family

c ya laterrrr is the first in a series of exploratory works by Dan Hett covering his experiences during and in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, where his younger brother was one of 22 people killed.

As summarised by Hett himself:

This game expresses some of the experience, along with exploring some of the what-ifs of choices I ultimately didn't make. All identifying information is removed, there are no names or locations specified anywhere. There are many choices within this game, and one of the many possible pathways does reflect my actual experience. This isn't marked or confirmed anywhere, and all pathways ultimately lead to the same endpoint. 

c ya laterrr  garnered press coverage, including articles in UK publications The Guardian and The Big Issue, and later won the New Media Writing Prize 2020.

Hett released second and third works to the series, The Loss Levels and Sorry to Bother You, in 2018. 

Coronation is a webcomic created by the Marino family using digital tools and platforms to document our experience of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Since the beginning of the lockdown and the various homestay orders in Los Angeles, we have been creating and publishing one comic per day, five days a week, using a combination of digital tools, specifically filters and graphics applications. Images include photographs from our family albums, screenshots and downloads from Internet-based news sources, as well as original hand-drawn images created using digital tools. As the pandemic continues to sweep the globe, Coronation documents one family’s experience of the ups and downs of the Corona virus and the surrounding times, including the 2020 US Election and its ensuing drama and the Black Lives Matter protests. The comics are profoundly domestic and yet reflective of a global crisis, focusing on intimate family moments, transformed through digital tools into a visual expression of the ongoing homestay during a time of turmoil. As we craft these together, the webcomic has been a way for our family to take this time of chaos and to respond creatively and collaboratively by reflecting on the life in one household. We try to frame our experience with humor, sensitivity, and a medicine that is in quite short supply, hope.Unlike previous pandemics, such as polio, HIV, and the Spanish flu, COVID-19 has emerged at a moment of tremendous digital connectivity. However, the news and social media feeds have created so-called doom scrolling. We have used the digital tools and platforms available to us to rapidly document events, to transform them into comics, and to share them online with a broader world, inviting them into our homestay as we share our climbs and falls, confusion and epiphanies, all born of some unexpected family time.Although our main platforms for distribution are electronic, we have also been producing individual hand-made print versions as well.

(Source: Author's abstract)

a webcomic born during the Coronavirus outbreakand subsequent social isolation of 2020,written by me with my family.

(Author's description)

For the Engineer, death is an art and a corpse, his friend. This documentary offers a unique and disturbing look at El Salvador’s brutal gang conflict through the eyes of a man whose life revolves around murder.

Father - A Tribute is an interactive storygame around the theme of the father. In Father - A Tribute citations and own texts about the father confront each other for the memory of the player-reader. Find the two texts that belong together. Directed by your memory, a new story about 'the father' comes into existence each time the game is played.

(Source: Translation from description in Literatuur Op Het Scherm)

Everyone at this party is Dead/Cardamom of the Dead is one of the first lyric literary works for Oculus Rift. It is a complete but expanding work (Cardamom of the Dead is the larger suite of stories) containing about 30 small narrative worlds, explored in a sandbox. You enter the piece standing at the edge of a island and in the middle of a soundscape of a party taking place, with guests being named: these were the guests of my 21st birthday and they are now all dead. What follows is a fictionalized narrative, at times semi-autobiographical, at other times entirely made-up. You are urged to explore houses and stones and artefacts spread across the terrain of the island at skewed scales - like a dreamscape. Addressable objects are signalled by tear-shaped signposting and will propel you into a different environments in order to access and bring to light three longer narratives of the dead woven through the work: 1) a story of a sudden illness and a meditation on euthanasia and family stories on this theme; 2) a coming-of-age story of sex relating to a murder; and 3) a meta-theme of collecting - objects, memories, digital artefacts - as a consoling practice: most of the images and soundscapes here are from my family archives. (Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=everyone-at-this-par…)

USA-based computer engineer and innovator PJ Sanders returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda: to close the place down and sell it. But not before he employs an experimental device he’s been working on, primed to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood.

(Source: Author)

WALLPAPER is an interactive and immersive piece of digital fiction that has been exhibited in the UK at Bank Street Arts Gallery in Sheffield as a largescale projection and as part of the Being Human Festival of the Humanities 2016 in Virtual Reality. Funded by Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, it forms part of the Reading Digital Fiction research project led by Dr Alice Bell at Sheffield Hallam University. Reading Digital Fiction aims to raise public awareness of and engagement with digital fiction by analysing the way that readers respond, applying empirical methods and cognitive theory. Through its accessible storyline, strong visuals and immersive atmosphere, WALLPAPER has engaged non-academic audiences online, through live events and within gallery settings.

A work of short fiction, it follows the story of PJ Sanders, a USA-based computer engineer and innovator who returns to his remote family home in the UK following the death of his elderly mother. His agenda is to close the house down and sell it. First though, he wants to trial an experimental device he’s been working on to help him uncover the history behind one particular room in the house – a room that has remained locked since his childhood. WALLPAPER can be shown on a modern gaming PC, through large-scale digital projection and in Virtual Reality on the Oculus Rift.

