Flight Paths (2007 – 2012)

“Flight Paths: A Networked Novel” is a web-based project created by Kate Pullinger in collaboration with Chris Joseph and an international group of participants. It tells the story of Yacub, a young Pakistani man, whose life collides with Harriet, a middle-aged woman in London. The story was inspired by an article in The Guardian newspaper about a man who falls from the sky. “I’m continuing to develop the story that begins in Flight Paths on other platforms” – she explained on her blog in 2012, mentioning “Duel” and print novel “Landing Gear”.

Pullinger describes “Flight Paths” as a “reaction” to “A Million Penguins”, a 2007 participatory wiki-novel project she was involved and which she found “chaotic and exhausting”. The question behind “A Million Penguins” was whether a community could write a novel – in today’s terms, whether the writing of a novel could be crowd-sourced – while with “Flight Paths”, Pullinger and Joseph were curious about how collaboration could work during the research phase of their project. They invited readers to participate from the beginning in “Flight Paths” development, encouraging them to share stories, texts, pictures, audio recordings etc., that could be an inspiration for the “five little flash story hot points” Pullinger and Joseph were creating and to take part in the discussions on the work in progress. The first platform for such a community (much smaller than in the case of “A Million Penguins”) was a WordPress blog; then the project moved to a Netvibes Universe an early web aggregator. The five episodes were published on the website and all participants whose materials were used while creating the Flash stories were mentioned as co-authors. Pullinger and Joseph remember working on “Flight Paths” as a long process of finding the right formula for such a participatory project. “I’ve found I’ve needed ages to ponder it all and get my head round how best to make this project work online” – Pullinger wrote in April 2008. A sixth episode was added in 2012.

In 2011 Andy Campbell joined the “Flight Paths” team to work on the app version of the project that would work on all platforms. That was never released, but in 2012 an experimental open-source version of the first episode was published.

In the Archive you can see what the Netvibe Universe looked like as well as read the archived blog from the project.