Back row, left to right:
Catherine Byron, Gavin Stewart, Lawrence Upton, Jane Alexander, Jeff Instone.
Front row, left to right:
Cris Bevir, Dene Grigar, Chris Joseph, Nandy Millan, Kate Pullinger, Barbara Mella

During our residential week at Nottingham Trent University in November 2003, participants took advantage of the Art & Design Department's state-of-the-art technology resources to work individually and in groups, taking their projects to the next stage of development.

CATHERINE BYRON - GODSIP/THIS CREEL OF SOUNDS
Catherine Byron is a poet currently based at Nottingham Trent University, where she teaches Medieval Literature and Writing. From 2003-2006 she holds an AHRB Creative Fellowship in Writing, and will be making new works for the web as well as writing poems for her seventh collection Glass Pages.

Catherine has used as her creative starting point Geoffrey Chaucer's pre-vision of the babble of tales in cyberspace - his wickerwork Hous of Fame. At the Lab, she experimented with recorded sound and created her first voice/image sequence for a new interactive audio work.
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/places/cbyron.htm

LATEST: Since November, Catherine has been 'tooling up' in earnest with new software and kit. She's been on a Dreamweaver course and also got to grips with an MP3 recorder. She hopes to have new work online by the time she joins the TrAce Roadshow in June.

GAVIN STEWART - GAS
Gavin Stewart is a poet, an academic and creative writing tutor. He is a biology graduate, a former derivatives trader and an avid traveller who draws inspiration from a variety of sources. His last collection, Biology Lessons, won the 1999 Poetry Monthly booklet competition.

Gavin is setting out on the ambitious task of creating a "New Media Meditation on the Self", based in part on the ideas of the Russian philosopher Bakhtin, and divided into a series of short works and symbolic motifs or "elements".

The metaphor of gas is being used by Gavin both to describe his shifting sense of self and the borderless, unstable nature of networked computer-mediated texts. Gas also happens to be a convenient pun on Gavin’s own initials - Gavin Andrew Stewart.
http://www.gavinstewart.net/textlab/tlmain.htm

LATEST: Gavin has now completed not one but two versions of 'Ontology' - just one part of his ambitious GAS project. He has also found time to publish another experimental piece called 'Poiema' and is keeping a very useful journal about his development process. (see above link)

LAWRENCE UPTON - BOAT/TREES
Lawrence Upton is a solo and collaborative poet, artist and performer. He chairs Sub Voicive Poetry readings and colloquia in association with the Centre for Contemporary Poetics Research at Birkbeck College, London; and is co-Chair of Writers Forum. He is conducting doctoral research into microcomputers and creativity.

Through a combination of prose and verse, including visual and sound-score poetry, video and computer generated images, Lawrence is exploring the related themes of wooden boats and trees. Ultimately he envisages a book text of video stills of a decaying boat in the Hayle Estuary, a film text for Web or CD and an interactive text. He used his time at the lab to record sound, and get to grips with digital video capture and editing techniques.
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~bepc/

JANE ALEXANDER - YOU/WE/US
Jane Alexander is a Scottish writer living in Glasgow and Edinburgh. She holds a BA in visual communications from Edinburgh College of Art and is currently studying for a creative writing masters at Glasgow University. She is also the marketing officer for the Scottish Poetry Library.

You/We/Us is a story of relationships. It takes the form of eight short pieces of animated writing with a simple user interface to be viewed on the web. When the project is complete, the viewer/reader will be able to play each piece separately or run them in sequence, deciding their own playing order.

Jane spent the week getting to grips with Flash and then producing one of her eight proposed sequences.
http://www.abctales.com
http://sites.ecosse.net/jalexander/

JEFF INSTONE - BY-M-BY HAUS BILONG YU BILONG MI
Jeff is an artist who since the early 1960s has worked with systematically used prepared scripts to draw, paint, print and cast multilayered serial written artworks. In the late 1980s he began transferring his practice to electronic text as image. At the lab, Jeff explored the idea of bringing together three projects currently in development:

"(a) Skeletal (barebones) textual intercourse with an Intelligent Building: Formation of an (in)appropriate language with which to carry out this intercourse; (b) Construction of a multiScreen projection installation to run independently of user: with 'addedContent': running (a fragmented) socioPolitical commentary; (c) Online textual reference (perhaps via search-engine(s)): archived 'bot' accumulation of source material: emptied and refilled (via timetabled instruction)."

LATEST: Jeff has recently secured a residency at PVA Medialab in Dorset and generated considerable interest in his ideas about tapping into an intelligent building as a source of real-time data for use in an interactive text-based work. He has his eye on a new site at the Institute of Digital Art & Technology, University of Plymouth, where a "new operating system for buildings" is already in development.

CRIS BEVIR - IN THE BATH
Cris Bevir is a theatre writer/translator and dramaturg who has worked mainly in international theatre, new writing and educational contexts, developing theatre projects across languages and cultural contexts with particular expertise in new theatre writing from Beijing.

in the bath is a web-based international community art project using photography and text to explore our relationship to water, across the world.
The aim is to encourage as many people as possible to submit portraits/self-portraits taken in an individual or communal washing space accompanied by a short text. Cris aims to create a virtual space where contributors can share and extend these initial thoughts and contributions. 

During TEXTLAB she created a first draft of an introductory page designed to capture the spirit and atmosphere of the project as well as encourage people from around the world to contribute images and texts.
http://www.inthebath.org

LATEST: Cris has secured a residency at the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design, London Metropolitan University. This includes a month of workshops during April 04 with local communities in Tower Hamlets, as well as the real time display of images from the website on a plasma screen at the entrance to the department. Also, as part of the Art & Praxis Research Group, Cris will be participating in "Watershed: Environmental Art - Engendering a Community of Change", organised by Crossovers UK, with exhibitions to be held both in London, England, and Japan.

