alan bigelow

MyNovel.org

MyNovel.org (2006) is an interactive work that takes six classic novels (Moby Dick, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Scarlet Letter, Lolita, 1984, and On The Road) and compresses them into four sentences apiece; these four-sentence novels play out against a shifting series of Flash background movies. At any point, if visitors wish to, they can write their own four-sentence novel by using the tools included on the site. These new novels, written by the viewers, remain on the site for others to read and interact with.

MyNovel.org challenges certain assumptions about traditional distinctions that partition the genres of novel, short story, and poetry. These distinctions, particularly as they pertain to how text typically appears on the static page, are made to overlap on MyNovel.org and merge into new forms. This site questions what form(s) a fictional work can take, and uses the Web as a venue for the presentation of a multimedia event that defies conventional definition.

MyNovel.org also offers an online home for a community of writers who are offered the opportunity to not only read interactive fictions, but also create them. The ‘novels’ they create, experimental and counter to tradition (but nevertheless part of an emerging form with its roots in the literary past), give a voice to those who daily surf the Web searching for some reflection of themselves, some outlet for the literary creativity they sense they have, but have no outlet for. Mynovel.org suggests that there is an outlet, and that the Web, with its reliance on multimedia, presents an environment in which individual creativity can flourish in a new way.

Alan Bigelow writes interactive stories for the web. These stories are created in Flash and use images, text, audio, video, and other components. These stories are created expressly for viewing on the web, although they can be (and have been) shown as gallery installations.

Originally a fiction writer in traditional text genres, Alan Bigelow started working in Flash in 2000. He quickly recognized the potential within this application for creating stories as multimedia events, and the Web as the best place to publish them. With hard copy fiction increasingly difficult to publish, and many writers moving to vanity presses and desktop publishing, it appeared that the Web offered a free market of new genres and, within digital fiction, a relatively undiscovered area of exploration.

Biography

Alan Bigelow’s work, and his conversations concerning digital fiction, have appeared in Turbulence.org, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, BlazeVox.org, New River Journal, e-Poetry 2007, DreamingMethods.com, and elsewhere. Recently, he was a visiting online lecturer in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, UK.

Weitere Links

http://rhizome.org/object.php?46836

http://www.webyarns.com