French

A Web Odyssey deals with the navigation on the Web. It is based on "The Odyssey" by Homer and the figure of Ulysses trying to navigate back to Ithaca.

This interactive narrative features the different episodes of The Odyssey (the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso...). The goal of the user is to reconnect to the e-thaca network. Parallels are then drawn between the oblivion caused by the lotos flowers and the infinite scrolling of social networks, the eye of the Cyclops and the webcam which monitors the Internet user (and which must be blinded or disabled), the Underworld and the Dark Web... The ecological question is also addressed through the Sirens, who feed on human flesh, and the streaming platforms which consume a lot of energy and data and feed on the resources of our environment.

The Greeks associated a mythological divinity with each phenomenon. They accepted not to be able to understand everything, and the gods often served as an explanation. Centuries later, don't we have the same relationship with digital technologies? Are human beings free to make their own choices or do they have to obey their Fate, the Greeks wondered. Are human beings simple pawns, constrained in their choices, or sovereign creatures with free will? When we navigate on the Web, especially on platforms, we can often feel the same tension as the one felt by Ulysses during his perilous journey…

This narrative, which articulates literary, educational and recreational dimensions, is available in French and English. It invites us to reflect on our digital milieu, social media, platforms… and more broadly on digital technologies.

Source: exhibition documentationPresentation: http://www.utc.fr/~bouchard/works/presentation-odyssey.pdf

The first text adventure game by pioneering software company Radarsoft (John Vanderaart). Players had to make their way through the storyworld by typing in commands on their keyboards.

The philosophical animal stories by famous Dutch author Toon Tellegen are brought to life in the app ‘A Distant Journey’. Now even the youngest can enjoy the story of the elephant, the squirrel and a mysterious tree. This interactive story is perfect for parents and teachers who want to spend some quality time with their children or want to hand them something interesting and thoughtful to do on their own.

With hand drawn illustrations by artist Gwen Stok, a compelling and heartfelt soundtrack by Half Way Station, lively animations and various interactions, this heartwarming story will keep children coming back again and again. Reading the story themselves or listen as the story is being told.

Adventures with inter-linguistic combinatorial poetry, machine translation and text-to-speech.

“Monde instable” is French for “unstable world.”

This is an African e-poem expressed in French and inspired by thecurrent Covid-19 pandemic and the politicians’ responses.

A lot of politicians are turning themselves into scientists.

They proffer political sentiment as an egress to this nightmare that’ssweeping millions of souls to the next world, instead of relying onthe established scientific facts to fight the disease.

Moreover, these world leaders are not humble enough to allowscientists and academics to give us lasting solutions through the helpof the Heavens and the intelligentsia.

Another pandemic is climatophosis (i.e climate change, a word I coinedthis year in my digital poetry).

This is worse than the Covid-19 pandemic, though many don’t believethis. It is real! Climatophosis has brought humans and wild animals toshare the same niches.

Notably, in the northeastern Nigeria (Adamawa and Borno), since theearly 2000s, we’ve had elephants invading our backyard orchards andgardens which led to the loss of valuable forest and cash crops.

Leaders don’t still believe these changes in the ecosystem.

When I read a scientific article on Covid-19 earlier this year, Idiscovered parallels between my tribal people’s mythology andscientific explanations of the spread of the pandemic. It is believedamong my tribe, the Margi, that there is a a black bird with curvedbeak and long legs called a shimdu. Shimdu possess a deadly coughcalled kekika, probably a sickness like the coronavirus pandemic. Ifthe bird is killed and roasted, it spreads kekika to the environmentvia air.

English translation: Unstable world

     This world is full of trouble!      It’s made indeed for the humble.I see it, I humble myself but mumble.Thinking that it’s just a grumble.Covid-19 & climatophosis killMore souls in the night than ever.Their terrors lead the world into errors.Cos heads want powers in their corridors.    Only stable minds conquer terrors        Cos they are mind conquerors.

-->

(Source: Author's note in source code of the poem)

This work started to be built in the year 2013, out of scripts, texts writing, musical composition, and a crime investigation (aside from the compilation of images from the web) that I carried out during previous years as if gathering pieces from a puzzle. “Hotel Minotaur” first was entitled “It`s Enough to Open a Hotel`s Doors” and I first started to visualize it when writer Fernando Marias, invited me to be part of his anthology “Solitude is the Home of the Monster” (Imagine Press, 2013), with a multimedia piece. To facilitate the reader`s turn from paper to the digital space a QR (Quick Response Code) in the book`s Codex was added.

Staging was possible due to the support of David Losada, who decisively contributed to the idea and the concept and brought the means of Maloka Media, and to the collaboration of Fidel Cordero (music), Jesus Jimenez (design and programming) and Paola Rey (production). Programming of “Hotel Minotaur” was brought to an end back in 2015 with subtle changes on both, text and interface and was part of the Conclusions to the Doctoral Thesis “Form and Core of the Multimedia Narrative” (Humanities, Carlos III University, brilliant cum laude, 2015).

It was first presented on the opening to the European Digital Literatures (House of Velazquez, Madrid, June, 2013) and since its advent it has been a subject to study, being included on the Ciberia Anthology (Madrid Complutense University). It has been translated into French by Christian Roinat and into English by Montague Kobbe.