Homer

An explosion sends you, the reader, from your boat in the Mediterranean into what Homer called the salt immortal sea only to be rescued by a mysterious ancient watercraft. Aboard this boat, you encounter allegorical characters from ancient and modern times, locked in a dangerous power struggle, passing secrets, currying favor, creating enemies, and fostering unrest. In this interactive story, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the most abject and disenfranchised of global citizens in epic terms. In Salt Immortal Sea, we explore the international crisis of the refugee by placing the reader on a boat leaving Syria, set adrift on an indifferent, turbulent sea. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to survive. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? Salt Immortal Sea will be presented as a stand-alone iPad app (which can be projected or viewed on the device itself). An earlier version of Salt Immortal Sea was displayed in installation form at ELO 2017 in Porto.

The online interpretation of Homer's classic The Iliad, transformed for computer multimedia by Barry Smylie, Jeff Wietor, Susan Katz, and Ryan Douglas is an excellent example of an attempt to take a classic work of literature and adapt to the particular affordances of the contemporary computer. Produced from 1999­‐2007, this work not only produces a contemporary interpretation of the classic, but also tracks some of the new media shifts that occurred from the late 1990s to the present. The multimedia work allows the reader to switch between the text of Samuel Butler's translation of The Iliad and contemporary multimedia interpretations of several sorts. For the first nine books of The Iliad, this translation takes the form of illustrations, collages produced in Photoshop, which mix classical imagery, such as statuary and Grecian urns, with more contemporary imagery. The battles between the Greeks and Trojans in this version include imagery from professional wrestling shows, advertisements, and American football contests. Helen is represented with imagery reminiscent of soap operas of soft‐core pornography.As they move through the project and through the later books of The Iliad, Smylie and his collaborators use multimedia in more complicated ways. Portions of the Iliad are retold as an online radio play, and short animated movies, even as mock video games, in which the player can throw spears or shoot arrows. The outcome of any of these games is however predetermined, to fit with the exact details of the epic. The reinterpretation of The Iliad is an excellent experiment, both in attempting to bridge the language of epic with contemporary media vernaculars, and in its playful engagement with some of the many different media modalities available to authors creating work for the computer.(Source: Scott Rettberg "Old Wine in New Bottles")

Portal is a mix between a computer novel and an interactive game. It was published for the Amiga in 1986 byActivision, written by Rob Swigart, produced by Brad Fregger and programmed by Nexa Corporation. Versions for the Macintosh, Commodore 64, Apple II, and the IBM PC were later released. A unique game for its time,Portal was one part text-driven adventure (à la Zork or Planetfall) but with a graphical interface.

The player, taking on the role of the unnamed astronaut protagonist, returns from a failed 100 year voyage to 61 Cygni to find the Earth devoid of humans. Cars are rusted and covered with moss, the streets are completely barren and everything appears as though the entire human race had just vanished suddenly. The player happens upon a barely functioning computer terminal that is tied into a storytelling mainframe, Homer. Through this interface, the player, assisted by Homer who attempts to weave the information into a coherent narrative, discovers information in order to piece together the occurrences leading to the disappearance of the human race. For instance, spending some time in the Medical Records section may unlock a piece of data in the Science section, and through these links the player can finish the game.

A hardcover novel, titled Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval and composed mostly of the text from the interactive novel with some new additions, was written by the same author, Rob Swigart and first published by St. Martin's Press in 1988. It takes the form of a series of notes on different subjects, in an order that the player would encounter them through Homer. A softcover edition was released by Backinprint.com in 2001.</p>

Now an ebook version has been released "under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Unported license 3.0" It has been authorized to be uploaded here by the author himself. http://67.205.70.12/forums/showthread.php?t=37197

(Source: Wikipedia entry)