Periodic Fable

Thinking about the “Art of Digital” had me reminiscing about my years as a digital writer and artist and remembering all the wonderful creative online writing and digital art projects we did as part of the trAce Online Writing Centre.

When I did my MA in Writing my dissertation was only the second at the University to be submitted in hypertext, and I still had to print it out to submit it.  I wonder if that’s still the case?  I expect students are submitting dissertations in all sorts of media and probably defending their theses in Second Life.

Social media provides some great creative opportunities.  In the 1990s when I was first starting to develop new media writing with an enthusiastic community of others from around the world,  we  set up user-contributory webpages and user-generated projects before Web 2.0 was invented, including quick-shot two-way and multi-way exchanges that were not so different from creative writing on Twitter or similar social media tools today.  We worked elaborately in MOOs (Multiple user text based worlds), obviously the precursor of Second Life, though the learning curve is steeper these days!

I was online every Sunday evening for years running online chats for the international community of writers interested in the digital, with some artists and filmmakers too. Sunday evenings being the only time we could get together people from Australia, the UK, Europe and the East and West coasts of North America. We had to have separate times for our Asian colleagues.  Now that webinars, live audio meetings, videoconferencing and synchronous interactions are an accepted part of education and training, including that Reach Further offers, those years of practice with live groups has come in very useful!

The list of technologies we could appropriate and adapt for creative purposes was shorter in those days (sounds like ancient history, and perhaps it was in digital terms!) and there are so many more digital and online tools to ‘play’ with now, including social media, audio and video. To create a distributed story for readers to “hunt out” on the Web one used to have to create one’s own websites from scratch; now it’s just a case of setting up profiles on social media sites and there’s your character and  their story created in many dimensions as it were, for the reader to explore.

Technologies become superceded as well, and many original works are no longer accessible. The advent of a new browser often rendered a lovingly wrought creative piece unreadable. Nonetheless I’d still like to hope that some of my creative works such as (parts of!) Web, Warp and Weft are of interest.  To recreate them in current technology would be the equivalent of converting from book to film, so I won’t be doing it and there are now bits that no longer work – but that is in the ephemeral nature of this kind of art.

Appropriation of the unintentional features of technology as well as the features they are designed to have – pushing technology to the limit – is something that Reach Further also do in the elearning, social media and online communities we create for clients. The more tools become available the more digital creativity comes into its own in finding new and effective uses for them in building community, enhancing learning and teaching and  facilitating online interaction for business.

Originally published on reachfurther.com