Hi
I'm a writer and artist, living in Leeds in the North of England. I
started out as an artist and film-maker, gaining a BA and MA in Fine
Art from the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Later I went on to
write screenplays, including a BBC commission for an original
comedy-drama series that never got out of development hell. I started
creating hypermedia works for the web in Summer 2004, thanks to the
trAce Digital Writing course http://www.tracewritingschool.com. You can
read my article - Alice and the Digital Dump - published at the trAce
Online Writing Centre http://trace.ntu.ac.uk (March 2005).
As well as my hypermedia work - http://homepage.mac.com/christinewilks
- I write short stories and I’m currently working on my first novel. I
have this crazy idea - and I don't know if I'll ever have the time to
fully realise it - of creating a virtual version of the mood,
atmosphere, themes and dreams of the novel. A kind of subconscious of
the novel, or the novel dreaming. So that, while I'm working on the
linear narrative, I'm also exploring the same imaginative territory
(mainly in images) in a much more fluid, nebulous, and experimental
way.
Is this still digital writing? Is a story or a poem told in pictures,
with no text at all, still writing? I think so. Seems to me that the
digital life, mine at least, is so much more than 'writing'. In our
multi-media culture, more than ever, words and pictures have become so
entangled. Is there any point in separating them out? Classification
may be useful, of course, but it's also artificial and can be limiting,
especially in this 'great nerve', the internet.
I notice there are one or two others with a special interest in
cross-media storytelling. As you can no doubt tell, I'm not academic,
but I'm looking forward to this and I hope I can contribute.
Christine Wilks
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