IPad app

Vital to the General Public Welfare was a solo exhibition (Edward Day Gallery, Toronto, 2012) revolving around themes of language, authenticity and contingency filtered through the lens of my experience as an adopted-out Cherokee person. I have recently turned the interactive touchwork poems in Vital, a 30-minute performance using the Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media (P.o.E.M.M.) mobile apps as the main performance tool. The title of the show came from documents filed in a 1964 Louisiana court case seeking to ascertain an adopted child’s racial classification. The judge claimed that the proper identification of the child’s race was “vital to the general public welfare”; in other words, whichever way the child was classified, a wrong classification would endanger the fundamental fabric of White culture. The now-hyberbolic seeming claim strikes me as a powerful metaphor for any conversations we have not only about racial classification but also about any number of other issues that some group or another feels is central to their definition of a well-functioning society. All of the works performed in Vital engage the question of how we talk to one another, how we locate ourselves in wider cultural geographies, how we authenticate ourselves against our own expectations and that of others, and how matters that are once seen as so vital – so essential – can later be regarded as contingent. The performance will consist of augmented readings, whereby I manipulate the P.o.E.M.M. app while performing the text of the poem. I will also be using several text-based apps by different creators (with permission!) I use an iPad connected wirelessly to an AppleTV (via Airplay using WiFi), which then pumps HD video via HDMI to a projector. This allows me to move freely around the stage while operating the pad. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This is a story about a girl, a woman and an old sailor told in images, sounds and fragments of text that the reader must find by navigating through a dreamlike ocean landscape. By taking advantage of the affordances of a tablet, Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardebäck have created a fictional world built on an exceptional lyrical narrative, engaging graphics and a soundtrack that completes a well balanced enviroment that readers will love to navigate. The work uses the iPad in portrait mode, and begins with a dark screen with the words: “It’s night.” The reader swipes the words to the left to read more, sentence by sentence on the dark screen: “A girl lies in her bed. There’s not a sound. No footsteps in the hallway, no one talking or whispering. Everything is quiet. The girl shuts her eyes.” The sound of waves fades in, and you see you are in the ocean with islands to explore. A visual hypertext without links, you navigate through this world finding spaces that lead to short texts that seen together tell a story of loss, memories and fire.

The Computer Wore Heels is an interactive book app for the iPad that shares the little known story of a group of female mathematicians, some as young as 18, who did secret ballistics research for the US Army during WWII. A handful of these human 'computers' went on to serve as the programmers of ENIAC, the first multi-purpose electronic computer. The app is based on the documentary film Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII (LeAnn Erickson 2010), and aims to bring this story to younger students in the hopes of giving today's teens role models that might encourage them to study math, science and computer science. The app's design resembles a girl's diary from the 1940's with the narrative unfolding as an adventure story. Readers may access primary research documents such as original WWII era letters, photographs and mathematical equations actually completed by the story's subjects. There are also numerous audio and video clips that expand on story plot points or events.

(source: Kid e-Lit booklet)

The Secret Language of Desire (2015) is an electronic literature app exploring the narrative and touchscreen affordances of digital tablets. Merging 27 ultra-short chapters with interactive animations and sound, The Secret Language of Desire traces a woman’s journey from everyday life into a landscape of sensuality and desire. Every chapter of The Secret Language of Desire contains elements to enrich the narrative – objects can be touched, triggering animations and sound, or images can be rubbed off, revealing hidden contents.

The Secret Language of Desire differs from Heyward’s early works by emphasising textual content over image, sound and interactivity, reworking the balance of multimedia elements into an electronic literature form that is predominantly textually-driven. The project was supported by funding of $15,000 in 2014 from the Australian Government through the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.The work includes mature content and themes. It was produced for iPads and was available in the AppStore from 2015 to 2018.

The Secret Language of Desire was written and developed by Megan Heyward using Adobe InDesign DPS (Digital Publishing System) and Adobe Animate. It features original sound design by Michael Finucan and original music by Australian saxophonist Martin Kay.

The VNIVERSE app is a poetry instrument you can play. In DRAW mode, touch and drag to create your own constellations. In CONSTELLATIONS mode, explore the ten constellations found in the coordinate print book, V : WaveTercets / Losing L’una (SpringGun Press, 2014). WAVETERCETS plays the entire run of poem tercets for you, starting at the beginning. Or, by touching any star, you may begin anywhere you like. ORACLE lets you pose seven questions to the sky. CLEAR button clears the sky. Stephanie Strickland’s V was first published by Penguin (2002) as an invertible book with two beginnings, V : WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una. Mid-book, a URL leads to V : Vniverse (2002, Director project with Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo). Another part of V is the Flash poem, Errand Upon Which We Came (2001, with M.D. Coverley). The Vniverse app for iPad was created in 2014 with Ian Hatcher.

Ice-bound is an interactive novel that combines a printed art book with an iPad app. Our goal was to create an experience with both high-quality surface text and significant player agency. The story concerns an encounter with a fictional artificial intelligence, a simulation of a long-dead author who enlists the player's help to finish his original's final novel. Inspired by the dense, labyrinthical texture of works like Nabokov's Pale Fire and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, the novel is a unique collaboration between two artists, both of whom are writers, coders, and graphic designers. Each story is built around a dynamically chosen set of symbols representing possible elements of the story. These might be traits a character could have, or plots that could be included in the story. When a story is first visited, the symbols are assigned to an author-defined group of sockets which can be turned on or off by the player. However, the player can only turn a limited number of sockets on at one time. As different combinations of sockets are activated, a version of the story is displayed, projecting what might happen if the symbols associated with those sockets were part of the story. While players explore possible stories, they also carry on an ongoing conversation with the AI character, who comments on the reader's activity, engages in philosophical discussions, and ultimately demands physical proof that a reader's selected ending for the story is appropriate. The reader provides this by finding a page from the companion printed book that contains an overlapping theme with the selected ending. Using markerless tracking augmented reality (AR), we can identify which page of the print book the player is pointing the iPad's camera at, and display additional layers of story content overlaid on the physical book. Once a story is resolved, the themes associated with it are strengthened. In this way the next story has thematic connections with the way the reader resolved prior stories, and as play progresses subsequent stories become more and more similar to the reader's own aesthetic. (Source: authors abstract)

Abra is an exploration and celebration of the potentials of the book in the 21st century. A collaboration between Amaranth Borsuk, Kate Durbin, Ian Hatcher, and a potentially infinite number of readers, the project merges physical and digital media, integrating a hand-made artist's book with an iPad app to play with the notion of the “illuminated” manuscript and let readers "hold the light" of language. In the artist’s book, the poems grow and mutate as the reader turns the pages, blurring the boundary between text and illumination, marginalia and body. Animating across the surface, the poems coalesce and disperse in an ecstatic helix of words, taking turns "illuminating" one another's margins and interstices.They play with the mutation of language, both by forming new portmanteaus and conjoined phrases, and also through references to fecundity as it manifests in the natural world, the body, human history, popular culture, decorative arts, and architecture, placing the shifting evolution and continuous overlap of all these spheres in dialogue with the ever-changing technology of the book. The iPad version of Abra, which provides a physical backdrop for the artist's book into which it is inserted, extends and revels in this ephemerality, putting special emphasis on interactivity to highlight the role of the reader. The poems spring to life onscreen: not only do they conjoin and separate, with a swipe of his or her finger, readers may join the collaboration and mutate the text further, creating new juxtapositions and surprising turns of phrase. Their texts provide scores for potential performances of the work, making Abra function much like the magic word of its origin–abracadabra–as an unpredictable living text. We are interested in both exhibiting the hybrid artist's book / iPad app and performing from the work. We would also be happy to give a presentation, if that is of interest. While the project is a collaboration between 3 people, only Amaranth and Ian are applying to present it. We both plan to attend the conference and are especially interested in the opportunity to expand the performative possibilities of the text, which to date has been performed by Kate and Amaranth in conjoined costume. Abra is being produced under an Expanded Artists’ Books Grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago. The project will launch this spring. For exhibition, our piece requires an iPad running iOS7 and a podium. We can provide the artist's book. For performance, we can provide iPads and adapters. Amaranth Borsuk's books include Between Page and Screen and Handiwork. She teaches at the University of Washington, Bothell. Kate Durbin's books include The Ravenous Audience and E! Entertainment, among others. She teaches at Whitter College. Ian Hatcher is a text/sound artist and programmer living in New York.

(Source: Author's abstract)

This piece won the 2017 Turn on Literature Prize.

Six years ago, James – a demolition expert – returned from the Gulf War. Explore James’ mind as his vision fails and his past collides with his present. PRY is a book without borders: a hybrid of cinema, gaming, and text. At any point, pinch James’ eyes open to witness his external world or pry apart the text of his thoughts to dive deeper into his subconscious. Through these and other unique reading interactions, unravel the fabric of memory and discover a story shaped by the lies we tell ourselves: lies revealed when you pull apart the narrative and read between the lines.

(Source: http://prynovella.com)