Norwegian (Bokmål)

Tristessa is a narrative machine that generates short stories. Words and phrases are combined to produce a new story each time the program is run, but as you see when you read some of Tristessa's stories the structure remains the same.

Launched November 21, 2005.

A changing and growing literary work or works published, performed and displayed between 2003 and 2007. The version referenced here was published by the Danish electronic literature journal Afsnit P. The works all explore the title word: "soldatmarkedet", which means the soldier market. Some of them simply repeat a single letter from the word over and over, in a dense form of concrete poetry almost divorced from meaning. An installation at Skulpturens Hus in Stockholm in 2005 included filing cabinets filled with printouts of 15000 unique, computer-generated permutations of 20 texts written by Aasprong.

I mellom tiden is a hypertextual web work consiting of static and dynamic elements: sound, text, image, video and graphics. The work centres around four topics: "friends", "alone", "family" and "lovers". By traversing the work the reader experiences various everyday aspects of life, crisscrossing the four topics. Through sampling and combination of themes, moods, modalities, genres and various degrees of user control, i mellom tiden creates a many-facetted and complex aesthetics, where different life worlds interact, where real meets artificial, private meets public and the straight-forward confronts the secret. 

In the video lyms (which is a non-semantic word), I have solved the question of translation in a special way: words in different languages like spanish, french, german, english and scandinavian are put together.  None of them have the same meaning, the viewer may just taste on the words.  In the first part of the video all the words are starting with f.  In the beginning the f's are exposed in a way they constitute different pictures. The system of the expositions are based on how I made concrete poetry in the sixties. Instead of repeating them differently line by line, the new technology allows me to expose them differently through time.  Then more and more letters are shown, until all the words are exposed.

Each viewer will have a different experience dependent upon their language background, and the ability to enjoy the poetic combination of the words and the visuality together with the music.  

The second part is different.   Here I use a combination of photos and pictures I have made just out of letters.  (I’ve done the photowork in the darkroom, and then scanned). Some of the letter-pictures are from an exhibition of digital prints I’ve had in Oslo.  Most of them are just made out of the sounds and the visual aspect, some are meaningful in a way, like the page with spanish words starting with a.

Duration: 7:40

(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI)

English title "Light-Darkness." Description by Hans Kristian Rustad: a remediation of a play with the same title. Moving the work into a digital environment Næss makes use of written and verbal text, pictures, graphics, and animations to create a quite different work than the original. She also explained in an interview that the play not really was meant for the stage, but that she was waiting for its right medium. So she utilises facilities of the medium to make the text appear as she first intended. 

The work is interactive in the sense that the reader need to move the mouse courser over the screen to make something happen. The narrative is divided into three different and independent stories, and which of the three stories that appear, depends on where on the screen the reader holds his mouse cursor.

One of the narratives is about a fire in a train coupe. Two persons die in the fire, probably kids, and the narrator is probable the father telling us how he remembers the fire. Another of the narratives is about a group of people going in the mountains, than suddenly one of the group members disappears. And the dead body of the person is not found until the snow starts to melt. And the third narrative is about a father taking his two sons on a fishing trip. And one of his sons discovers what might be a dead body. It is hard to tell actually. In the play which is published in a book, the text tells explicit about a dead body that one of the sons finds in the water. While in the digital version, we can hear the son telling his father: “There is something in the water”. This part of the narrative actually ends with laughter, so it is hard to tell what actually happened. 

The work is about losing someone and/or finding someone, and it demonstrates the big semiotic leap that the work takes from the theatre stage to the digital screen, from a play to a kind of digital narrative. It shows how other semiotic systems can be used to tell the same story, and how the technology can be used to make different scenes, different incidents, collide, because they can be combined and read in different sequences and contexts.

English title (What are the trees saying?)

Kan man tenke seg at vindens sus i trekronene er trærnes måte å kommunisere på? Og at dersom vi klarte å dekode denne lyden og oversette den til vårt språk, så ville vi få vite hva trærne sier? Marte Aas' fortelling om trærnes språk kombinerer direkte online overføring, databaser og sanntids generering til et svært poetisk verk.

Lansert 11. oktober 2005© Marte Aas, BEK/PNEK, NRK Ulyd 2005

Hypertext short story - second HTML version of short-story first published on paper cards in Sesam 71 from 1971. Can be read in sequence in the collection SF - Samlede fortellinger (collected stories) by Tor Åge Bringsverd.