short story

“I’m on the hard drive. When the gift came. Both disk and memory disappear”. Kulaktan kulağa, Chinese whispers, or Arabic telephone reveals mis(machine)translated stories of found images through tangible interaction. The installation uses what is (at first glance) just a box of old photographs to examine the western-centric lens of the internet by humanising machine translation errors. The artist collected old photographs from London’s flea markets, and wrote short stories for each photograph in her non-native English. Using an online machine translation tool, she machine-translated the stories into her native Turkish, and into other ‘foreign-looking’ languages such as Chinese and Arabic. The garbled outcome then is machine-translated back to English, carrying its inaccurate interpretation alongside. The stories and photographs are integrated into an interactive installation that invites readers to reveal mistranslated stories through tangible interaction. The installation invites spectators to pick a photograph from an old box and explore its interpretation. The interpretation becomes garbled along the way, until it significantly deviates from the initial meaning due to the inaccurate machine translations of non-Indo-European languages. By acting as a mediator of the interpretation, the reader is invited to reflect on the displayed errors, and the reader’s own position within its commonality. The name of the artwork is an analogy to question socially accepted neologisms for what is foreign-looking or foreign-sounding to us. The title refers to the name of a children’s game in Turkish, Kulaktan Kulağa, in which a message is passed through a line of players through whisper. The name translates from Turkish as ‘From Ear to Ear’, literally describing the act of whispering and emphasising the act as the centre of the game. The title of the work is completed by two Western naming for the same children’s game, which emphasise the foreign-sounding of the garbled messages as the core of the game.

An interactive short story, A MODERN GHOST explores a young man's memories of a love that was never realized.Featuring an original soundtrack, 22 photo illustrations, and a few innovative surprises, it is the first release by digital literature studio AltSalt.LENGTH: 3-5 minutes

(Source: App store description of the work)

A short story that uses hyperlinks to link different chapters on a keyword basis.

“A Change of Heart” asks the question, Is there life after college? For Danny Clay, there is no easy answer as his job, dreams, love life, and health devolve into chaos. Refusing to be molded, “Clay” navigates through one strange event after another on his predestined path to what he has always rejected: change.”A Change of Heart” is linear in plot and uses other elements of fiction (character, symbol, etc.) typically found in conventional print-based works. This is a deliberate attempt to bridge the “audience gap,” where we still see a mainstream audience for print-based literature, but a limited audience for electronic works. This bridging is an important concern in our field: with works using linear plots and other standard elements of fiction, we can expand our audience among readers who are more comfortable with the conventions of traditional literature; at the same time, we can also show younger writers a path, with its historic antecedents, that connects the past and future of storytelling. This mixed brand of electronic literature—technically savvy in its use of multimedia but borrowing elements of traditional story telling—empowers our field with an inclusiveness that embraces beginning writers and widens the potential for popular engagement.

This is a digital embezzlement of Bruno Schulz’s short story “Sierpień” (“August”). Some of the nouns have been cut out of Schulz’s text and randomly replaced with words taken from the book Polski Fiat 125p. Budowa. Eksploatacja. Naprawa (“Polish Fiat 125p: Construction, Use, Repair”). (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

The old-school demo based on scroll-text, which moves up and down the screen. Fifth Demo is a kind of short story about the author’s imaginary struggles with the computer and his attempts to rein it in, as illustrated by the strange behavior of the scroll, allegedly caused by the computer. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

(Re)Playing The Lottery is a dynamic reinterpretation of Shirley Jackson's famous short story, "The Lottery." It presents a scenario in which the interactor is a a citizen of the small town on the day of the fateful lottery, and must move through the story by making various choices which result in random outcomes - no matter how many times the story is played, past results are no guide to future outcome. Just as the story hinges on the chance selection of a marked ballot from a box, this piece employs chance selection as its central mechanic, demonstrating one way in which interactive media can help readers inhabit and interrogate existing texts from multiple perspectives. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

“Two matchsticks” (2008) is the title of an e-poem by short story writer, Samir Mesquita based on “Two matchsticks,” a popular saying in Brazil. The origins of this Brazilian folk expression are difficult to determine, but its significance indicates the rapid execution of a task. The matchbox is a Brazilian’s old friend. Even with the absence of musical instruments several sambas have been created accompanied only by the cadenced rhythm of these improvised little rattles. Today, in the Internet and microblogging age, the matchboxes inspires new literary genres.

(Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Minicontos Coloridos is a collaborative project conceived by Brazilian journalist, writer and teacher Marcelo Spalding in 2013. The short tales are structurally and conceptually associated with colors in a playful way. To access the stories, the reader should mix the primary RGB colors through a pull down menu available on the website in HTML which hosts the tales interface. The website offers three blending options for each of the three primary colors, totaling 27 short tales. According to the author, the short tale is a micronarrative, with at most a page or a paragraph that had its antecedents in the prose poem and the Chinese fables. However, since the mid-twentieth century the short story has experienced extremely rapid forms from texts of writers like Cortázar, Borges, Kafka. Marcelo Spalding intends to increase the number of stories through collaboration with other writers. (Source: Luís Claudio Fajardo, I ♥ E-Poetry)

The piece is the short story of a digital chess game, a constellation which may be read conventionally from left to right, top to bottom - or in any other combination. Each of the 16 squares encodes an eight letter (byte) word, originally a file name from a computer chess game.