Jerz and Thomas identify our fascination with natural cave spaces, and then chart that fascination as it descends into digital realms, all in order to illustrate the importance of “the cave” as a metaphor for how we interact with our environment.
(Source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/cave)
In this review of Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects, Robert Seguin contemplates the implication of the text’s eponymous subject on art, philosophy, and politics. The “hyperobject,” a hypothetical agglomeration of networked interactions with the potential to produce inescapable shifts in the very conditions of existence, emerges as the key consideration for the being in the present.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/hurts)
Opening in the center of the international refugee crisis, this playable story places the interactor in the position of the refugee. As the tale opens, an explosion sends the interactor from the comfort of a ship into the salt immortal sea. Rescued by a mysterious boat the player encounters eight other passengers, drawn from the present and the ancient past. However, one of these passengers has angered the gods, and unless the player can discover which, all will face their wrath. However, finding that secret is no easy task. Each passenger harbors secrets that pit them against each other in an allegory of contemporary global crisis. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to keep the shipmates in balance by collecting and circulating secrets. In this tale, 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. It is a tale of the eternal return to proxy wars and the challenge of achieving some semblance of world peace. 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 contemporary global conflict in timeless, epic terms. 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? The Salt Immortal Sea will be set up as an installation that invites a primary interactor to make choices while a larger group can watch the story’s progression play out.
The primary interface will be an iPad. LED lights spread in the room will represent the characters aboard the ship, lighting up when the player interacts with them. The reading experience can take 5-30 minutes, depending on depth of exploration. Platform: Ink + Unity Displays on IPad, (also PC or Mac).
(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)
“Moveable books” predate the printing press. Such experiments, including popular pop-up books of the nineteenth century, pushed against the boundaries of two-dimensional storytelling by crafting ways paper can mechanically foster motion and depth. iPad artists and game designers experiment with device-specific expressive capacities. I call moveable books designed for iPad “playable books” to invoke their ergodic filiation with videogames. In this presentation, I analyze one playable book, 80 Days (2014) by Inkle Studios, which won Time Magazine’s best game of the year and was named by The Telegraph a best novel of the year. Crossing the “border” between literature and videogames, 80 Days invites us to consider how popular modes of human/computer interaction in games shape new forms of reading in device-specific ways. I discuss how 80 Days’ gameful attributes adapt and contest Jules Verne’s 1873 novella Around the World in Eighty Days. The game gives the reader a physical experience of the original story’s chief mechanic, racing to beat the clock. Interactions with NPCs [non-player characters] in 80 Days unlock information essential to win; respect and cultural sensitivity are procedurally rewarded. This resists the original novella’s racist depiction of nonwhite “others.” My paper suggests how 80 Days‘ emergent game attributes interrupt our readerly drive to “master” a text.
(Source: http://kathiiberens.com/)
Some children story apps have incorporated a reflexivity typical of the metafictive picturebook but this reflexivity is altered in the digital medium by the possibility of interaction – as the reader is addressed by the story, there is in interactive texts the possibility of a response that affects the narrative. The construction of metafiction is also changed by the extended multimodality of these texts, that now incorporate movement and sound, for example, creating a different kind of immersion from that promoted by the image-writing dynamics of the print picturebook. In this paper, I will discuss the realization of metafiction through the participation of the reader in the app The Monster at the End of This Book (Stone & Smollin, 2011).
(Source: Author's Abstract at ICDMT 2016)
Artist’s Statement:
When materials that support texts change, the content could be affected. This installation is a physical reflection on how the materiality could affect the text. From ceramic tiles to displays, each new supporting material has opened new possibilities for writing.
MATTERS, seeks to write through the manipulation of electromagnetic fields with new raw materials instead of the screen. Sensitive components to these fields will be placed on three acrylic drawers (45 x 30 x 15 cm). Each drawer allows different reading times, interactions and experiences.
(Source: http://elo2016.com/jose-aburto-olezzi/)
Matters is a physical reflection on how the materiality could affect the text.
From ceramic tiles to displays, each new supporting material has opened new possibilities for writing.
Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive is a Twine game that invites the reader to become physically involved through marking up their own body with symbols throughout play.
As a Twine game, the work relies primarily on text and audio along with backgrounds of shifting colors to draw the player into a disturbing science fiction landscape. The game opens with a level of customization that invites the player to become connected and even embedded into the game, choosing their month of birth, element, and eye color.
As the player becomes a servant to a monstrous larval queen, the stage is set for a dystopia of dream-like and vivid yet mundane violence. After playing, the reader has a tangible record of their own choices and identity beliefs in the drawings on one’s skin.
It's inspired by mob violence, trash struggle, C-PTSD, and child abuse. It's also inspired by friendship between trash girls. In most media there’s an unspoken belief that feminine lifeforms can't survive on their own, can't have spaces of their own, can’t have relationships of their own. The author try to go against this with basically everything she make.
(Source: http://collection.eliterature.org/3/work.html?work=with-those-we-love-a…)
Glass flowers on iron stalks. Canopy of leafbone. Statues sunk into the earth.
