Mobile Avant Garde
From Mobileradicals
TxT Books (www.thetxtbk.com)
TxT Book is an open, collaborative storybook based upon the technique of 'Exquisite Corpse' which was developed by surrealists in the 1920’s for creating accidental poetry. Users may only submit a maximum of 160 characters (standard SMS length) to the book at a time and they may only view the previous person’s entry when considering their own. In order to ensure some kind of (shallow) cohesiveness, when a user is submitting their entry, the database is locked-down to ensure that the entries follow on from each other (in a chain). Once a user has entered his/her story (or their allotted timeslot has expired), the database is unlocked to allow others to participate.
Users can submit entries to TxT Book via two different methods – from their PC or from their mobile phone. By allowing different methods of input, TxT Book seeks to compare the popularity of the two.
TxT Book will attempt to examine the spread of information in way which is not intrusive (this is not viral marketing!), free and, hopefully, quite fun. We will initially seed TxT Book by sending out an SMS to friends containing a link to the WAP submission page. Once a user submits an entry to TxT Book, they are then asked if they would like to forward the original SMS to a friend who might be interested in contributing.
On visiting the TxT Book’s homepage, users are automatically served content based upon the capability of their browser (WAP enabled browsers receive dynamically generated WML files, whilst PC users are delivered XHTML content). Users may also subscribe to an RSS feed of the story which contains the latest submissions.
A modified version of the thetxbk was created for the Spoken Word tent at Roskilde Rock Festival July 2007.
