multimedia novel

Steve Tomasula is the author of several novels—VAS: An Opera in Flatland [2002], The Book of Portraiture [2006], TOC: A New-Media Novel [DVD, 2009; App for iPad, 2014], IN&OZ [2012]—, short stories—Once Human: Stories [2014]—and essays. His work reflects on language, technology and embodiment at the intersection between the human, society and culture. Inventive explorations of the technologies of the book, his narrative image-texts and image-audio-texts are complex multimodal and multimedia compositions that reveal the interconnectedness of print and digital codes. Expressed through graphic devices and source code, these material interventions are functional elements in weaving a transdisciplinary web of discourses —literature, biotechnology, cybernetics, art history. Heterogeneous and dialogical, the novel-form is transformed into a multilayered media assemblage and a meditation on our post-human experience.

In this interview, Tomasula tells us about the process of producing such complex literary objects, describes the feedback of digital culture on his printed novels, and analyses the specificities of print and electronic media.

(Source: Sandra Bettencourt's introduction)

In this interview Domenico Chiappe describes his works of both electronic literature and print literature published between the years 2000-2012. He gives insight into the interesting collaborative work for the work of electronic literature and ponders about the difference of the two forms of expressions: the printed book and new media. His then articulates discourse about the language of new media taking in account the SMS Literature and his concept of hiperphonia. On regard of the new possibilities provided by new media technology, he maintains that there should be a certain balance and harmony of the audio-visual effects and the written texts.

Advances in authoring tools are allowing a new kind of novel to emerge that resides at the intersection of print, film, and e-lit. I’d like to propose a reading from TOC: A New-Media Novel as its example of the new-media book.

Often created by a team of collaborators working in sound, animation, and language, these new-media novels involve many of the same challenges and pleasures of working in film, theater or other collaborative arts. And yet, unlike theater or film, these multimedia novels are books: they are read; they offer the same one-on-one personal experience readers have always had through reading traditional novels. The first part of the presentation will be a tour through TOC: A New-Media Novel by Steve Tomasula, with art and design by Stephen Farrell, animation by Matt Lavoy, programming by Christian Jara, and music, art, and other contributions from 13 other artists.

An interactive novel that extends the tradition of earlier hypertext novels, TOC pushes the boundaries of what a “book” can be. It is a multimedia epic about time: the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. TOC is also part visual-audio novel: an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to both, that uses the interactive and gaming potential of the computer as part of the story.