DENE GRIGAR - FALLOW FIELD
Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor of English at Texas Woman's University, specializing in Electronic Literature, Interactive Arts, Rhetoric and Ancient Greek Literature and Culture. Founder of two virtual spaces, TWUMOO and Nouspace, she was the 2001 recipient of TWU's Innovation in Academia Award in the field of computer science.

Fallow Field, a short work of fiction of no more than 30 lexias, chronicles the breakdown of a marriage. The work is essentially an experiment in what Katherine Hayles calls "electronic textuality," yet one that utilizes the "software functionality" (Writing Machines 19-20) of hypertext not for breaking down narrative structure, but for holding the narrative structure more tightly together.

In essence, it looks to find a way to bridge assumptions readers bring to electronic work from the world of print, without losing, but enhancing, the power of the word with all of the attributes electronic media can bring to bear upon it.
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/elit/fallow_field/
fallow_field_opening.html

LATEST: Having completed Fallow Field, Dene is taking a break from the perils of Flash, and is currently teaching and developing a new piece of 'e-literature'. She will attend Incubation 3 in July 04.

CHRIS JOSEPH - LOOPS
Chris Joseph is a digital writer and artist, creator of 'babel' and the experimental magazine 391.org, which explores the ideas of early avant-garde artists within new media. He was recently nominated for the JavaArtist of the Year Award 2003.

Loops is a digital play, recorded as audio and/or video, navigated and experienced in a hybrid 3D/2D environment. Briefly, it is a tale of an experiment gone wrong, where the power of repetition in rhetoric is used to creating inescapable infinitely 'looping' conversations.

The play itself is a short loop which can be entered and exited at any point, and features 10 non-gender specific characters chosen by the user. At Textlab, Chris concentrated on two short scenes in order to develop his ideas about navigation and sound for the complete piece.
http://www.391.org
http://www.babel.ca
http://www.animalamina.com

LATEST: Since November Chris has been very much in demand, and yet has still found time to deliver a first iteration of Loops. He has recently teamed up with fellow Textlabber Kate Pullinger to work on Breathing Wall (see below). His keen interest in all things dada are demonstrated in his recent article written for Trace entitled Dada2data. And he's also working on a collaborative narrative project entitled 'online/offline' for presentation at Incubation3.

NANDY MILLAN - A.D.A.M. and V.E.R.N.
Nandy Millan came to Britain eight years ago to study Spanish Literature at the University of Birmingham. By the circuitous route of a PhD in Spanish Erotic Poetry, she has ended up taking a Masters degree course in Computer Science.

Nandy is highly interested in the fusion of poetry and technology, and used TEXTLAB to see how contemporary software tools such as Flash could be used to to create new versions both of her prototype computer poetry generator, A.D.A.M., and a series of visual poems developed under the banner V.E.R.N.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~nxm/Poetry/CGPoetry.html
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~nxm/animations/AnimPoetry.html

LATEST: Nandy is currently very interested in nurturing potential collaborations between visiting artists and her colleagues within the Computer Science Department at Birmingham University.

KATE PULLINGER - BREATHING WALL
Kate Pullinger’s books include the novels The Last Time I Saw Jane and Weird Sister, as well as the short story collection My Life as a Girl in a Men's Prison. Kate has lectured and taught widely in prisons, universities, and arts centres. She teaches online for the TrAce Online Writing School and is currently the Royal Literary Fund’s first ever Virtual Fellow.

Kate's piece tells the story of a girl, Lana communicating with her boyfriend, David, through the wall of his prison cell. She is dead; he's been falsely convicted of her murder. Using audio, text and video the story will be told through both hypertext and HTF, a new experimental software that allows the reader to interact with the story through their rate of breathing. The Breathing Wall will reside both on the web and on CD-ROM.
http://www.katepullinger.com

LATEST: Kate has a deadline of 1 July 04 to complete her project. She and her principal collaborator, Stefan Schemat, have been through several script rewrites, but they have now defined the project as : "a web-based hypertext with a series of four dreams that come on CD-ROM, the first of which will have a downloadable version on the web that will act as a kind of taster". Kate plans to now have an offline version of the dream sequences completed by the beginning of April 04. She has also recently completed another novel.

BARBARA MELLA - DERRIDA'S DETOUR
Barbara Mella moved from Italy to London ten years ago. She has been, amongst other things, a tour manager, a language teacher, an art project manager, a freelance film journalist and a property developer. She is currently working on a PhD on metaphor and non linear narrative at Goldsmiths University in London.

"With the help of philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hélène Cixous and winding through on an elegant discussion of the abstract expressionist painter, Sam Francis, Mella takes us on an elliptical journey into the story of a word."
http://www.reconstruction.ws/024/mella.htm

LATEST: Barbara won a grant to attend Brown University, *the* place to study hypertext, e-literature and new media writing.

TUTORS:
Professional development advice continues to be available to help participants realise and promote their project beyond the workshop, and the group will continue online until Spring 2004.

Mark Amerika
Digital Artist and Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Boulder, Colorado.

Tim Wright
Digital Writer-in-Residence and new media producer of Online Caroline and winner of two BAFTA awards.

Plus the trAce team of specialists:
Mary Cavill
Simon Mills
Sue Thomas
Helen Whitehead
Simon Widdowson