textual instrument

Textual instruments make text playable in a new way. At first, as one encounters their workings, they are toys for exploring language — more flexible than link-node hypertext, more responsive than batch-mode natural language generators. With growing experience, these instruments can also become tools for textual performance. Regime Change begins with a news article from April 2003, following the bombardment that began the U.S. invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush cites "eyewitness" intelligence that Saddam Hussein was assassinated by targeted U.S. bombing and clings to the contention that the Iraqi president was hiding "weapons of mass destruction." Playing Regime Change brings forth texts generated from a document that records a different U.S. attitude toward presidential assassination and eyewitness intelligence — the report of the Warren Commission. This instrument operates using the statistics of n-grams, a technique used for textual games for more than 50 years, beginning in Claude Shannon's 1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication. These n-grams are chains of words, and this instrument uses shared chains between documents as "bridges," allowing movement from the text of one document into a body of text created from another and back. (Source: Author description, ELC 1).

wotclock is a QuickTime "speaking clock." This clock was originally developed for the TechnoPoetry Festival curated by Stephanie Strickland at the Georgia Institute of Technology in April 2002. It is based on material from What We Will, a broadband interactive drama produced by Giles Perring, Douglas Cape, myself, and others from 2001 on. The underlying concepts and algorithms are derived from a series of "speaking clocks" that I made in HyperCard from 1995 on. It should be stressed that the clock showcases Douglas Cape's superb panoramic photography for What We Will.

(Source: Author description).

A recombinatory digital fiction/poem for predicting death. It uses the stripped down the code of an online slot machine game, replacing the cards with 15 five-line death fictions/poeticals. The artwork recombines the scenarios randomly every time you spin. The writing divides the scenarios into location, method, result and post-result of each death possibility. Additionally, you can win death videos/poetry visuals and free spins. Some are rather scared of this creature's forecasting tone, while others exalt in the absurdist joy of the way all stories are interchangeable, interrelated and happily random.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Screen is an alternative literary game created in the "Cave," a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins with reading and listening. Texts, presenting moments of memory as a virtual experience, appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that does not settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster; struck words don't always return to where they came from; and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing "better" and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. (Source: authors' description.)

Roulette is a work of recombinant narrative that offers a novel interactive reading experience. As lines of text shift and fade in response to user manipulation of the 3-D interface, a fractured collection of stories is revealed, shifting in mood and meaning with each reading.

(Source: Author's abstract from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Following Genette's forms of paratextuality, the process of quoting or re-writing in this poem involves a hypotext - the antecedent literary text (Clarice Lispector's "Amor") - and a hypertext, that which imitates the hypotext (the poem "Amor de Clarice"). Both hypotext and hypertext were performed and recorded by Nuno M. Cardoso, and later transcribed within Flash, where the author completed the integration of sound, animation, and interactivity. Following the hypotext/hypertext ontology, there are two different types of poems. In half of them (available from the main menu, on the left), the main poem (the hypertext) appears as animated text that can be clicked and dragged by the reader, with sounds assigned to the words. In these poems, the original text (the hypotext) is also present, as a multilayered, visually appealing, but static background. The sound for these movies was created by Carlos Morgado using recordings with readings of the poem. In the other half of the poems (available from the main menu link on the right), the same animated hypertext/poem is present, but the hypotext in the background of the previous is replaced by video frames, animated and manipulated by Ana Carvalho. The sound files for these movies was designed by Luis Aly, integrating recordings with readings of the short-story.

(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2)

Previous publication: R. Torres, et al. (2005) Amor de Clarice - Poema Hipermédia, CD-ROM multimédia, CD audio e livro, Ediões Universidade Fernando Pessoa.

my Molly (departed), formerly titled Twittering, is a textual instrument designed as a performance application. The pieces remixes text, image, audio, and video triggered through keyboard interaction. The work has been performed at the OpenPort Performance Festival (Chicago), ePoetry 2007 (Paris), The Codework Workshop (West Virginia University), The Electronic Literature in Europe Conference (Bergen Norway), and the Interrupt Festival (Brown University).

The piece coexists with a novel (Free Dogma Press) that was written simultaneous to the development of this work. Where the novel plays on aspects of time, and draws from sources such as Joyce, Strindberg, Beckett, Dante, among others; the hypermedia textual instrument combines these in a more immediate, collapsed manner.

Cutting through memories, pinning down facts, stitching fabrications, unpicking the past - an interactive, animated memoir, created in Flash, exploring aspects of my relationship with my dressmaking mother. Life’s mysteries are rarely uncovered by a logical, linear process of deduction. You arrive at answers, ideas, suspicions, intuitions… haphazardly in fragments. Over time you build the picture, piece by piece, shuffling and rearranging, until you start to see a pattern emerging. The structure of Fitting the Pattern attempts to replicate this experience; hence it is a memoir in pieces that the reader can explore, to some extent, in a non-linear fashion. There are certain parallels between my mother’s creative craft process and my own in new media; therefore the visual design of the piece is based on the aesthetics of sewing patterns. These similarities, as well as our differences, are embedded in the digital media and text, literally drawn out through animation and dramatized through interactivity. Custom cursors designed as digital dressmaking tools fuse the interactive process into the narrative world, so the reader becomes actively involved in constructing and/or unpicking the narrative.

(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

The main part of the Nio project is an interactive audio piece done in Shockwave. It consists of two "verses." In verse 1, the wreader layers audio and lettristic animations. In verse 2, the wreader both layers and sequences them. Verse 2 is a little sequencer. The Nio project has other parts such as the source code (requires Macromedia Director 8+); the (Shockwave) Song Shapes, which are audioless and use the same animations as in Nio; an essay on the poetics of interactive audio for the web; an essay on audio programming in Director, which is now part of the Macromedia documentation; still visual poetry drawn from onion skins of Nio animations; and an interview by Randy Adams with me about Nio.

(Source: Author's abstract: Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1)