I made an expanding story called Telescopic Text which led to making tools for writing expanding narratives. I have made some animated films including Talk To Me, Scribble and These Are The Boring Bits, made bespoke websites for Erica Lorraine Scheidt, Steven Appleby, Minus 9 Design, Louise Naunton Morgan, The Human Printer, Christopher Potter, A Small Town Anywhere and others, designed a typeface, created an identity for The Web Copywriter, had a conversation with IKEA, (ab)used the Google Street View API to create a website where you can only look up at the sky, taken portraits of people staring back at Google, and photographed things. Contact [enable javascript to see email address] ⇗.

Telescopic Text

2 July 2008

www.telescopictext.com ⇗

Telescopic Text is an expanding story that I made as a mini-experiment while researching narrative.

A story is a necessary telescoping and selecting of events. It is impossible to avoid bias and perspective, no retelling of events is objective because we are deciding what and how much to tell. If we didn’t make these selections, it could take a day or more to describe what happened in a day. Normally we are perhaps not aware of the impact of such authorial decisions because as an audience, we only receive the final draft. With Telescopic Text, the reader is involved in the selection process, although the combinations are predetermined. At every level of detail, the words act as shortcuts to denser meaning than they might immediately suggest.

Telescopic Text has been featured on numerous blogs and websites about teaching and creative writing. Partly due to this interest I spent the next year or so creating a set of writing tools based on it.