Interactive art

In every step of this interactive game-poem find the point-and-click trigger, to make the dialogue evolve. The game consists of approximately forty screens/events, which you may read or explore until you get to the end. Some times you may be asked to write down an intimate thought. All answers typed and submitted by players are collected to create a collective think-tank of the overall game experience.

The proposed work is an ode to the struggles of human communication. It reflects on the hardships of unfortunate dialogues, the splendor of reaching to the other side, the rise and fall of human connectedness, the agonies of stray meanings and words. Expressed through the poetics of weather phenomena, this conceptually driven interactive work represents the mental landscape between two lovers, a parallel metaphor for the contemporary digitally mediated condition. Early cyberspatial theories referred to an erotic ontology of digital experience. Michael Heim described the platonic dimensions of an augmented Eros. Roland Barthes on the other hand described language as the skin with which we struggle to touch the 'other'. In this game-poem, senses, meanings and ideas appear to be all permeated by the ‘spell’ of technology, a rhetorical as well as an erotic act of mediation through different worlds. The reader/player is asked to become part of the dipole, to meander through poetic texts and tormented emotions, at times linear, other times bifurcating, while exploring a dialogue ‘atmosphere’ inspired by visual poetry. Endeavoring to reach the 'other side' through the use of spoken language, this piece of work is an affective journey to the tempests of a fallen dialogue.

“I live on Earth at the present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing –a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process– an integral function of the universe.”

– Buckminster Fuller, from I Seem to be a Verb, 1970

‘Bucky’ Fuller’s well-known quote, originally published in his book I seem to be a verb, (1970) contrasts human participation in the material world (which Fuller suggests can be described with nouns) and the ongoing evolutionary processes which influence and shape that world (which Fuller suggests can be described with verbs).

The web-based "A.I. seems to be a verb" (2021), automatically identifies and maps speech, not only as linguistic functions (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc.) but also across a spectrum of sentiment from negative to positive, in order to generate a complex array of paratextual supports (typeface, page-design, rules and symbolic elements and word-prompts) used in the visual representation of the text to the screen. The entire process happens in real-time, providing an uncanny ‘mise-en-abyme’ experience which contemporaneously engages the participant’s auditory and visual responses to language construction.

Eyecode is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system records and replays brief video clips of its viewers' eyes. Each clip is articulated by the duration between two of the viewer's blinks. The unnerving result is a typographic tapestry of recursive observation.

Liberdade is a collective and collaborative experience in computational poetics. The work is inspired by São Paulo’s neighborhood “Bairro Liberdade” [Neighborhood Freedom]. In the same way as the neighborhood, an island that aggregates people from different nationalities in friendly coexistence, the poetic work Liberdade is an invitation to interaction and collective creation. Liberdade is a field of poetic possibilities written in code. Liberdade is a stream poem like Heraclitus’s river. Every time you enter it, you can bathe in different streams, free as poetry itself.

Poetry Chains and Collocation Nets are two intertwined projects that investigate the 1955 edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems through various interactive animated navigations of collocated words. As such, they perform what Samuels and McGann term “experimental analyses.” Each of the visualizations displays a different presentation of her work. Poetry Chains begins with two words and attempts to find a chain of words in a specified number of lines that connects them together, displaying them as it succeeds. Collocation Nets begins with a single word centered in the middle of the screen. When the user selects the word, a random selected of its collocations pops out in a surrounding ring. Any of those words can be selected, which results in collocations of that word appearing. A user can toggle into an ambient mode of this visualization that automatically eventually cycles through all of the words, forever. These visualizations offer a continuously dynamic remapping of Dickinson’s work. The deformations present new opportunities for interpretation, some of which may lend themselves to successful insights, and others which might be ludicrous, or merely bland. Each of the visualizations performs this remapping in different ways. The Poetry Chain effectively runs a kind of smoothing operation, an averaging filter, by treating her entire corpus as a single poem. Additionally, it uses a depth-search algorithm to get between two points within the corpus, performing a non-linear “hopscotch” (with a poetic rather than narrative destabilization). The Collocation Net completely disassembles the corpus into individual words and links them together, not grammatically, but instead by a frequency metric that correlates words by the likelihood of their appearing together within the same line. While it is unclear what exactly the interpretive value of these remapping offers, it is interesting to think of them in relation to, or perhaps as a differentiation from, visualization projects utilizing the methods of information visualization or visual analytics. In those fields, it is assumed that the raw data is inherently atomic, and that the goal of the project is to enable users to recombine the data in different ways in order to facilitate new revealing and new interpretation, or what Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card term “knowledge crystallization.” That is, they allow the user to create models by the synthesis and analysis of data, through which hypotheses may be generated and then either validated or falsified. A recent article by Ben Shneiderman reframes the products of information visualization projects as creativity support tools, where the goal of such a tool is to facilitate novel ideas and new perspectives. Poems however, as noted in Samuels and McGann’s article, are not simply composed of irreducible raw data. Instead, the meaning in some sense is the raw data. But this meaning lives in the interaction between the text and the reader, and cannot be extracted, simplified, summarized, or evaluated in any direct way. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Collaborative project on the WWW shown at 25 São Paulo Biennial. The idea of Plural maps: lost in São Paulo is to use cyberspace to create a multidimensional cartography of São Paulo. This cartography will be constructed by the choices sent by netcitizens and some other points like webcams showing traffic avenues and cultural centers. Based on an open structure, Plural maps: lost in São Paulo will incorporate the received material in order to create a big rhizomatic labyrinth. Each element sent by the netcitizens will be a knot, a link that will contribute to the creation of this organic, subjective and collective cartography. (Source: Author's description)

A conversational labyrinth where the walls are lined with phrases composed, in real time with sound and words, in a virtual environment.

Labylogue, a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel, was a simulated three-dimensional large-scale visual poetry performance. Created from different French language speaking Internet nodes, it incorporated software-generated text, triggered by algorithmic recognition of words spoken by participants meeting virtually in the labyrinth. Maurice Benayoun explains that in art spaces and museums in three different French speaking cities -- Brussels, Lyon, and Dakar -- Labylogue developed eight main themes that invited visitors to meet in the labyrinth and as they conversed, immerse themselves in the accompanying text on the walls.Source: Narrabase

It may seem paradoxical to create an online work on touching. One cannot touch directly: in this case touching requires a mediating tool such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people and objects in everyday life. The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. She can thus experience various forms and modalities of touching: the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse; the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke; touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched; touching as a trace that one can leave, as with a finger dipped in paint; and, touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes, or another part of the body. This supposedly immaterial work thus stages an aesthetics of materiality.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)