Application

A haiku-generating program written in TRAC at the Cambridge Language Research Unit.

Written in Unity for use with Oculus RIFT glasses, Cardamom of the Dead is a literary VR environment - the user wanders through a virtual environment filled with a vast collection of things a narrator, heard in voice-over, has hoarded over years (decades? centuries?).  The environment is filled with debris and stories and the piece is ultimately a meditation on collecting as madness, consoling practice and memory palace.

(Source: ELO 2014 Media Arts Show)

ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email "scary" in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google's Gmail, the work adds to every new email's signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This "story" acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense. Each email's story is unique in an attempt to avoid automated filtering by NSA search systems. One of the strategies used by the US National Security Agency's (NSA) email surveillance programs is the detection of predetermined keywords. Large collections of words have thus become codified as something to fear, as an indicator of intent. The result is a governmental surveillance machine run amok, algorithmically collecting and searching our digital communications in a futile effort to predict behaviors based on words in emails. ScareMail proposes to disrupt the NSA's surveillance efforts by making NSA search results useless. Searching is about finding the needles in haystacks. By filling all email with "scary" words, ScareMail thwarts NSA search algorithms by overwhelming them with too many results. If every email contains the word "plot," or "facility," for example, then searching for those words becomes a fruitless exercise. A search that returns everything is a search that returns nothing of use. The ability to use whatever words we want is one of our most basic freedoms, yet the NSA's growing surveillance of electronic speech threatens our first amendment rights. All ScareMail does is add words from the English language to emails written by users of the software. By doing so, ScareMail reveals one of the primary flaws of the NSA's surveillance efforts: words do not equal intent.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Children's choose-your-own-story book app that won a BAFTA.

A FOUND E-MAIL LOVE AFFAIR UNFOLDS IN FOUR APPISODES™

Have you ever been involved in a steamy e-mail love affair? What would you do if your scandalous love letters were published in living color for the world to see?

TREEHOUSE contains the provocative e-mails of an actual love affair carried out online over 14-years-ago during the advent of the Internet. The entire manuscript has been released as a series of tantalizing Appisodes™ to be enjoyed in the privacy of your own phone.

FILE UNDER:
Voyeur / Vintage Internet / Romance / Prince

APPISODE 1: DEEP
APPISODE 2: DIRTY
APPISODE 3: DARK
APPISODE 4: SECRET

APPISODE 1: DEEP
The year is 1996. The Treehouse Series begins in the midst of a prolonged courtship separated by years and miles. United online through the magic of the Internet, the story fumbles and stumbles its way through this new mode of communication, like teen-agers in the backseat of a digital Chevrolet. The provocative and expressive back-and-forth electronic transmissions reveal in explicit detail how these two have been linked together from past-lives to eternity, but is an AOL chat-room sexy enough to deliver?

SOUNDTRACK:
The Editor has compiled a Treehouse soundtrack tailored to moods of the e-mail exchange. Download and listen while reading for a truly immersive experience. Search the iTunes iMix for “Treehouse Soundtrack” to explore more.

PUBLISHED BY FIRST FIFTEEN:
First Fifteen is a collaborative venture between Hybrid/ in New York and FORMation in Dallas. We publish work digitally and in print for ourselves and for others. Visit www.FIrstFifteen.com to learn more.

DESIGNED BY FORMATION:
FORMation is a multi-disciplined design studio focused on communication and content. FORMation has released a series of iPhone “Games for Creatives” including KERN, EYE vs. EYE and PRESS CHECK. Visit www.FORMationAlliance.com to learn more.

(Source: iTunes App Store description)

The application encourages user movements / act
and turn them into a / personal / own performance.
captures / records user interactions. 12 levels.

"ZYX uses the iPhone or iPod Touch's built-in motion-tracking capabilities to guide users through a series of gestures, from turning in a circle to raising one's arm up and down. Each time a gesture is performed correctly, the phone clicks; when all gestures have been completed, the device sounds an alarm in celebration. This app situates the user in a realm that is both virtual and physical. Bystanders see the user as performing a strange dance; in contrast, the iPhone observes and rewards the user's adherence to a prescribed set of movements. This dissonance between the virtual space inhabited by the iPhone user and the physical space occupied by the observer has become an everyday phenomenon, exemplified by the experience of passing someone on the street who appears to be delivering a nonsensical monologue while speaking into the microphone of a wireless mobile device."

(Source: http://zyx-app.com/)

"Elogio del texto digital. Claves para interpretar el nuevo paradigma" (Praise to Digital Text. Keys to interpret the New Paradigm) is an essay about the history of printed text and the history of the digitization of texts. The author supports the idea of updating the universities curricula by using knowledge bases. (Description written by Maya Zalbidea Paniagua)

"Stories Unbound" is an application commissioned by the Melbourne Writers’ Festival that allows anyone to read and write stories about anything they choose, and tag them with GPS coordinates. Locations are the places where the writer/participant happens to be located geographically. Connections between stories and place happen accidentally. Stories Unbound does not create a curated space for literature."

Source: Berry, Marsha, and Omega Goodwin. 2013. Poetry 4 U: Pinning poems under/over/through the streetsNew Media & Society September 2013 vol. 15 no. 6 909-929 (http://nms.sagepub.com/content/15/6/909.full)

Editor's note: cannot find more info about this.

A Humument, an oracle of love and life: a diversion of chance and change.Combining the 367 full-colour pages of Tom Phillips’ artist’s book, the treated Victorian novel A Humument, with an interactive oracle function, this App displays the luminous artwork in a fun and highly accessible way. The App version includes 39 newly created, previously unpublished pages. Using a chosen date and a randomly generated number the oracle will cast two pages to be read in tandem. You may receive direction, encouragement or warning. The Find wheel spins through the book to quickly navigate the pages visually and find your favourites. Email your personal choices or oracle reading to friends. Sharekit supports image posts to Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook direct from the App.I found this book (or rather, it found me) when I was not quite thirty and have worked on it constantly ever since. It beckoned me on as it yielded strange words and provoked new images and told the fragmentary tale of Irma and Bill Toge. Now I am well over seventy and still revisiting and revising its pages, I find further layers of hidden texts and buried messages. Like the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes, chance pairs of pages, taken together and interpreted, act as a guide and cryptic commentary on life in word and picture; a not-too-serious oracle which I now share with you.

(Source: Author's description in the App store)

Text ‘n FX is a DJ mixer for text. It is a prototype machine developed in the 80’s for the emerging practice of Hip-Hop. Instead of a DJ mixing two records together, the designers of the device proposed the idea of a Text-Jockey (TJ). The TJ acted as a machine-assisted poet mashing up lyrics read from two floppy disks in real-time using statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and cut-up techniques from experimental literature. The product never made it to market but it exists today as a media-archaeological curiosity.

(Source: ChercherLeTexte website)