I’m excited to announce a new piece of work, previously known here as Sore: a collaboration with the author Jeff Noon, entitled The Literary Operator.

Commissioned by Lighthouse for Brighton Digital Festival, the work interprets and remixes Spore #50 – one of Noon’s microscopic short stories, known as Spores – and manifests it as a functional object; our literary operator.

After the Babel Towers attack, lo-fi operators worked the edges of the language, forging new phrases from the fragments of literature. They filled boxes with word shards in the hope of recreating lost stories.

From Jeff’s original text, we slowly poked and explored the idea, ending up with this object; a working device, that takes books and attempts to generate more of them. It touches on Jeff’s work around remixing text – which he’s written about in Ghost on the B-Side – and some of my esoteric toys that explore generative prose, such as Markov Chocolates and its cousins. It is an object that is both entirely fictional, and entirely real. Not “design fiction”; just fiction.

It was an exciting project to build – lots of new territory to explore, materials to shape – and great to collaborate with Jeff, an author I’ve enjoyed for many, many years.

Find out more at the dedicated website for the Literary Operator.