The main character in the Book App 'Bitterveld' travels with the Berlin S-Bahn and U-Bahn to different World War II memorials and observes fellow travelers. How are the observations and Wold War II connected? The major World War II events happened a long time ago, but are still relevant today.
In de Book App Bitterveld reist de hoofdpersoon met de Berlijnse S-Bahn en U-Bahn naar de verschillende herdenkingsmonumenten van de stad en observeert de medereizigers. Welk verband is er tussen die observaties en de Tweede Wereldoorlog? De gebeurtenissen van toen lijken lang geleden, maar hebben wel degelijk met onze tijd te maken.
In de Book App Bitterveld reist de hoofdpersoon met de Berlijnse S-Bahn en U-Bahn naar de verschillende herdenkingsmonumenten van de stad en observeert de medereizigers. Welk verband is er tussen die observaties en de Tweede Wereldoorlog? De gebeurtenissen van toen lijken lang geleden, maar hebben wel degelijk met onze tijd te maken.
The Pleasure of the Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel is a bilingual web-based work in English and French. This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Université Paris 8 in partnership with the cartographic collections of the Archives nationales. The title and much of the text in the work détourne Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973), replacing the word ‘text’ with the word ‘coast’. The images are drawn from an archive of coastal elevations made on a voyage for discovery to the South Pacific by the French hydrographer Beautemps-Beaupré (1793). In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of charting new territories by drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. In this hydro-graphic novel, Barthes’ détourned philosophy inflects the scientific and imperialist aspirations of the voyage with an undercurrent of bodily desire. Excerpts from An Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts, written by Beautemps-Beaupré intermingle with excerpts from Suzanne and the Pacific (1921), a symbolist novel by Jean Giraudoux written in direct opposition to the mechanistic view of science based on the assumption of an objective reality. This three language system unfolds in long horizontally scrolling web pages, mimicking the coast as it slips past the ship. This is a work of overlapping peripheries. It takes place, as it were during a period of imperialist expansion. These newly discovered coastlines are written over the surface of a topography which had already been inscribed by its inhabitants through thousands of years of use. The practice of hydrography sits at the peripheries of our contemporary understanding of the technology underpinning the maps of the world we know today.
I summon simply a circular memory: the impossibility of living outside the infinite coast.
I left for another world as for a coasting voyage, innocently; trying to see all of France, like an island, as I left it behind. I made a sketch of the land commencing with those parts which, being most remote, were the least liable to change in appearance. I savoured the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior coast out of the subsequent coast. At last the sky appeared, the whole sky, so pure, so laden with stars.
this work is not optimised for phones
The aim of this interdisciplinary practice-based artistic investigation has been to create a multi-linguistic and interactive online poetic narrative, The Poem that Crossed the Atlantic, and this accompanying website. The Poem is fed by the stories gathered in the website through uploaded posts. The interlacing of the stories will increase with the number of posts. Its main inspiration has been a personal story rooted in historical events of the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish and Chilean Historical Memory, interconnected with the involvement of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in the evacuation and rescue of 2,200 Spanish civil war exiles- including my own grandfather- from French concentration camps to Valparaiso, Chile, in the Winnipeg ship in 1939.
Creative Programming: Alexander Dupuis
An article on the creation and critical context of J. R. Carpenter's web-based work "Walks from City Bus Routes", which uses JavaScript to randomly and endlessly recombine illustrations and portions of text from an Edinburgh City Transport booklet published in the 1950sand bus and tram route icons from a City of Edinburgh Transport Map published in the 1940s, resulting in a new guide ‘book’ which perpetually proposes an infinite number of plausible yet practically impossible walking routes through the city of Edinburgh, and and its book shops, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, reading and writing, fact and fiction.
Questions of place have long-pervaded my fiction writing and maps have figured prominently in many of my web-based works. An outline of a map of Nova Scotia served as the interface for one of my earliest web-based works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls (1996). In The Cape (2005), I used an assortment of maps, charts, and diagrams borrowed from an Environmental Geologic Guide to Cape Cod National Seashore published in 1979 as stand-ins for family photographs. In In Absentia (2008) I used the Google Maps API to haunt the satellite view of the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal with stories of former tenants forced out by gentrification. My first novel, Words the Dog Knows (2008) included an impossible map of ancient Rome. I’d never set out to map a place I’d never been before, but then sometimes maps seem to call places into being.
Though many of the paths, towpaths, grassy slopes, fields, and roundabouts referenced in the Edinburgh City Transport pamphlet no longer exist, as variables within JavaScript strings these past places are ascribed new locations in computer memory. Called as statements into this new narrative structure, these past places become potential (albeit imaginary) destinations once again (albeit for readers rather than walkers).
"How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome" pieces together fragments of history, poetry, video, photography and cartography collected during an extended stay in Rome. This work reflects upon certain gaps - between the fragment and the whole, between the local and the tourist, between what is known of history and what is speculative. Rome is among the largest and oldest continuously occupied archaeological sites in the world. Daily life is complicated, even for the locals. Everything is running late, circuitous, or quasi-rotto. Romanticism and pragmatism must coexist. My struggles with slang, schedules, and social vagaries reminded me acutely of when I first moved to Montréal. Understanding what's going on around me now seems to be less a question of the acquisition of language than one of overcoming the dislocation of being a stranger. In her poem The Fall of Rome: A Traveller's Guide Montréal poet Anne Carson writes: "A stranger is someone desperate for conversation." I certainly found that to be the case. There were days in Rome that I did not, could not, speak to anyone. Oxford Archaeological Guide and cameras in tow, I tried to capture something of the impossibly elusive and fragmentary nature of language amid Rome's broken columns, headless statues and other, often unidentifiable, ruins.
