Application

Depression Quest is an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment. This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people.

(Source: Official Website)

Online social networks and video games are prevalent in today’s society, and using both video game characters and social networking profiles cam potentially be used to help people better understand others’ experiences, delivering meaningful experiences which enable critical reflection upon one’s identity, and on others’ experiences related to identity. However, merely customizing graphical representations and text fields are insufficient to convey the richness of our real world identities. As a step towards conveying richer identity experiences, we introduce our interactive narrative game called Mimesis, which aims to allow players to explore identity phenomena associated with discrimination. The story of Mimesis takes place in an underwater setting with subtly anthropomorphized sea creatures as characters. The player character is a mimic octopus, which is a species of octopus adept at emulating other creatures. The octopus is on a journey that takes it from the dark depths of the ocean to its home in the tropical shallows. Along her way, the octopus will encounter several sea creatures who inhabit the waters and whose actions serve as examples of particular kinds of covert discrimination. These sea creatures provoke the octopus, leaving the player to must choose between different emotional responses to the creatures in order to guide the octopus through a series of short conversations. In this way, the project maps the experience of discrimination onto gameworld based on an underwater metaphor. (Source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/mimesis)

Separation: an online creation and a performance based on the separation of words. The creation entitled Separation takes two forms (an online creation - for PC, tablet and smartphone – and a live performance). It is the result of a collaboration between the ALIS performing arts company (http://www.alis-fr.com/) and the i-Trace digital collective (http://i-trace.fr/). This creation (in its versions for the stage and for the Web) deals with the theme of separation (considered as both detachment and rupture). The creation is based on the ALIS company’s work on the separation of words. Indeed, the company has invented a technique called la Poésie à 2 mi-mots (two half-words poetry or cutting edge poetry), and has been developing it for the past ten years. This technique makes it possible to create sequences based on the idea that words which are halved horizontally, contain the half of other words (http://www.alis-fr.com/site/?q=node/26). These often humorous productions raise fundamental questions about the language, the writing process and the Digital. The website (in progress): http://i-trace.fr/2013/separation/alis An online version for PC and an app for tablets and smartphones will be available in 2014. In the live performance, we will use a tablet, a PC and a Kinect device. We will make the audience participate: they will propose words that we will manipulate. (Source ELO Conference 2014)

The VNIVERSE app is a poetry instrument you can play. In DRAW mode, touch and drag to create your own constellations. In CONSTELLATIONS mode, explore the ten constellations found in the coordinate print book, V : WaveTercets / Losing L’una (SpringGun Press, 2014). WAVETERCETS plays the entire run of poem tercets for you, starting at the beginning. Or, by touching any star, you may begin anywhere you like. ORACLE lets you pose seven questions to the sky. CLEAR button clears the sky. Stephanie Strickland’s V was first published by Penguin (2002) as an invertible book with two beginnings, V : WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una. Mid-book, a URL leads to V : Vniverse (2002, Director project with Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo). Another part of V is the Flash poem, Errand Upon Which We Came (2001, with M.D. Coverley). The Vniverse app for iPad was created in 2014 with Ian Hatcher.

