The New-Media Novel: The Intersection of Film, E-Lit & Story

Advances in authoring tools are allowing a new kind of novel to emerge that resides at the intersection of print, film, and e-lit. I’d like to propose a reading from TOC: A New-Media Novel as its example of the new-media book.

Often created by a team of collaborators working in sound, animation, and language, these new-media novels involve many of the same challenges and pleasures of working in film, theater or other collaborative arts. And yet, unlike theater or film, these multimedia novels are books: they are read; they offer the same one-on-one personal experience readers have always had through reading traditional novels. The first part of the presentation will be a tour through TOC: A New-Media Novel by Steve Tomasula, with art and design by Stephen Farrell, animation by Matt Lavoy, programming by Christian Jara, and music, art, and other contributions from 13 other artists.

An interactive novel that extends the tradition of earlier hypertext novels, TOC pushes the boundaries of what a “book” can be. It is a multimedia epic about time: the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. TOC is also part visual-audio novel: an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to both, that uses the interactive and gaming potential of the computer as part of the story.