Last week was an amazing, and yes, we (namely Lynn, Nihal and me) had Kate Pullinger for the talk. We were in the south building of ECIAD for an hour but I believe it felt looooonger than ever, haha. So here it is, the long-awaited review (phew~) about Kate Pullinger:
(nb: I love her silverfish white, curly hair)

Kate Pullinger is a British Columbia-born, England-based contemporary writer. Although most of her works are using paper-based medium, she did a few collaborative interactive web-based media works as well. Her recent on-going project, Inanimate Alice, is to be launched as downloadable episodes on mobile phones in UK.
Kate attempted her first collaborative interactive fiction in 2004 titled The Breathing Wall. It was done in Macromedia Flash and it incorporated audio and visuals (of images and texts) to tell the story.
Kate’s practices of art intrigues me as she breaks free from the stereotypical media designated for literature. Her collaborations with other digital artists resulted in higher connectivity with her viewers, where readers are interacting visually and audibly. Digital interaction creates environment for viewers as these interactions give a more wholesome stimulation for the viewers’ brain to experience the work of art.
Her latest project, Inanimate Alice, incorporated video-installation style, with fast, inter-cutting graphics and unique engineered music piece. Inanimate Alice will be a 10-episodes interactive fiction, in which each episode tells a segment of Alice’s life at different age, in different locations (Alice’s parents travels all the time). According to Kate, Alice’s dream is to be an animator. This character concept brings about the feature of interactive animated technological gadget in each episode (e.g: PDA, gameboy, O2s, etc).

I am in favour of Inanimate Alice than all her other interactive previous works as concept and technicality wise, it is more well-developed and neat. It has faster beats than ‘the breathing wall’ and the storyline is more engaging. I can’t believe that I am actually anticipating the upcoming episodes of Alice as I normally don’t enjoy stuffs like that. The pilot episode of this interactive fiction itself is enough to convince me that this is waaaaaay different from Kate’s previous works in the new media.
Another factor which I like from Kate Pullinger —she is thoughtful about the financial problems in the web-based interactive media community. Not many digital artists earn from their project (as most would keep those as non-profit, side projects) but Kate generates income off-net out of Inanimate Alice. I am always compelled to the idea of generating income from digital art, because I believe that every artist have to realize that they do art not only to satisfy their artistic need, but also to serve the community as a form of artistic therapy.
Currently, Kate is working on Flight Paths, a research writing project of a networked novel (written by a few novelists). It is done in the modded blog softwares (which means, something that works like wordpress but waaaaay moreee advanced (and maybe, have the ability to change our own css stylesheet! =p) Hmm.. interesting.
(aaaah.. super sleepy. goodnite everyone)
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