Art in Chunky Bits… “Prom Queen” & “Fledgling”
Grant McCracken, who I like immensely as both a blogger and a person, has written a lot about “chunky culture” and “chunky marketing” as evolutionary replacements for declining mass culture and mass marketing.
Two examples of this have recently hit the web, and both are pretty good.
First, Michael Eisner’s new company, Tornante, is the funding entity behind “Prom Queen,” a horror movie in 80 individual chapters, each about 70 seconds long, unfurling daily on MySpace, VeOh and PromQueen.tv. I thought at first it was merely an artificial exercise in delayed gratification, doling out small servings of narrative day by day. However, if you click to the “Characters” page on PromQueen.tv or the related MySpace page it becomes clear that more is going on, with each character having a page and other communications happening between and during the episodes. Oh, and “Prom Queen” is ad supported, with New Line’s new “Hairspray” movie a big sponsor.
More on this to come, but it looks fun and interesting, although other than passively watching and “friending” the show, I don’t see what there is for the watchers to do with all this. Not that there’s anything to do with most narrative, but given the fact that so much of this is taking place within an online community, it seems a bit odd that the community is inherently mute.
On the other side of the technological scale, two science fiction novelists, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller, are serializing a draft of the latest book in their “Liaden” universe, called “Fledgling.” This is pure text (although the authors recently dabbled in Second Life), and rather than ad-support the authors are asking for $25.00 donations.
I’m planning to contribute if for nothing else than a happy couple of hours they afforded me the other day while I was babysitting my sleeping son at Lego Land here in California without a book to read but with my trusty Treo 700p ready to hand.
It’s definitely a draft, but a good one, and check out the novel’s LiveJournal community, in which their very devoted readers are giving them drive-by feedback as they release each chapter. Now that’s writing without a net!
Why am I telling you this? It’s all well and good to talk about how media is changing, but it’s refreshing to see how artists are taking advantage of these changes.
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