To see a short film of its reception in the UK at the Being Human Festival of the Humanities, please visit http://wallpaper.dreaming-methods.com/being-human/ For more information about the work, the storyline, its development, screenshots, in-project footage and downloads, please visit: http://www.dreamingmethods.com/wallpaper http://wallpaper.dreamingmethods.com http://www.readingdigitalfiction.com

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

"Two Roads Diverged" is a story of family loss and its aftermath. Using Robert Frost's famous poem "The Road Not Taken" as its metaphorical model, this interactive narrative offers brief glimpses into the paths three children take after the accidental death of their parents. The narrative also offers a view--through archetypal imagery and remote voices--of the darker side of the family's tragic past.

(Source: Author's Description)

daddylabyrinth is an interactive new media memoir, a combination of traditional writing and personal video assembled and delivered through the authoring system SCALAR <http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/&gt;. It exists at the cusp of several forms—the lyric essay, the archive, the family history, the home movie—and delves into questions that shape our contemporary narrative practices, such as navigational readership and new ways of experiencing the cinematic. daddylabyrinth is a father/son book, in a long tradition of such, refracted through the lens of new media’s narrative possibilities. The legacies of my father that I carry—objects he left behind and a flotilla of unresolved emotions that continue to vex my self-identity nearly forty years after his death, when I am a father myself— resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR for this project because it lets me create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions. These two legacies have with time become inextricably bound, and the stories that I weave from them resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR to write daddylabyrinth because it allows me to create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I could track and explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions—ranging from objects of his that I’ve given my children to ways that my father has shown up in my fiction. A portion of the work is currently up to view on demo at http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/daddylabyrinth/index. Approximately 25% of its pages are available at the moment, and I will have a significantly more robust version of it available for the ELO conference next spring should my proposal be selected for the Media Arts Show—ideally a premiere of the whole work before I seek a publisher for it. Exhibition at ELO could take one (or both) of two forms. Internet-connected desktop, notebook, or tablet computers with headphones could be used in a stationary gallery situation, where readers could explore the work at their own pace. I could also present it in a live venue, talking my way through the labyrinth as I navigate it live and play some of its short videos. A combination of these two exhibition approaches would be ideal, and I am amenable to either a full presentation or a split one with another artist. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

“The Descendants” by Alexandre Gherban is a dynamic and “active” program with an indeterminate function. It varies in transiency, sometimes being transient and other times intransient; In other words, the aspects of the program (the text, the images, and the sounds) change and move constantly in a random, or indeterminate, function. Even if the text does not have a personal perspective, the viewer plays a role by choosing his/her path in the work. The reader can interact with the processes and find the links within the images. Only then do words reveal themselves. By clicking on the words, (“the descendants”, “the parents”, “who…”, “and who…”) the work changes and the viewer can interact with the images of the new page. For the page where one sees “the parents”, one must choose one of the two images that represent the parents themselves, and this choice determines the path for what follows. This function suggests a reference to artificial life. By starting with “the parents” that produce “the descendants”, the viewer sees a type of reproduction that resembles that of a family tree. By choosing the path of one parent or the other, the user has an exploratory function. With each new page that follows, the viewer can play with the images and the symbols, and then find a link to continue on to the following page. Because of this, one could say that the text offers an explicit chaining, or linkage. These images are made of letters, geometric figures, and small photographs, all representing the “descendants” and what they do. Even if the images are designed with a random function, they move in repetitive ways with each new page. At the same time, one can always see the calculated randomness that presents itself in real time (where the objects move at the moment when the viewer sees them or the mouse touches them), all of which determines the atmosphere of the program. Like the article “3eme brouillon pour un manifeste de l’œuvre d’art sur ordinateur “ by Antoine Schmitt suggests, “Put there is a direct relationship between the processes and the spectator, through the effects and their perception, the actions and the reactions.” This program is similar to the third program of “Trois Machines de poésie” by Gherban presented at the international festival "e_poetry Paris 2007". One sees “the parents” and then “their descendants”. It is interesting that the descendants of this program are introduced with a possessive adjective, "their", rather than an indefinite article like “the descendants”. In general, the relationship between the parents and the descendants is evident because “descendants” must have parents from which they came, but perhaps this relationship does not have the same meaning in these two programs. One can, perhaps, conclude that “Les Descendants” is an extension, or rather a continuation, of the third program of “Trois machines de poésie”.

A short story told from the perspective of a young girl named Stella, who is lying in the grass in the summer sunshine when she realises that she cannot move. She finds that in order to escape from this immobility she can change herself into a series of other things and creatures: a stone, a fish, a house - and she finally finds that she in fact wants to be herself again. This is a lyrical story raising questions of identity and the transition from child to adult.

The story is displayed as a series of pages with a paragraph on each page and graphical elements beneath. It is entirely linear, but designed to be read on an iPad.