Russell Davies

fish - a tap essay - new ways of writing

Robin Sloan's trying something. This is lovely. Go try.

writing / experiments

Back in the old days you could throw a blog post together out of an old link and an ugly sentence.

So this is like a bonus celebration of plenitude. A link and a video.

The link - Charlie Stross on a really interesting writing experiment.

The video is me trying to think about possibilities for text. It's an incredibly dumb and simple example. I know this isn't KIndlable but it could be text on a iPad. And if you could think through how this would work - how the writer would mark this up - I bet all kinds of better ideas would present themselves.

SXSW, the new aesthetic and writing

UPDATE: James has written about his own talks too.

I was on a panel on Monday, at SXSW. It was called The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices. And it was organised by fellow RIGster James Bridle. People seemed to like it. it was the most fun I've had speaking for ages, partly because I had to make up a whole bunch of new stuff but mostly because I was doing it with Ben, Aaron, James and Joanne.

I tried to talk about the New Aesthetic and writing - about how exciting it might be to do writing with machines in it. I didn't say anything hugely cogent but I think I got away with it via jokes and analogies. (A lot of which you might have seen on here before, it's similar stuff to what'll end up in the Making Magazine talks.)

This was my starting point. On one level it's just a stupid typo, on another it's a brilliant seed for a short story about a sentient restaurant that's trying to stay close to you, and the mystery of the inconvenience it caused. But - most interestingly - it's a story about the meaning created in collaboration, presumably between someone who didn't have English as a first language and Microsoft Word.

And that's the bit that reminded me of Princess Diana saying 'there were three of us in this marriage'. I know that lots of what's great about reading and writing is the direct connection between reader and author, but what's exciting me at the moment is the idea that there's a third party in there too - machines, software, bots.

Impressionism was apparently, at least partly conjured into the life by the invention of paint in tubes - the convenience of which allowed painting go outside. I'm excited by the writing that'll be caused by the invention of different reading and writing technologies. Just as iTunes/iPod enabled Matt's Music For Shuffle.

[ONE OF THOSE WOOLY TRANSITIONS YOU CAN DO IN A TALK BUT WHICH IS HARDER WHILE WRITING]

Something, something, form factor example is the brilliant Autonomous Parapoetic Device; 

"The effect is well-known to anyone with an iPod: the serendipitous juxtaposition of sound and place expands and mutates both. The iPod’s shuffle function amplifies the effect: an unexpected song played over a familiar environment brings with it a new (and potentially revelatory) reading...The APxD seeks to approach these issues from a textual point of view. Can words have the same interventionist effect on space that sound has? Of course, a book or a newspaper can be read anywhere. The wrinkle that the APxD introduces is its aleatoric nature: no two glances at the screen are the same; no two encounters between the text and the outside world are the same."

Or the effect you get when you put William Gibson's tweets in a cigar box.

But what's really exciting me right now are the possibilities of collaborating with robots. Because when I look at businesses like Narrative Science I imagine a fiction factory like James Patterson's combined with the gnarly brain-snagging language of Markov chocolates.

Because the way robots write, right now, tickles your brain in exactly the same way that the best bad prose does:

And all these robots Markov-chainsawing their way through literature are a little akin to the procedural aesthetic mayhem being wrought by some merchants on Zazzle - as described in the best article I've read for years.

Those possibilities are exciting. That'd be a great way to write - or to be edited.

I don't know what all this means yet, I think I've figured more out through arguing with James, seeing everyone else present and through thinking about my presentation on Friday. But this quote still seems an appropriate way to end...

making magazines talk II

People have kindly suggested some other things I should be thinking about re that post from the other day.

And I remembered that I'm trying to write a non-fiction book with Inform7, which must be a thing.

Other things:

Tony reminded me of Jeff Noon's microfictions here and here.

Richard pointed out Cybernetics And Ghosts (pdf).

There are all sorts of interesting possibilities in Frankie's Responsive Text (make your browser window much smaller, see what happens to the words.)

And having assembled an Adafruit Internet of Things printer over the weekend and started playing with it, I'm even more convinced that things like BERG's Little Printer will create new forms of magaziney writing.

(And Matt has provided a timely analogy by making more 'Music For Shuffle'.)

Onwards to PowerPoint! 

making magazines talk

One of the talks I've got coming up is at Making Magazines on March 16th. I'm trying to work out what to say for that.

The brief is to do something about the 'blended future' - ie moving past the analogue v digital stuff and talking about what happens when we're equally comfortable with both, and are using both. Newspaper Club experiences providing a backdrop.

But I'd also like to explore what some of this means for writing and being a writer. I figure five years of doing a weekly column qualifies me to call myself that. Just.

Having watched Mr Bridle's unfolding ideas about Networked Realism and networked writing the line that keeps coming back to me is 'Writing now has machines in it'. What's exciting to me about writing now is that machines aren't just part of the distribution system - they're in the writing. They're in the process (see James and Gibson and Google), they're in the reading experience and they're in the conversation around them. Or at least, they are if you want them to be, and I, personally, want them, because I think they'll make for interesting new things.

I haven't worked out what I want to say about all this yet, but this is some of the raw material:

Various experiments with 'live writing' by Paul Graham, Baratunde Thurston and Danny O'Brien. (it's interesting how ephemeral this stuff is, the final pieces are captured, not many examples of it in action.)

Kindlyness, kindlyness again.

Trying to write with metadata (by me), metadata and magazines, long, good reads.

The Autonomous Parapoetic Device. 

A Year Of Links.

Bot booksellers and authors, bot journalists, (how long before AOL invent SubBots?)

And : "Ironically, by way of mass-customization, Zazzle may represent the final spasm in another long-protracted demise—the death of the author."

Anyway.