French

One highrise. Every view, a different city. This is Out My Window -- one of the world's first interactive 360° documentaries -- about exploring the state of our urban planet told by people who look out on the world from highrise windows. It's a journey around the globe through the most commonly built form of the last century: the concrete-slab residential tower. Meet remarkable highrise residents who harness the human spirit -- and the power of community -- to resurrect meaning amid the ruins of modernism. With more than 90 minutes of material to explore Out My Window features 49 stories from 13 cities, told in 13 languages, accompanied by a leading-edge music playlist. (Source: http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/outmywindow/ "Credits")

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")

In 1985 Paul Braffort and Marcel Bénabou’s program “Fifteen Personalized Aphorisms” was presented at the Centre Pompidou. In the 1990’s, Éric Joncquel created the online version on the ALAMO website. This program is a digital remediation of the Oulipian method of creating aphorisms. The politician Jean Jaurès formulated his famous aphorism “A small bit of internationalism distances us from patriotism, but a lot brings us very close to it” from Roger Bacon’s “A small bit of Science distances us from Faith, but a lot brings us very close to it.” Even though these two sentences discuss two very different subjects, the method of formulating an aphorism allows us to place these two subjects in the same lexical context. At its most essential, an aphorism unites what is separated and separates what is united (this sentence itself is indeed an aphorism!). The four most common tools of doing this in the Oulipian method are equivalence, antithesis, parallelism, and proportion. Jaurès’ quote is an aphorism of implicit proportion because the relationship between the words created by the aphorism is not immediately obvious. When choosing the words for an aphorism, one must first decide the principle of the final phrase. One chooses words that already have an immediately obvious relationship. In the end, there are three relationships between the terms: 1) the initial aforementioned relationship between the words, 2) the relationship created by the aphorism, and 3) the relationship between groupings of words. For example, Jaurès uses the terms “internationalism” and “patriotism,” which are linked by politics. The aphorism then creates a new relationship between the terms by stating that internationalism and patriotism are directly proportional to each other. Because the terms A and B always have an initial relationship before being placed in an aphorism together, one can use the same formula with “internationalism” and “patriotism” (politics) as with “Science” and “Faith” (creation debates). ALAMO contributors Paul Braffort and Marcel Bénabou’s program, Fifteen Personalized Aphorisms uses two methods to choose the terms and formulas for the personalized aphorisms. Method I: Choose the relationship between the words that the aphorism creates before choosing the terms. Method II: Choose the words for which the aphorism is going to create a relationship. The esthetic of an aphorism is useful for politicians because the rhetoric creates secondary relationships for A and B in an already known method. For this same reason, Fifteen Personalized Aphorisms seems to make sense. The program uses both methods, I and II, in a “controlled random” fashion. For example: Le présent est le temps de la puissance, l’avenir celui de la lucidité. Le présent est le temps du silence, l’avenir celui du pouvoir. [The present is the time of power, the future is the one of lucidity] [The present is the time of silence, the future is the one of power] The “random” aspect, the formulas, and the methods permit the creation of two aphorisms that seem to make sense individually, but that are ironic and contradictory when placed face to face. In using an ironic esthetic, the aphorism hides a truth in a minimum of words that are methodically combined. These words function like a mask and it is the role of the reader to look for the small ironic truths hidden within. Evenmore, the title of Bénabou’s article, « An aphorism can hide another within itself » is also an aphorism. The phrase creates a relationship between the aphorism and that which is hidden inside. (Source: Claire Ezekiel and Alix Martin)

FIGURES texts are constructed as a literary illustration of the Golden Number and the Fibonacci sequence. As a mathematical and aesthetic constant, the Golden Number is a "matrix" formal for determining the number of words and lines of texts and how they fit together one inside the other. FIGURES texts are therefore of Golden Rectangles where words are used as measurement unit horizontal and unit vertical measurement lines.