About the Project

In which we consider what words in digital media might do for stories. To answer this question I decided to go back to the beginning of reading, to children’s stories. I began by writing stories on paper, exploring the repetitive structure of a classic folk tale, the role of fantasy, as well as the pacing of longer narratives that can be read aloud. Next I created a picture story for a different sort of handheld device—not a book, but an iPhone. The final story in this collection is a "zoom narrative," where turning pages becomes zooming into surfaces and walking your fingers across the multi-touch screen of the iPhone. I hope you will enjoy this suite of stories as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.

About the Author Aya Karpinska is an artist and interaction designer working in digital media. This project was part of her Master’s thesis at Brown University’s Literary Arts program. Dowload a PDF of the written portion of the thesis, or see more of her work at: http://technekai.com.

Credits Nick Dalton programmed the iPhone app and Roxanne Carter posed for silhouettes in the title story, Shadows Never Sleep. Ana Luisa Figueredo’s photos inspired the text of From the Balcony.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.