Author(s):
Will Luers, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean

“novelling” is a recombinant digital novel that employs text, video and sound. It poses
questions about the acts of reading and writing fiction, and inhabits the liminal space
between the two activities. The work is a generative system that algorithmically orders and
spatially arranges fragments of media (design elements, text, video and sound) in 6-minute
cycles. Every 30 seconds the interface changes, but the user may also click the screen at
any time to produce a change.
Straddling the lines between literature, cinema and music, “novelling” evokes the history of
the novel (remixing and rewriting 19th and 20th century sources), but it also questions the
form’s basis in plot, character and words alone. “novelling” unfolds through suggested
narrative connections between four characters. The characters, immersed in their isolated
life-worlds, appear to be transported elsewhere by what they are reading. Are they reading
and thinking each other? How does the writing relate to the reading? Are the words on the
screen versions or even drafts of the novel? Do the sounds come from a different interior
world? The work is suggestive of novelistic spaces, spaces of interior reflection and exterior
gestures, intimacy and estrangement, gazing and being gazed at. The variable and
deterministic system of selection and arrangement produces a fluid, ever-novel and potential
narrative.

Modality of presentation: Web based work
URL to work: http://novelling.newbinarypress.com/