Machine #69 - A weird app by a novelist. But why? by Mark Wernham

Sometimes it’s only after you’ve done something that you realise you’ve skied wildly off piste, so to speak. I’ve just made an app for the iPhone. It’s called Machine #69, and the reason for its existence is the novel I’m currently writing, a metaphysical adventure story called Jefferson Greenspan Saves The Word? which is about time-travelling air conditioning salesman from the future trying to save the world in the 1960s. But the app isn’t an enhanced novel. The novel isn’t even finished, much less published. I describe the app as a ‘fractured digital entertainment experience’, which is jargony and uses the words ‘digital’ and ‘experience’, and indeed ‘fractured’, to suggest that it’s a bit broken, but that it’s something modern and to do with technology that isn’t a book, or a film, or a magazine, or an art exhibition, but might hint to the 21st century time-starved mobile device carrier that it’s a little bit of all of those things. Or something cool, at any rate. It’s certainly supposed to be a solid 45 minutes or so of immersive (headphones recommended) interaction. If you have Apple TV, you could stream it your huge television and share it with friends and family instead of watching a clip show about the best 100 sitcoms of all time.

So what is the app really, and why did I take time out from finishing the actual, y’know, uh, novel to make it, and why is out now (free download, get ‘it here while it's hot) when there is no novel yet to promote? 

Practically speaking, it’s partly a series of images and narrations, the texts lifted from the novel as it was being written, extracts which I felt leant themselves to being standalone moments which could be represented by a photograph that I could take. It’s also an expansion of unused back story, mostly around a band called La Grupo, an improvising counter-culture psyche rock outfit the main character in the novel finds himself playing synthesiser for in 1968. So I cast the band – friends, people I bumped into – and photographed them. And I asked musicians to create La Grupo’s music, which they did after reading extracts from the novel describing their psyche rock with synthesiser mojo and further guidance from me (‘they’re kinda like like early Cabaret Voltaire and Can and Silver Apples and MC5!’). I made up fake press cuttings about them from 1968 issues of Rolling Stone and Berkeley Barb. It’s all in the app; live shots, music tracks, press cuttings. By the time I’d finished making all this stuff I half-believed they were real myself.

In some places, the visuals are enhanced by sound effects, noises and atmospheric ambient loops. At one point, the app attempts to explain itself with a faked radio interview, made to sound like one of those earnest intellectual discussions interviewers used to have with novelists in the early 1960s. The whole thing is packaged behind an interface which doesn’t explain itself, but encourages, maybe even forces, the reader (reader? User?) to stumble into what there is of the story all out of sequence. The structure owes more to the 1970s films of Nic Roeg than it does your traditional novel. The experience is intended to mirror the confusion the characters in the novel feel as they warp back through time to the 1960s, using an unreliable machine that spews more information at them than they can cope with. And that idea itself is, in part, inspired by the possession of an iPhone, and our (OK, my) reliance on it and the likes of Twitter and Facebook to maintain connection with, and to create, an external reality. Technology here is a metaphor for the human mind itself, plagued with viruses and bio-chemical delusion. Or it’s the other way around. It’s a Möbius strip of a thing, its inside is its outside and vice versa. Give me a break, I haven’t finished the novel yet.

So why did make the app? Partly because it’s the sort of thing I really enjoy doing. One of the attractions of the creative process is the mystery of creation itself; until you make it happen, it doesn’t exist. The more you make something happen, the more it exists. By pulling more people into its orbit – musicians, actors, coders, illustrators, artists of all stripes – and pulling moving parts out of the novel and packing them into an iPhone, somehow it starts to flesh out. It gradually becomes a different beast, a broader concept, a big project the novel is a part of, with a fleshy interdependence. The app starts to influence the novel and the real people involved become key to its creation.

Another motive was to explore the technology’s potential for a novelist to connect directly with a readership, and to make connections with other artists to collaborate on a piece of work that has at its heart writing. Does the iPhone, and especially the iPad, represent a new way to write? Is it an opportunity to bend the novel out of its traditional shape, to mutate it? So far, people seem to appreciate the idea and are enjoying it.

One thing’s for certain, I loved making it, and I want to do more. I will continue writing novels, and I will continue creating content for this miraculous and exciting technology. And I’ll finish writing the novel itself any day now. Honest.

Mark Wernham is the author of Martin Martin’s on the Other Side, available in Vintage paperback.