English

“You and CO2” is an innovative, interdisciplinary project combining research and public engagement activities to encourage young people, aged 12-15, to engage with the global problem of climate change on a local scale and to commit to behaviour changes that will reduce their carbon footprints.

Through three workshops delivered in class, we educate the students about the role of carbon dioxide in climate change and the carbon dioxide emissions associated with everyday activities. The students read/play No World 4 Tomorrow, a custom-built interactive digital fiction on climate change, and then create their own interactive stories on the topic.

Through discussing and creating their own works of fiction, we encourage the students to explore their ideas about climate change and the role that individual citizens play in shaping the world’s climate. The purpose of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of these workshops on young people’s engagement with climate change, and to assess whether their personal feelings about their own responsibilities for their carbon dioxide emissions change over the course of the workshops.

(description from Youandco2.org)

Prairie Chants is part of a collection of hypermedia, narrative videos that chronicle aspects of life on the shores of Lake Michigan [called Michigami by some first nations].  In this video, a story of the prairie - and the native tribes who once lived there – unfolds.  The past, the present, the future….

The tribal narrative happens to follow the historic movement of the Sauk or Sac tribe (officially Sauk and Fox), but it could be that of any one of many eastern woodland people, indeed hundreds of tribes across the country, who were forced from their homes, had their land taken by trickery or force, and walked their own trail of tears into captivity. The narrative links to the present with the development of new prairie associated with solar gardens.

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.

Clay conversations arose out of collaborative conversations I had with British ceramicist Joanna Still. After several meetings and exchanges, Joanna created some ceramics which evoked various forms of communication, for example a clay book, a calendar, and an abacus, but which also had an abstracted connection with the objects to which they refer. I wrote several short poems in response to Joanna’s ceramics, conversations we had, and textual material she sent me (such as a newspaper cutting about Haitians eating clay plates because they could not afford food).  My poetry also drew on experiences I had independently, which seemed to connect with the project, such as a visit I made to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

I then started to experiment with the video program Final Cut Pro, and with a variety of techniques and processes such as split screens, superimposition and merging of images, and a range of filters for image transformation. Besides the images of the ceramics, I worked with photographs and emails resulting from Joanna’s travels in Zambia and Ethiopia, where she was sponsored by Voluntary Service Overseas to conduct workshops with local communities.  These were very inspiring and suggestive, and seemed to fit well with my own increasing interest in a cosmopolitan poetics,which moves between different cultures in the same work. I adapted some of the poems I had written for the video, often fragmenting and reorganising them in new ways to optimise integration with the visual images, and to exploit the possibilities of the split screen dynamic.

To accompany the video (presented here as a quicktime video), Roger provided a recorded soundscape: it reflects both the violence and love with which clay and ceramics are treated. With one short exception, all the sounds here are found sounds directly involving clay and pots. Several are recordings of Joanna at work, others are of stone/pot interactions recorded by Roger, while a significant selection of the sounds are taken from the freesound online sonic database maintained in Barcelona. Notable amongst these recordings is a five minute recording of clay gradually distributing itself as it hydrates in a body of water, made with an underwater microphone by KG Jones. We would also like to acknowledge, in keeping with the Creative Commons license which applies, the use of material from Benboncan, Heigh, homejrande, NoiseCollector, Robinhood and volivieri.

Clay Conversations, which runs for just over 10 minutes, was first presented at a performance by austraLYSIS at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in December 2009.

It was published in Scan Gallery in 2010 and in Hyperrhiz in 2012. 

The first text adventure game by pioneering software company Radarsoft (John Vanderaart). Players had to make their way through the storyworld by typing in commands on their keyboards.

Computer generated poem in English by the Dutch sound poet Greta Monach (1928-2018), which was anthologised in the Richard W. Bailey's collection Computer Poems (1973).

You Say Time is a River is a locative, digital poetry collection, created and currated by Maria Barnas for the AMC Kunststichting (Academic Medical Center Art Foundation).

Anyone who is in a waiting room, lives in her own special time zone. For some, time goes by slowly, for others, time pulsate like a stroboscope. Maria Barnas created poems for the Emergency Room of the AMC Hospital that open up a spaces where the different timelines of the visitors are made accessible.

The philosophical animal stories by famous Dutch author Toon Tellegen are brought to life in the app ‘A Distant Journey’. Now even the youngest can enjoy the story of the elephant, the squirrel and a mysterious tree. This interactive story is perfect for parents and teachers who want to spend some quality time with their children or want to hand them something interesting and thoughtful to do on their own.

With hand drawn illustrations by artist Gwen Stok, a compelling and heartfelt soundtrack by Half Way Station, lively animations and various interactions, this heartwarming story will keep children coming back again and again. Reading the story themselves or listen as the story is being told.