Project:Sandbox

PRY is an interactive multimedia fictional novella launched in October 2014 by art collective Tender Claws, LLC. It tells the story of James, a Gulf War veteran-turned demolition worker. Created as a downloadable app for Apple products, PRY is available for $2.99 in the App Store and requires iOs 6 or later to be used on iPhones and iPads. It has been hailed as “the future of literature” by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

1. Creator/Author

Tender Claws LLC is an art collective and studio founded by Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman that works at the intersection of writing, art and technology. The collective is based in Los Felix.Both have been working together for 8 years now, developing projects across a broad range of disciplines from live performance, interactive installation, and virtual reality to digital publishing. Their recent projects include Tumball, a competitive 2-player game and Pry, which is an hybrid of conema, game and novel created for mobile iOS.. Danny Canizzaro is an interdisciplinary artist who studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and holds a B.A. from Brown University in Visual Art. Currently he is enrolled at the University of California-San Diego and will receive a M.F.A. in Visual Art in 2015. Samantha Gorman is a writer and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, cinema and digital culture. She holds an MFA/B.A. from Brown University in Literary Arts – Digital Language Arts and a B.A. in Digital Performance Practices. She is currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the interdivisional Media Arts+Practice (iMAP) program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. They describe themselves as a kind of “digital press, working at the intersection of art and technology” (link to FB page). In this constellation, they also enjoy “gaming beyond the digital”. One of their physical games, Tumball, (a 2v2 competitive sport played with leaf blowers and tumbleweeds) was a finalist at IndieCade in 2014. In terms of describing the impetus behind their range of works, Gorman and Cannizzaro say: “We are always thinking about issues at the intersection of interactivity, story and text. Why engage, why interact in a specific way? …Part of the fun of creating games is getting to be a collage artist. We also love to work between genres. How can books, cinema, and games learn from and enhance each other?” (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/236153/Road_to_the_IGF_Tender_Claws_PRY.php)

2. Development

Gorman and Cannizzaro started developing PRY during a decidedly unplugged residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the country’s oldest artists’ colony. Pry was released on October 3rd in the iTunes App Store. They kept working on the project even as Cannizzaro completed an MFA in fine art at UC San Diego and Gorman began pursuing her Ph.D. in the interdivisional Media Arts + Practice (iMAP) program at USC's School of Cinematic Arts. There, Gorman has been able to draw on resources and support from an encouraging staPRY was written by Cannizzaro in the programming language Objective C, used for iOs. He taught himself how to code using iTunes U courses in order to create the project together with Gorman.

3. PRY - How it works
PRY is a novella that is “hybrid of cinema, gaming, and text.” The reader is presented with the story of James, a demolition expert and veteran of the Gulf War who is trying to reintegrate into civilian life. In two chapters, the reader has access to what James experiences in the present day, but also to the never-ending stream of memories and experiences that lie just below in his subconscious. These various layers are shown through a mixture of video, text, and other graphics (show examples) that allow the reader to witness James’s external world or to physically pry apart the text of his thoughts to go deeper into his unconscious. A number of different movements can be used to access different parts and features of the novella; the reader can swipe to the left to move the plot along and can move his/her fingers apart in a vertical fashion to peer within James’s subconscious. High quality video is used to show what is going on in James’s external world, while a mixture of video and text that moves, hovers, and disappears at will within the world that is James’s subconscious, manifested in flashbacks and chaos. This can be seen in PRY’s promotional video.This largely reader-directed interactivity allows the reader to “to unravel the fabric of memory and discover a story shaped by the lies we tell ourselves: lies that are revealed when you pull apart the narrative and read between the lines”. Besides literally “prying” James’s eyes open or shut to experience these levels, the reader can also use his/her fingers to help James read Braille as he begins to lose his sight and also his mind. In this vein, the first chapter of the novella makes the prying function come to the forefront, while the second chapter provides an endless wall of text that readers can scan through at will. According to Gorman and Cannizzaro, “the whole point of the interface is to capture the sense of being overwhelmed: “We use this sense of overload and endlessness as a way of mirroring James’ internal state. The text represents an obsessive thought that repeats endlessly. This is one example of how the type of interaction resonates with and, in many ways, is the content of the story."

