4B Transcoding Storytelling/1
Session 4 – July 2, 15:30 – 17:30
Birth of a New Medium? The Case of App-Driven Fiction
One of the most recent trends in digital storytelling is the emergence of app-driven fiction. Such works either combine the traditional book format of, say, a novel with a digital environment of a smartphone application or exist exclusively as a downloadable app. An example of the former is The Pickle Index written by Eli Horowitz with art design by Ian Huebert, whereas that of the latter is PRY by Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman.
Both formats make the best of the affordances offered by the digital environment constituting an immersive and interactive storyworld by means of multimodal and multimedia resources. However, are The Pickle Index and PRY some new type of novel or digital hybrids, perhaps? Or is it possible, especially in terms of Cannizzaro and Gorman’s piece, to speak about a completely new medium or fiction genre, the smartphone app? What codes of representation are employed and what decodification strategies might be most effective?
These and other questions I would like to address during my talk.
Bio
Bartosz Lutostański, PhD, works as an Assistant Professor in the Institute of English at the University of Warsaw; founder and former head of Olsztyn’s Research Group in Narrative (ORGiN); editor of journal issues on intermediality and transmedia (2018 and 2019); author of numerous studies of contemporary and experimental fiction, literary theory and narratology. His current research focuses on online storytelling practices, multimodality, and various forms of mediality.