"The (scratch) novel CRACKED EGGS AND WASTED TIME is very (very) loosely based in simultaneous (mis)readings of D. H. Lawrence's WOMEN IN LOVE and THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD, commingled with other additional nonsense..." From the introductory page.
Fairy tales have been hijacked throughout history for various uses. Emigrating from one distribution method to another, they have been duplicated, mistranslated, and subverted. It could be that Cinderella is the world's most-told tale. There are thousands of versions, each one colored by the details of local culture, the needs of its audience and the desires of its teller. Buried among the world's heap of Cinder tales, is the Russian version, in its multiple incarnations. Bare Bones is a retelling of this story about a girl and her encounter with the fearsome hag, Baba Yaga.
We identify with this tale through our own experiences of loss, humiliation and enslavement. By reshaping its text, imagery and format, I try to build a bridge for the fairy tale audience between traditional media and digital media. Bare Bones is just one piece of The Vas(i)lisa Project which is more visually and texually complex.
(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery)
The crux of my work two artist/poets, William Blake (1757-1827) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1919), is in how they expanded the definitions of the man/nature relationship through mythology and spiritual exploration. In addition to audio recordings of readings of the poets' poetry that accompanies their artwork and selected words for emphasis, which I composed in a movie format, I created a podcast discussing my critical and analytical study of the influence of Blake's writing on the increasingly well-studied Modernist, Rosenberg. The exploration of Rosenberg is benefitted by a recent and first scholarly edition of Rosenberg's poems by Vivien Noakes in 2004. While Noakes' edition of his poetry is in itself important, little critical exploration into the influence of Blake on Rosenberg's poetry has occurred, although it is often mentioned in brief. Indeed, not much critical exploration into Rosenberg's poetry has occurred whatsoever. The natural elements of Blake's and Rosenberg's poetry and especially the difference in the ways they presented nature compared to their contemporaries, will stand foremost in this study. A discussion on how the poetic form is brought forward through their experimentation with spirituality and nature also figures prominently in this discussion. Both sought to redefine the specific understandings of personhood, states of mind/soul, virtues and vices, and relationships of man to the natural world. Each staunchly rejected all that was not included within their vision, however nonsensical to others, and neither artist could be bothered with the rationality of the absolutes of their age.
(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)
Hermenetka is a project of Net Art that generates fortuitous cartographies from search engines in data bases. The starting point of the Hermenetka project is the Mediterranean view as spiritual scenery of thoughts, as method and search of knowledge. Hermenetka is an acronym formed from the association of Hermes, Greek god of communication and exchange; Net, from Internet and "Ka", a very complex part of the symbolism in ancient Egyptian mythology, Ka represents the consciousness and the guide of the invisible world, the kingdom of the dead. In contemporary era, the metaphor of the "sea between territories" (Mediterranean) embodies in the flows and the exchanges of cyberspace. The proposal of the Hermenetka is to generate plural cartographies of the seas of data that populate the quotidian of the cyberculture. The project is constituted by two types of mappings. In the first one, it is possible to generate a map in real time from topics that gravitate around the concept of the Mediterranean.The second possibility consists in answering the question "What is the Mediterranean for you?". In this case, your reply triggers a research in cyberspace for images and texts that will compose a unique map. The aesthetics project associates remixing, transparencies and revisits the watercolor techniques and collage practices of Robert Rauschemberg. In both cases, the image is generated at random and composed of different sizes and levels of transparent overlaying of images and texts. (Source: Author's description)
Hermenetka (acrônimo formado pela associação de Hermes, deus grego das comunicações e das trocas, Net, de Internet e Ka, figura mítica do antigo Egito, polimórfico, que presidia a passagem para o mundo invisível, o reino dos mortos) é um projeto de Net Arte que gera cartografias randômicas a partir de buscas em bancos de dados. O ponto de partida do projeto Hermenetka é o Mediterrâneo compreendido como cenário espiritual de pensamentos, como método e busca de conhecimento. Na era contemporânea, a metáfora do “mar entre territórios” se corporifica nos fluxos e nas trocas do ciberespaço. A proposta do Hermenetka é criar cartografias plurais dos mares de dados que povoam o cotidiano da cibercultura. O projeto é constituído por dois tipos de mapeamentos. No primeiro, é possível gerar um mapa em tempo real a partir de tópicos que orbitam em torno do conceito de Mediterrâneo. A segunda possibilidade consiste em responder à pergunta “O que é o Mediterrâneo para você?”. Nesse caso, a resposta irá buscar no ciberespaço imagens e textos que comporão seu mapa. Nos dois casos, a imagem gerada é composta por sobreposições randômicas de imagens e textos que compõem o banco de dados do sistema. A estética adotada associa transparências, remixagens e revisita as práticas de colagem de Robert Rauschemberg. Conceito O ciberespaço é a nova ágora, um espaço que transmuta trocas e vivências. Assim, o ciberespaço revisita vários dos aspectos que a paisagem do Mediterrâneo descortina. Espaço que nos convida ao deslocamento, o ciberespaço também é o espaço do mito e da memória coletiva. Navegar pelas redes informacionais é se aventurar por territórios estrangeiros, travar contatos em busca de conhecimento e engendrar subjetividades. Nas comunidades virtuais, nos fóruns de discussão e nos registros, a força simbólica do Mediterrâneo emerge como experiência vivida, cotidiana, simultaneamente única, coletiva e universal. No passado, o mercador atuava como pesquisador nômade e promovia intercâmbios ao trazer de suas viagens elementos de culturas distantes. Na infoera, o antigo mercador volta repaginado em programas de buscas, agentes inteligentes, blogs e bloglines. Para o psiquiatra e filósofo Mauro Maldonato, o Mediterrâneo é cenário espiritual de pensamentos e mestre de divisas, de medida: “o Mediterrâneo é, antes de mais nada, escola de limite e de philo-sophia”. Ao seguirmos as cartografias de Maldonato, o Mediterrâneo ressurge como método, como busca de conhecimento. O mar como convite a viagem, a navegações por caminhos errantes, aos “dis-cursos”. O Mediterrâneo-camaleão da cibercultura não se fixa. Em suas fugacidades, ele se transmuta em mares, espaços líquidos, em cais, em portos, ágoras ativas, lugares de trocas, meios de passagem. O Mediterrâneo-camaleão é ainda, paradoxalmente, limite entre territórios e zona de confluências. Hermenetka tem por objetivo desvelar suas múltiplas faces, seus rizomas, seus platôs.
