Alasdair Gray is Digit Al
Alasdair Gray is generally seen as an inherently analogue creator. But playwright Anita Sullivan and Alasdair’s niece Kat, are intrigued by what his work and practice might have looked like as a digital native. Digit Al!
Uncle Al: Alasdair Gray at home in the early 1980s
Digit Al: Alasdair Gray drawing we’ve adopted as Digit Al
Digit Al inspiration
As digital creatives we’ve often found ourselves wondering how a digitally enabled Alasdair Gray would have worked and what he might have produced. Indeed we found the subject so intriguing that we decided to conduct a more thorough investigation. We asked friends of Alasdair, his collaborators, fans and cross-media experts for their thoughts. And we shared our ideas at Making Imagined Objects, the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference in Glasgow hosted by the University of Strathclyde and The Alasdair Gray Archive.
This page recreates our conference session with minor changes and updates to accommodate the different format and in response to requests from contributors. We would like to thank the conference organisers, funders, hosts and partners together with everyone who contributed to our research and made the event such a pleasure. There’s a list of all our contributors and a link to the conference website at the end.
Alasdair Gray and Digit Al
For the purposes of our investigation, Alasdair Gray and Digit Al are exactly the same in every respect. They have the same personality and preferences. The same creative drives to deliver the same messages. But there’s one critical difference: Alasdair Gray was born in 1934 and Digit Al was born in 1994. So Digit Al has grown up with digital technology and has different options to his older-era self, Alasdair Gray.
Some caveats
Although we shared these ideas at a conference they’re definitely not objective or academic. But they are based on conversations with people who knew Alasdair Gray well and worked closely with him at different times and in different ways.
We’ve tried to stay true to our contributor’s feelings as well as their words but the context and conclusions of this piece are entirely our own. So while we hope our ideas are informed and informative they’re also speculative, exploratory and very subjective. It’s the start of a conversation rather than a conclusion.
We’ve assembled our findings into 4 areas that feel fruitful –
Tools
Process
Output
Collaboration
But in the context of Alasdair Gray these boundaries are permeable and so ideas may escape and cross-pollinate!
Tools
Some of Alasdair Gray’s tools
Some of Digit Al’s tools?
Alasdair Gray’s tools
What was Alasdair Gray’s relationship to tools? His sister Mora, collaborators Nichol Wheatley and Edwin Pickstone and Glasgow Print Studio Director John Mackechnie share their thoughts.
Mora: His pen and his fingers are one. They are moving as one over a piece of paper which is also static. What he could not do, for love nor money, was contact with a moving object.
Mora: Having tried London he goes back to Glasgow. He goes back to where he knows. And I think there’s a sort of correlation there between sticking with what you know you can do well. I mean he obviously did try new things. But the same as there was a security in returning to Glasgow, I think there’s a security in returning to your pen and pencil.
Nichol: Alasdair knew what he wanted but he didn’t want to engage with the technical aspects of making it. What he did have was the vision.
John: And I think it was me that had the idea of getting him to do the colour proofing digitally. And surprisingly, he took to it.
Nichol: As long as he was able to direct the person correctly he was very comfortable directing me to, you know, zoom in. Zoom out. Make that slightly pinker. Right bring that back. Right let’s look at it as the whole thing. Then pull it back in again.
“The digital process didn’t seem to be of particular interest to Alasdair. He was more keen on seeing print-outs which he could then get involved with using pencil and ruler, examining the proportions and structure of his designs and grappling with how the structural logic of the capital letters fit with the complexity of a much larger, digitally designed, character set.”
Digit Al’s Tools
Our investigations revealed that Alasdair Gray stuck to simple tools he could trust – particularly the pen he used for writing and drawing, which was an extension of his hand. But Alasdair was happy to use more complex tools through other people. He could imagine the potential.
So what tools might a much younger Alasdair be attracted to and why? His sister Mora, assistant Stef Gardiner and scholar Alan Nevens share some thoughts.
Mora: It was how to get things out of his imagination onto the paper in a way that he felt secure with. You can use an iPad. You can now do it with your finger. So that might have been something, I think, that might have intrigued him.
