A collaboration with the Queensland State Archives, this is a collection of digital poems using archival material built into a physical space. Interactive elements cleverly repurpose old archive equipment such as card index drawers and microfiche machines. The poems draw on Brisbane’s past and recreate the experience of losing yourself in archival material.
Explained very simply, this piece is a story about a man being presented with a mysterious object that is either 1) directions upon which he must act or 2) documentation of his own origins. If they are the former, then the events that proceed in the story are the events that proceed. If they are the latter, the events that proceed are his re-encounter with how he came into being not as an organism (what is that even?), necessarily, but as a someone who believes in space, physicality, reason, etc.The piece alternates between two locations: "in here," which is where the narrator builds a space in order to orient himself in relation to the question the mysterious object presents, and "that sort of place," which is where the narrator is presented with new information that both helps and antagonizes him. The juxtaposition of the closed, structured space of "that sort of place" with the open sprawl of "in here" invokes the question that the narrator circles around - whether he can recreate or reconstruct his own beginnings or origins to the point of creating the closed, structured space in which he exists now.
Source: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/wdm/Cave+Writing+Presentation…
[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants' interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym "seeds," each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants "plant" their interests, each becomes a tree that "grows" over time. Each organism's leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants' trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.
Tale of a Great Sham(e Text) The date is 1881.
There are high rents and evictions, there is homelessness. In answer to the extra-ordinary times the Ladies’ Land League is directed by Anna Parnell to organize public meetings and protests. Thirteen women, speak, rally, and inspire female agency. Irish Women realizing their own political potential, moving the struggle away from government to the personal. This is an electronic text, to be created using 13 female voices and a computer. The visuals/text of the electronic text will be created using game development software and electroacoustic compositional techniques, presented as an interactive work within a web browser. The 13 female voices will sound original text created using works by Anna Parnell, processed using electroacoustic compositional techniques. Passive resistance is be combined with a constructive creative programme, developing the self-confidence of the audience and encouraging them to participate.
“The best part of Independence is the independence of the mind.” (Anna Parnell)
Culprit is a choose-your-own adventure screen-based game created using the interactive documentary software Klynt and inspired by the resurgence of interest in a genre that elit has seen as unsophisticated but is currently enjoying an uptake in popularity as interactivity goes mainstream both on handheld devices and livingroom televisions. A multi-modal murder mystery with five storypaths that intersect to provide for many more distinct readings, Culprit is set in a contemporary, urban North American city and anyone could be the murderer.
always tomorrow is a virtual reality fiction piece for HTC Vive. The viewer/reader is positioned in the centre of an infinite visual galaxy populated by 40 small interactive spheres, suggestive of planets but textured with distorted images that resonate with the stories they hold within. The viewer touches the spheres in any order to activate audio and unfold a time-twisting, fringeaffirming, ether-inflected love story set in Berlin in the Weimar Republic with a tomorrow already speaking itself on the protagonists’ lips. We hope the piece resonates with the contemporary moment, too, somewhere between histories and futures; the objects of our desires and our longing, the periphery of the culture and its centre. It’s also a mediation on the power of poetry
EMBLEM/AS consist of three digital poetic artifacts created in Flash that present three emblem or banners (“Emblemas” in Spanish) related to three geographic-poetic/linguistic areas: 1. MORA AMOR 2. ARENA AL COR 3. UNITED ESTADOS The three artifacts allow interactive experiences based on words created with the acronym of each of the city/banner referenced. As you move the cursor, words and sounds lead new audiovisual and political constructions based on meanings that explore the author’s split sense of identity as a nomadic subject. The first banner, “Mora amor” (Love dwells), was published in 2017 and its record is archived at elmcip.net: https://elmcip.net/creative-work/mora-amor This artifact refers to the banner of the city of Zamora, the place of birth of the author. The interactive words and Spanish sounds explore her sense of disengagement and nostalgia towards this city, while pointing to the conservatism and religious constrains of this area of Spain: Ora, Roma, Mazo, Amor, etc. (Prey, Rome, Mallet, Love). The interface can be experienced here: https://proyecto.w3.uvm.edu/Emblem/as/ZamoraFinalVoice.php
“Arena al cor” (Sand in the heart), is visually based on the Catalonia banner. The voice now reproduces, in both Catalan and Spanish, words created with the acronym of the city of Barcelona, the area where the author grew up. Now, the meanings intersect semantics of the sea (Ona, Roca, Ancla –Wave, Rock, Anchor) with others related to work and pain (Labora, Lacera –Works, Wound). This interface can be experienced here: https://proyecto.w3.uvm.edu/Emblem/as/BarcelonaArena.php Finally, “United Estados” reproduces the emblematic flag of the United States. The words and sounds, now in English, Spanish and Spanglish, reflect political issues in the country of residence and co-citizenship of the author. The acronyms point now to notions of anxiety, division and pain (Ansiado, Dissent, Duelo, SOS), as well as longing (Deseado).
