Multimedia Writing
by
Steve Tomasula
An overview of writing that incorporates visual imagery can be found in the double issue on Narrative Theory and Image that I co-edited for ebr (The Electronic Book Review).
For a a general discussion on the thinking behind the subject see my Introduction in Part II.
Narrative Theory + Image, Part I, Winter '97/'98
Narrative Theory +
Image, PART II, Summer '98
Ways of Seeing/Ways of Being is an essay I contributed to the volume that more fully develops these ideas.
Dog is
an early short story in the form of a Chain-link
Comix, i.e., a hypertext comic book about reality, meaning, and Las
Vegas. It was published in the magazine
Two
Girls Review (2000).
C-U
See-Me is a short story about our culture of
increasing surveillance. It tries to use
the
Internet as part of the story, not just a delivery system.
That is, the story watches readers watching
it, raising issues of surveillance by causing its readers to engage
in
surveillance practices both as viewer and victim, making readers part
of the
drama that is the story. A print
version of "C-U See-Me" was originally published in The Iowa Review (2000).
The interactive version was then
published on their web site (though by now some of the original links
are
probably dead).
TOC is a DVD novel I'm now working on with other artists and programmers. Basically, it is a novel about Time that also tries to re-imagine the book in order to tell itself: to think of a book not just as blank pages to be filled with text, but as an animated space which the reader must navigate as well as read while "text" expands to include images, sounds, movement and a shifting sense of narrative time and/or real Time. That is, TOC asks readers to enter this meditation on Time by coming to grips with a book that reflects our understanding of the world just as manuscript technology (with its quills, natural inks and sheepskins) once reflected medieval culture. Today, TOC exists in pieces; I'll put up some stills in the future.
VAS (Station Hill Press 2003) is an image-driven novel that, like the other works, uses the space of the page as part of the novel: in this case, the physical body of the book (body text) is used as a metaphor for the human body, just as human bodies, which can be written, coded, rearranged (a more literal kind of body text), can be seen as a metaphor for the book. That is, VAS is a novel about the dawning bio-tech revolution and the nature of people as they cross its ever-new horizons. Some sample pages can be found at the web site for the book.