Stef: Dante! Oh 3 books! Oh I know how you feel, Sir. We’ve been up and down for so long! But to have that level of detail in your head, that you can constantly change so quickly, on so many different things at the same time.
Alan: With Alasdair it’s so clear from the fact that he is making use of the facilities available to him, even if it’s to the computer via a typesetter. And really working them, as far as I can tell, to the absolute ends of their wits. But certainly that would suggest that whatever he could have taken control of for the purposes of his text, you suspect he would have.
Tools: It’s all about flow
Alasdair Gray’s work in both visual art and prose is all about flow - of a voice, a line an idea. A vintage typewriter is a thuggish machine. You have to hit keys hard and it has an inescapable staccato rhythm. Revision is a separate process, awash with correction fluid. And a typewriter isn’t good in bed. Is it really such a lovable tool?
But imagine if Alasdair had been able to skip not just the typewriter but also the uncomfortable early tech before accessible WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors? What if he’d entered the digital universe when tools are responsive and intuitive? If he’d jumped straight to iPad touchscreen and could train his own Dragon voice-recognition software to take dictation? And isn’t the portable equivalent of pen and paper now a mobile phone?
Alasdair Gray stuck with a few simple tools he knew well throughout his life. But he was also very happy to work with people who could use other tools including digital ones. So we suspect that Digit Al would also stick with a few tools he can trust – the pencil and his phone? But as a digital native what tools could he now use through other people?
Process
An Alasdair Gray drawing covered in correction fluid
An Amazon review of Alasdair’s novel 1982, Janine
Alasdair Gray’s process
So how analogue was Alasdair Gray’s process? His assistant Stef Gardiner is painfully familiar with his working methods. He shares an insight along with John Mackechnie.
Stef: Yes he would have a notebook, which had been written and re-written with notes on the notes on top of the notes. But for the most part he would just dictate it as you’re trying to keep up with him. And by the time he’d got to the end of the sentence, even though he’s about to start the next sentence, he would alter the start of the paragraph you’d just typed. So he’s already changing what he’s changed 14 or 15 times in his notepads.
John: I mean I have heard that people wouldn’t let him into their houses to get near to the pictures in case he sort of started redoing them. You know, so I think that’s just a natural inclination that you know, something was never quite finished. There was always more that you could do to it. So from our point of view we have to say, ‘Look Alasdair, sorry. It’s done. It’s finished.’
Alasdair Gray’s brain
Alasdair’s process was iterative and ongoing – he was always refining and improving in a constant creative conversation. And this may have something to do with his brain which worked in extraordinary ways. As his editor Francis Bickmore, filmmaker Kevin Cameron and Stef Gardiner explain.
Francis: I think there’s something about his brain that would absolutely be comfortable in the hyperlinked, slipstream world of just slipping through to libraries of knowledge at your fingertips. It felt like he had the Internet in his brain in a way.
Kevin: One of the things was how vast Alasdair’s brain was. And how he could relate these different ideas. Like he had these kind of hyperlinks so when you were kind of talking to him, it was almost like he contained all these books that had been deleted or something. That all this information that you’ll never know again, or you wouldn’t be able to connect in the same ways that his head could connect it. That’s a real loss!
Stef: But to have that level of detail in your head that you can constantly change, so quickly, on so many different things at the same time. As it would have been known in the modern vernacular, the multiverse. You, me, all his characters, all his work, in different worlds, existing in different universes. Trying to draw them all together. He knew where to put it. In what memory bank it went. And why it went there. And how to find it again, to bring it back up and appropriately put it into conversation.
Digital by design?
Alasdair Gray didn’t use the internet but in many ways his brain was the internet. His access-memory was astonishing: his mind hyperlinking between factual information, great literature, history, politics and his own past, present and future works.
His process was one constant, fertile, restless conversation. A way of thinking and working that feels very contemporary and also very digital. Nichol Wheatley and Alasdair’s biographer Rodge Glass share some recollections that support this idea.
Nichol: He’d send Stef down to the print place, increase it by 100, 110, 120%. Bring it back. He’d decide the one he wanted to use. He’d glue it down onto a bit of paper and then draw it again with, you know, tippex and pens. Effectively photoshopping it. But just in the old school way.
