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.
