wordtoy

The digital project Family Tree is conceived as a mobile responding to two forces: wind and gravity. The reader/listener conjures these at will by moving the mouse: left and right to create movement through wind in the horizontal plane, and up and down to apply the force of gravity and create a vertical movement along the family tree. In this way, the reader/listener shapes the reading experience, causing the text to move and rearrange itself on the digital page. Family Tree can be regarded as an exercise of memory, investigating stories told and our ever-changing recollection of them, as well as a path towards some kind of source DNA: stories mix, converse and change, as people from different places and times are faced with each other. This imaginary space is flexible and open to new possibilities.

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

The digital project Family Tree is conceived as a mobile responding to two forces: wind and gravity. The reader/listener conjures these at will by moving the mouse: left and right to create movement through wind in the horizontal plane, and up and down to apply the force of gravity and create a vertical movement along the family tree. In this way, the reader/listener shapes the reading experience, causing the text to move and rearrange itself on the digital page. Family Tree can be regarded as an exercise of memory, investigating stories told and our ever-changing recollection of them, as well as a path towards some kind of source DNA: stories mix, converse and change, as people from different places and times are faced with each other. This imaginary space is flexible and open to new possibilities.

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

Author description: Stud Poetry is a poker game played with words instead of cards. Your goal is to build as strong a poetry hand as you can and, of course, to win as much money as you can. Stud Poetry is a game of courage and faith, and a bit of luck too. To become a great master of Stud Poetry, you need to believe in the power of words, their magic capability to move mountains, minds, and souls. Surely it won't be easy, but when you finally have won all the money with your wonderful five-word poetry hands, you'll know it's worth it.

(Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).

These soundpoems are interactive phonetic poems. Minimal abstract poetry. Games for sampled voice.

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

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)

Trope creatively intervenes in the ways that readers engage with literary texts by creating a virtual environment that is conducive to and assists the experience of reading the poetic text. The physicality of the text itself is key. Poems and short stories are repositioned rather than illustrated in spatialized, audio and visual format/s not possible in “real” life. In the trope landscape, Second Life users can negotiate their own paths through each creative environment and for example, fly into a snowdome, run through a maze in the sky, listen to a poem whispered by a phantom pair of dentures, or stumble upon a line of dominos snaking around the bay. Trope aims to expand writing networks and further develop the virtual literary community.

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

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)