Application

Machines of Disquiet (iPad App) has been developed in the context of an ongoing research project at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and its goal is to create a Digital Archive of the Book of Disquiet [Livro do Desassossego – LdoD], an unfinished work written by Fernando Pessoa between 1913 and 1935. Machines of Disquiet is the name chosen for a number of experimental applications for mobile devices (iOS and Android) that aim to provide reading and aesthetical experiences based on the text of the Book of Disquiet. Every application is an attempt to find a new setting for experiencing the LdoD as sensitive matter (i.e. matter experienced in different modalities – text, drawing, sound, image, motion) and explores the expressive potential of these types of devices, particularly in terms of interface (e.g. multi-touch interactions and motion sensors). (Source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Death Of An Alchemist is a multimedia novel written by Big Data—a detective story generated in real-time from live online content. The installation consists of an 8m wall displaying 128 pages of projected text, symbols and charts. This content is generated by scraping Twitter, Google and social platforms for today’s headlines, social media conversations, memes and more. The text flickers and updates as new data is received, yet still creates a coherent narrative that can be read from beginning to end. This is thanks to a bespoke technique we have termed the “poetics of search”: using a combination of search operators and algorithms to mine data, then string manipulation to fit it cohesively into a new plot. In the story, readers investigate the death of 16th century alchemist Trithemius. He has left behind a supposedly magical book, Steganographia, said to reveal the “clavis magna”: the idea from which all knowledge flows. Readers must decode the book to find the clues to Trithemius’ murder. But this is no ordinary leather-bound volume… The work is an extended allegory for coercive uses of Big Data by technology companies such as Google and Facebook, which aim to create their own “clavis magna”. Death of an Alchemist is an official selection of the 2015 International Symposium on Electronic Art, to be held in Vancouver, Canada. It is also being made available as a free iOS/Android app. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Mother|Home|Heaven is a magic-mirror augmented reality installation that overlays digital assets – 3D models, video, poetic spoken word and soundscape over a series of objects sourced from a pioneer village in Canada. It combines historical fact and literary fiction to weave together a series of fragments that together consider gender, space and place, private and public, loss, longing, time and place. Created with the Unity game engine and the Vuforia augmented reality plug-in, the experience uses fractal and non-linear narrative to bring real objects and accounts – notably an archive of amazing diaries – to life, while also using fictional, whispered secrets and ghosts to suggest what might haunt the neatly ordered shelves of the General Store. We wish to track 2-D images rather than physical objects. The viewer would encounter shelf after shelf of everyday objects relating to domestic material culture – teapots, kerosene lamps, spools of ribbon, wood burning stove and parlour games etcetera. The objects we found in the general store serve as a cypher through which to conjure messy everyday lives, playing with the tension between the calm and regularity of the public objects on the shelves and the curious, lonely, worried, violent, in-love and sometimes desperate and forgotten hands we imagined might have touched them. Having been given access to thousands of pages of diary entries allowed us a factual window into the lives of Markham residents in the 19th century and early 20th century, and we used these to structure our storytelling. The written reflections ranged from lists of daily chores to discussions of the rhythms of pioneer life, more lyric meditations on God and existence and birth and death. One particular entry from September of 1867 entitled “Heaven” became a guiding theme for the project. The opening line of this entry read: Someone said that the three most beautiful words in the English language are Mother, Home, and Heaven. The three words bring to our notice three phases of life... In response to this entry, we decided to organize our augmentations around both temporality and gender, domesticity and riffs on immortality. The shelves and objects of the General Store became visual “trackables” to be detected by the iPads’ cameras. When visitors hold up an iPad – their magic looking glass – they are positioned to see both the real world object and to unlock a series of connected story fragments we’d inferred and projected from the diaries: a rich imagined memoryscape held by and within these everyday objects for over a century, accessed through a magical eye. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Poetry Chains and Collocation Nets are two intertwined projects that investigate the 1955 edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems through various interactive animated navigations of collocated words. As such, they perform what Samuels and McGann term “experimental analyses.” Each of the visualizations displays a different presentation of her work. Poetry Chains begins with two words and attempts to find a chain of words in a specified number of lines that connects them together, displaying them as it succeeds. Collocation Nets begins with a single word centered in the middle of the screen. When the user selects the word, a random selected of its collocations pops out in a surrounding ring. Any of those words can be selected, which results in collocations of that word appearing. A user can toggle into an ambient mode of this visualization that automatically eventually cycles through all of the words, forever. These visualizations offer a continuously dynamic remapping of Dickinson’s work. The deformations present new opportunities for interpretation, some of which may lend themselves to successful insights, and others which might be ludicrous, or merely bland. Each of the visualizations performs this remapping in different ways. The Poetry Chain effectively runs a kind of smoothing operation, an averaging filter, by treating her entire corpus as a single poem. Additionally, it uses a depth-search algorithm to get between two points within the corpus, performing a non-linear “hopscotch” (with a poetic rather than narrative destabilization). The Collocation Net completely disassembles the corpus into individual words and links them together, not grammatically, but instead by a frequency metric that correlates words by the likelihood of their appearing together within the same line. While it is unclear what exactly the interpretive value of these remapping offers, it is interesting to think of them in relation to, or perhaps as a differentiation from, visualization projects utilizing the methods of information visualization or visual analytics. In those fields, it is assumed that the raw data is inherently atomic, and that the goal of the project is to enable users to recombine the data in different ways in order to facilitate new revealing and new interpretation, or what Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card term “knowledge crystallization.” That is, they allow the user to create models by the synthesis and analysis of data, through which hypotheses may be generated and then either validated or falsified. A recent article by Ben Shneiderman reframes the products of information visualization projects as creativity support tools, where the goal of such a tool is to facilitate novel ideas and new perspectives. Poems however, as noted in Samuels and McGann’s article, are not simply composed of irreducible raw data. Instead, the meaning in some sense is the raw data. But this meaning lives in the interaction between the text and the reader, and cannot be extracted, simplified, summarized, or evaluated in any direct way. (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Gateway to the World is a mobile application designed to run on an iPad2 / iPad mini or later models. This work was created specifically for the SILT exhibition, hosted in Hamburg, Germany in June 2014. I took this exhibition as an opportunity to research the city of Hamburg and discovered that it had one of the largest ports in the world; its name Gateway to the World (GttW) seemed like a great title for the app. The vast and busy port served as a metaphor for the immensity of the Internet, the flow of information and its meaning of openness and outreach to the World Wide Web. The aim of the app was to use open data from the maritime databases to visualize the routes of the vessels arriving to and from the Port of Hamburg, as well as have the vessels’ names mapped to Wikipedia entries. As the vessels move they act as writing tools to reveal a string of text creating calligramatic forms of information pulled from Wikipedia entries about the name of the vessels. The information gathered from these entries generates a remix of text going from presenting factual information about vessels (containers, cargo ships, tankers, high speed crafts) to describing their names connecting them to characters in literary works, plays and mythological stories. (source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

