prose

Recollections is a collection of 12 vignettes from Lashihai in China designed for iPad and available as a free web app.

One challenge of General Education is that of finding ways to develop student interest in, and enthusiasm for, reading written texts or critically viewing visual texts. CHAOSity was created to address that issue. CHAOSity is a collaborative, original cultural work that involves individual readers as co-creators. CHAOSity questions the "linear, rigidly logical development of plot" and the "facile interpretation of life's complexities" that strict adherence to linearity, what author Carole Maso calls "the tyranny of narrative," can imply. The resulting multi-threaded story, told in text, animation, images and sound, permits both linear and nonlinear reading. CHAOSity includes 49 prose/poems Flash movies, 49 event sounds and legend.

(Source: ELO 2002 State of the Arts gallery)

Author description: Blue Lacuna is a long-form work of parser-based interactive fiction containing nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, an explorable novel telling a serious story about the nature of choice and happiness. Lacuna simplifies standard IF syntax with a unique interface: to advance the story, readers type highlighted keywords indicating objects of interest, directions to explore, or topics to pursue during conversation.

Blue Lacuna’s story revolves around a complex reactive character, the castaway Progue, who evolves over the course of the story based on the reader’s interactions with him. The climax of the story and resolution of Progue’s character arc—whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes—is dependent on how the reader treats him in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work’s ten chapters. The structure of Blue Lacuna is thus best represented not by a branching tree but a braided rope, with countless ways each reader may braid the threads of story into a personal and meaningful narrative.

A mash up of Orson Welles reading Moby Dick drawn in the pages of Moby Dick with Led Zep and John Bonham playing "Moby Dick"... with some Champagne thrown in for good measure.

(Author's description)

Vive la Bagatelle is a short, kinetic digital poem in the Italian Futurist style, featuring the song "The Airplane" by Futurist composer George Anthiel. Through deft manipulation of Flash CS4 and Actionscript much of the prose seen is randomly selected and displayed on screen. The end result is a new poem with each viewing, every bit as mesmerizing as it is curious.

(Source: description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)

Note: This work was featured in the 2012 Electronic Literature Exhibition on the computer station featuring Future Writers--Electronic Literature by Undergraduates from U.S. Universities--Works on Desktop

TOC is a multimedia epic about time: the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. An evocative fairy tale with a steampunk heart, TOC is a breath-taking visual novel, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is the story of a man who digs a hole so deep he can hear the past, a woman who climbs a ladder so high she can see the future, as well as others trapped in the clockless, timeless time of a surgery waiting room: God's time. Theirs is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to both.

(Source: Author's description on TOC website)