fairy-tale

Retellings of classic fairy tales and childrens' stories: Alice in Wonderland, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and Cindarella. The stories are told in a series of "living photos", that is images with limited video motion, and in some cases, sentences and phrases are used to tell the story. Readers for the most part move through the stories by clicking "next" arrows, but in some cases - for instance when Red meets the "wolf" - readers are given a choice that affects the rest of the story.

A collaborative fairy-tale coordinated by Roy Ascott but incorporating fragments from participants around the globe who sent in their parts of the text on the ARTEX computer network.

Roy Ascott described this piece in an interview with Südwestrundfunk that is quoted on Media Art Net:

1983—that was in 1980, I actually set it up—1983, Frank Popper invited me to do a project for a huge exhibition in Paris, called Electra, which was looking at the whole history of electricity right across the spectrum of the arts. And I got rather good funding. I set up this planetary fairytale. We had fourteen nodes across the world, Australia, Hawaii, Pittsburgh, various places, ... Vienna, Amsterdam, and so forth. And to each node I ascribed an archetypical fairytale character. [...]

Over a period of three weeks started a narrative, that could be either in English or in French, it wasn't a matter of translation, had to be just English or French because it was IN Paris, and so forth. To start it off—I played the part of a magician in Paris, so I would naturally say, «Once upon a time…» and then others from their point of view-the Wicked Witch or whatsoever—would pick up the narrative, and develop it online. So that what was happening was you would go on line, and you would see the story so far, and then input.