Encyclopedia is an ecological work featuring digital and physical content. The core of the work is a text generator that creates encyclopedic entries for extinct fictive animal species. These unique entries are given away as one-off printed index cards to visitors of the exhibition. Encyclopedia aims to put a gentle focus on the state of the planet, meanwhile exploring the possibilites of digital literature and art. The textual presentations of each animal shift between matter-of-fact descriptions of habitat and feeding habits, and more poetic sentences on the characteristics of the species and its surroundings. The generator analyzes text content and additional data from EoL.org (Encyclopedia of Life), which has comprehensive information on a huge amount of species, extinct and still living. It then outputs an encyclopedic entry derived from the data, creating a fictive animal species, starting (and simultaneously ending) a new track in evolution. Each entry is unique, never to be repeated. One of the key parameters in the generator is Conservation status (as of the IUCN red list): in each micro-narrative every species is already extinct at the moment of creation – every entry ends with a description on how the animal was driven to extinction by humanity, through varying factors such as pollution, poaching, deforestation, climate change and more. This theme is mirrored in the presentation of the work, in its temporal representation: the text presentation of the generated animal is impossible to replicate. It becomes a personal, intimate message to the person on the receiving end – this species is now yours to keep, only ever existing in these few lines of text. Hopefully this will also make an ecological statement on how we view and treat this planet.

Langlibabex is a multilingual collaboration that departs from our shared experience of reading and responding in constrained poetic forms to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel.” As collaborators who met at ELO 2014 and shared conversation in three languages, we are committed to working in French, English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and translating one another’s work across continents and media.

(Source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Collocations is a work of experimental writing that explores the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics by appropriating and transforming two key texts from Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein’s historic debates about the complementary relationship between position and momentum. By interacting with Collocations, the user turns into an experimenter, observing and physically manipulating the device to materialize unique textual configurations that emerge from within Bohr and Einstein’s original writings. Striking a balance between predetermined and algorithmically influenced texts, Collocations constructs a new quantum poetics, disrupting classical notions of textuality and offering new possibilities for reading. (Source: ELO 2015 catalog)

This project is an app that re-imagines a sea monster who communicates as or via an app. Lusca, is an ancient sea monster, who once thrived upon the telegram messages that were sent using the telegraph cable system. Back in the day, when she first noticed the cable structures being built, they were of no interest. Then, as the system came to life, the various noises aroused her curiosity. Sometime around 1877, after numerous tentative approaches to this unknown creature, she figures out how to latch onto to the structure, and manages to extract a transmission or two. The messages she steals fill her with new feelings. She grows strong. Her consciousness evolves. Sometime around the turn of the 21st century the volume of messaging drops. She sees the disrepair, the rust. She grows hungry. She is dying. She needs those messages. You can help. The app invites users to submit new messages in order to keep Lusca from losing consciousness. She then releases stolen messages of the past in order to absorb those of the present. Lusca might still be monitoring the airwaves.

(Source: http://luscatelegraphs.com/)

This is a remediation of a popular paper book about two friends whose names reflect their personalities. Jakob always says yes (ja) to everything, and Neikob always says no (nei). The interactivity that has been added to the app version works perfectly. Of course children love touching Jakob to make him say ja, and Neikob to make him say nei. The repetition of this interaction perfectly mirrors the repetition in the characters’ responses, which is the whole point of the narrative. Other features, like being able to turn lights on and off, also enhance the experience, which culminates in Jakob’s cunningly finding a way to make Neikob go along with his plans, allowing them to escape great danger involving a thief and a crocodile. (source: ELO conference catalog)