In the heart of Amsterdam, near Central Station is the land of Marine, which is thirty hectare and inaccessible to citizens. Since the 17th century the land has a militarian function; from shipyard to helicopter landing and safe heaven. During 2015 the land has reinstated and opened its doors to public.
Midden in het hart van Amsterdam, nabij Centraal Station ligt het Marineterrein, dertig hectare groot en ontoegankelijk voor burgers. Sinds de zeventiende eeuw heeft het terrein een militaire functie; van de scheepswerf van de Admiraliteit tot helikopterlandingsplaats en safe haven. In de loop van 2015 krijgt een gedeelte van het terrein voor het eerst weer een publieke functie en opent het voorzichtig zijn poorten.Ontwerpers Sjoerd ter Borg en Jorrit Schaap kregen toestemming om alvast vijf schrijvers uit te nodigen op het terrein en hen een fictief verhaal te laten schrijven over deze plek. Op de interactieve website van het project 'Het land binnen de muren' worden de verhalen gebruikt als methode om dit nieuwe stuk stad in kaart te brengen. Door middel van een wisselwerking tussen literatuur, fictie en ontwerp wordt het Marineterrein ontsloten en wordt er een alternatief startpunt voor de geplande gebiedsontwikkeling gecreëerd.
Children are growing up in a reading ecology unlike any that has come before them. Although this can be said of every generation, today’s children are exposed to responsive texts from any early age. They are presented with touch-screens as their first tutors and explore apps on iPads alongside board and chapter books. In these handheld media, a child’s relationship to stories is intimate and consequently formational. As a writer and scholar of children’s electronic literature, I am interested in role of the persistent transcript in children’s interactive stories. Transcript here refers to record of the text or tale produced by the child’s choices. In 2016, Maria Goicoechea and I argued that transcripts in interactive children’s writing serve as what Winnicott calls “transitional objects” because these transcripts offer them some measure of security in the more ephemeral reading conditions of interactive literature. In this paper, I would like to put those ideas to the test in an examination of writing and reading practices of electronic literature for and by children. The first part of the paper will examine the reading records from one corpus of electronic children’s literature. For the past four years, I have been collaborating with my own children to write a series of interactive stories entitled “Mrs. Wobbles and the Tangerine House,” featuring a magical foster care home. Each of those stories contains decision points that report back anonymously analytic data on which choice has been selected. For this presentation, I will analyze reading logs from the Mrs. Wobbles stories, specifically comparing choices made when the persistent transcript was present and after the transcript was removed, as the authoring software offered the ability to wipe the slate clean after transitions. These stories have been featured in past ELO conferences, including ELO 2017 (Porto), 2016 (UVic), 2015 (Bergen). Drawing upon my work in composition instruction, the second part of the paper will examine how this notion of a persistent record affects authorship of interactive digital texts. In addition to my collaborations with my children, I have developed a writing exercise that teaches how to write a choice-based texts. Just as the persistent transcript affects the choices of readers, knowing that a work will or will not have a persistent record affects authorship. In this section of the paper, I will offer analysis of the stories written using this exercise across a series of platforms, including Undum and Google Forms. Ultimately, the question is how do persistent transcripts impact writing and reading in electronic texts written for and by children. This work dovetails with the research Maria Goicoechea is conducting in Spain (which she is proposing to present in a separate paper submission for this conference) on the role of persistent transcripts of children exploring electronic literature.
Ruczaj - cyberżulerska gra ekonomiczna (Ruczaj - cyber hobo economic game) is a web-based experience simulating living in Polish suburbs with access to fast internet connection. There are only three things that player can alter. First, writing social media posts that generate „likes”. When you have enough likes, you can „code corvee” which provides beer. With beer, you go out where farming some weed is possible, weed can be exchanged for a social media post and so on. Every action is fulfilled with one mouse click. Gathering likes, beers and weed is creating mutually dependent loop that quickly becomes insufficient to generate income. Especially when your debt to Social Insurance Company is growing with every second.
Game is constructed of three columns where on the left are listed actions that player can make, in the middle is news feed with e-mails and messages from other people and companies and on the right are debts that need to be payed. There are no objections in the game to finish it nor ways to lose or win. Boring, repetitive and frustrating gameplay is very much intended. There is nothing to do, no perspectives to progress and no prize – only dry and absurd sense of humour.
Ruczaj is available online for free and can be accessed with any computer or mobile phone. Used medium is central to the nature of the game – it is almost fully randomly generated, but always tells the same story of slow, jaded neighbourhood where nothing happens anymore. Player quickly catches that feeling of bitter internet experience and probably leaves unsatisfied.
Cyber hobo (or cyber junkie) is a person that has given up on the state of today's internet – he knows that only junk and scraps are left in cyberspace of graphomaniac and corporate cliches. Cyber hobos are actually trying to find and distil something extraordinary and original from banal sea of repetetive aesthetics.
This cute interactive story offers a reimagining of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Designed to appeal to literate and preliterate audiences (as young as two years old), the game offers twelve exploratory animated scene peppered with hidden mini games. The work uses touch and tilt to allow the interactor to discover the story while engaging the affordances of mobile devices. Interactors are free to explore the tale at their own pace, as the wolf stalks over to granny’s house. However, created for even the youngest of audiences, the wolf merely shoves granny into a closet, rather than eating her. Rendered in white, black, and grey (with a hint of red), this app’s aesthetic draws upon the style of Japanese anime and contemporary animation. Backed by an immersive soundtrack, the piece offers a delightfully modern retelling of this classic tale.
