The project collects images from a tag-constrained stream of public Flickr images and combines them with fragments from the original non-linear text. Once the application is downloaded, image and text come together into a frame which is read and then advanced, creating an ongoing dynamic narrative.

Readers can capture frames and send them to an archive, where each frame becomes a “page” in the novel. The collective archiving of iterative captures from the project means that a version of the book can be read in a linear order.

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.