What does a cutting-edge collaboration between music, visual, and literary artists look like and how did it evolve? This ongoing, transdisciplinary collaboration between said types of artists evolves a born digital interactive poetry application for every presentation and exhibition opportunity. Our mission as collaborators is to open up creative workflows for interactive technologies and artists interested in using them to benefit the presentation and experience of the visual, musical, or literary arts. We developed an interactive, live-streaming poetry web app that takes audience response to trigger improvisations, sensory experiences, and create an event-specific poem collectively. The user acts as collaborator by sending word selections that resonate with individual users by tapping text from a born-digital “seed poem” on their mobiles to trigger Markov chain reactions, which enables succinct recombination of massive amounts of language as source material. The app that creatively data mines +2500 TED talks as a found text corpus to send improvisational stanzas to the poet on stage as well as acting as a multimedia sound installation and interactive performance enhancer for poets. ELO2019 University College Cork #ELOcork 51 We will adapt our interactive performance web app to become a more open tool for parameterized poetry performance—to become a container, stand-alone installation as well as a tool for other literary and multimedia artists to utilize and explore using their own “seed text” and “found text corpus” for unique, interactive performances. This way one need not be a developer to perform heightened text collaboration—with the opportunity for generative input from an audience and a dynamic set of texts—or create unique, new media collaborative poetry from mobile interactivity. This new system would be attractive to contemporary poets, performing artists, and audiences seeking more engagement from readings as well as scholars curious about language processing to creative datamine subtexts. Our precedent for this adaptation is from the first iteration of our interactive poetry application, Causeway, which was exhibited in the “Louisiana Contemporary 2016” Juried Exhibition at the Odgen Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans (http://thehelisfoundation.org/what-we-fund/louisiana-contemporary/). Diamonds in Dystopia is a clustered Node.js application that is served and balanced between Google Cloud Compute and a custom OpenStack installation for interactive art. Users connect to an Express.js HTTP server that displays the original manuscript. They click on individual words that resonate with them which get passed along to a server via WebSockets. Each time a user taps a word the collection of texts, hosted on a Redis server, are searched for the top results that contain that word. Those texts are used as source material for generation through something such as a Markov chain algorithm to generate a new stanza of found text. These new stanzas are fed to the performer who can choose via a "controller" interface running on their own mobile device which to read and display on a theater view.
Sound Spheres combines computational digital media and storytelling techne to provide an interface with which users can create and experience interactive aural narratives. Sound Spheres was conceptualized and created to encourage active engagement with sound sources (the colored spheres) representing narrative elements. Participants may engage these sound spheres to construct aural narratives using multiple interactive techniques. As participants do not know the contents of sound spheres, narratives constructed using this technique are serendipitous, similar to actively tuning a radio from one station to another, hoping to find interesting aural content. Meaning is supplied by the participant's interpretation, which, in turn, depends on memory, cultural context, and previous hearing experiences. Sound Spheres suggests that engaging narratives can be created from non-dialogic sound sources. And, through its remix of radio, aural narratives, and non-linear composition, Sound Spheres demonstrates new methods for creating and experiencing interactive digital storytelling.
“I’m on the hard drive. When the gift came. Both disk and memory disappear”. Kulaktan kulağa, Chinese whispers, or Arabic telephone reveals mis(machine)translated stories of found images through tangible interaction. The installation uses what is (at first glance) just a box of old photographs to examine the western-centric lens of the internet by humanising machine translation errors. The artist collected old photographs from London’s flea markets, and wrote short stories for each photograph in her non-native English. Using an online machine translation tool, she machine-translated the stories into her native Turkish, and into other ‘foreign-looking’ languages such as Chinese and Arabic. The garbled outcome then is machine-translated back to English, carrying its inaccurate interpretation alongside. The stories and photographs are integrated into an interactive installation that invites readers to reveal mistranslated stories through tangible interaction. The installation invites spectators to pick a photograph from an old box and explore its interpretation. The interpretation becomes garbled along the way, until it significantly deviates from the initial meaning due to the inaccurate machine translations of non-Indo-European languages. By acting as a mediator of the interpretation, the reader is invited to reflect on the displayed errors, and the reader’s own position within its commonality. The name of the artwork is an analogy to question socially accepted neologisms for what is foreign-looking or foreign-sounding to us. The title refers to the name of a children’s game in Turkish, Kulaktan Kulağa, in which a message is passed through a line of players through whisper. The name translates from Turkish as ‘From Ear to Ear’, literally describing the act of whispering and emphasising the act as the centre of the game. The title of the work is completed by two Western naming for the same children’s game, which emphasise the foreign-sounding of the garbled messages as the core of the game.