This year I submitted an abstract to AoIR for the first time, and my proposal was accepted, I’ll be presenting in Sussex in September. My topic is distributed narrative, or viral narrative, or contagious narrative; I’m not quite sure what to call it yet but I think this is going to be my main research topic for a while. I’ve also made sure that I’m teaching networked culture and contagious media this autumn, so hopefully that will help me keep on track. I’ve found it hard to work up to Real Research after finishing my PhD, but this week I’m determined to do some work on this, so I’m going to focus my energies by blogging it. I’d like to submit this to Fibreculture’s journal issue on contagion (deadline August 31) but with a holiday in France, teaching beginning in mid-August and ten days at ISEA that may be optimistic. OK. To work!

THE ABSTRACT
A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed narrative. Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This paper explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives. I will trace stories told across weblogs, looking at the possibly fictional She’s A Flight Risk, the authentic Bagdad Blogger and the proven hoax Kaycee Nicole. This networked distribution will be compared to a physically distributed narrative, such as Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg’s sticker novel Implementation.

The endless hypertext has been a spectre of new media for over a decade, feared by some and sought after by others. Today’s “book without end� is not a single website but rather an interlaced patchwork of narrative traces across medias and genres: distributed narrative.
The term distributed narrative is inspired by distributed computing, which spreads processing across many computers, attaining as much or more power than is possible in a single supercomputer. The immersive game Cloudmakers used the tagline “distributed biological processing� to characterise the ways in which thousands of players participated in solving the puzzles of the game. A distributed narrative, then, is a narrative that instead of trying to gather itself into one “whole� structure spreads its story across many spaces, both virtual and physical.

Distributed narratives can be literally distributed, as in Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg’s Implementation: A Novel, where readers are asked to post stickers printed with fragments of the narrative in their surroundings. From a traditional point of view, the pages of pristine stickers, before they are stuck on sign posts and toilet doors, constitute the work. Or perhaps the website would be viewed as the work, with its photos of pasted stickers. Such a view disregards the expansive ambitions of this narrative. Fittingly for a story about “psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place�, Implementation not only seeks to be read, it asks its readers to colonise the world with it, to paste its fragments everywhere, inserting it into their everyday lives and spaces. Although the authors publish selected photos of pasted stickers on their website, ultimately they surrender control of how their work spreads and is pasted in new contexts giving new meanings.

Tim Etchell’s Surrender Control is the title of another distributed narrative that merges digital space with the reality of the reader. The reader of this piece received SMSes over the course of 72 hours instructing her to do many strange things, thereby spreading the narrative into her physical surroundings. Invitations to sign up were both advertised on the web and distributed on unsigned fliers in London, combining physical and networked space much as Implementation does.

Another way in which narrative can be distributed access media is by combining it with textual performance, as when Isabella V., the possibly fictional protagonist of She’s A Flight Risk, steps outside of her weblog to ping her readers in iChat or to participate in interviews. Kaycee Nicole, the famously fictional teenaged web diarist who “died� of leukemia in 2002, presents a parallel example of a distributed narrative. “Kaycee� participated in chats and email conversations in addition to writing frequent diary entries at her website. Both fictional and non-fictional weblogs tend to have narratives spun across sites, through comments in other blogs, mentions elsewhere, participation in discussion sites and chats, and sometimes interviews and the like. These are personal, distributed stories, stories for a new time.

Immersive gaming, sometimes called unfiction or pervasive gaming, is a related phenomenon, however there is a distinct difference: distributed narratives don’t expect the reader to play along, they expect the reader to distribute the narrative, virus-like, a narrative meme. One might also compare distributed narratives to similar attempts to release art from the “work� or from the white or black cube of the gallery or theatre in the visual and performative arts. Literature and narrative have been slower than these art forms to explode the shackles of the work, and it appears that the ubiquity of the network has been a driving force in this.

Distributed narratives demand more from their readers than reading or suspension of disbelief. They ask to be taken up, passed on, distributed. They seek to be viral, the memes of narrative, looking for readers who will be carriers as well as interpreters.