Requirements : Modern web browser (such as Chrome)
samen dichten is een poëziemachine waarbij mens en computer elkaar kunnen versterken. zo ontstaat er een gedicht dat de gebruiker niet zonder computer en de computer niet zonder deze specifieke gebruiker had kunnen schrijven.
het idee achter dit project is om poëzie toegankelijk te maken voor een breder publiek. de poëziemachine laat mens en machine samenwerken, maar belangrijker: iedereen kan zo de kracht van taal ontdekken.
(source: http://rooslaan.nl/samen-dichten/)
Through the creative projects Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk the author explores how language and communication function in a hybridized context where human and machine are responsible for both the articulation and interpretation of texts. The dynamics of such a hybrid apparatus allow insights into how the making of meaning and its reception can be considered as a socio-technical system, with implications for how people are situated and instantiated.
Bodytext, Tower and Crosstalk are language based digitally mediated performance installations. They each use progressive developments of generative and interpretative grammar systems. Bodytext (2010) was authored in Adobe Director and coded in Lingo and C++. Tower (2011) was developed with a bespoke large scale immersive virtual reality simulator and was coded in Python. Crosstalk (2014) was developed and coded in Processing.
Bodytext is a performance work involving speech, movement and the body. A dancer's movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented environment employing real-time motion tracking, voice recognition, interpretative language systems, projection and granular audio synthesis. The acquired speech, a description of an imagined dance, is re-written through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the performer causing texts to interact and recombine with one another through subsequent re-compositions. What is written is affected by the dance, whilst the emergent texts determine what is danced. The work questions and seeks insight into the relations between kinesthetic experience, memory, agency and language.
Tower is an interactive work where the computer listens to and anticipates what is to be said by those interacting with it. It is a self-learning system, and as the inter-actor speaks, the computer displays what they say and the potential words they might speak next. The speaker may or may not use a displayed word. New word conjunctions are added to the corpus employed for prediction. In its first version the initial corpus was a mash-up of Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey. Words uttered by the inter-actor appear as a red spiral of text, at the top of which the inter-actor is located within the virtual reality environment. Wearing a head mounted display the inter-actor can look wherever they wish, although they cannot move. The predicted words appear as white flickering clouds of text in and around the spoken words. What emerges is an archeology of speech where what is spoken can be seen amongst what might have been said, challenging the unique speaker’s voice.
Crosstalk is a multi-performer installation where movement and speech are re-mediated within an augmented 3D environment employing real-time motion tracking, multi-source voice recognition, interpretative language systems, a bespoke physics engine, large scale projection and surround-sound audio synthesis. The acquired speech of inter-actors is re-mediated through projected digital display and sound synthesis, the inter-actors physical actions causing texts to interact and recombine with one another. The elements in the system all affect how each adapts, from state to state, as the various elements of the work – people, machines, language, image, movement and sound – interact with one another. Crosstalk explores social relations, as articulated in performative language acts, in relation to generative ontologies of self-hood and the capacity of a socio-technical space to “make people”.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
The digital turn brings about not only changes in young adult literature considered as aesthetic artifacts and literary works but also changes in the perception and reception of the reader. Digital young adult literature is increasingly multimodal and interactive, and it integrates elements from game aesthetics. When young adult literature navigates between media, new analytical approaches are required to explore the way in which it operates among various aesthetic strategies and medialities and the way it affects the young adult reader. With this development it becomes essential to combine different fields of research, e.g. research in literature and media science; thus, the focus of this paper will be research in children’s literature in an intermedial perspective. The analytical approach can be either diachronic when the object is the study of how various aesthetic expressions (text, picture, sound, etc.) have been used to create the literary artifact, or the approach can be synchronically based when the object is studying the categories which cut across the aesthetic expressions with the aim of transgressing conceivable media specific borders, and the latter will be the focal point here.
The pivotal point of this paper will be exploring how transgressing analytical categories, e.g. rhythm, sequentiality, time, space and dialogue with the reader, can shed light on the formation of meaning in a specific digital young adult literary work, i.e. Tavs (Camilla Hübbe, Rasmus Meisler and Stefan Pasborg 2013) which prompts different reading methods, paths, and types of interaction. The analysis will focus on selected analytical categories in order to explore the integration of various art forms and sensory appeals, viz. visual, auditory, and tactile modalities. In other words, the paper will investigate the ‘denaturalization’ of the reading process and it will attempt to investigate and offer analytical categories which can be used also by young readers so that they can become competent cross media readers of young adult literature in a digitalized and medialized landscape of texts.
Theoretically, the presentation will be based on theory on digital literature and media (Hayles, N. Kathrine Electronic Literature. New Horizons for the Literary. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2008, Simanowski, Roberto, Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla (ed.) Reading Moving Letters. Digital Literature in Research and Teaching. Bielefeld, Trancript Verlag 2010, Bell, Alice, Astrid Ensslin and Hans Kristian Rustad Analyzing Digital Fiction. New York: Routledge 2014) and theory on picturebook (Nikolajeva, Maria and Carole Scott (2006) How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge).
(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)