best.hello is a web poem, composed of original and appropriated texts. The appropriated texts were liberated from emails received by the author. Both bodies of text have been fed through a text-manipulation program to reorder the words, interleaving them to unfold new layers of meaning or interpretation. The resulting poem, best.hello, utilizes the affordances of both time-based visual media and the encounter with a ‘pop-up’ ad or alert box on the web. When combined, the two create a dialogue between them that refuses to be ignored or passively experienced: the alerts trigger the browser to jump to the front of other running applications, asserting the poem even after it has been minimized or concealed behind other applications. Even while the text obscures itself, several orders removed from its original context, shifting in and out of legibility, it demands to be read. What would be the "best" hello? Is it one that cannot be ignored? best.hello exists in the tension between restraint and release, hiding while wanting to be found in the most mundane of cultural exchanges: the greeting.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Ice-bound is an interactive novel that combines a printed art book with an iPad app. Our goal was to create an experience with both high-quality surface text and significant player agency. The story concerns an encounter with a fictional artificial intelligence, a simulation of a long-dead author who enlists the player's help to finish his original's final novel. Inspired by the dense, labyrinthical texture of works like Nabokov's Pale Fire and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, the novel is a unique collaboration between two artists, both of whom are writers, coders, and graphic designers. Each story is built around a dynamically chosen set of symbols representing possible elements of the story. These might be traits a character could have, or plots that could be included in the story. When a story is first visited, the symbols are assigned to an author-defined group of sockets which can be turned on or off by the player. However, the player can only turn a limited number of sockets on at one time. As different combinations of sockets are activated, a version of the story is displayed, projecting what might happen if the symbols associated with those sockets were part of the story. While players explore possible stories, they also carry on an ongoing conversation with the AI character, who comments on the reader's activity, engages in philosophical discussions, and ultimately demands physical proof that a reader's selected ending for the story is appropriate. The reader provides this by finding a page from the companion printed book that contains an overlapping theme with the selected ending. Using markerless tracking augmented reality (AR), we can identify which page of the print book the player is pointing the iPad's camera at, and display additional layers of story content overlaid on the physical book. Once a story is resolved, the themes associated with it are strengthened. In this way the next story has thematic connections with the way the reader resolved prior stories, and as play progresses subsequent stories become more and more similar to the reader's own aesthetic. (Source: authors abstract)

Racter is an artificial intelligence simulator from 1984. Similar to Eliza, Racter will converse with the user until boredom occurs. However, there's a twist - Racter is not quite sane! This makes for a lot of fun conversation.Racter was originally programmed on an early Apple computer. Additional comments by developer William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter:RACTER was designed in a tongue-in-cheek manner, using remarkably minimal resources, to amuse and entertain its users, rather than to advance the research in natural language processing. In conversation, RACTER plays a very active, almost aggressive role, jumping from topic to topic in wild associations, ultimately producing the manner of - as its co-creator Tom Etter calls it - an "artificially insane" raconteur. Its authors publicize RACTER as an "intense young program [that] haunted libraries, discussion societies, and sleazy barrooms in a never-ending quest to achieve that most unreachable of dreams: to become a raconteur."

Source: https://www.chatbots.org/chatbot/racter/

Wandering Meimei / Meimei Liu Lang Ji is a bilingual interactive fiction app designed for mobile interfaces for the Chinese market. This story is an intertext to the traditional Chinese comic strip, Sanmao Liu Lang Ji (Wandering Sanmao), a homeless boy. Meimei, meaning little sister, is an allegorical character and contemporary representation of the largest migrant population the world has ever seen: the migrant female factory worker. Through the app, you can make contact with the character Meimei who works in a smartphone factory in the Pearl River Delta city Guangzhou. Meimei's only technology and access point to the outside world is through her own phone. The social media hub and interface enable you to enter and become a part of Meimei's story.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

AUTHENTIC IN ALL CAPS is a web audio adventure about the meaning of death. It draws audio drama, audio tours and alternate reality gaming. The use of audio is an attempt to create a sense of unity in a highly fragmented experience. I see the techniques and experience of audio tours as a way to bring disparate elements together. Just as an audio tour involves guiding a listener to different places, this audio experience guides players to different websites. I include both custom and existing sites, and so this project continues my interest in pervasive design: where the players’ world is part of the fictional world. The story is born out of the pain of suddenly losing my mother, and facing the meaninglessness of my life. I got past heaviness of the subject matter by drawing on my early days in sketch comedy theatre, unifying the disparate times of my life.

(Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

AdLiPo is a browser plugin that replaces advertisements with generated language art. Leveraging the ad-detection techniques of popular ad-blockers, AdLiPo not only blocks ads, but replaces them with calls to a JavaScript language library (the RiTa library, in this case), filling the advertising regions of pages with static or kinetic text created for the specific context (the containing page, advertising-content, and dimensions of the ad-frame). (Source: http://rednoise.org/adlipo/)