A chapter about a web site Stefans hosted, Circulars, which "was founded on January 30, 2003, to provide a focal point for poets’ and artists’ activities and reflections on the impending inva- sion of Iraq along with the politics of the media and civil liberties issues." (quote from first sentence of chapter).
Chicago Soul Exchange (CSE) was a weeklong collaborative web fiction, including a multi-character blog and fictional online store. Prompted by the claim that there are more humans alive now than the sum total of humans who have lived before, Chicago Soul Exchange imagines an e-commerce site that re-sells past lives, in high demand. ‘Yes, you can have a better past! At competitive prices!’
Rob Wittig devised the project, structured the narrative, and was team leader of the collaborative cast of writers. I provided digital collage images and designed elements for the fictional store and past-life catalog. I also participated as online characters who shopped and posted to the fictional Soul Exchange online shopping network
What motivates games of make-believe—collaborative creative play—is not the overcom- ing of an unnecessary obstacle, but the resolution of unavoidable and intolerable tension. Like seismic forces in the earth’s crust, inner wars among our own sub-personalities with their conflicting motivations, as well as outer social tensions among members of social hier- archies, we find rebalancing in the earthquake of laughter. A core piece of advice from the renowned Chicago theatrical improv company Second City is: “There is a wealth of humor available through status differences and the playing thereof. Realize it and play with it. The changes and shifts that are inherent are ripe for the taking” (Libera 2004). Satirization of status and the status quo through travesty, impersonation, and formal mimicry is a long tra- dition in literature and theater. This play of mimicry, parody, and satire is vital to reveal and rebalance relationships of power. An un-satirized world is unlivable. For me the goals of each netprov are: laughter, insight, and empathy. Therefore here is my reformulation of Suits, the flag under which I play: Netprov is the voluntary attempt to heal necessary relationships.
When serious communications are made silly, the world goes cuckoo. Cuckoo birds are brood parasites. They lay their eggs in the nests of other birds. Cuckoo chicks hatch earlier and grow faster than the others, often kicking them out of the nest. We netprov players are cuckoo birds: we lay our eggs in other birds’ nests; we hijack available media for our own nefar . . . er, I mean . . . hilarious purposes. We come from a proud line of cuckoo birds. Like the London riverbank players who took the crazy tradition of court- yard morality plays and hijacked them by asking: could these become as good as the clas- sical tragedies and comedies? Let’s look at some other of our cuckoo ancestors.
IVANHOE is a pedagogical environment for interpreting textual and other cultural materials. It is designed to foster critical awareness of the methods and perspectives through which we understand and study humanities documents. An online collaborative playspace, IVANHOE exposes the indeterminacy of humanities texts to role-play and performative intervention by students at all levels.
While we often refer to IVANHOE as a ?game,? it is important to understand that the concept has broader implications for humanities pedagogy and research, and that many modes of sophisticated, scholarly gamesmanship are possible in the IVANHOE environment. The ?rules? of the game are up to its players and initiators. IVANHOE can foster both competitive and collaborative interaction, well suited to research and teaching.
No, really: what is IVANHOE?
In simple terms, IVANHOE is a digital space in which players take on alternate identities in order to collaborate in expanding and making changes to a ?discourse field,? the documentary manifestation of a set of ideas that people want to investigate collaboratively.
Conceived at SpecLab and developed by ARP, IVANHOE was released to open-source developers under an Educational Community License in late 2006.
(Source: http://www.ivanhoegame.org/?page_id=21)
In December of 2013, I mailed blank journals to thirty poets and asked them to record their dreams for two months and return the journals to me. I asked that they record the dreams themselves rather than their interpretations, relying on language, voice, and syntactical rhythm to emerge as distinctive markers. From the dream journals I compiled the dreams into a spreadsheet database, setting the linear retelling of the dream along the horizontal axis (rows) in chronological order, color-coded by poet. Ciphering the dreams into single cells was the true editorial work of the matrix. Even as poets were creating their own patterns, I was reorganizing dialogue, bisecting idioms, segmenting narrative apparitions. Phrases and snippets of these dreams were now decontextualized into raw form, phrases and words shaken out of their former constellations to become single pure poetic units. After the dream journals had been reorganized into the matrix, they could be used to generate new poetic material.
