August 28, 2006
SHIRLEY BASSEY GETS MIXED UP
A Collaborative Biography
Shirley Bassey Mixed Up is a collaborative biography: an illustrated biography of the legendary diva, where the reader helps to 'mix' the illustrations online, using Internet searches. The biography was inspired by an incident on a TV awards show last year, where Bassey was publically humiliated. I felt sad to see this happen, and wanted to know more about what led up to this. All illustrations are built on-the-fly from live Yahoo searches. By specifying different searches and playing with the customisation options, the reader creates the illustrations themselves. This is a traditional (linear) 14-page story built on top of a generative composition tool, that uses Internet search data as its input.
The work can be described as a networked narrative, as a story partly created by networked data. Adding unexpected and uncontrolled elements to the story influences and changes the presentation, how it's experienced and what we take away from it. This shapes the story, changing fact into fiction, sometimes disrupting the story. As the networked elements are dynamic and largely unpredictable, every version of the biography is unique. Your version of the story is packaged into booklet form, for you to print and keep.
About Dave Miller: Dave Miller experiments with illustrated stories and networked media. More of his work can be seen here. [Related]
Posted by jo at August 28, 2006 09:16 AM
