Wuwu & Co

wuwu figurer

Merete Pryds Helle, Kamila Slocinska, Tim Garbos & Aksel Køie:  Wuwu & co. (Touchbooks 2014)

When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.

Norwegian / norsk

Når lesebrettet ligger flatt leser du historiene til Wuwu og de andre dyrene i det lille røde huset i skogen, men når du løftet brettet opp blir det til et vindu inn i en tredimensjonal fiksjonsverden hvor du kan hjelpe dyrene løse sine problemer. Du rister på brettet for å riste snøen av et tre, roper høyt for å vekke Gregers søsken og må peke kameraet på noe gult i den virkelige verdenen for å tenne lysene til mørkredde Storm og hans familie. Merete Pryds Helle er kjent som en pionér innen danske elektronisk og hybridlitteratur, og denne appen har fått skryt av anmeldere for den kreative balansen mellom rolig, passiv lesing og en lekende deltagende modus hvor leseren bruker hele kroppen.