Tim Wright, Digital Writer In Residence, uses this section to publish work in progress and launch participatory projects.

You can join in or give feedback either in the dedicated forum, or at Tim's blog.

OLDTON.COM IS NOW ONLINE:
The site has grown a bit into what I'd call a promotional taster. I now have a structure for the piece and a fairly clear mechanism for how people can participate. See the In Search of Oldton section of this site for details.

THE ROADSHOW IS READY TO ROLL:
From now until the end of July I want to go to as many towns as possible and introduce people to the joys of digital writing - and generate fresh assets for the Oldton archive. Check out the Roadshow section for more details.

Forthcoming appearances (not necessarily Roadshow events):

Nottingham Faculty of Humanities, English Research Seminar, 4th May 2004
Writers Workshop, Lincoln Library, 12th May 2004
The Writer Online, Hay Festival, 5th June
MAC Birmingham, 22nd June

IMPORTANT: Please check with the organisers of these events about your eligibility to attend. Don't just turn up!

SEND ME YOUR OLDTON ARTEFACTS:
Say goodbye to a place you love
Send me a letter of farewell or a final photograph before you take your leave of a place or a situation. You can contact me via the trAce forum.

If you’re feeling adventurous, film yourself saying goodbye, tape a short message or post me a physical object. With your permission I will attempt to weave everything and anything you send me into my story.

A THEORY ABOUT DOGS & PARASITES
In the forums, we are beginning to see that there is something special about the stray dogs of Oldton.

Feel free to join in a discussion that has already ranged from alien abduction to Pi to Oriental calligraphy to Restoration painting via DNA sampling and Schrodinger's cat.

MY FATHER - A 90% TRUE STORY
The personal narrative of my piece will inevitably focus around my father's suicide. I think about it every day.

All the events I will mention about my childhood and my family are more or less true. Certainly the emotions I try to convey to you will be genuine. In the tradition of interactive narrative, I have been playful about when things happened and the order in which they happened.

Names and places have been changed and/or borrowed from elsewhere. But then that's all part of the story anyway.

DISTRACTION LOOP 1: GET STONED
An absurd picaresque in the form of a fictional blog with elements of performance video art.

Not much progress with this except I have digitised some potentially useful video clips (see stills) and transcribed some of the voice track. Interesting how it changes when you divorce it from the moving image and convert it to text.

Key elements still include:

Very rough blog setup: need to re-do template, add Amazon & Paypal, add episodes and work out how to integrate DV footage (phew!)

Psychogeography & location aware narrative discussion in trAce forum: should Mike go out and about in the real world, making it up as he goes along, rather than working to a pre-formed narrative?

DISTRACTION LOOP 2: TALKING FRIDGES
Talking fridges. Do they talk? If so, what language? And once they are all net enabled, how will they talk to us?

Discussions with chatbot experts have led to a formal funding application for a serious educational project:

"Building a ‘talking fridge’ could facilitate completely new ways for children to model and reflect on social, economic and political decisions, based on the development of mature conversational strategies with the help of the virtual fridge."

More details to come when the results of the application are known. Check out people's fridge talk in the dedicated forum section, or at my blog.