(Source: Description from ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)
Sherwood Rise is the world's first augmented novel. It's an Augmented Reality (AR) transmedia interactive graphic novel/ game, told over 4 days through a range of media and formats: printed newspapers, AR on mobile phones, emails, hacker websites, blogs, sound, music, graphic novels and illustrations.
Inspired by the current financial crisis, and the Occupy movement, the story is based on the traditional Robin Hood tale. The traditional tale of peasant revolt and dissent is brought up to date, and adapted for AR and transmedia. In our adaptation, austerity is imposed on the poor by a privileged elite, but resisted by a gang of hacker outlaw terrorists called the 'Merry Men'.
Each day you receive a newspaper (via email) which you interact with via AR. Your interaction (how much you support the establishment or the Merry Men) updates a database, which then determines the version of newspaper you receive the next day. My intention was to make a physical book interactive, and in this way explore the future of the book.
The project explores the future of the book and transmedia storytelling:
The objectives of the project are:
My research interests for this project included:
Sherwood Rise - the story begins here
Please note that since the AR software "Junaio" is no longer available (since 2015), then the project doesn't run anymore.
This was a research collaboration between Dave Miller (concept, code and drawings) and Dave Moorhead (screenwriter). This was a post-doc research project funded by the University of Bedfordshire, as part of the UNESCO Future of the Book project.
The novel "Borders vomited" takes place in different directions that the reader chooses responding to requests displayed on the screen. Whatever choice is made, the story continues until the end. In fact, he sailed along a braid by taking one or the other of the strands, in one direction or the other. It is he who decides: or it goes quicker towards the end even restart later other ways, he is seeking to recognize stroll each channel possible even fall from time to time in certain passages
(Source: authors documentation on work, http://www.epi.asso.fr/revue/76/b76p135.htm )
Le roman "Frontières vomies" se déroule selon différentes orientations que le lecteur choisit en répondant aux sollicitations affichées sur l'écran. Quel que soit le choix fait, le récit se poursuit jusqu'à la fin. En fait, il navigue le long d'une tresse en empruntant l'un ou l'autre des brins, dans un sens ou dans l'autre. C'est lui qui décide : soit il va au plus vite vers la fin quitte à recommencer plus tard par d'autres voies, soit il flâne en cherchant à reconnaître chacune des voies possibles quitte à retomber de temps à autre dans certains passages uniques. [Source: authors documentation on work, http://www.epi.asso.fr/revue/76/b76p135.htm ]
Artificial intelligence methods open up new possibilities in art and entertainment,enabling rich and deeply interactive experiences. At the same time as AI opens up newfields of artistic expression, AI-based art itself becomes a fundamental research agenda,posing and answering novel research questions that would not be raised unless doing AIresearch in the context of art and entertainment. I call this agenda, in which AI researchand art mutually inform each other, Expressive AI. Expressive AI takes seriously theproblem of building intelligences that robustly function outside of the lab, engaginghuman participants in intellectually and aesthetically satisfying interactions, which,hopefully, teach us something about ourselves.This thesis describes a specific AI-based art piece, an interactive drama calledFaçade, and describes the practice of Expressive AI, using Façade, as well as additionalAI-based artwork described in the appendices, as case studies.An interactive drama is a dramatically interesting virtual world inhabited bycomputer-controlled characters, within which the player experiences a story from a firstperson perspective. Over the past decade, there has been a fair amount of research intobelievable agents, that is, autonomous characters exhibiting rich personalities, emotions,and social interactions. There has been comparatively little work, however, exploringhow the local, reactive behavior of believable agents can be integrated with the moreglobal, deliberative nature of a story plot, so as to build interactive, dramatic worlds. Thisthesis presents Façade, the first published interactive drama system that integratescharacter (believable agents), story (drama management) and shallow natural languageprocessing into a complete system. Façade will be publicly released as a free downloadin 2003.In the Façade architecture, the unit of plot/character integration is the dramatic beat.In the theory of dramatic writing, beats are the smallest unit of dramatic action, consistingof a short dialog exchange or small amount of physical action. As architectural entities,beats organize both the procedural knowledge to accomplish the beat’s dramatic action,and the declarative knowledge to sequence the beat in an evolving plot. Instead ofconceiving of the characters as strongly autonomous entities that coordinate toaccomplish dramatic action through purely local decision-making, characters are insteadweakly autonomous – the character’s behavioral repertoire dynamically changes as beatsare sequenced. The Façade architecture includes ABL (A Behavior Language), a newreactive planning language for authoring characters that provides language support forjoint action, and a drama manager consisting of both a language for authoring thedeclarative knowledge associated with beats and a runtime system that dynamicallysequences beats.Façade is a collaboration with independent artist and researcher Andrew Stern.Expressive AI is not the “mere” application of off-the-shelf AI techniques to art andentertainment applications. Rather, Expressive AI is a critical technical practice, a way ofdoing AI research that reflects on the foundations of AI and changes the way AI is done.AI has always been in the business of knowing-by-making, exploring what it means to behuman by building systems. Expressive AI just makes this explicit, combining thethought experiments of the AI researcher with the conceptual and aesthetic experimentsof the artist. As demonstrated through Façade and the other systems/artworks describedin the appendices, combining art and AI, both ways of knowing-by-making, opens upnew research questions, provides a novel perspective on old questions, and enables newmodes of artistic expression. The firm boundary normally separating “art” and “science”is blurred, becoming two components of a single, integrated practice.
(Source: Author's abstract)