Schoolboy Daze. Nightingale's Playground

[p][img]http://www.furtherfield.org/sites/furtherfield.org/files/imagecache/content_width_598px/nightingale-main.png[/img][/p]
[p]http://www.furtherfield.org/articles/schoolboy-daze-nightingales-playground[/p]
[p]Edward Picot reviews Andy Campbell's four-part digital mystery-story, "Nightingale's Playground", which appeared online last year. "Campbell has always been at pains not to place his text in front of his images, or beneath them or to one side, like labels on tanks at the zoo or explanatory plaques next to pictures in a gallery; instead he puts his words inside his graphical environments, sometimes hidden or partially-hidden inside them, so that we have to explore to read. It pulls us in, and it makes his work inherently immersive and interactive… His central characters are often living in a reality with two layers: the "ordinary" everyday world which is mean, dull, shoddy and constricting, but relatively safe; and an inner or underlying reality which can only be glimpsed rather than viewed as a whole, possibly because it is so dangerous and frightening - a reality which emerges fitfully via dreams, games, imaginings and doodles."[/p]
[p]"Andy Campbell is a UK writer who has been experimenting with new media fiction since the 1990s, when he started creating stories on floppy disc for the Commodore Amiga. By 2000, when I first came across him, he was working mainly in Flash and self-publishing the results on a website called "Digital Fiction". He has continued to produce one or two pieces of work per year ever since, latterly on a site called "Dreaming Methods". His output is invariably enigmatic, complex, densely-textured, dark in tone and technically highly-accomplished; and he has gradually established himself, certainly amongst his peers, as one of the leading exponents of the digital fiction form." Picot.[/p]
[p]This article is co-published by The Hyperliterature Exchange (http://hyperex.co.uk/) and Furtherfield.org.[/p]
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