Beware and warning! This book is different from other books. You and you alone are in charge of what happens in this story!

Choose Your Own Adventure (1979)

The 21st century is known for its interactive art, where the boundaries between audience and performers are blurred thanks to the use of technology. However, such openness has also been part of experimental projects in the previous century. For example, so-called gamebooks were designed as interactive stories in which the reader could decide the fate of the characters by choosing narrative paths at the end of each section.

In A Gothic Gamebook, the audience will unfold the story of a young couple of lovers according to the tropes of early 19th-century Gothic literature. For each scene, the musicians perform music belonging to a corpus of Romantic German lieder. The music itself is full of references to magic, fantastic creatures, ghosts and horror.

This musical game is part of the artistic research project A Whirlpool of Imaginary Sounds led by Nicholas Cornia (nicholas.cornia[at]orpheusinstituut.be).