Rodge: He was forever recycling his emblems. And many of the things that appear on the Hillhead subway are things that he had done before, that he was re-appropriating. And I think that, in a digital space, would have suited him very well. The idea that you could create different versions of the same thing. Or take elements from different pieces and different contexts and remake them anew.
Digit Al’s process
As a digital native his younger-era self is free to experiment, integrate, capture, connect, revise and share fluently because the relationship between process and output is very different in digital. In fact they’re often the same thing.
Digit Al doesn’t need to have hard lines between the different artforms in his creative practice. His thoughts don’t need to be compartmentalised into different processes as contemporary software allows him to create integrated prose and artwork as one thought-stream, one workflow. The emblems and themes that echo through his work could be cut and pasted across artforms. His digital work can retain different versions, different revisions, in open conversation with itself across time. And he could share that process with his collaborators, readers and viewers.
Process: It’s a creative conversation
Of course Digit Al will still want to produce books and pictures, use analogue processes. But surely he would be drawn into other form of creativity too? Digital processes would enable him to take his experiments further, to capture and share his evolving conversations?
Surely this digitally enabled creative conversation would be the natural extension and output of his extraordinary, hyperlinked brain?
Output
Alasdair Gray at home surrounded by his work in the early 1980s
Sandy Grierson in the 2015 stage production of Lanark (adapted by David Grieg and Graham Eatough, photograph by Tim Morozzo)
Alasdair Gray’s output
Alasdair's process and output encompassed different media, often in unconventional ways. So how did his work fit with the canon? Was he traditional or revolutionary? Nichol Wheatley, John Mackechnie, Kevin Cameron and Stef Gardiner share some thoughts.
Nichol: What I got from Alasdair was, if you’re going to make proper art the budget and the timetable doesn’t matter. And then sometimes the technique doesn’t matter. It’s about delivering the idea. So where I had skills, he had intent.
John: He’s kind of like out of the past and into the future at the same time.
Kevin: He was interested in being part of a tradition. Like the whole kind of thing of murals and novels… I guess his work seems to be kind of engaging with those previous forms.
Stef: But he also had a hard time understanding when someone would say Alasdair, that’s not actually possible. Because it’s possible in his head ‘cause he’s seen it!
Nichol: He was so talented the medium almost didn’t matter. He could read a poem and see the line of pigment in a painting meaning the same thing.
Alasdair as early adopter
Alasdair Gray’s output is both conservative and radical. He was interested in the big questions and wanted to be part of the canon. But he pushed his art forms to the limit (and beyond) so that he could move the canon on. He also combined elevated art with egalitarian principles and wanted to connect directly with his audience.
Current version of Alasdair Gray’s website first built in 2000
Part of a letter sent to Alasdair’s niece Tracy in 2000
This desire to connect and share meant that despite never working with digital tools himself, Alasdair was actually a very early adopter when it came to having a website. His own was built in 2000 – way ahead of many big brands and before the appearance of internet institutions such Wikipedia (2001) Wordpress (2003) and Google (2005).
Digital frustrations
Despite being a digital native, Digit Al will also reach boundaries and be frustrated by them. In fact, Alasdair Gray’s analogue output often offers more creative options than its digital equivalent. As our contributors Alan Nevens and designer Neil McGuire highlight.
Print version of The Ministry Of Voices in Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine
eReader version of The Ministry Of Voices in Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982, Janine
“There are things that just can’t be easily reproduced in a Kindle. And so as an author whose work is reproduced electronically, you have less control over how your reader will encounter your world.”
“Alasdair would hate Kindle but embrace the idea of an online, interlinked text.”
A book today has multiple existences and is expected to function across many electronic formats such as ebook, Kindle and audiobook. It’s difficult for a writer to experiment with form because they have little or no control over the way the text is displayed and eReaders really require plain text to function most effectively.
So where does that leave the complex typographic design of The Ministry of Voices in 1982, Janine? In print, you have to physically turn the book around to read the multi-directional text. You therefore make editorial decisions about which voices to read in which order: it is an interactive text. In the ebook version those typographic pages have to be provided as images, which are a poor substitute. Your experience is limited, passive and frustrating.
