onlineoffline

Starting with a mysterious invitation to select an object from the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, England, three writers have set off on a trail which crosses continents and seas, times and religions, tracing a creative and narrative journey for Online/Offline - a collaborative narrative project developed for Incubation3 with funding from Arts Council England.

Writers Cris Bevir, Jane Draycott and babel, and digital audio artist Simon Keep will perform their work-in-progress at Incubation, inviting feedback which they will use to develop the final piece. A record of the collaborative process drawn from forum posts and messenger conversations exchanged by the collaborators will be presented alongside the final product, making this a unique record of an online collaboration.

Taking the project title as a starting point, the artists are examining what happens when four individuals unknown to each other create an online project from scratch and have worked in an open-ended way to produce a text and soundtrack which forms the core of the project. They are also exploring the possibilities and limitations of an online/offline collaboration, including an open invitation for readers to add their own texts, images and sounds around the central narrative. This invitation will be directly extended to the Incubation audience after the reading on Tuesday 13th July at 10pm.

The idea of a trail, a thread or a labyrinth has become a key metaphor for this creative and narrative journey. The Labyrinth is an archetype, a divine imprint, found in all religious traditions in various forms around the world. It has only one path - there are no tricks and no dead ends. The path winds throughout and becomes a mirror for where we are in our lives.

Online/Offline is a collaborative narrative project developed for Incubation3 with funding from Arts Council England.