'Shirley Bassey Mixed Up' is a collaborative biography by Dave Miller: an illustrated
biography of the legendary diva, where the reader helps to 'mix' the
illustrations online:

http://dev2.manme.org.uk/~davem/bassey_story/

All illustrations are built on-the-fly from live Yahoo searches. By
specifying different searches and playing with the customisation
options, the reader changes the appearance and content of the
illustrations.

The biography was inspired by an incident on a TV awards show last
year, where Bassey was humiliated. I felt sad to see this happen, and
wanted to know more about what led up to this. While researching the
work I was also experimenting with the idea of using Internet searches
to generate drawings, and the two projects ultimately came together.
The result is a traditional (linear) 14-page story built on top of a
generative composition tool, that uses Internet search data as its
input.

The work can be described as a networked narrative. By adding
unexpected and uncontrolled elements to the story we influence and
change the presentation of the story, how it's experienced and what we
take away from it. In effect we are shaping the story, even making a
new story, changing fact into fiction, sometimes disrupting the story.

As the networked elements are dynamic and largely unpredictable, every
experience of the story is unique. The generative composition tool is
controlled by the user, but this also has a controlled randomness
built in, to add to the unpredictability of the results.

By connecting the biography to live networked data, Dave Miller feels this
external connection can make it more valid or relevant. It makes the
story become less self-contained, and by being connected to a wider
body of knowledge, it can give it more contexts, less subjectivity and
reduce the control of the original author.