An interactive short story, A MODERN GHOST explores a young man's memories of a love that was never realized.Featuring an original soundtrack, 22 photo illustrations, and a few innovative surprises, it is the first release by digital literature studio AltSalt.LENGTH: 3-5 minutes
(Source: App store description of the work)
Recollections is a collection of 12 vignettes from Lashihai in China designed for iPad and available as a free web app.
Private reading practices and public spaces collide at the mobile browser, and this interactive installation imagines a browser that amplifies the intimate co-presence of its readers. In an ambient immersive environment, it asks if an interface could become more expressive of our influence on each other, and it embodies how language slips from one screen to another in an always shifting hybrid of reading-writing. Users join a public reading area equipped with a row of iPads, each opened to an experimental web browser. The darkened gallery combines the interstitial nature of the public waiting room with the intimacy of a bedroom, and the illumination from each screen invites digital eavesdropping and attention to fellow users. Upon browsing, each reader witnesses other readers' touch behaviors layered in colorful, ephemeral trails on their own screen as they browse. Fragments of text tapped by their neighbors float over their own reading choices, interceding in their chosen narratives, both as alteration of the reading experience and also as reminder that their reading behaviors are written elsewhere. In addition to the in-app display, the program collects these text fragments from all readers into an accumulating archive and conceptual poem, written collaboratively and programmatically. This shared composition is made publicly available on site, as the performance of digital reading becomes an act of writing in an era when every action becomes data. Language has always been about that spark gap of transmission from one mind to another. This work explores how digital reading negotiates the gap between readers as we share anonymous physical proximity but diffuse digital intimacy, plumbing the tensions alive in the intersections of reading–writing, physical–digital, self–other. The work directly engages ELO conference themes including "mobile technologies' effect on writing and reading habits" as well as considerations of screens and presence. The paper draws on interdisciplinary scholarship from media studies and classics, cognitive science and design research, to explore cultural and historical contexts for digital reading practices that ground the considerations of the installation. It argues that digital reading environments contribute to a more fragmented experience of subjectivity, one that reflects an existing social ecology which technology should be used to emphasize.
“Boum!” is a wordless narrative which uses a very simple horizontal scroll to present the linear story of a man whose routine stroll to work is altered by a snowfall that makes him lose his way and transforms his day into a surreal journey. The story is beautifully rendered in a series of scenes in which the graphic design and the soundtrack become the true protagonists of the tale: an ode to the universal need for friendship and fantasy. “Boum!” combines music, paintings, and interaction to create a delightful experience for all ages. It received a special mention of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (fiction) in 2016 and was the Editor’s Choice of the Children’s Technology Review supported by CNL, Salon du Livre de Jeunesse de Montreuil.
(Source: Description from ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)
Boum! est un récit horizontal pour grands petits hommes, imaginé et illustré par Mikaël Cixous, mis en son par Jean-Jacques Birgé et propulsé par Mathias Franck.
Première production du genre, Boum! détourne les codes de visualisation classiques et invente une nouvelle façon de s’immerger dans une histoire. Le principe d’une lecture horizontale enrichie par une bande sonore réactive et surprenante, bouscule et enrichi à chaque instant la perception du spectateur.
Boum! dénote par la simplicité du procédé utilisé et la richesse du rendu. Les Inéditeurs marquent ici un retour aux sources quant au travail d’écriture et de mise en scène visuelle et sonore avec un credo simple : privilégier l’histoire et laisser l’imagination galoper.
L’absence de paroles, l’enchainement et la beauté graphique des tableaux, la musicalité, la narration elliptique et simple à la fois, tout cela nous entraine dans une expérience hors du temps et de l’instantané, un moment et un espace pour soi, offrant une grande liberté d’interprétation et de ressenti, chacun à son rythme.
Augmented beasts builds on some of my experiences and preoccupations in the book world – my books on circus, optical illusion (Painted Circus), visual experiences that weave together unusually coupled animals (Mixed Beasts) and animals who live, for example, in strange Victorian Houses (Alphabeasts). It is also indebted to my fascination with magic and, of course, by the possibilities I see in the emerging medium of augmented reality itself for children: being able to ‘touch’ a virtual object and make it disappear... being able to use an ipad as a looking glass to encounter hidden illustrations, stories and music. This piece was coded in Vuforia for ipad during an artist residency at the Augmented reality lab at York University.
(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)
Created in Unity using the Vuforia plug-in, 200 Castles is an augmented reality piece for iPad about time, longing, and magical spaces set in both the domestic spaces of a castle across multiple decades and in the spaces of memory. The viewer unlocks the story by using the iPad as a magic looking glass to look at a series of images in a photo album (‘trackables’ – the images contain features that the camera on the iPad is seeking). When the iPad’s camera ‘sees’ the images, the augmented reality technology overlays a small digital scene with accompanying audio.
Anastasia Salter’s “Convergent Devices, Dissonant Genres” assesses the implications of the iPad for the state of literature. Looking at “traditional” approaches that re-mediate print for digital devices, “enhanced” approaches which add “special features” to extant texts and forms, pre-tablet eliterature re-experienced in the new environment, and finally the creation of original apps with literary qualities, Salter’s work is a critical document of the impact a single interface can have on the development of literary culture in the 21st Century. (Source: Author's Abstract)
TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.
TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.
What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.
(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)
When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.
When your iPad is lying down you can read or listen to this story about animals who live in a red house, during the coldest winter in 2000 years.. When you pick up the iPad, it becomes a window into a 3D rendition of the fictional world, and you need to move around to pan through the world. Each of the creatures in the house has a short story, and for each story you need to interact with the iPad to help solve the creature’s problem: shake it to get the snow down from a tree; shout into it to wake up Gregers’ siblings; or find a yellow color with the camera to turn on the lights in the dark winter night. Merete Pryds Helle has, alongside her work as a novelist, been a pioneer in the field of Danish digital literature or hybrid literature, and wrote several successful computer games in the 1990s. In this millennium she has been first to introduce danes to SMS novels, app novel (“The funeral”, 2011), an electronic calendar novel (“Mikkels mareridt”, 2014). With its clever use of the tools offered by the iPad, Wuwu places the reader in a tension between the written and imagined on one side and the animated, interactive and visible on the other side. The reader has to both join and separate the physical reality of the body and the reality on the screen, which heightens the awareness of both.