A collaboration with the Queensland State Archives, this is a collection of digital poems using archival material built into a physical space. Interactive elements cleverly repurpose old archive equipment such as card index drawers and microfiche machines. The poems draw on Brisbane’s past and recreate the experience of losing yourself in archival material.
The installation plays with the boundaries of form and consciousness through play with the material and the immaterial. From Beyond invites the reader to interact with a digitally augmented Ouija Board. The Ouija Board (also known as the “talking board”) is well-explored in popular culture as a device that is traditionally employed in an attempt to communicate with the dead, who are themselves voiceless and thus can be “heard” only through the indication of written letters. The board is thus itself an interface that plays at the boundaries of the real and the presumed supernatural, as it operates through superstition: readers place their fingers on the planchette and it moves to answer questions, with a “Yes” or “No” placed on the board. Likewise, our digitally enhanced Ouija Board invites the user to guide a planchette (a pointer) as a tactile interface for making binary decisions while traversing a hypertextual work on a screen that serves as a lens between the reader’s world and the world of the story. Our Ouija board and planchette is the physical interface to a modified Twine application, hiding its mechanisms from the reader’s awareness. Twine is an HTML-based interactive fiction storytelling platform that already has a growing number of pieces demonstrating its power and range. Twine is best characterized by its accessibility and the versatility of discrete choices presented to users. Each segment of the scenes in the story are projected in an ethereal fashion through the use of templated text and choice-links whose backgrounds, images and fonts can be customized through stylesheets and which keep in the theme of a view into the real world from the spirit realm. Each choice a visitor or group of visitors to the installation makes by moving the planchette will be incorporated into an ongoing story. The web page will use web sockets to receive input from the Arduino microcontroller connected to the sensors embedded inside the board. These sensors are triggered by a magnet in the planchette itself, and thus the seam between digital and physical is hidden beneath the surface, appearing as any board of this type. This invites the reader to contemplate the ghost in the machine, and, indeed, to embody that ghost through their own physical movement to produce digital input. The reader in the work may first approach the Ouija board assuming they are entering a story in which they communicate with ghosts, but in fact the reader will embody (or disembody) a ghost as they interact with the installation. As the ghost story unfolds, our transformation of the Ouija board will draw upon both the history of supernatural belief in the board’s role as a communication device and the potential of digital modalities to produce new ghosts. As this year’s conference is focused on the “ends” of electronic literature, we believe this metaphorical exploration of endings and unseen yet tangible interfaces is particularly fitting. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)
This essay is a synopsis of my fourth chapter from my dissertation. My research consists of game-poems and how they fundamentally alter the experience of “reading” poetry. Ultimately, my argument is that poetic experience is no longer initiated by text, but by the kinetic, audible, visual, and tactile functions in the digital environment that I label as trans-medial space; in effect, these functions sustain the poetry experience, and, thus, require the reader/user of the poem to play, rather than read, as a new form of “reading” the digital game-poem in order experience and interpret a poem’s meaning.
As a result, this essay explicates my theory and purpose for constructing and presenting an online, multiplayer game experience of a digital poem ironically titled “How to Read a Digital Poem”. Set in Markus Persson’s Minecraft platform, I demonstrate how this trans-medial space functions as an expression of poetry, mediating our interaction with digital poems. As a result, my Minecraft Poem challenges the level of immediacy and ephemeral notions of space that has been associated with technological advancement in digital poetry advocated by N. Katherine Hayles, Stephanie Strickland, and Mirona Magearu. The environment is a space oscillating between constraint and unconstraint methods to produce a poem, but results in a stable trans-medial space for the digital poem to perform and be experienced by the user/player.
Cris Cheek, Maria Engberg, Jörg Piringer, and Christine Wilks discuss tactile media, intentionality, messy screens, and electronic literary works fading into the past. The video-essay was shot at the ELMCIP Digital Textuality with/in Performance Seminar held in Bristol UK. May 2012. Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) is a collaborative research project funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation. Length: 9:29
Using the virtual reality work Screen by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (designed for Brown University’s CAVE) as a tutor-text, the paper addresses cave rhetoric as it relates to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of production of presence. One generalization to be made about CAVE pieces is that they foster a tactile impulse, despite the fact that tangibility in VR is unachievable. As he dissects “the gravity of the leaf” in his eponymous 2010 essay, John Cayley speaks of a new phenomenology of language, one wherein floating textual strings would not constitute acts of remediation proper but rather frame new instances of mediation (CAYLEY, 2010). Inasmuch as it re-introduces embodied text as both dislodged symbolic inscription and virtual obstacle – though lacking a third dimension, text becomes perceivable in space as solid matter –, then one might argue that the CAVE rehabilitates and multiplies the paradoxes with which literary criticism has had to grapple in the past with the advent of Concrete poetics. One might also argue that the haptic properties of the CAVE render these works particularly amenable to descriptive (non-interpretive) “readings.” In this context, “presence effects” are to be conceived of as events (temporary emergences), which restore materiality and embodiment as topics of theoretical reflection.
Source: Author
Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs explore the new materialism of the corporeal body in electronic writing and online environments. They argue that electronic environments have a strong relationship with affective modes of communication highlighted by their appeal to sensory novelty through technological innovation—new media platforms proliferate the potentials for combining visibility with aural and tactile modes. Their essay argues for a new materialism in electronic culture, one that has serious implications for the way that we understand memory.
(Source: Beyond the Screen, introduction by Jörgen Schäfer and Peter Gendolla)
...could Electronic Literature be a form of organized violence against this ordinary language?
Rather than simply making the comparison of epic struggle to our daily frustrations with technology, which is funny in itself, Bouchardon et al. (2008) go to great lengths to create distinctive levels of play, each of which is sufficiently novel to merit continued play (and to use the piece’s log in feature, so that readers can save their progress as they play).
While the writing itself is fairly utilitarian (rather than poetic), 12 Labors is literary at a conceptual level. At once, it relies upon familiarity with classical literature (myth and allegory) and the conventions of contemporary narrative (cinematic and ludic) to provide critical and humorous insights into the tedious realities of daily life in the 21st century.
The piece is notable for the ways in which it signifies the reader’s touch, and thus poses a fascinating question for critics of electronic literature: when a physical act such as ‘touching’ is transformed into representation via an interface, in what ways might this parallel the representational conjuring that we associate with literary works?
On its most basic level, it is a piece about control and its loss that resonates with the common experience of media users in times of transition. Technology always proceeds by the extension of grasp and the promise of control.
It may seem paradoxical to create an online work on touching. One cannot touch directly: in this case touching requires a mediating tool such as a mouse, a microphone or a webcam. This touching experience reveals a lot about the way we touch multimedia content on screen, and maybe also about the way we touch people and objects in everyday life. The internet user has access to five scenes (move, caress, hit, spread, blow), plus a sixth one (brush) dissimulated in the interface. She can thus experience various forms and modalities of touching: the erotic gesture of the caress with the mouse; the brutality of the click, like an aggressive stroke; touching as unveiling, staging the ambiguous relation between touching and being touched; touching as a trace that one can leave, as with a finger dipped in paint; and, touching from a distance with the voice, the eyes, or another part of the body. This supposedly immaterial work thus stages an aesthetics of materiality.
(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)
Adobe Flash player or plug-in required. This work requires headphones, a microphone (for "blow") and a webcam (for "brush").