How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome was produced in residency at OBORO’s New Media Lab with the financial support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
When I could not speak
because I knew no Roman tongues
and all day long I was
overwhelmed by fragments -
headless statues littering the gardens
and the museums, full
of shelves of heads of stone -
for days on end I roamed
alone in beauty.
When I could not think
because I was hungry
or tired or lost
in a crowd of conversation,
when even if I wanted to
I could not seek
answers to ineffectual questions -
"How long will it take?"
"It is impossible to know this…"
What I wanted I could not say.
uses popup windows, requires quicktime plugin
You Are Not Here (.org) is a platform for urban tourism mash-ups. It invites participants to become meta-tourists on simultaneous excursions through multiple cities. Passers-by stumble across the curious You Are Not Here signs in the street. The YANH street-signs provide the telephone number for the Tourist Hotline, a portal for audio-guided tours of one place on the streets of another. Through investigation of these points and with or without the aid of a downloadable map, local pedestrians are transformed into tourists of foreign places. Current walking tours include Baghdad through the streets of New York City and Gaza City through the streets of Tel-Aviv.
"traces" is a locative media work delivered on mobile phone via video, audio and MP3, exploring the relationships of people, memory and place. In it, the environments we move through- the streets, buildings; the parks and bridges and alleyways of Sydney’s CBD - reveal themselves as sites rich with meaning, traced over with both personal and shared narrative.
In “traces” 5-7 people will disclose 5-7 true stories, recounting a vivid, intense personal experience that has occurred in a specific place in Sydney. A postcard showing an “alternate” map of Sydney with the 5-7 specific sites marked on it will tie the experiences to the actual locations. This will also allow audiences to choose between accessing the material immediately while in the exhibition space, stepping outside or walking/ travelling to the actual location to experience the stories. Audiences will also be able to submit their responses to the stories or their own vivid location based experiences via SMS to a specific phone number or moblog, revealing a city alive with memory and personal meaning. The moblog of public responses could also be exhibited as part of the overall work within d_Art05. The initial 5-7 narrative “traces” have been selected as experiences representing intimate, personal recollections as well as those forming parts of Sydney’s shared cultural memory. Initial selected sites include the Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Luna Park, Chinatown, Kings Cross and Bondi. In the next few weeks I will also attempt to identify other stories and locations close to the Opera House.
"traces" will use Bluetooth technology to transfer the video or sound files to audiences. Potentially MP3 files of the audio information can also be transferred to iPod users as an alternate mode of experiencing the work.
Appearing in the beginning of the non-commercial era of interactive fiction, it is considered one of the milestones of the genre. The player takes the part of an English aristocrat called Meldrew. In the course of searching the attic for an old tourist map of Paris, Meldrew steps into a surreal adventure to uncover a centuries-old curse that has been placed on the family. The goal of the game is to find the missing map, and thus annul the curse. (Wikipedia)
From Marie-Laure Ryan's article "Cyberspace, Cybertexts, Cybermaps":
The map created by this project, which operates on the word level rather than on the level of lexia, is not only dynamic, but animated and interactive as well. Literalizing the idea of textual architecture, the system asks the user to input words or sentences, and it creates the floor plan of an apartment to accommodate this verbal furniture. Words are assigned to rooms on the basis of semantic content. Twelve types of rooms are paired with twelve semantic categories: living room is themed around the idea of group, dining room needs glamour, kitchen holds food, closet is a place of secrecy, hall suggests motion, foyer stands for change, bedroom means intimacy, bathroom caters to the needs of the body, library is associated with truth, office is where one works, and windows afford vision. (Dillon, Writing with Pictures, ch. 6, p. 9). The various rooms are created as they are needed, and their size and the thickness of their walls increases with every new piece of furniture that needs to be brought in. Different inputs will consequently generate different floor plans. The system ignores the words that it cannot categorize (mostly articles and prepositions), and it tries to pair new words with old ones into meaningful phrases. When the components of the resulting expression come from different rooms, these rooms are made adjacent to each other, the wall between them is taken down, and the group of words floats in the area where the two rooms meet each other. The same rearrangement and tearing down of walls occurs when a word hovers between two categories. Matching the fluidity of the architecture of the floor plan, an architecture undergoing constant transformations, the fluttering of the words and phrases around the rooms suggests the polysemy of language and the impossibility to immobilize its words into rigid semantic categories. We can read the result as a kind of aleatory poetry, or as a story of daily life, with different episodes taking place in different symbolic locations.
J.R. Carpenter describes creating and distributing The Broadside of a Yarn, a hybrid print-digital art-literature project commissioned by Electronic Literature as a Model for Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, UK, 1-17 November 2012.
The Broadside of a Yarn is a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR reader and a hand-made map of dubious accuracy. Yes, but what is it? Well, it’s kind of hard to say...