relationships

"Je veux" is a collection of poems written in 1997/1998 directly accessible through the authors' website by clicking "Being Human 1997/1998". Access to the text is through a menu offering a choice between "Je veux" , "tendresse easy easy", "a kiss" and "more". In the three poems the reader/visitor is invited to click on either "tu" or "you". The narrator's voice appears in the forms of "Je", "me" as well as in expressing his/her desire in "je voudrais".

In the poem "a kiss", the visitor "engages" with the narrator when s/he encounters a dialogue box and is asked to enter his/her name - the narrator only kisses people whose name s/he knows. The visitor then has to confirm if he or she wants a computer kiss. There are four different languages: German, English, French and Dutch. If the visitor responds in the affirmative in a language, oui, ja or yes, the screen is emblazoned with monochrome flashes of orange, red, pink resembling lipstick kisses. There is also a sentence in the middle of the screen saying how many times the narrator has kissed, reminiscent of the number of visitors to a website. The visitor returns to the menu and finds it changed. S/he now finds "a kiss" replaced with "we could meet again?" This new link brings the visitor to an error page. The question remains as to whether this is intentional or a reminder of the ephemeral character of electronic literature.

If the visitor responds "no", another scenario is launched. The narrator asks for the visitor's name, and reveals the number of times s/he has kissed up to that point. The moment the visitor responds "no", s/he is left with the return response of "Then, I will leave you" as well as the "threat" of the closing of the window. The window closes automatically after a few seconds and the visitor is out of the website completely. There is a possibility to keep the window open, which mirrors an ultimatum in a real relationship - underneath "Then I will leave you!" which is presented in bold letters, in fine print is "If you don't want the window to close click here". The program playfully mimics a relationship. The personalized reaction of the program to the visitor's answer suggests artificial intelligence.

In the poem "je veux", the words "tu", "me" and "respectes" in white appear on a black background. These form to read "je veux que tu me respectes" (I want you to respect me); "you are loved", "you loved me". Some words are underlined in the poem, and if those words are clicked, they freeze. After clicking several more times on different words, the visitor is returned to the initial menu.

In the poem "tendresse", rectangles and squares form across the screen in different colors. Seven screens follow in succession in different colors and containing different words for each. The words appear in English, French, Dutch and in German. The seven screens represent the seven days of the week, and those words are written in English and in French moving from top to bottom of the screen. The days of the week are associated with emotions and feelings and also have different sounds for each one. This collection of poems blends visual, plastic and textual art, and animated poetry shows how well this relationship works.

(Source: Iona Wynter Parks)

E:Electron is an extended structural analogy, using the periodic table of elements to muse on the life of a love affair and states of mind. Three pieces work together to create nuances of connections and relations. A poem hidden in the periodic table of elements leads to the stages of a relationship. Each element adds a new electron or word association, cumulating in a lifetime of memory. These connect to an intricate series of poems that fill each electron shell with musing.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

“Blind Side of a Secret” consists of three audiovisual variations, created individually by Mühlenbruch, Sodeoka, and Nakamura, on words written by Thom Swiss. The work could be considered remix culture in action, overlaying and cutting up an underlying tale—which is never given entirely as a whole, though many sections are held in common—about the unspoken parts of relationships, of coming and going. In all three pieces, alternating third-person voice-over narration by a man and a woman forms the bulk of the audio portion, and it includes parts in English, French, and Dutch. The three collaborators approach the material in sharply contrasting ways: the horizontally scrolling, black-and-red fluidity of Nakamura's animation tells the tale in the most linear fashion, with no interruptions or breaks in the audio and no interaction; Sodeoka takes a DJ's approach, carving up the audio into rhythmic segments and pulsating images that recall song more than narrative; and Mühlenbruch turns it into an interactive flash animation, where an image based on the narrative forms a template that a user can click on to follow the individual narrative threads of the voice-over or run them over each other concurrently. Taken together, and given the absence of the source text in the final presentation, the work suggests that the plethora of angles from which to approach the idea of remix in digital art need not conflict, while at the same time suggesting that nostalgia for an “original work” is perhaps secondary in some respects to the artistic potential of collaboration and redistribution.

