webyarns.com – ETL533 – Assessment 2 – Review 3

The Text

webyarns.com: stories, comics and toys for the web

The Creator

Alan Bigelow

Alan Bigelow is the recipient of the Robert Coover Award for Electronic Literature (2017); the Judge’s Prize, Opening Up Digital Fiction Writing Competition (2017); First Runner Up, Digital Humanities Awards (2016); and the Lauréat du Prix (First Prize) Poésie Média, BIPVAL international Prix de Poésie Média (2011). His work, installations, and conversations concerning digital fiction and poetry have appeared in the Library of Congress (USA), SFMOMA, La Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), Turbulence.org, Rhizome.org, The National Art Center (Tokyo), Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, FAD, VAD, FreeWaves.org, The Museum of New Art, Art Tech Media, FILE, Blackbird, Drunken Boat, IDEAS, New River Journal, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, and many other places worldwide.

The Format

Website

The Details

Webyarns is a grab bag of quirky and unusual imaginings and re-imaginings of a variety of text-based literature.

The Review

Where to begin?!

Let’s start with the first ‘story’ I read – How to Rob a Bank (2016-2017)

How to Rob A Bank is a retelling of or riff on either Bonnie & Clyde, the 1967 movie starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, or Raising Arizona, (1987), starring Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter. The plot unfolds through a series of screenshots, each one advancing the story in sometimes predictable, sometimes totally out of left field ways. How to Rob a Bank has five parts: “research”, “romance”, “home”, “escape” and “sister sister”, of which the fifth part, “sister sister”, is the least successful – one too many and it does not add significantly to the story.

How To Rob a Bank employs familiar internet tools – Google Search and Maps, apps, news feeds, text messaging, and Instagram – and uses them to great effect. Every screen advances the story in an engaging way, for example, the predictive text in Google successfully creates suspense about the next steps that the protagonist is going to take, whilst the texts and apps reveal the age and lifestyle of the protagonist. The Instagram account is particularly amusing. Using the handle @bankrobr, the ‘hero’ of the story, Ted, documents his crime, walking to the scene and ordering a getaway through his ‘curb’ app.

The story progress through the next four parts, each of which has its own vibe, enhance through cracking tunes and increasingly bizarre plot twists. This webyarn is suitable for teens to adults.

Now for something completely different – The Shootout (2016)

Appropriating the western genre – music, plot, vernacular – Bigelow creates an entirely modern take on the old-fashioned con job. The Shootout starts with a typical Western scenario – a stranger, “The Dude”, walks into a bar and orders a drink, paying for it with shiny, alluring gold coins. The interest of the local barflies is piqued – they know an easy mark when they see one! – and they move in to fleece the stranger of his money. Without spoiling the twist in the tale, it doesn’t go entirely to plan.

This webyarn has three alternate endings in the style of a ‘choose your own’ but with a grown-up twist. Again, the audience would be teens and adults.

And finally – Deep Philosophical Questions (2008-2020)

Combining historic comic art, new technology, and modern thinking, Deep Philosophical Questions is a graphic mash-up of philosophy, mathematics, and science. Covering a diverse range of topics, Bigelow unites fact with pure fantasy. The ‘stories’ combine art, music, repurposed works (visual and aural) with humour and a touch of the bizarre. Covering such diverse topics is What is art?, Are men more sensitive than women?, Does God exist?, and Is colour real? (my favourite one for its meta-meta-textualism!) amongst others, Bigelow’s quirky sense of humour is on full display.

Deep Philosophical Questions is the first of a set of three. The other two titles are Science for Idiots (2008/2020) and Higher Math (2009/2020).

There are hits and misses, but webyarns holds together very well as a collection, showcasing many aspects of digital literature. In their 2020 conference paper, “Circuits, Cycles, Configurations: an interaction model of web comics”, Antonini, Brooker and Benatti argue that “[w]e are accustomed to thinking about multimedia technologies as a coming-together: consider the convergence of still images and sound in film, for example. This approach, however, struggles to accommodate the slippery distinction between different components in a digital space.” (p. 1) Bigelow’s webyarns extend beyond multimedia working together to create a single composition, rather, the comics and stories are a ‘new’ literature, the elements generating a gestalt where “the whole is other than the sum of its parts” (Koffka quoted in Antonini et al, 2020). The authors further explain that theory thus: “This new form has a being apart from the individual elements, one recognised by the drawing-together of single components into one perceptual system.” (p. 1)

Bigelow’s use of digital and analogue media produces a new “whole” – one that stands outside any one of the individual parts – a state of being that the authors name ‘transmedia’ – and one in which the interactions between creator and reader become more fluid and less rigid; a communication between ‘actors’.

This idea of digital literature as a state of gestalt rings true and will be explored in more detail in the summary post here.

Reference List