cinematic

Novelling is a digital novel from 2016 by Will Luers, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean and it is about fiction itself, and how we read and write it. The authors' aim is to analyze and combine the performances of reading-fiction and writing-fiction in order to create a "common system" in which the two activities work together. To make it possible, they employed three key-elements, as text, video and sound. Novelling has been written on a website using the languages of HTML5 and JavaScript and it is available on its website (novelling.newbinarypress.com). The authors created several interfaces which last 30 seconds - then, new interfaces will appear. Anyways, the user may change it whenever he/she wants just clicking on the screen. After 6 minutes, the novel restarts allowing the reader to experience a new reading direction. In this way the reader has the chance to try different "key-lecture" time by time. Novelling unfolds through the narrative connections between four characters, which are all immersed in their isolated-life-worlds. On the screen appear several 'he' and 'she' and never real names. This give you the feeling of a lot of voices that speak with any specific direction or purpose - consequently you do not really understand what is going on. At some point, it became easy to me to identify the four characters: even if they seem to be insulated in each of their words, it is clear how they are seamlessly connected to each other. There is no real or specific plot and neither a point from which the story can be spotted. It is funny to try to guess who the main character in every different text is. In this way the entire project is like a test of every possibilities of narrative.

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Novelling is a generative interface that renders a semiotic arrangement of sound, image and text. Readerly and cinematic, narrative and poetic, its sequential structure is variable. It unfolds without a strongly delineated plot, character or narrative structure and yet is suggestive of “novelistic” spaces. These are spaces of interior reflection and exterior gestures, intimacy and estrangement, things said and unsaid, action and desire, reading, writing and looking.Continuing an exploration of generative multimedia and potential narratives, this third collaboration of Will Luers, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, takes up the subject of the novel as a virtual space of co-mingling subjects and settings. (Source: http://elo2016.com/will-luers-hazel-smith-roger-dean/, Artists' statement)

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novelling is a recombinant digital novel that employs text, video and sound. It poses questions about the acts of reading and writing fiction, and inhabits the liminal space between the two activities. The work is a generative system that algorithmically orders and spatially arranges fragments of media (design elements, text, video and sound) in 6-minute cycles. Every 30 seconds the interface changes, but the user may also click the screen at any time to produce a change. Straddling the lines between literature, cinema and music, novelling evokes the history of the novel (remixing and rewriting 19th and 20th century sources), but it also questions the form's basis in plot, character and words alone. novelling unfolds through suggested narrative connections between four characters. The characters, immersed in their isolated life-worlds, appear to be transported elsewhere by what they are reading. Are they reading and thinking each other? How does the writing relate to the reading? Are the words on the screen versions or even drafts of the novel? Do the sounds come from a different interior world? The work is suggestive of "novelistic" spaces, spaces of interior reflection and exterior gestures, intimacy and estrangement, gazing and being gazed at. The variable and deterministic system of selection and arrangement produces a fluid, ever-novel and potential narrative.

Aleph Null (2011) marks Jim Andrews’ return to open source work since he shifted to Macromedia (now Adobe) Director in 2000. His earliest works were written in DHTML between 1997-2000, a highly creative period in which he found his “voice” as a poet and programmer of electronic literature  with works like “Seattle Drift” and the “Stir Fry Texts.” The limitations of DHTML at the time prompted his move to Director, which allowed him to develop highly musical and visual pieces, such as “Nio,” “Arteroids,” and “Jig Sound.” During his Director period, Andrews started creating works as artistic tools rather than as end products (as was the case in his early visual poetry), as seen in “A Pen” and “dbCinema,” both of which are artistic predecessors to Aleph Null. “A Pen” is a software pen with four simultaneous nibs that offers simple tools that encourage both active play and contemplation to allow a textual and visual poem to unfold. “dbCinema” uses diverse shapes as nibs, the results of an image search as “ink,” a random path and rotation for the nibs, and highly elaborate tools to shape the results as they are generated in real time. Aleph Null continues in this tradition by creating a digital tool that allows users to create “color music” and still images, or simply step back and allow it to unfold as “painterly cinema.”Aleph Null is many things. It’s an exploration of JavaScript and HTML5. It’s a record of a creative process. It’s a set of digital tools created to produce artistic pieces and made available for audiences to explore their own creativity. But tools shape their users in subtle ways. To use Aleph Null is to enter Andrews’ thought process, poetics, and vision.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-POETRY)

On one level, Cruising is an excited oral recitation of a teenager's favorite pastime in small town Wisconsin, racing up and down the main drag of Main Street looking to make connections, wanting love. But by merging the linear aspect of the sound recording with an interactive component that demands a degree of control, Cruising reinforces the spatial and temporal themes of the poem by requiring the user to learn how to “drive” the text. A new user must first struggle with gaining control of the speed, the direction, and the scale in order to follow the textual path of the narrative. When the text on the screen and the spoken words are made to coincide, the rush of the image sequence is reduced to a slow ongoing loop of still frames. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing a filmic flow of images — but cannot exactly have both at the same time. In this way, the work seeks to highlight the materiality of text, film, and interface.

(Souce: Authors' description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One)