French

"On October 1st 2015, ten people were shot and killed at UMPQUA COMMUNITY COLLEGE in Roseburg, Oregon. The University of Washington where I work is located near the slaughter, enough for the medias to consider the event as local and send journalists on the site. It was definitely close enough for me to think: "But what if...".

Nick Wing wrote in The Huffington Post that the Umpqua Shooting was the 45th school shooting this year as well as the 142nd taking place since the slaughter at SANDY HOOK ELEMENTARY in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012.

Several of these shootings were considered as mass killing, wich means, according to the FBI, a shooting involving at least four victims or more exculing the perpetrator. Many people died in our schools.

The Umpqua shooting made me react to that. What could I do to pay respect to the victims of Rosenburg in Oregon? What could I do to pay respect to the those across the whole country? I thought that by pronouncing all these names, we could remember the victims, confirm their existence and in the end, keep them from being forgotten."

(Source: bleuOrange : http://revuebleuorange.org/)

YELLOWFLOWERPOWER (2017) is the fifth film by Norwegian concrete poet Ottar Ormstad. Here again viewers encounter letter-carpets and a yellow y he identifies with. The work is based on slogans and song-titles from different countries at the end of the Sixties, presented in their original language, intentionally without translation.The texts are combined with photographs of sculptures from the Vigeland Park in Oslo/Norway, where Ormstad lives and shot the naked people exposed in stone and iron by sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943). This park is the largest in the world based on one artist and contains more than 200 works.The film also includes live video-footage of Charles Lloyd playing saxophone in front of a huge painting by Norwegian expressionist painter Edvard Munch (friend/enemy of Vigeland), as well as an unpublished photo of the young Mick Jagger, both shot in Oslo by Ormstad.Like in earlier works, Ormstad uses a strong sound in the very start for creating a period of silence at the beginning of the film.The animation is created in close collaboration between artist Margarida Paiva and Ormstad.YELLOWFLOWERPOWER invites viewers for an individual experience dependant upon the viewer's language background and tolerance towards non-translation.

Video HD 16:9, duration: 07:17Animation: Margarida PaivaSound: Hallvard W Hagen & Jens P NilsenConcrete poetry, cameras, piano and production by director Ottar Ormstad© Ottar Ormstad 2017

One of the first works of interactive fiction made by a female designer, La femme qui ne supportait pas les ordinateurs is an examination of sexual harassments in cyberculture. The game, written by Chine Lanzmann and coded by Jean-Louis Le Breton, allows the player to impersonate a woman who has to face numerous seducers. Interestingly, one of the sexual predators is a computer. The game is stylized upon a chat on Minitel, where the player is asked several questions. She can type only two answers: "yes" or "no", which influence the outcome of the game. However, the more the player becomes involved in the simulated chat, the lesser the chance to avoid one of the six endings, all of them negative.

As interactive writing and digital art are relatively emerging fields there remains considerable research areas to explore. One of the most pressing is the examination of how to re-think, translate and remake older creative works into new cultural and language contexts. This work was create for BleuOrange in Canada. And is an entirely new work loosely based Jason Nelson's This is How You Will Die generative fiction,  rethinking all aspects of the work in a French context.

Working with translators, Ariane Savoieand Lisa Tronca at BleuOrange in Quebec, the work developed new methods for rethinking and translating everything about a digital writing artwork. Specifically examining how the images, the motion, the interface, the animation, the sounds, and the interactivity, as well as the words, have to be re-created.  So once those models and methods were developed, an entirely new work was created, based loosely on This is How You Will Die, which comprised of re-combining 15 different stories through an interactive game engine, as well as numerous additional sections, graphic and audio work.

2×6 consists of short “stanzories”—stanzas that are also stories, each one relating an encounter between two people. Appearing in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and Polish, the stanzories are generated by a similar underlying process, even as they do not correspond to one another the way a translation typically does to a source text. These sixfold verses are generated by six short computer programs, the code of which is also presented in full. These simple programs can endlessly churn out combinatorial lines that challenge to reader to determine to whom “she” and “he,” and “him” and “her,” refer, as well as which is the more powerful one, which the underdog. Generating 2×6 is a simple process, and readers are invited to study the programs and even modify them to make new sorts of text generators. Reading the output can be much more difficult, as the text that is produced crosses syntax with power relations and gender stereotypes, multiplying those complexities across six languages.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released in 2004 by Blizzard Entertainment. It is the fourth released game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe. World of Warcraft takes place within the Warcraft world of Azeroth, approximately four years after the events at the conclusion of Blizzard's previous Warcraft release, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.(Source: Wikipedia)