One day ago, Neil Gaiman wrote the beginning of a story, which was retweeted by BBC Audiobooks America as the first of a thousand or so tweets that would compiled and edited to become an audiobook. People are still contributing, and BBCAA's blog has four scenes compiled (1, 2, 3, summary of scenes 1-3, and 4), for a total of 175 tweets. When 1,000 or so tweets are logged, they'll be edited into a script, and produced in a studio to make the final audiobook, which will be released for free on BBCAA's website. This isn't the first game of exquisite corpse played via twitter that made a piece to be refined and presented in some way. The first Twitter opera was one of a few recent "gimmicks" to garner attention for the Royal Opera House (twitter opera feed, ROH twitter feed, ROH blog). The result, Twitterdammerung, was given a decent review by opera critic Igor Toronyi-Lalic.
posted by filthy light thief on Oct 14, 2009 - 32 comments

The Day the Saucers Came was originally published in 2006, in the (now defunct) EZine Spider Words 1, no. 2. Neil Gaiman has read the story aloud, on occasion. In December 2008, the story was made into a poster by a Finnish artist. That poster was then transformed into a fancy Flash presentation on Microsoft's Infinite Canvas ("A Funky Side Project from Microsoft Live Labs"). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Jan 26, 2009 - 15 comments