surrealist

"The Dancing Rhinoceri of Bangladesh" is described as "an interactive poem with a strong message" and "a surrealist poem." Niss states that her goal was "to make a textually-based work that uses techniques other than ordinary hypertext. So instead of clicking to get to a new part of the poem, all the text is presented on the screen at once. The content is revealed by mousing over a word which highlights words scattered across the field which combine to form a sentence."--From Furtherfield

Nord and Bert was unique among Infocom games in that it was highly surrealistic, centering around word play and puns. It is Infocom's twenty-seventh game. Nord and Bert defies easy description, and in fact almost seems to have been created in an effort to be as strange as possible. For example, the title and front box illustration (two farmers staring at an animal that consists of two cows' rear halves fused together) have nothing to do with the game. Rather, Nord and Bert revolves around several different kinds of wordplay, with a "chapter" of the game dedicated to each style. The first seven chapters can be played in any order, since each exists as an independent "short story" unrelated to the other chapters; to begin the eighth, however, the player must provide seven "passwords" provided by completing each of the other sections. (Wikipedia)

[the perpetual bed] is an online, virtual VRML world in which users can interact with each other from within a navigable, surrealistic narrative. A hybrid between video, interactive art, installation, and animation, the piece is based on my own and my grandmother's experiences within transparent yet tangible beings and places discovered when hospitalized. My creative concerns in creating this piece are numerous, but I am trying to create a new media from the temporal and motion imaging elements of film and video, the accessibility of the internet, the user-centered narrative form from interactive art, and elements of choreography. The interaction will take place through a technology I have designed called Navigable Chat. Users can percieve each other through their textual presence. My goal is to tell a story in an altogether new way -- that of allowing the user to move through a story, to "happen" upon a scene, and to find their own meaning in this ever-enacted place. Users can then leave their mark and become part of the story--leave hints, impressions, etc--for the next viewer.