So when it came time to think up an idea for the remix project, I couldn't help but go back to what Reed was doing. In the case of "blueful", the problem is partially that it's a new and original story. So when someone goes through it, they never get a chance to absorb the story itself if they become too concerned with the storytelling method. My thought here was that using a public domain but well-known text would provide an interesting alternative. In this case, if the text was well known, there wouldn't be so much of an issue about a reader missing out on it. Someone who was at least somewhat familiar with the text could follow through and use their existing familiarity to see the work in a new light because of how it is presented.
I settled on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot for a few reasons. First, it is a long enough work that it can be spread out over a variety of sites to provide a lot of different "venues" for bits of the poem. I had thought about doing something with something like an Emily Dickinson poem, but that would have been too short. By the same token, I also thought about using an even longer work; namely, Eliot's "The Waste Land". However, I decided that would be just a bit too long and unwieldy. At some point the novelty of a text spread across Internet sites wears off.
Ultimately I thought "Prufrock" actually fit the concept pretty well. It is mostly monologue, and the stream-of-consciousness style seemed to be a natural fit for things like LiveJournal postings and Twitter streams. As a piece that jumps around in the mind a lot too, it seemed to be a natural fit for the concept of jumping from site to site, seemingly at random. Some of the poem's own internal metaphors, such as the introduction where he talks about going through half-deserted streets seemed to apply to the idea of taking a sort of "tour" through the Internet, as it were. I also found that some individual sections actually fit the "feel" of the site they were placed in. My goal was to see if the poem could be seen in a new way if seen in odd places, like message postings or inside a YouTube video or a spreadsheet, and I think for the most part it does. At the very least, the disjointed nature of the format accentuates aspects of the poem that aren't necessarily quite as obvious when it is read as straight text.
One final consideration is that many of the "locations" I've chosen for this work have the potential to be user-editable/changeable but I've generally disabled those capabilities. A Flickr photo could be annotated by others, a LiveJournal posting could be commented on, a public spreadsheet could be modified. In this case I wanted to leave the work fairly static, but the next logical progression of this concept of "spreading a work out onto the Internet" would be to give people free reign to edit it and modify it however they see fit. Presumably you could very soon end up with something quite different from T.S. Eliot's original text. But for this, I wanted to focus on the way the original text works when put in unusual places. Seeing how it might be modified naturally would be an interesting experiment, but it wasn't the goal of this particular version.
One last difficulty with spreading a work out like this is that you find yourself subject to the uptime of any particular service........ the Zoho service which I originally used for both the two spreadsheets and an online powerpoint presentation was a bit flakey, so I switched the presentation over to Google Docs. And originally I had the audio recording directly on sharemusic.com, but was running into a problem where it seemed to get hung up trying to load - a major problem since it puts a total stop on the progress of the poem. I ended up embedding the sharemusic.com player on a MySpace page, which turned out to be a nice way to integrate MySpace into this (originally I hadn't planned on using it). A final problem I ran into at the last minute was when I discovered that Twitter seemed to have "lost" a number of tweets, removing a number of lines from the section of the poem I had set up as "tweets", including the link to the next page. I still haven't figured out why this is occurring, but I did manage to find a way to "retain" the tweets by marking them all as favourites, which held up for a while. However, even the favorites started getting lost, so ultimately I gave up entirely and replaced Twitter with Jaiku (a twitter-like service). It certainly is another good example of the pitfalls of using external sources...... something could be said for doing something similar, but hosting it all completely on your own site. But perhaps that is part of what makes this storytelling method interesting. And of course, a work like this only lasts as long as the other sites stay up, or even as long as you maintain the accounts. Presumably at some point an account could be closed down and bits and pieces of the work could become inaccessible. But I think that the potential of spreading the text out like this makes up for it.
The most challenging aspect of putting the piece together was probably deciding which chunks of text to put on which site or service. Initially I planned on making it completely random, but I found myself trying to figure out particular types of sites that would be a good match for specific ideas in the poem. Once I did have this decided, the actual implementation on each individual site was usually fairly straightforward. The only complex parts left were creating new audio and video content; the audio clip on sharemusic.com (recorded from the computer's text-to-speech output) and the ending video clip, comprised of a few different photos found on Flickr and given iMovie's "Ken Burns effect".
The final challenge was figuring out how to put it all together. blueful was done by putting links somewhere on the page (although not clickable links - you generally had to copy and paste the links), but I initially was reluctant to do that, because I didn't want the "reader" to have to go to any specific effort. However, I found that trying to do some sort of automated slideshow wasn't ideal either, as it took away too much control over how long the reader could spend on each section. I settled on going back to blueful's concept, but only when I could offer a clear clickable link. I specifically decided not to use some of the sites Reed used for blueful, like polldaddy.com or cafepress.com, because they didn't provide a direct way to make an obvious clickable link to the next site.
So, overall the main thing I set out to accomplish was to explore some of Reed's ideas about storytelling, but with an established text, and I think that the final "Prufrock Remixed" project succeeded in showing how the storytelling method has a different effect when used with an existing known text. I think there's still plenty of room to experiment with other variations on this storytelling technique, as well as the kinds of stories to be told.