While Alasdair Gray pushed his analogue typographer to the limit and beyond, the eReader version of 1982, Janine is a frustrated object. Something that neither Alasdair nor Digit Al would like!
Inherent obsolescence
The multiple formats and constant upgrades that characterise digital technology present further limitations.
“Imagine you were a digitally engaged author… we hear tell of the wonderful interactive thing you created that everyone marvelled at… that’s no longer accessible and will never be seen again.”
However, the same is true of Alasdair Gray’s analogue work. His early plays were never videoed. Or if they were they’re not in an accessible format. The BBC doesn’t hold Alasdair’s radio plays in its digital archive, so they can never be broadcast or made available online. These plays now only exist as text.
Cover of Alasdair Gray’s A Gray Playbook
Mobile phone screenshots of Alan Trotter’s hyperlinked typographic story All This Rotting
Digit Al’s output
If Digit Al is anything like Alasdair, he won’t settle for simply reproducing his analogue work digitally. He wouldn’t accept a flawed, frustrated object, lost in translation. He’d push the medium and the process to the limits and use digital technology to create something new. Perhaps something hyperlinked, illustrated, animated, audio, accessible, interactive and open source?
Output: Finding new forms
So let’s imagine a different kind of output. With marginalia and footnotes as active links within and across the primary text, connecting us to works that influenced our author or to images, maps, audio or video. Let’s imagine animated concrete poetry (where the shape of the text-on-page is integral to the poem) appearing as it is spoken, or animated symbols or doodles interconnecting across his texts, so we can follow the lightning journeys of his hyperlinked mind.
DigitAl would take control of the means of production. He would integrate his work across media and forms, switching between analogy and digital to suit his message. He would become not just the author but also the curator of his own Canon. But the more multimedia a project becomes, the more specialists are needed to make it happen. So to achieve his vision, Digit Al might need a little help from his friends.
Collaboration
Group of artists with Alasdair Gray on the far right
Digit Al word cloud created by Anita Sullivan
Alasdair Gray’s collaborations
Alasdair Gray was certainly part of a network but was he also collaborative? Rodge Glass, Francis Bickmore and actor John Hollywood share their thoughts.
Rodge: He was consistently, always, instinctively community minded. Never looking to pretend that the author or the artist is the great I am, that does everything.
Francis: I think a lot of his skill and success was about single-minded vision. Cause he was just so single-minded about the stuff he was doing. He was just doing it. And everyone who came into his orbit was sort of, delighted to be roped into helping him do that stuff.
“If there was a problem in rehearsals he’d help solve it, change it. It was as if it were written for me.”
Inclusive and egalitarian
Alasdair Gray was part of a large inter-connected network of creatives who he worked with in different ways – from supporter or contributor to leader or auteur. So how collaborative he was varied depending on the project and his role in it.
But whoever he was working with and whatever his role, Alasdair was always inherently inclusive and egalitarian. He always wanted to listen and understand other perspectives. And he was meticulous in crediting his contributors.
He was also inherently open-source. Always happy to share money, ideas, projects and his own works with other people. And to carry on the creative conversation by developing other people’s ideas and output.
Digit Al’s collaborations
Digital technology enables both the auteur and the collaborator. A single multi-talented musician can write their own music, play and record all the instruments, release the tracks themselves and connect directly with their audience. Or alternatively a collaborative creative can work on complex projects with multiple global contributors they will never meet face to face.
So where might Alasdair Gray’s open-source nature and experimental process have taken him as a digital native? Who might he have worked with and what might they have created together?
Collaboration: Breaking more boundaries
Imagine if Digit Al were collaborating with animators, immersive technicians, coders who could create interactive narratives and texts? Imagine stories breaking free of the page and the reductive eBook to become interactive online narratives? Unthank, The Institute and Glasgow woven together but discretely viewable.
Imagine murals as street-sized multimedia light installations subverting public spaces. Imagine The Ministry of Voices as a VR world where the walls are text and you walk through character audio, conducting the sound as you go.
