video

Riding the Rust Belt is one in a series of (hyper)videos that comprise the Legends of Michigami project.  The videos map the routes of trains along the shores of Lake Michigan.  These works trace a drama of the western Great Lakes – stories revealed in place and landscape. The persistent motion of the train is metaphoric for time passing whether we want it so or not – for the way human beings (in the name of progress or circumstance) are swept up in inevitable social and economic shifts. Riding the Rust Belt addresses the evolution of industrial cities on the shores of Lake Michigan.  It takes place in one day: a ride from Millennium Station in Chicago to Gary, Indiana.  25 miles on the ground and decades back in time.

Author statement: 

One specific artistic choice in my train video works is that of platforms.  The move to make a piece of e-lit almost transparently accessible across devices imposes significant design accommodations.  Legends of Michigami can be read on a variety of platforms (mobile, tablet, desktop, screen projection). Even decisions as critical as type face and size needed to be made with various resolutions and screen sizes in mind. Moreover, as in all time-based narrative productions, the timing is a compromise between image-reading speed and text-reading capability. 

The Legends of Michigami works continue my career-long experiments with narrative structure and the blending of sensory media.  The layering of time and space, the merging of history and private symbolism and events, and the presence of multiple voices are all part of the storyline.  Each element: text, image, sound, and structure is almost equally important in conveying information about the story world.

An experimental piece, drawing from the artist's Waveform project, this 10 minute film depicts a single, overhead shot of incoming ocean waves, which are scanned and analysed at various points by a machine vision system, which then parses the data gathered into short, poem-like texts. This film marks an attempt at using the dynamics of the moving image to better apprehend both the subject matter and the technical processes behind Waveform.

This piece was displayed at the Peripheries: Electronic Literature and New Media Art exhibition held at the Glucksman Gallery, Cork, as part of ELO2019, in July 2019.

Dorset's paranormal history dates back hundreds of years and continues to be a hotspot for unexplained activity.

In your role as a paranormal investigator, complete the interactive documentary by navigating your way through three of Dorset's most haunted locations. Only after discovering the stories behind them will you be able to escape. Good luck.

A short multimedia-enhanced hypertext game about perpetual cycles of displacement and violence, as seen through the lens of a child. Takes about 15 minutes to read/play, and no gaming skills are required.

Ishmael debuted at the 2017 Spring Thing interactive fiction festival, was selected to be showcased at the PixelPop Festival in St. Louis, was nominated for the "Best Social Impact Game" award at BIG: Brazil’s Independent Games Festival, was an IndieCade Finalist, and was shortlisted for the 2017 New Media Writing Prize. 

A short hypertext exploration of psychosis, about ignorance, defiance, and freedom—or: self-knowledge, acquiescence, and fate. Takes about 15 minutes to play. There are two significantly-divergent endings, but replays are intentionally discouraged.

This game was awarded the New Media Writing Prize in 2016. 

aimisola.net/hymiwo.po: a poemtrack for a yet-to-be-written dance piece departs from material produced by AIMISOLA, in respect to the project “voices of immigrant women,” and further research developed by Álvaro Seiça & Sindre Sørensen on immigration, Spanish immigration policies, cultural, social and political issues in Spain. The first-person poem addresses immigrant women in long-term unemployment living in Spain, and the social, professional, linguistic, and educational obstacles that they face. The poem intends to be a possible account and denouncement of immigration, migration, and dislocation aspects, in a broader global scope, though more specifically, in the European context: rootlessness, social and personal hopes, women’s rights, social, gender and sexual inequality and aggression.The poem starts with an onscreen display of keywords used to write the poem, some of which are hash-tagged. As the poem unfolds onscreen, displaying a fixed line at a set temporal interval, these recurrent keywords scrape real-time tweets. The resulting display is a poetic mash-up of collective text, composed of background and foreground. The combined text can act as textual and visual texture, or active multimodal reading. However, it functions as a timely snapshot of a certain collective consciousness or, perhaps better, it provides an update debate on topics related to the poem that are happening as collective discourse in social media.The coding mechanics create tensions by juxtaposing a fixed (non-)poetic text with an ever-changing social(-poetic) text, which might be further complicated by the way certain tweets contradict or amplify the lines, or even when the audience participates by inputting tweets as the poem is live performed. Furthermore, interactivity is keyboard-driven. Arrow keys control line display and the avatar (“silence”) progression, as well as a visual representation of duration. The reading progression through the language game questions modes and functions of reading, and roles and boundaries between viewer, reader, user, and player. The “intermezzo” game acts as a scene, or “poemscreen,” using the BSoD as glitch source. An error display screen, the side-scroll game thus critically dialogues with game mechanics, OS errors and factual ocean traversals in the Mediterranean Sea. The very act of reading/living continues only if the reader/player traverses the poemscreen.aimisola.net/hymiwo.po was originally written in Portuguese and translated into Spanish and English. The soundtrack is “Lighthouse” (2011), by the Swedish jazz band Tonbruket.Start work at http://aimisola.net/hymiwo.po 

(Source: Author's Website)

"Voices of Immigrant Women" is a digital project in which AIMISOLA project's members have developed digital poems written for the Web, based on the experiences of immigrant women in long-­term unemployment living in Spain. Their testimonies have been recorded as sound files, images, and videos. The work has been done in Portuguese, Spanish and English language.

This work was shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize in 2016: http://newmediawritingprize.co.uk/past-winners/2016-shortlist/

(Source: Nina Kovolic)

Rediscovering Springfield will be an art-type walk that is a site-specific exhibition using mobile devices and printed items to unearth content by walking along Main Road Moonah. Rediscovering Springfield will be a project that engages with the community of Springfield and the greater Moonah area in Hobart, Tasmania.

The work Rediscovering Springfield will add another chapter in the history of Tasmania. It will share the personal untold stories from migrants who came to Tasmania in the mid 20th Century onwards. Their contribution to the building and adding to this state is not often talked about or acknowledged in Tasmaniaʼs history.

The work will investigate how they communicated, what they brought with them, how their concept of home and food was re-created and experienced in their new “home” in Australia. How they shared their culture with other communities, how they spoke with one another, especially as many of them didn’t speak fluent English, if at all, on their arrival. How does one negotiate a space one does not understand fully?

These are some of the questions Rediscovering Springfield will explore – we can consider how did they navigate their lives through their new foreign home? Those who speak English natively will gain insight into this day-to-day experience of the new migrant.

The work will be realised by encouraging community involvement, through the exploration of people’s personal archives of the area or street – including photos, audio, etc. realised as moving images plus video and audio interviews.

Kindred is a project which combines text, video and interactive elements to tell a story inspired by the music of the band.