For the past three years or so, I’ve been working on a piece of ‘speculative fiction’, told through an interactive map of Norwich, currently titled ‘The Seams of the City’.
My last post here was a long time ago, so I thought I’d better post an update to state that I haven’t abandoned the project.
Here’s the first ‘Behind the Seams’.
While it’s been a struggle at times, I am moving forward on this and I’ve recently created a prototype web app which I’m almost ready to share. The story is told through a series of scenes located within short walking distance of each other. In fact, for the most part, you follow the protagonists as they walk through the city streets from place to place.
Themes include:
- The experience of being excluded from society and what a sense of community might mean to the dispossessed
- The encroachment of digital ‘enclosures’ into public and private space
- The sense of a ‘neo-medieval’ futurism along with the concept of ‘techno-feudalism’ which is fitting for a futuristic vision of the city of Norwich
- Psychogeography — creating meaning from seemingly random encounters with places and people while walking the city streets
- Weaving as a metaphor for programming and for interlacing the human with the digital
- Sewing as a metaphor for… you might get the picture.
- The lives of historical figures through the lens of people living in a near future. Norwich has been home to quite a few writers and activists through the ages.
- Portals, ghosts… portal ghosts that might neither be portal nor ghosts… all the good stuff…
Unfortunately, along with exploring all these themes, I realised after creating the map that the story both needed to be longer and structured in a slightly different way, which meant more revisions and additions to complete a reasonable first draft. The story is currently in 5 Acts and the first act is nearing an initial ‘beta’ release pending some sense-checking with what happens later on. While you can use the web app to walk around Norwich and follow the story, it’s possible to just read it too. It would also be possible to adapt it to a book at some point, so I haven’t forsaken the printing press entirely.
More soon, I hope…