No, this won’t be one of those posts lamenting the ubiquity of dirigibles and fair maidens and their related plot points, so never fear.

The Melbourne Writers Festival is currently in full swing, with all sorts of exciting things listed in the programme during the hours of 9-5, when lucky people like me are sitting at their desks and feeling jealous of the blue-rinse brigade and the school kiddies and the hapless bums who wander in off the street and get to listen to clusters of interesting people talk about interesting writerly stuff.

(Although I did take an extended lunch break today to pop down to the festival to listen to Mark Billingham, David Shelley (LIttle, Brown), and Michael Williams (Text) talk shop, which was pretty cool.  I’ll elaborate on this when I get a chance.)

This evening I went along to an event called ‘Trope’, which was, oddly enough, about a zine called Trope, a project being run by the University of Western Sydney in tandem with the Australian Council for the Arts.  Trope is, I suppose, a little unusual in that it’s an interactive zine that exists (or will, upon its launch) on an island in Second Life.

The zine is working with short poems and flash fiction, and is repositioning and recontextualising (or perhaps re-textualising?) them in various ways so that the reader/user can interact with them in a non-standard or non-traditional manner.  Some have a tactile element, where one’s avatar can physically interact with the text; the imagery of others is quite literally manifested in a visual way; the mood for others is created through the positioning of a relevant context, such as a room or a forest.

So standardly two-dimensional text has been drawn out into an additional dimension, and exists in a multi-modal realm of multi-media.  Unlike some of us, who can be significantly unaware of audience, these guys have taken it all into account, with brief, often humorous works to appeal to the sorts of users who might frequent such an online realm.