The purpose of soliciting dreams for this project was in the cognitive dissonance of the language and motif of the dream experience. To record a dream as faithfully as possible is already a blended act: remembering and inventing. The hyperreal poetics of dreaming both undermine and reify the narrative construct of the telling. The filtering of dreams through a collaborative matrix is a social act. Poets have an opportunity to take a solitary – the most profoundly solitary – act and become part of a collective generative functional form. The dreams belong to the poets. The database belongs to the making of poems, to all of us. As soon as the database is finished, it generates poems based on the application of a rule, any rule. For example, to create a title that generates a poem based on the order of its letters (the first S, for example, refers to the numbered row, column S position). By making poems in this way, poets wake into a unified dream. This generative model based on a simple matrix is significant to Poetics as a networked social application of poetic units. If poetry can be said to be made up of poetic units, then those units can make up a larger poetic compilation that is a shared source poem from which other poems can be made. The investment in the project database is therefore in its work as a flexible form that is at once collaborative and generative.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Bergen Public Library
Bergen
Norway
Scott Rettberg presents collaborative, combinatory films, and an interactive artwork he has produced in collaboration with filmmaker Roderick Coover.
Three Rails Live (2012), a web-based combinatory film developed by Rettberg, Coover, and Nick Montfort, produces new juxtapositions of image and text on each run, delivering narrative fragments from a contemporary story of personal and environmental dissolution sandwiched between “perverbs” that deliver a “moral” to each story.
Toxi•City (2013-14) is a feature-length combinatory climate change film that layers segments of a speculative narrative of life in the toxic environment of the Delaware River Estuary after a series of hurricanes have devastated the landscape with the actual stories of area residents who perished during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project (2014) was developed by Rettberg, Coover, Daria Tsoupikova, and Arthur Nishimoto for the CAVE2™ immersive virtual reality environment at the Electronic Visualization Lab in Chicago. Based on interviews of American soldiers who participated in the torture of detainees in Iraq during early 2000s, Hearts and Minds presents us with difficult personal testimonies and consequences of policies that have left a generation of soldiers scarred with PTSD and memories they would rather forget.
Scott Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen He is a digital artist and author, working in the fields of electronic literature, combinatory poetry, and film (The Unknown, Kind of Blue, Implementation, Frequency, Three Rails Live, Toxicity).
(Source: UiB)
Mata la reina –Killl the Queen- is one of the theatre projects playable by YOCTOBIT in which there is alive theatre and the collaborative game. It was developed between May 2011 and January 2012 in Intermediae-Matadero of Madrid. The players become human pieces in a huge board of hexagons. They must reconstruct a puzzle and solve it to overthrow a despotic queen.
Mata la reina es uno de los proyectos de teatro jugable de YOCTOBIT en el que se conjugan el teatro en vivo y el juego colaborativo. Se desarrolló entre mayo de 2011 y enero 2012 en Intermediae-Matadero de Madrid. Los jugadores se convierten en fichas humanas de un enorme tablero de hexágonos. Deben reconstruir un puzle y resolverlo para derrocar a una reina despótica.
CALYPSIS: A HYPERTEXT FICTION is based on a role-playing campaign featuring nine participants (seven player-characters and two game masters) that took place in three stages: world building, character creation, and a series of six role-playing sessions, mostly conducted online but also over email and a few face-to-face gatherings. These game narratives accompany each vignette, a storytelling segment derived from the game play. Calypsis was a creative PhD dissertation, accompanied by a critical introduction.
Minicontos Coloridos is a collaborative project conceived by Brazilian journalist, writer and teacher Marcelo Spalding in 2013. The short tales are structurally and conceptually associated with colors in a playful way. To access the stories, the reader should mix the primary RGB colors through a pull down menu available on the website in HTML which hosts the tales interface. The website offers three blending options for each of the three primary colors, totaling 27 short tales. According to the author, the short tale is a micronarrative, with at most a page or a paragraph that had its antecedents in the prose poem and the Chinese fables. However, since the mid-twentieth century the short story has experienced extremely rapid forms from texts of writers like Cortázar, Borges, Kafka. Marcelo Spalding intends to increase the number of stories through collaboration with other writers. (Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)
Minicontos Coloridos é uma forma sinestésica de escrever ficção, pois todos os minicontos foram produzidos a partir da cor. São 3 gradações para cada uma das 3 cores primárias da luz (escala RGB), totalizando 27 minicontos. Futuramente a ideia é ampliar para 5 gradações de cada cor, o que totalizaria 125 minicontos. O objetivo principal é fazer com que o leitor tenha uma nova experiência de leitura de ficção, precisando intervir para ler o maior número de textos possíveis. As histórias em si são por vezes trágicas, por vezes irônicas, poucas vezes românticas. Pela extrema concisão e ausência de título, cabe ao leitor buscar nas entrelinhas o desfecho, devendo usar também a cor para dar completude ao sentido das histórias Com experiências como essa buscamos demonstrar que a literatura existe para além dos livros, existe também em ambientes digitais, utilizando para sua construção ferramentas próprias dessas novas mídias. Para conhecer outros projetos experimentais de literatura digital, acesse www.literaturadigital.com.br. (Source: Marcelo Spalding)
