spy novel

This is a romantic-spy story rendered into the genre of Recombinant Fiction. Four characters told a fiction using dialogues shown on several media channels. The cloned identity of a real spy was used to portray a story about the political and sentimental weakness of our era characterised by a dysfunctional sociality being created by social media communications. Actions in public environments completed the set of stages upon which the story was acted and audiences had an active role by unfolding and creating other pieces of fiction. The drama deconstructed language and symbolism of ideologies by remixing characters' lives and identities with real-world patterns.

The work has been exhibited as an installation and there is also a web version.

The Reading Glove is the first component of a research program called the TUNE Project (Tangible, Ubiquitous, Narrative Environment). Karen and Josh Tanenbaum describe TUNE as a story, a space, a game, and a research instrument that investigates questions of interactive narrative, player modeling, adaptivity, and tangible embodied interaction.

The Reading Glove itself has gone through several iterations. Version 1.0 consisted of a wearable RFID-enabled glove and tagged objects that allowed readers to experience an interactive narrative by picking up objects that have been augmented with story fragments.  There is a video of Reading Glove 1.0 and details of the design process on our blog.

For Reading Glove 2.0 we added a tabletop display and a recommendation engine the helped to guide readers through assembling the distributed narrative. This version has its own video and its development is also documented on the blog. In the summer and fall of 2010 we ran a series of user studies exploring how participants experienced the adaptive system and object-based narrative.

(Source: author's website.)