magical wonderment

The Required Field is an expansive interactive digital poem exploring the impact of policy documents, bureaucratic forms and the river of applications on our lives and our daily culture. Using twenty found and remixed government and corporate documents, the work poetically translates those overly complex and confusing forms. For example, a Tax Form for farmers will be recontextualized through an interactive image-­‐map tour, transforming specific sections of the forms into poetic text and animated elements. Or a page from a Work Visa application will be created into a platform game, where the reader/player triggers poetry blasting bureaucracies through their game play. And in the end, The Required Field, builds from and then poetically destroys the bureaucratic cultures and their fields of red-­‐tape, laws and policies for the sake of policies, the sub-­‐section to a sub-­‐section, part B stroke 9 for breathing.

: Cryptext (a series of interactive puzzle/science prose poems) and Nomencluster (a generative digital poem created by the user’s hand movements using poetry and science designs) were built for one of the world’s largest, most advanced touch screen spaces, located at QUT’s The Cube (four 40ft sides, over 40 touch screens, towering over two stories).  These two works were made possible by a $125,000 grant from the Australia Council of the Arts and the Queensland University of Technology. Cryptext is a puzzle science fiction prose work where players use giant wheels, one to each touch screen, to solve a cryptic X-files style mystery surrounding a secret military technology program. And Nomencluster an interactive artwork/game where players create with science shapes and designs, and through each of the six levels poetic text is generated by the player’s movements.

As interactive writing and digital art are relatively emerging fields there remains considerable research areas to explore. One of the most pressing is the examination of how to re-think, translate and remake older creative works into new cultural and language contexts. This work was create for BleuOrange in Canada. And is an entirely new work loosely based Jason Nelson's This is How You Will Die generative fiction,  rethinking all aspects of the work in a French context.

Working with translators, Ariane Savoieand Lisa Tronca at BleuOrange in Quebec, the work developed new methods for rethinking and translating everything about a digital writing artwork. Specifically examining how the images, the motion, the interface, the animation, the sounds, and the interactivity, as well as the words, have to be re-created.  So once those models and methods were developed, an entirely new work was created, based loosely on This is How You Will Die, which comprised of re-combining 15 different stories through an interactive game engine, as well as numerous additional sections, graphic and audio work.

Nine Billion Branches is an interactive digital poem and fiction hybrid. It explores the unexpected beauty hidden in the seemingly mundane objects and places around us. And the desires is for this digital poem to open a curious hope in the reader, that in our local and immediate worlds there are wondrous and interesting narratives and poetics, streaming out from and around us.

Note: Nine Billion Branches refers to a hypothetical number of the narratives within reach of all of us. And to experience it is to experience a book of poetry if that book was mutated and recreated as wondrous interactive creatures! Each section is different, each section is its own creation.

This digital poem won the inaugural digital writing prize at the Queensland Literary Awards. The prize of $10,000 is the largest of its kind internationally.

w: http://media.hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz17/gallery/nelson/index.html

d: The world, its politics and environments, conflicts and economies, is in peril, in disarray. We are flooded with tragic tales and the shameful deeds of others. And because of this we have lost sight of the beauty, the story and narrative hidden in the local, in the landscapes around us. We filter out the seemingly mundane of our immediate world. And yet it is in this immediate world where beauty lives, and change begins.