Norwegian

VUMA Soner honours the voices, stories and talent of people of colour in Scandinavia. It is an app created by VUMA Projects with geo-triggered immersive audio experiences. This chapter of the app contains a collection of thoughts, reflections, and conversations, remembered or spontaneous, tied to specific landmarks, buildings and areas in the city of Bergen. The authors are all living in Bergen, some speaking in Norwegian and some in English. The sounds can be accessed in six central locations through a free downloadable app, which can be combined into one long, or multiple small walks. Production of the app is supported by the City of Bergen, the Arts Council of Norway and BEK.

How to access the appTo find the app, go to an app store (Google Play or App Store) on your mobile device. Search for “VUMA Soner” and download it for free. Create an account and select the walk. The audio experiences are linked to GPS locations and will be triggered when you walk into the zone of your selected walk. If your signal is weak in some areas, you can download the walks onto your device beforehand. Just be sure to keep the GPS on.

A blind date between an American epidemiologist and a Norwegian woman takes place on a transatlantic Skype call. In trying to impress his potential paramour, the American steers the conversation terribly wrong, toward a discussion of the Plague and all the devastating historical memories it entails.  Rats and Cats :: Katter Og Rotter is a film by Roderick Coover and Scott Rettberg. The film is designed both installation (loop) and single channel screening. It is the second in a series of works about memory, desire, catastrophe, and translation. Rats and Cats :: Katter Og Rotter features the voices of Jill Walker and Rob Wittig. The sound technician was Joseph Kramer. The work was made possible in part with funding from the Philadelphia Independent Film and Video Association.

The Poetry Machine was developed in 2012 as a way for libraries to exhibit electronic literature.52 The installation consists of three sensor-equipped books through which (up to) three simultaneous users can compose poems on a screen, and then get them printed on small receipts and stored on a website. When seizing a book, the user is assigned a sentence from this book out of approximately a hundred different sentences. Each sentence exists in three variations, which the user can choose to drag into the writing space. After a limit (e.g., 350 characters) is reached, by combining the books and sentences, the poem is finished, printed, and stored online.

The Poetry Machine was designed as a collaborative project between librarians, authors, and researchers, and the design has focused on critically addressing the digiti- zation of literary culture—that is, on the tendency of the literary apparatus. The Poetry Machine allows users to experience digitization through the composition of poems and interaction with the installation. In this way the installation seeks to make the apparatus of digitization sensible. Apart from making a usable and meaningful literary installation, it proposes that digitization does not just make the book disappear into virtual libraries but instead on a more fundamental level changes writing itself. Furthermore, it suggests a tactic to comprehend and act against the disappearance (“burning”) of the book that has happened at many libraries. As not-just-art, it explores how tactics from electronic literature challenge traditional literary understanding through three interconnected levels.

(Source: The Metainterface by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold)