letters

This poem is an interactive landscape. Bicycles, letters and a traveler's musings pass bij. 

This app developed for the iOS environment is a reworking of a video work titled Unicode (2012) which “shows all displayable characters in the unicode range 0 - 65536 (49571 characters). One character per frame.” The video lasts about 33 minutes and has a sound component which he didn’t use for the app. The app adds a simple user interface which allows speeding up or slowing down the character display, shaking for random access to the characters, and an interactive function that uses the touchscreen interface and the accelerometer. This is a conceptual work which allows us to appreciate the rich palette of characters and symbols written languages from around the world offer and can be accessed when encoded in the Unicode standard.

(Source: ELC 3)

The installation plays with the boundaries of form and consciousness through play with the material and the immaterial. From Beyond invites the reader to interact with a digitally augmented Ouija Board. The Ouija Board (also known as the “talking board”) is well-explored in popular culture as a device that is traditionally employed in an attempt to communicate with the dead, who are themselves voiceless and thus can be “heard” only through the indication of written letters. The board is thus itself an interface that plays at the boundaries of the real and the presumed supernatural, as it operates through superstition: readers place their fingers on the planchette and it moves to answer questions, with a “Yes” or “No” placed on the board. Likewise, our digitally enhanced Ouija Board invites the user to guide a planchette (a pointer) as a tactile interface for making binary decisions while traversing a hypertextual work on a screen that serves as a lens between the reader’s world and the world of the story. Our Ouija board and planchette is the physical interface to a modified Twine application, hiding its mechanisms from the reader’s awareness. Twine is an HTML-based interactive fiction storytelling platform that already has a growing number of pieces demonstrating its power and range. Twine is best characterized by its accessibility and the versatility of discrete choices presented to users. Each segment of the scenes in the story are projected in an ethereal fashion through the use of templated text and choice-links whose backgrounds, images and fonts can be customized through stylesheets and which keep in the theme of a view into the real world from the spirit realm. Each choice a visitor or group of visitors to the installation makes by moving the planchette will be incorporated into an ongoing story. The web page will use web sockets to receive input from the Arduino microcontroller connected to the sensors embedded inside the board. These sensors are triggered by a magnet in the planchette itself, and thus the seam between digital and physical is hidden beneath the surface, appearing as any board of this type. This invites the reader to contemplate the ghost in the machine, and, indeed, to embody that ghost through their own physical movement to produce digital input. The reader in the work may first approach the Ouija board assuming they are entering a story in which they communicate with ghosts, but in fact the reader will embody (or disembody) a ghost as they interact with the installation. As the ghost story unfolds, our transformation of the Ouija board will draw upon both the history of supernatural belief in the board’s role as a communication device and the potential of digital modalities to produce new ghosts. As this year’s conference is focused on the “ends” of electronic literature, we believe this metaphorical exploration of endings and unseen yet tangible interfaces is particularly fitting. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

ASCII versions of familiar films.

M.M. is a poetic project on a poem from Moestrups collection Golden Delicious. Moestrup sent the poem to 300 persons with the initials M.M. in and around Copenhagen. She retrieved 57 of them, each writing the original M.M (Selvportræt) poem in their own handwriting. They are now published on Afsnit P and manually in the +Laboratorium.

This collaborative work is built using Geniwate’s (Australian writer Jenny Weight’s nom d’ordinateur) “concatenation engine” and Stephans’ images and text. This “page space” is a computational upgrade to the cut-up, because in addition to randomly joining lines of verse, it cuts them further and places them in different positions of the page, creating multiple lines and readings of the same text. The gorgeous oversaturated images of urban and natural landscapes serve as a backdrop for an explosion of letters in different font sizes and lines of free verse, all of which serve as links to the next piece of the concatenation. The sound clips are nowhere nearly as pleasant as Brian Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” which has a line that inspired the title of this poem, and perhaps some of its postcard-like visual design and conceptual language choices, such as the frequent use of “you,” “she,” and references to writing.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work in its own right. You can play with the letter-creatures and watch and listen how they interact with each other or use them to produce soundscapes like you would with an electronic musical instrument. abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz blends art, biology, fun and physics to create a unique, dynamic and interactive sound ecology.This app is the result of joerg piringer's ongoing research of vocal sounds and their relation to dynamic typography in the form of performance, video and software art.

(Source: Author's description)