4. Contextualising PRY within Digital Literature
PRY by Tender Claws has been hailed as “the future of storytelling” because of its cutting edge use of Hollywood level cinematography, high level of technological advancement, and creativity. The Tender Claws duo Gorman and Cannizzaro comment on their desire to use modern technology like iPhones and iPads as the platform for their project: “The future lies in approaches to storytelling rather than core judgements about how stories will irrevocably alter. What excites us most is an attention to form in service of the narrative. The idea that the platform, interactions, and way in which a story is told are just as important and are indeed a part of the story itself. I think we’re seeing more and more apps, games, and interactive projects of all type using technology as a meaningful part of the experience rather than just as a delivery mechanism or gimmick." (vice, the creators project blog). In line with neuroscientist Stanislav Dehaene idea which states that 21st century reader’s brains call for a new kind of reading experience which centers around the born-digital: a reader in the 21st century is much more likely to be moving his eyes across a screen than a page, so reading has to reinvent itself. Yet in seeing the novella in the longer trajectory of media theory, PRY highlights a conflict between an “autonomy in technology” (posited by German media theorist Friedrich Kittler) and American media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of media as an “extension of man.” Media/digital culture theorist and founder of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder Lori Emerson voices similar concerns in her 2014 book: “the shift to the ideology of the user-friendly(…) is expressed in contemporary multitouch, gestural, and ubiquitous computing devices … whose inner workings are therefore inaccessible” (Reading Writing Interfaces 49). While the Tender Claws duo admits having to learn the code with which to write the novella within their chosen medium, saying that “PRY’s interfaces were very much guided by the project’s story and vice-versa,” they also see the physicality of the app in relation to the novella’s structure and story as fundamentally transformative: “Increasingly, we consume fiction on mobile devices that have a huge array of sensors and processing power that can be used to create really unique and interesting experiences. We’re excited by the idea that interfaces and gestures can be just as much a part of a story as the plot itself. More and more, it seems like there's a growing range of experimental narrative games.” This emphasis on media integration plays a central role in the way that the art collective wrote and designed PRY. Another approach understanding PRY may be to classify it as “Ergodic literature”, a term which was coined by Norwegian video game and electronic literature scholar Espen Aarseth to describe text that requires more of readers than simply moving the eye from left to right between page turns. Ergodic books require not only that you read but that you also figure to how to read the content within. Since PRY was an IGF finalist for “Excellence in narrative”, it could also fall under Katherine Hayles’ concept of Interactive Fiction (IF) which has a stronger emphasis on a gaming interface than earlier hypertext projects. Overall, PRY remains difficult to categorize, because there are no established conventions for the electronic book. After the printing press the novel emerged and along with it narrative techniques for how to handle first-person narration; film adopted montage, but on the commercial multi-touch screen and the new syntax has not emerged. Pry accomplishes what no prior e-lit work has done so far: to credibly blend competent video, text animations, and literature with custom interactivity specific to iOS multi-touch that contributes psychological insights into character."

4.Prizes and critiques
"'What Pry does is expand the field of the book. As a conceptual writer ... I want to be made to think through, not just think about. This is new reading, though it's reading we know how to do. As much as photography altered the landscape of landscapes, digital forms and their writings open narrative to other kinds of telling.' - Vanessa Place (conceptual poet)" "Everyone interested in the contemporary state or future of literature as a hybrid tactile mediated experience should experience Pry." — Los Angeles Review of Books "The narrative is fragmented, the visuals atmospheric: Charlie Kaufman by way of an acid trip.' — LA Weekly"

5. Links
Homepage of the APP: http://prynovella.com/ Tenderclaws LLC Homepage of the project: http://tenderclaws.com/ Biographical information about Samantha Gorman : http://gamesforchange.org/festival/presenters/ Articles about PRY: http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/prying-jhave-on-tender-claws-new-app (Review) Interview with TenderClaws abouhttp://thecreatorsproject.vice.com/blog/go-inside-the-mind-of-a-gulf-war-vet-with-first-person-digital-novella-pry http://heyevent.com/event/883978624956223/an-evening-with-tender-claws-creators-of-the-acclaimed-ipad-project http://appesel.org/ios-apps/pry-tender-claws-llc/