'Bleed' (2014) 160pp
Available from blurb.com
from the introduction
I have many lives not just two. Roleplay is changing one's character to assume a role: it can be realistic for training purposes; for example one character plays an awkward customer. The internet gave rise to new, freeform text-based roleplays and the subsequent advent of virtual worlds has given rise to a new genre of personal actors immersed as avatars in the virtual world where paragraph after paragraph they create fictional narrative drama with each other over hours, days, months and sometimes years.
Bleed describes the remarkable gestalt where the character actor and the out of character typist 'bleed' into one another. There is a similar effect when reading a novel or watching a film experienced as the empathy you have for the characters and following from this is the memory of the experience, the film becomes a part of you, a book becomes a part of you, just as much as last years holiday is a part of you.
The actor George Costigan once said "you can't play yourself, it's too fluffy" and we know from the drama of theatre and the narratives of the novel that dull people make for dull stories so the citizen paragraph role players living in Nadir Taov's 'Dead End' explore twenty-first century themes reminiscent at times of ancient Euripides.
Published June 18th 2014, Liverpool
27.8 x 32.6 cm (11 x 12 3/4 ins)
160 pages colour
Hardback, Softback (Printer blurb.com)
keywords
book, art, photography, philosophy, psychology, avatar, virtual world, peter hagerty
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