war

Within an enclosed darkened room, the image of Beyond Manzanar's 3-dimensional space is projected onto a large, wall-sized screen. The life-sized image fills your field of view and gives you a feeling of immersion within the virtual space. A joystick mounted on a pedestal in the middle of the room allows you to move your viewpoint at will through the virtual space. Speakers mounted on either side of the screen provide stereo sound. Although only one person at a time can control movement in the space, others can watch and share the experience. We have combined techniques of computer games and theater design to create a highly symbolic, often surreal environment with a poetic reality stronger than photorealism. The mountain panorama that defines the Manzanar site forms a constant backdrop for shifting layers of superimposed context. Open doors lead viewers through spaces that react to their presence, shifting between home and prison, between paradise and wasteland, to investigate Manzanar as a layering of contradictory and complementary images and emotions for two groups of immigrants. Archival photographs of Manzanar Internment Camp alternate with paradise gardens constructed from ancient Japanese scrolls and Persian miniature paintings; images of the immigrant American Dream alternate with media images of betrayal and hatred. Sound is also an important mechanism to set the emotional and cultural context: The constant moan of the desert wind or the cool burbling of water from a fountain; the scream of war jets or a woman singing a love song. The virtual space is sensitive to your presence, shifting context around you to change your emotional relationship to the space. If you follow an open road, barbed wire appears to block your path. If you enter a dark barrack you may find yourself in a pavilion overlooking a paradise garden - that disappears when you try to enter it, as if you suddenly awake from a dream.

What the user sees is a black-and-white, rectangular obituary in the middle of the
computer screen which addresses the victims of the last Iraq war. By letting the languages
and the meaning the textual fragments create fluctuate, the author emphasises
the fact that obituaries are a global phenomenon, the rhetorics of which are replaceable
and interchangeable regardless of where these are being written or read. The date of
the obituary is always the same as the actual date the text is read on, thus the text
gains the quality of actuality and credibility at the same time. Furthermore, in order to
increase the desired artistic effect, the author has put a body-count at the bottom of the
page, which is incremented roughly every second. Furthermore, there are strong sounds
of war, such as machine-gun fire, and screams of women and children in the background.

(Source: Roman Zenner "Hypertextual Fiction on the Internet: A Structural and Narratological Analysis")

Xyzzy winner, Best Use of Medium 2000

Massive Comprehension Machine s an audiovisual device for simultaneous navigation in two semantic networks generated in real time facing a unique concept: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but addressed from two opposing views: the media that operates on one or other side of the border. Can semantic netwoks map thoughts? Can they disclose structures that reflect the way we see the world? This device allows the investigation between the subjectivity and imaginary of one and other, and also from the subjectivity of the visitor, dealing with the complexity of one of the greatest conflicts inherited from the 20th century.

[It] is designed to require an active participation of the user to deepen the concept that he/she would like to explore. In this way, the user is involved in the conflict and can ask himself/ herself questions such as: What is important and what is not? Why the semantic network gives me this result? The keys to navigate in a semantic network with thousands of nodes are hierarchies. We can surf the net from more present concepts or of greater size, and zoom up towards words with less relevance. The search tool facilitates the research of unusual concepts, showing only directly related words. The words are connected from multiple news, and therefore the relations are sensitive to the frequency in which they appear. At a glance, we can see the most important concepts and the relationships of each vision of the conflict. To give the work an immersion nature, when you select a node you can see news related to this concept by the use of a machine-readable robot.

"Family of silence" is the portrait of a Cambodian family, a couple and their daughter, exiled in France before the Civil War and the takeover of the Khmer Rouge the country in 1975. This film is a portrait of the daily life of this family of memory which emerges the deaf the buried memory of the war, exile, the painful feeling of being surviving when other members of the family disappeared.

(Source: http://www.lindasuthirysuk.com/LindaSuthirySuk_book.pdf)

A cartoon is very good support for a database documentary on the Second World War. From the story of a young child through France, each vignette is an opportunity to build links to specific information about the war. The structure of the comic vignettes is completely redesigned. Animations endow a temporal structure. Some travel "printing screen" full and create a link between the thumbnails. The action moves on several boxes at the same time. As the reader has not done the necessary actions to advance the narrative, some cells in the "board-screen" remains grayed out and the bubbles are not displayed. Action of the reader simultaneously affects several cases.

(Source: http://www.olats.org/livresetudes/basiques/litteraturenumerique/9_basiq… )

This piece presents a passage done by the act of clicking. Emotional mapping allow the reader to shape the passage by choosing one of 3 paths, randomly addressing three themes (war, pollution, cloning), the actor clicks getting at the end its a haiku navigation, readable form of his choice.
(http://www.epoetry2007.net/)