(Source: Electronic Literature Directory entry by Rob Schoenbeck)

Opacity is a 4-part short interactive story.We live in an age of obsession with transparency especially in politics and business.But in our personal relationships, what is the point of being transparent to oneself and to others ? The following interactive narrative commends a kind of opacity which is meant as an in-between. It is the story of a journey from a dream of transparency to a desire for opacity.(Source: Author's description on work's website)

Katastrofetrilogien is a trilogy centered on themes of how stories of historic disasters impact contemporary conversations and relationships. Collaboratively and organically constructed, these three films call upon histories of deadly volcanic ash, great floods, and the plague to tell stories of present day longing, anxiety, and environmental change.

"The Last Volcano / Det siste utbruddet"A story of a catastrophic volcanic eruption and its aftermath is retold by a woman to a man before the slowly turning image of contemporary urban landscape. Though the story seems to reference events of the distant past, its setting and telling raise anxieties related to cycles of memory and forgetting.

Direction: Roderick CooverWriting: Scott Rettberg Translation by: Daniel Apollon, Gro Jørstad Nilsen, and Jill Walker RettbergVoices: Gro Jørstad Nilsen and Jan Arild Breistein

"Cats and Rats / Rotter og katter"A blind date between an American epidemiologist and a Norwegian woman takes place on a transatlantic Skype call. In trying to impress his potential paramour, the American steers the conversation terribly wrong, toward a discussion of the Plague and all the devastating historical memories it entails.

Direction: Roderick CooverWriting: Scott Rettberg Translation by: Jill Walker Rettberg,Voices: Jill Walker Rettberg and Rob Wittig

"Norwegian Tsunami/ Norsk flodbølge"During a cigarette break on an oil platform in the North sea, a Scottish geologist and a Norwegian chef consider a certain strangeness in the waves, their changing spirits, and the last time a tsunami devastated the nearby shores.

Direction: Roderick CooverWriting: Scott Rettberg Translation by: Scott Rettberg and Jill Walker Rettberg,Voices: Gillian Carson and Kristian A. Bjørkelo

This Webyarn frames an argument between husband and wife about having children. The wife wants to keep trying, while the husband doesn’t seem to want children at all. The piece is structured around a wedding: its imagery (cake, dancing, food), vows, institutions, and symbols. The surface of the text responds to the reader’s mouseovers, rewarding exploration by triggering multiple layers of language and musical phrases in short loops. The circularity of the wedding ring structures the poem as the argument goes round and round the topic, replaying sounds, images, words, and their movements. A small cluster of squares slowly gets colored in a non-linear sequence near the bottom of the window, suggesting the passage of time for this relationship, yet the questions continue throughout. Will this disagreement ever get resolved? The Buddhist touches interspersed between mostly Christian wedding vows suggest a way out of the endless cycle: the cause of suffering is craving and both characters have desires they could let go of.

(Source: Leonardo Flores)

Spamology is a live audiovisual representation of word frequencies in spam e-mail messages.

The visualization is based on analysis of a private archive of spam messages which were collected during 10 years (1998-2007), containing up to 2,000,000 emails originated from various parts of the world. Spam data is visualized in a 3D landscape, where popular words are represented as rectangular structures of various heights, illustrating the occurrence rate of each word in the archive year. Next to the visual representation, each word generates an audio signal with a frequency related to the number of times it occurred during a certain year. Words of various frequencies flow through the 3D landscape simultaneously, forming a constantly-changing sonic texture.

Spamology is a part of ongoing research examining the nature of Spam as a digital-cultural phenomenon. The project aims at visualizing the links and interrelationships between the contents of spam, the user/ individual and the society, by revealing patterns which may reflect cultural and social trends, behaviors and variations.