"A work between reality and fantasy, where the Brazilian Regina Célia Pinto offers an interpretation of Lewis Carroll's world from the perspective of the balcony of her house, a metaphor for the artist's own life." -- El País, April 21st, 2005 (auto-translated).
Last word is a literary audio walk through the forest in Amsterdam. During the walk you listen to four voices that lead you to a place where the story - a bitter sweet family history about parting, punishment, insanity, and acknowledgement - comes to a surprising end. The walker chooses his or her own direction at a crossing-point which also determines the perspective of the story: Jason, little Kees, Helga or Carlotta. What connects these four people? Do they meet each other at the end of the story at the agreed place.
Laatste woord is een literaire luisterloop door het Amsterdamse bos. Tijdens de wandeling leiden vier stemmen je naar een plek waar het verhaal - een bitterzoete familiegeschiedenis over afscheid, straf, gekte, en erkenning - tot een verrassend einde komt. De wandelaar bepaalt zelf op de kruispunten de richting van zijn route en daarmee ook het perspectief van het verhaal: dat van Jason, kleine Kees, Helga of Carlotta. Wat bindt deze vier mensen? Ontmoeten ze elkaar inderdaad na afloop op de afgesproken plek?
An explosion sends you, the reader, from your boat in the Mediterranean into what Homer called the salt immortal sea only to be rescued by a mysterious ancient watercraft. Aboard this boat, you encounter allegorical characters from ancient and modern times, locked in a dangerous power struggle, passing secrets, currying favor, creating enemies, and fostering unrest. In this interactive story, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the most abject and disenfranchised of global citizens in epic terms. In Salt Immortal Sea, we explore the international crisis of the refugee by placing the reader on a boat leaving Syria, set adrift on an indifferent, turbulent sea. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to survive. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? Salt Immortal Sea will be presented as a stand-alone iPad app (which can be projected or viewed on the device itself). An earlier version of Salt Immortal Sea was displayed in installation form at ELO 2017 in Porto.
This paper will discuss how picturebook applications place themselves within the tradition of children’s literature. In the discussion the various ends of hypermediacy will be emphasized.
Children’s literature is characterized through a child perspective, which is a narratological means developed within literary modernism. It reflects a consideration for the child reader’s cognitive capacity. Even though the narrator may have an adult voice, the story’s point of view reflects the point of view of a child, in order that the reader may be able to recognize—or at least imagine—the story’s universe, characters, milieu and plot. In picturebooks for children the child perspective is equally dominant through the pictures and the verbal text. And in picturebook applications environmental sounds duplicates the effect. One might therefore ask whether the child perspective is highlighted in multimodal children’s literature with hypermediacy as a result.
Picturebook applications seem to combine a cognitive consideration with performative aesthetics. Interactive elements increase the possibility of play. Thus, the applications can be characterized as playgrounds, which is a common way to define postmodern picturebooks (Meerbergen 2012, Sipe and Pantaleo 2008). The interactive elements might also increase the reader’s involvement in the storytelling, which is a common ambition in contemporary picturebooks (Ørjasæter 2014a). Schwebs 2014 argues that the affordances of an app is to bring a story to life in a multi-sensous way, and that the story-telling is embodied in the reader through the finger gestures. My point is that even hypermediated picturebooks such as Stian Hole’s trilogy on Garman have developed means for embodied sensuous experience (Ørjasæter 2014b). But when the picturebook Garmann’s summer is adapted to a picturebook application the multi-sensous story-telling becomes redundant. The story is told out loud as well as presented as scripture. The environment becomes audible as well as visible. The effect of this seemingly redundancy in the storytelling might be regarded as hypermediacy. The question is how it affects the work’s capacity to make embodied sensuous impression.
Apart from Remediation. Understanding New Media (1999) where Bolter and Grusin introduce their hypermediacy concept, the discussion in this paper will be influenced by Software takes command (2013) where Lev Manovich points out that ”computers and software are not just ’technology’ but rather the new medium in which we can think and imagine differently” (13). Thus, the research question in this paper will be: What does hypermediacy do to the way one thinks about children’s literature? Does it in any way alter what one thinks children’s literature is?
(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)
"In Natalie Bookchin's piece, The Intruder, we are presented with a sequence of ten videogames, most of which are adapted from classics such as Pong and Space Invaders. We interact via moving or clicking the mouse, and by making whateve we make of/with/from the story. Meaning is always constructed, never on a plate. The interaction is less focused on videogame play than it is on advancing the narrative of the story we hear throughout the presentation of the ten games. The story is the Jorge Louis Borges piece The Intruder with a few changes. The female in the story is "the intruder" She is as a possession of the two closely bonded miscreant brothers enmeshed in a hopeless triangle of psycho-sexual possession with homoerotic undertones. Finally one of them kills her to end the tension between the two men. Game over. Story over.
Bookchin presents an awareness of being an intruder, herself, in the (previously?) male-dominated world of videogame creation and enjoyment. The videogame paradigms are subverted, mocked, and implicitly criticized for their shallow competitive and violent nature not unrelated to the nature of the violence of the males.
Although moving and clicking the mouse is associated with advancing the videogames, the videogames are subordinated to the story; the videogames are used as and within literary devices. The videogames are literary devices in that they are programmed machines functioning less to advance gameplay as triggers for the advancement of the audio of the story. The videogames are also functioning within other comparative/metaphoric literary devices. We compare the worlds of the games with the worlds of the story. We compare ourselves in the world of the games with ourselves in the world of the story, i.e., we compare the goals of the games with our goals in reading/listening to and understanding the stories. We cannot enjoy the games in the way that videogames are meant to be enjoyed [....]The artist mops the floor with the videogames. Art 10. Videogames 0. Women cheer this artwork like few other Net-based works. It is deservedly famous both as statement and for its formal literary innovation."
Author's page: http://bookchin.net/projects/intruder.html
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