Matthew Sheret.com

I’m in the suburbs, waiting to get an early morning flight to the south of France for an actual holiday. Typically I do badly out here, struck with a desperation to be back in the city, but I’m starting to settle down this time. I’m starting to think like I’m on holiday. I’m starting to think.

There’s an idea that’s been bubbling away in the back of my head since a meet-up with Matt Jones, James Bridle and Matt Webb a few weeks back, something that works like an ARG but with a more stripped down, personal narrative, seeded over time.

Writers/Artists, generally, are getting better at using technology, but uptake is to slow to embrace the possibilities offered by combining multiple-platforms in a single narrative for purely artistic purposes. Marketing teams, rightly, have been quickest to exploit the crossover, The Lost Experience being the first time I saw people genuinely talking about ‘weird phone numbers’ and the DHARMA adverts that accompanied the second series, using readers to chase clues to feed them parts of a story, one which managed to advertise Jeep, Sprite and Verizon as well as Lost in the process. But where are the love stories which embrace Wiki-edits and YouTube?

Fiction and social networking ostensibly go hand in hand: Public faith in the ‘truth’ of these site lasts only about as long as it takes the first porn bot to find your profile. The internet public is usually pretty aware that the act of setting up a MySpace or Facebook profile is an act of creative editing, tailoring one’s tastes and interests to suit an audience, desired or otherwise. It’s a half a step to create a fake one from there. But the fake Last.fm or Flickr profile is a different beast, that site and many others now working with data provided by a user’s history as part of the benefits of the system’s front end: The longer I’ve been a Last.fm user the more I’ve gotten out of it, which is the same of the profiles I view. It takes effort, or a friendly chat with the developers, to seed a character there, build up their fictional history and give them a lifespan, a soundscape to exist within.

I know there already exist some pretty fascinating hypertexts, interconnected storytelling mapping erratic paths over narrative and context. Why not seed them in Wiki articles, knowing they’ll be reverted, knowing too that they’ll remain in the Wiki history indefinitely, each Wiki providing a new context for the content.

But let’s assume these edits exist, let’s assume the process of burying fragments of the story has occured, what then locates them for the reader? I’m a fan of the cut-up model, the shuffled chapters of a book in a box, but I’m painfully aware that sometimes a signpost is needed. Hashtagging on Twitter has really opened up collective tagging, turning it into part of the conversation rather than an ad-on: There’s got to be some equivalent, some subtle inclusion that will mark the content as part of the narrative within the context of the page it’s within, even if it’s as ungainly as prefixing the content with a chapter number. That begins to dictate the order of the story, in a way I’m not particularly comfortable with, but gives a shape of what I’m getting at.

For me though the process gets compelling when you realise how easy it would be to combine this seeding process with some actual reality hacking. This idea first came to mind before the demise of Plan B was announced, when it seemed like it would be incredibly easy to use their famously subjective and personal review style to drop part of a narrative into a national publication, to get fragments of a story into people’s hands. To be honest it’s probably still not that difficult a thing to do. The news story or review that it’s seeded in provides the chapter, character or scene with a new context as well, allowing the reader a totally different insight into the narrative. It also provides a physical object, which adds a tactile, precious element to creep into what could be a too ephemeral process. Say part of the narrative involves information on a flyer, it’s the work of a couple of days to create and print a flyer and distribute it at a tube station. The PDF is a document everyone could see online, but the flyer itself becomes an artefact. It also paves the way for a live dénouement, a moment of performance at a set location that closes the narrative in a way that’s touching and appropriate, that involves readers and artists alike.

But the idea requires a story. I’m tempted to go for broke, a grand reality hack that mimics the impact of a headline event, but without knowing how well I could seed it on my own or how successful the idea is I wonder if a failure on that scale might be difficult to learn from. In turn, using the tools on an individual basis is too easy and has been done. Using these possibilities to build a story, as an artist and as a reader, that’s the most interesting part.

I wonder what I’ll be thinking about on holiday.