The Breathing Wall

In 2002/03, Kate Pullinger was Research Fellow at the trAce Online Writing Centre, Nottingham Trent University; this fellowship was part of a year-long AHRC funded research project overseen by Professor Sue Thomas, ‘Mapping the Transition from Page to Screen’ (http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/transition/project.htm). Pullinger spent her year as Research Fellow investigating forms of digital narratives on the internet and other digital platforms; she collaborated with web artists, writers and theorists. ‘The Breathing Wall’ developed directly from this research project and is a full-length work of digital fiction for which Pullinger received an Arts Council of England Individual Artist’ Award of £20,800 in 2003. It uses innovative software developed by Stefan Schemat, which allows readers to interact with the fiction via their rates of breathing. The fiction plays out through a series of interlinked audio, video, and flash movie sequences. Three years of research on digital narratives went into creating this piece. The Breathing Wall has been the subject of several academic papers, and sustained research – particularly by Dr. A. Ensslin (National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries, University of Wales, Bangor). It has been presented and discussed at a number of academic conferences and digital arts festivals, including: • PALA symposium 'Narrative and Multimodality' at Birmingham (April 2007) • Electronic Language International Festival (FILE-RIO), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (March 2006) • 19th Stuttgart Filmwinter, Stuttgart, Germany (January 2006) • Generative Arts Practice, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (December 2005) • Third Iteration, Third International Conference on Generative Systems in the Electronic Arts, Melbourne, Australia (November – December 2005) • Electronic Language International Festival (FILE), São Paulo, Brazil (November 2005) • SIGGRAPH 2005, Los Angeles, USA (July 2005) • New Media Writing, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK (October 2004 – May 2005

The breathing wall [website/CD]

'The Breathing Wall' is a story told using text, image and sound