Is Your Computer's Sound on? Fiction on the Flash Platform

With the arrival of the electronic media, the limits and possibilities for writers of prose fiction changed fundamentally. On the Internet, writers, who had had to depend on the linearity of the signifier in the printed media for the production and consumption of their fiction, explored the new patterns of signification suggested by the computer-based media. And, since the late 1990s, multimedia platforms have appeared, allowing writers to manipulate all kinds of text – video as well as audio, written as well as spoken – in an almost endless variety of ways. My paper takes a look at what happens to prose-fiction when it moves from the world of the printed book to the screen. I'm interested, first and foremost, in the work of contemporary writers who are using the multimedia platform FLASH in their attempts at "adapting" fiction already in print for the computer screen, e.g. Jeanette Winterson, or who have moved beyond hard copy fiction and are producing multimedia events instead, e.g. Alan Bigelow.