Imagine the Ubiquitous Chip murals with QR codes linking to oral histories. And that audio is on a website that encourages community creativity. And that site has a directory of people wanting to collaborate. And those people can be anywhere in the world, ‘all kinds of folk’ engaging with Alasdair’s Glasgow. That’s the world of Digit Al!
Alasdair Gray is Digit Al
Alasdair Gray is famously described as a polymath who worked in multiple mediums and broke boundaries wherever he found them. And while Alasdair never engaged with digital technology himself, he was constantly curious and delighted to explore its creative possibilities through other people.
He was also a restless, relentless investigator of the physical world we live in and the virtual worlds we create in the many different mediums open to us. One example of this is his slyly sinister short story The Trendelenburg Position, which was first published in 1993. In it he not only understands and describes Virtual Reality (VR) technology, which was very much in its infancy at the time. But he also anticipates anxieties about the ways in which it can be used to escape uncomfortable realities and exert social control.
Audio transcript:
The hat of tomorrow – an audio-visual helmet with or without the suit – will not only release you into an exciting world of your own choice; it will shut out the dirty, unpleasant future my wife keeps worrying about. It will give marijuana or heavy drug sensations without damaging the health. Of course, intelligent people like you and I, Mrs Chigwell, will use it for more than escapist entertainment. We will use it to talk to friends and entertain ourselves. Children of four will be fitted with helmets giving them the experience of a spacious, friendly classroom where beautiful, wise, playful adults teach them everything their parents want them to know. Schools will become a thing of the past and teacher too since a few hundred will scripted actors will be able to educate the entire planet. And think of the saving in transport! When the lesson stopped they could the helmet off and bingo – they’re home again. Unless the parents switch them onto a babysitter channel.
Some final thoughts
So we believe that the ways Alasdair Gray worked and the things he created are inherently digital. And that as Digit Al he would have been able to go even further and create even more extraordinary things. A feeling shared by Alasdair’s long-time creative collaborator Nichol Wheatley.
Nichol: I think if Alasdair had been native in digital and understood the digital world. And if he’d had a partner that had been able to support him in terms of coding, metaverse space, that kind of stuff. He would probably have created work that we couldn’t have imagined. Because he did have that ability to see things and to take steps that other people weren’t able to take.
With thanks to…
You – for taking this imaginative journey with us! Of course this isn’t the end but a starting point. We’re keen to keep Digit Al alive through digital and collaborative responses to Alasdair Gray’s work. So if you’ve got something to contribute, get in touch!
Our contributors:
Imogen Ayres, AnOrdain, typeface designer
Francis Bickmore, Alasdair’s editor, Canongate
Kevin Cameron, Filmmaker, Alasdair Gray at 80
Sorcha Dallas, Custodian, The Alasdair Gray Archive
Stef Gardiner, Artist and Alasdair’s assistant
Rodge Glass, Alasdair’s biographer and Alasdair Gray conference Convener
John Hollywood, Actor, Birds of Paradise and Working Legs
John Mackechnie, Director, Glasgow Print Studio
Neil McGuire, After the News, designer and typographer
Alan Nevens, Alasdair scholar and electronic author
Edwin Pickstone, GSA lecturer and typography technician
Mora Rolley, Alasdair’s sister
Nichol Wheatley, Artist and collaborator, Hillhead and Oran Mor
The Conference organisers and funders: The University of Strathclyde and the Alasdair Gray Archive in partnership with the Glasgow School of Art, the University of Western Brittany (HCTI), Aix-Marseille Universite (LERMA), Edge Hill University, the University of Lausanne and the Tannahill Fund for the Furtherance of Scottish Literature.
Share your thoughts…
What’s your creative relationship with digital technology? Share your thoughts in our poll.
Explore more…
A Gray’s place
After Alasdair Gray died his flat was cleared and sold. But you can still visit it.
Interpreting our Gray DNA
How does the AI behind ChatGPT and Midjourney interpret our Gray DNA?
AlasdAIr Gray’s art
Experiments in AI digital art generation using the work of Alasdair Gray.
External links:
Hear Alasdair read the whole of his short story The Trendelenburg Position on Alasdair Gray rereads.
More about Making Imagined Objects: The 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference