From Kate Pullinger
At that 2002 ELO Conference in Los Angeles one of the pieces of digital fiction I saw, and loved, was Caitlin Fisher's, 'These Waves of Girls', which also won the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 Award for Fiction. This work was one of the first pieces I saw that made good narrative use of the multimedia potential offered to us by computers, from the collage of images Fisher uses to the sound files embedded throughout the work. A coming of age story, 'These Waves...' appealed to me on many levels, from its direct and often subversive (and very Canadian) voice, to its enthusiastic embrace of story-telling, providing strong momentum and narrative drive within the context of a non-linear story structure. The story, and the writing, hold great charm at the same time as challenging the reader.
One of the many strengths of this piece is its on-going usefulness as a tool for teaching the fundamentals of digital fiction. Despite a great range of technical and professional writing skills, my students are often completely new to digital fiction and/or electronic literature and/or new media writing, and I have found, and continue to find, 'These Waves of Girls' provides an accessible point of entry for them. Despite the fact that, in digital terms, a work created eight years ago is like a relic from the Stone Age, 'These Waves of Girls' wears its years lightly. This is, of course, because of the strength of the story-telling, and this is what my students grasp immediately as I plunge them head long into the murky waters of fiction-that-isn't-in-books. Caitlin Fisher herself turns out to be a devoted educator and her current work, both academic and creative, is fascinating.
One of the many strengths of this piece is its on-going usefulness as a tool for teaching the fundamentals of digital fiction. Despite a great range of technical and professional writing skills, my students are often completely new to digital fiction and/or electronic literature and/or new media writing, and I have found, and continue to find, 'These Waves of Girls' provides an accessible point of entry for them. Despite the fact that, in digital terms, a work created eight years ago is like a relic from the Stone Age, 'These Waves of Girls' wears its years lightly. This is, of course, because of the strength of the story-telling, and this is what my students grasp immediately as I plunge them head long into the murky waters of fiction-that-isn't-in-books. Caitlin Fisher herself turns out to be a devoted educator and her current work, both academic and creative, is fascinating.
Project
These Waves of Girls
http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/
Thematically, this piece began with my fascination with girl culture. When we say 'Girl' what do we see? What's she supposed to be like? I wanted to play against what happens in developmental novels, and hypertext - the actual mechanics of the code -- allowed me to challenge simplistic causality. Although Waves is a fairly narrative text, the small stories are to be encountered in no particular order. I wanted the small stories and memories to crash like waves because I wanted possibly contradictory tales to emerge, for readers to encounter the complex nature of diverse girlhoods themselves - girls at once strong, as victims, as scheming, as vain, as kind, as wanting... all of this within one girl. Or are there many girls here? The waves can be read as generational, as one girl growing-up, or many. It can signal one point in time with all these crashing narratives, remembered in one instant, like a thick palimpsest. Because it's a hypertext, I think it can be all these things.
Aesthetically, I wanted to recreate the feel of a girl's diary in the 1970s, not necessarily my own, but the one I wish I had persisted in writing: pre-pubescent Rococo, ornate, busy, infinitely telescoped. In keeping with the collaborative spirit and collective memory-making enterprise of many feminist hypertexts of the period, the project was also a mnemonic system, filled with small gifts from people who encountered the text along the way to its completion: laughing into my microphone so I could make .wav files, baby pictures, pockets turned inside out to reveal mysterious things to put under my digital microscope. Waves came to life first as a series of old photographs of myself and scanned images from some children's books - then came the first stories and then a rapid weaving of images and stories and links.
I deliberately used a number of very traditional storytelling techniques and worked with characters, was concerned with pace, with the feel and choice and weight of words. I took it as a challenge to produce a new media work that was still mindful of the way we hunger for stories,too. Would I do it differently now? Perhaps. But even though it feel like an historical piece at this point, with its messy html frames and very short audio (I assumed everyone would always have dial-up), I still like it.
My current work is in the area of augmented reality story telling. Augmented reality overlays digital imagery on physical objects and a piece is brought to life as the reader unlocks textual, video and audio elements with a hand-held video camera attached to a computer. The reader experiences the effect by watching the computer screen or by wearing vr goggles. It's a unique authoring environment and a wonderful medium for poetic expression. Here in the lab we're making drag and drop interfaces to make it easy for writers to experiment with this technology. My most recent work, Andromeda, is an augmented reality journey poem about stars,loss and women named Isabel.
Thematically, this piece began with my fascination with girl culture. When we say 'Girl' what do we see? What's she supposed to be like? I wanted to play against what happens in developmental novels, and hypertext - the actual mechanics of the code -- allowed me to challenge simplistic causality. Although Waves is a fairly narrative text, the small stories are to be encountered in no particular order. I wanted the small stories and memories to crash like waves because I wanted possibly contradictory tales to emerge, for readers to encounter the complex nature of diverse girlhoods themselves - girls at once strong, as victims, as scheming, as vain, as kind, as wanting... all of this within one girl. Or are there many girls here? The waves can be read as generational, as one girl growing-up, or many. It can signal one point in time with all these crashing narratives, remembered in one instant, like a thick palimpsest. Because it's a hypertext, I think it can be all these things.
Aesthetically, I wanted to recreate the feel of a girl's diary in the 1970s, not necessarily my own, but the one I wish I had persisted in writing: pre-pubescent Rococo, ornate, busy, infinitely telescoped. In keeping with the collaborative spirit and collective memory-making enterprise of many feminist hypertexts of the period, the project was also a mnemonic system, filled with small gifts from people who encountered the text along the way to its completion: laughing into my microphone so I could make .wav files, baby pictures, pockets turned inside out to reveal mysterious things to put under my digital microscope. Waves came to life first as a series of old photographs of myself and scanned images from some children's books - then came the first stories and then a rapid weaving of images and stories and links.
I deliberately used a number of very traditional storytelling techniques and worked with characters, was concerned with pace, with the feel and choice and weight of words. I took it as a challenge to produce a new media work that was still mindful of the way we hunger for stories,too. Would I do it differently now? Perhaps. But even though it feel like an historical piece at this point, with its messy html frames and very short audio (I assumed everyone would always have dial-up), I still like it.
My current work is in the area of augmented reality story telling. Augmented reality overlays digital imagery on physical objects and a piece is brought to life as the reader unlocks textual, video and audio elements with a hand-held video camera attached to a computer. The reader experiences the effect by watching the computer screen or by wearing vr goggles. It's a unique authoring environment and a wonderful medium for poetic expression. Here in the lab we're making drag and drop interfaces to make it easy for writers to experiment with this technology. My most recent work, Andromeda, is an augmented reality journey poem about stars,loss and women named Isabel.
Bio
Caitlin Fisher holds a Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Department of Film at York University, Toronto. A co-founder of York's Future Cinema Lab, her research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments. Caitlin completed York's first hypertextual dissertation in 2000 and her hypermedia novella, 'These Waves of Girls', won the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 Award for Fiction. Her augmented reality poem, Andromeda, was awarded the 2008 International Vinaros Prize for Electronic Literature.