trauma

c ya laterrrr is the first in a series of exploratory works by Dan Hett covering his experiences during and in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, where his younger brother was one of 22 people killed.

As summarised by Hett himself:

This game expresses some of the experience, along with exploring some of the what-ifs of choices I ultimately didn't make. All identifying information is removed, there are no names or locations specified anywhere. There are many choices within this game, and one of the many possible pathways does reflect my actual experience. This isn't marked or confirmed anywhere, and all pathways ultimately lead to the same endpoint. 

c ya laterrr  garnered press coverage, including articles in UK publications The Guardian and The Big Issue, and later won the New Media Writing Prize 2020.

Hett released second and third works to the series, The Loss Levels and Sorry to Bother You, in 2018. 

The Hollow Reach is a choice-based virtual reality (vr) experience built on becoming posthuman to overcome the trauma of emotional and physical loss. What at first appears to be an adventure game turns out to be an exploration of psychological and physical recovery, not a retreat from reality but a coming to terms with it. In this interactive puzzle game, virtual reality offers a space of recuperation through adaptation and prostheses. In this piece, the player progresses from the human to the post-human only by letting go of their notions of what is and is not under their control to encounter a life augmented and transformed by the digital.

The Deer is a rhythmic, image-driven literary psychothriller about a physicist who hits — what appears — to be a deer. As he returns from the scene of the accident to his childhood home, long-forgotten memories flood his consciousness, and he must come to terms with the fact that his past, and reality as he knows it, are not what they appear. This piece is an interactive text/recording and/or a performance piece which carries the user through the text line by line. As the narrator becomes more and more emotionally fraught, audio effects bend the narrator’s voice to the point of incoherence, mirroring the breakdown of language in the face of trauma.

This e-poem describes a historical event during the winter of 1945 in which German families who lived in Brno were forcibly evacuated and marched 40 miles to the Austrian border, resulting in many deaths. A descendant of survivors from that march, Saemmer draws on those experiences and through her poem evokes the difficulty of grasping and reconstructing this traumatic portion of family history by writing, positioning, and mapping a way through a spatially arranged text using a presentation software called Prezi. Prezi is a spatial presentation tool, which allows for placement, scaling, and visual navigation of textual and other objects on an “infinite” canvas. Saemmer uses it to place a textual layer over a video of a march in Winter with thunder-like sounds of war in the background. The arranged texts can be explored as the reader desires, but to better appreciate Saemmer’s vision use the autoplay function on full screen.

Translation of Michael Joyce´s afternoon, a story. The publisher´s catalog-entry comes along with a video-presentation of the work (embedded in this database-entry) as well as a number of notable references.

Because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project. In Tramway, this instability of the device is metaphorised on the surface of the screen; and it is thematised in the relationship between the figures of "manipulation" and the manipulable textual context.

In this work, I tried to compose with the strange temporal thickness of certain events. Ten years later, an event in my life took this paradoxical thickness: My mother and I had to make a gesture that always seems so solemn and natural in movies, i.e. close the eyes of my father who had just died. My mother finally did it, but in a way I managed to describe only once; also because she partially failed. This scene had remained an open wound - like a fiery eye I could neither close nor keep open.

After a few exploratory clicks in Tramway, a scrolling text appears: it describes the traumatic scene. On most standard computers, it is possible to decipher the text. But the stream of words will become undecipherable when displayed on more powerful computers. The "lability" of the digital device is thus used to reflect on the possible forgetting of this scene. The result of this process is both reassuring and unbearable.

Tramway therefore proposes a second definition of mourning and oblivion, based on the persistence of memory. Pop-ups "invade" the screen. The reader tries to close these windows, but others keep on popping up. Five narrative threads revolve around the traumatic event without ever thematising it. Throughout their arduous interactions, readers finally understand that no manipulation of the digital interface will ever allow them to "accomplish" the frozen gesture described in the traumatic scene.

Afternoon, a story is a work of electronic literature written in 1987 by American author Michael Joyce. It was published by Eastgate Systems in 1990 and is known as the first hypertext fiction. Afternoon was first shown to the public as a demonstration of the hypertext authoring system Storyspace, announced in 1987 at the first Association for Computing Machinery Hypertext conference in a paper by Michael Joyce and Jay David Bolter.[1] In 1990, it was published on diskette and distributed in the same form by Eastgate Systems. The hypertext fiction tells the story of Peter, a recently divorced man who witnessed a car crash that may or may not have involved his ex-wife and their son.