Tryptich interactive video installation, layering sound and video. As installation, a user would trigger the different speakers by walking in front of one of three screens. Dealing with the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce.
Steeped in Egyptian history, mythology, religion and art, Coverley imagines a work in which words count as images and images as words, time has two complementary dimensions of linear progression and eternal return, inscriptions are not merely tokens for words but powerful sepells capable of deciding one's fate for eternity, and the individual subject merges into the archetypes of eternal gods and godesses.
(Source: N. Katherine Hayles, "Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature", State of the Arts)
Director, Shockwave
Galatea is a work of interactive fiction set in an art gallery an undetermined amount of time in the future. The player takes on the role of an unnamed art critic examining works of personality referred to in the story as “animates.” Galatea is the name of one such animate however, unlike the other exhibits at the museum (which are forays into rudimentary artificial intelligence,) Galatea was a sculpted women who simply willed herself to life. The player must interact with Galatea through text commands until they get one of several endings.
It's hard to place Galatea in a single genre. With its “animate” art gallery one could place it in Science Fiction. It relates rather easily to Issac Assimov's works about artificial intelligence, sharing a similar atmosphere and similar thoughts on what it means to be human and what it would be like to be a conscious other, Galatea is fairly speculative in this regard. On the other hand one could say the work is more a piece of Magical Realism or Gothic Fiction, since Galatea's creation is miraculous and is the only thing that's really out of place with the world. Also like many Gothic fiction pieces the human psyche is rather thoroughly examined. The name Galatea is actually a reference to Greek mythology, something that this work seems to be rather fond of. In Greek mythology Galatea was a statue that came to life after her creator fell in love with her.
The tech at work beneath the text is fairly complex. It's not simply a dialogue tree with set responses and limited choices. The game tracks tension, sympathy, mood, and general conversation flow to give players a level of interactivity in conversation that is rarely seen in any examples of modern games. On top of this there are over 400 responses to words and 25+ unique endings. Its method of interaction is very similar to old text adventure games like Zork and its ilk, the player enters commands followed by key terms and the results are narrated.
Overall the work is objectively well written. Its lore of “animates” lends itself rather interestingly to the player. One may look at the work as an example of what interaction with an “animate” from the story's world might be like. Galatea the character being very similar to the “animates’” description from the story. The many varied endings and possible responses lends itself to a very individualized experience. No two readings would be exactly alike and each repeated reading builds upon the world’s lore and the characters of Galatea, the narrator, and Galatea's creator become more fleshed out and grounded. It uses multiple references to Greek mythology which helps give the work an atmosphere of mystery and a kind of oldness to its sci-fi themes.
To Begin ... Mac: Download and install Spatterlight if you do not already have a z-machine interpreter. Download and unzip Galatea.zip and open the resulting file Galatea.z8 in your interpreter. Windows: Download and install Gargoyle if you do not already have a z-machine interpreter. Download and unzip Galatea.zip and open the resulting file Galatea.z8 in your interpreter. Type commands to the main character at the ">" prompt and press enter. Input can take the form of imperatives such as "look," "examine the pedestal," or "touch" followed by some object. The most important commands in Galatea are those that pertain to conversation, which include "ask about" followed by a topic (abbreviated to "a") and "tell about" a topic (abbreviated to "t"). These commands steer the subject of the conversation. The best approach is to follow up on a word or idea that Galatea has herself used, or to talk about objects present in the room. Other important verbs are "think about" followed by a topic to recall a previous topic, and "recap" to review the topics previously discussed.
In this piece, the internet user is regarded as the Hercules of the Internet. Often, he has indeed the impression to have to achieve Herculean labours. It can be a question of blocking popups which keep coming when one would like to see them disappear (the Lernean Hydra), cleaning the inbox of its spam (the Augean Stables), driving away the advertising banners (the Stymphalian Birds) or retrieving specific information (the Belt of the Queen of the Amazons)... This work draws upon the mythology of everyday life. It does not consist in showing the tragedy of existence, but in transforming our daily activities into a myth. It is consequently a question of experiencing technology in an epic - but also humoristic - mode.
(Source: Author's description)
Aymeric Brisse, Adrien Pegaz-Blanc, Jérémie Lequeux, Mikael Labrut, Christopher Espargeliere, Mathieu Brigolle