fragments

The hypertexts of this project were written by interns from the psychiatric building Emil Kraepelin. These real stories are distributed in four sections: past, future, darkness and light. The genre is hypertext fiction, it is made of hypertextual confessional fragments like Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) with interactive elements like Belen Gache’s Wordtoys (2006). In the section named “darkness” the mouse is used as a lantern which lights up only parts of the text, a technique also used in Speeches and Poemas (2006) by Félix Rémirez. Yolanda de la Torre organized a literary workshop in which she explored with the patients the therapeutic possibilities of writing. References to God are common in the patients’ confessional texts, a sign of the importance of religion for many Mexican people. The technique of changing the text allows the reader to make up different stories, drawing makes the reader a participant of the story who can draw his/her own future like another patient or character and the audio effects recreate the sounds of a psychiatric hospital making the reader feel as he/she was in the place the patients were. (Source: Maya Zalbidea)

Round is a computational poem that is both non-interactive and deterministic. It is computational in that computation is an essential aspect of the work, non-interactive because there is no input accepted as the program runs, and deterministic because the text produced should be the same each time on any properly-functioning computer. The poem is also infinite (in the sense of boundless); there is no final line or internally specified condition that will cause the program will stop. Round is not never-ending, since whatever computational resources one has will eventually be exhausted, but there is no pre-set length to the poem. The poem is assembled out of ten fragments, one of which is a newline (line break). The other nine are strings of legible text. Round computes the digits of π, pausing after each digit is computed. (Each time Round is loaded, it begins at 3, continues to 1, continues to 4, and so on.) For each digit computed, the fragment corresponding to that digit is added to the poem. If the fragment selected is a line break, Round begins a new line. (Source: author description)

“Substratum” is an audiovisual artwork and the first in a series of collaborations by artist-composer duo, Alison Clifford and Graeme Truslove. This collaboration combines both of their artistic practices in an attempt to explore the space “between” abstract sound and image. Truslove’s work is typically concerned with exploring the space between acoustic and electro-acoustic sound, and between improvised and fixed forms. The audio in “Substratum” is devised from samples of bowed notes performed on a double bass, multiplied and arranged into rich, deeply layered textures by digital montage processes and computer algorithms. Clifford’s artistic practice is concerned with the process of translating between different forms of visual media, exploring what is lost or gained through such interpretation. For “Substratum”, she developed computer algorithms that “translate” samples from still photographic light paintings into animated fragments. She then sculpts the fragments into multi-layered moving image works that interpret the deep textures of the audio, creating an immersive audiovisual experience. (source: http://www.duck-egg.co.uk/substratum/index.html)

Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from the internet into a live action comic strip. From the time of its launch in 2005 to the end of 2008, the work used a live feed from social networking site LiveJournal. The work is currently using a feed from Flickr. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.

(Source: Project site)