politics

Sherwood Rise is the world's first augmented novel. It's an Augmented Reality (AR) transmedia interactive graphic novel/ game, told over 4 days through a range of media and formats: printed newspapers, AR on mobile phones, emails, hacker websites, blogs, sound, music, graphic novels and illustrations.

Inspired by the current financial crisis, and the Occupy movement, the story is based on the traditional Robin Hood tale. The traditional tale of peasant revolt and dissent is brought up to date, and adapted for AR and transmedia. In our adaptation, austerity is imposed on the poor by a privileged elite, but resisted by a gang of hacker outlaw terrorists called the 'Merry Men'.

Each day you receive a newspaper (via email) which you interact with via AR. Your interaction (how much you support the establishment or the Merry Men) updates a database, which then determines the version of newspaper you receive the next day. My intention was to make a physical book interactive, and in this way explore the future of the book.

The project explores the future of the book and transmedia storytelling:

• It's a story told in a range of media on multiple platforms
• It expands a traditional printed story, adds additional layers of story through AR
• It adds augmented digital artefacts onto a printed story.

The objectives of the project are:

• To add virtual elements to the real world page by combining mobile device/ new media technology and the book
• To use mobile device based AR and transmedia, in novel and artistic ways to expand a narrative
• In creative and artistic ways to raise awareness and stimulate thought about financial fraud, corruption, austerity, politics
• To produce a book which is part static and part dynamic, and altered by the reader's behaviour
• To challenge power relations of news using AR.

My research interests for this project included:

• AR activism, challenging authority, privilege and power
• The politics of AR and storytelling/ news, contested content, critiquing ways that news is reported, revealing the "truth"
• Aesthetic, artistic, cultural and sociopolitical uses of AR and transmedia stories
• Revealing hidden stories within a fiction
• Many voices in a story - simultaneous multiple viewpoints
• Documenting the process and experience of designing, adapting and building a transmedia story from the ground up
• The reader experience - reading and navigating an AR transmedia book, moving from paper to screen, the disjointed reading experience
• Exploring aesthetic possibilities of AR, graphic novels and illustrations on mobile devices.

Sherwood Rise - the story begins here
Please note that since the AR software "Junaio" is no longer available (since 2015), then the project doesn't run anymore.

This was a research collaboration between Dave Miller (concept, code and drawings) and Dave Moorhead (screenwriter). This was a post-doc research project funded by the University of Bedfordshire, as part of the UNESCO Future of the Book project.

Newscomic recycles the news, re-mixes it, subverts and distorts it.
It takes live news feeds (RSS feeds) from major news sources, chops them up at random and puts the resultant text into speech bubbles in a comic. The comic illustrations reflect the current latest news, and are regularly updated to keep up with the news. The result is a disjointed comic, where the words and pictures don't quite fit but make their own story.

Often the story is quite surreal, but can by chance make sense, and even be quite revealing.
To make the story more fun, you can contribute by adding your own words and sentences (up to a hundred characters long). These replace the word 'the' and other characters in the speech text. You can use this to perhaps get your own views across, or to manipulate the story so it makes more sense to you. Your word or sentence is stored and seen by the world until the next person comes along, and adds their words, replacing yours.

The result is a unique combination of a disjointed news reader, and a live comic story builder. It enables you to get the gist of the latest news, and at the same time enjoy a surreal comic, one that you have contributed to.

The RSS feeds currently used are as follows:
Showbiz --> Daily Mail (TV/ Showbiz)
News --> Guardian (UK latest)
Politics --> BBC (UK Politics)
Football --> BBC (UK Football)
Arts --> Guardian (Arts)

(Source: http://davemiller.org/projects/newscomic/learn_more.php)

Up until now, everyone alive on earth was bound to one another through African Eve, our last common ancestor, who 5,000 generations ago passed her genes and language to sons and daughters who did the same as they gradually populated the world. Today, however, Square, Circle and the other inhabitants of Flatland have the opportunity to step outside this lineage. To rearrange the bodies of animals, plants, and even themselves. VAS: An Opera in Flatland is the story of Square’s decision to undergo an operation that will leave him sterile for the good of his wife, Circle, for the good of their daughter, Oval, and for the good of society, including the unborn descendants he will never have. VAS is, in other words, the story of finding one’s identity within the double-helix of language and lineage—and Square’s struggle to see beyond the common pages of ordinary, daily life upon which he is drawn.

Utilizing a wide and historical sweep of representations of the body, from pedigree charts to genetic sequences, this hybrid novel recounts how differing ways of imagining the body generate differing stories of knowledge, power, history, gender, politics, art, and, of course, the literature of who we are. It is the intersection of one tidy family’s life with the broader times in which they live.

VAS will be of interest to anyone concerned with the futures we are now writing into existence.

(Source: http://www3.nd.edu/~stomasul/VAS_homepage.html)

Re:Activism is an analog game with direction provided through SMS and cell phone technology. Players race through neighborhoods to trace the history of riots, protests, and other political episodes in the history of New York City. Teams pit themselves against the clock and test their puzzle-solving skills to locate important sites representing acts of civic engagement and struggles for greater social justice. Activated by text messages from Re:Activism Central, teams reaching target locations respond to site-specific challenges that reinforce the historical content. Players must also activate strategic thinking by choosing to focus on racing or puzzle-solving, or a combination of both, to win points and become the most-active activists to win the game. Re:Activism was initially developed for, and first played during, the Spring 2008 Come Out And Play Festival. It has since been documented online and adapted into a downloadable kit to encourage redesign for use in other cities.

(source: Website PETLab)

The video-essay features interviews with 17 electronic literature scholars and practitioners including Mark Amerika, Simon Biggs, Serge Bouchardon, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Cris Cheek, Maria Engberg, Jerome Fletcher, Maria Mencia, Nick Montfort, Jörg Piringer, Jill Walker Rettberg, Scott Rettberg, Alexandra Saemmer, Roberto Simanowski, Christine Wilks, Jaka Železnikar. The production method for the video-essay is interesting in that the questions being asked of the interviewees are never explicitly pronounced. Rather, the video is divided into sections based on the general themes Futures and Foci, Platforms and Politics, The Human Problem, Senses and Screens, Reading and Writing. The answers given by the various interviewees are wide-ranging and address issues as diverse as the future of electronic literature, the ownership of data, the roles of author and scholar, and the issue of national models of electronic literature. What emerges from the video-essay is a sense of the dynamism and complexities that make up electronic literature as a field. (Source: ELO 2015 Catalog)