Application

"Meanwhile" begins as our young hero in dire need of a bathroom, knocks on the door of a mysterious recluse. His mansion is in fact a wonderous laboratory filled with amazing inventions: A mind reading helmet, a doomsday device and a time travel machine (although it can only go back ten minutes). Which invention will young Jimmy play with? YOU, the reader get to decide in my branchiest and most complex interactive comic to date. "Meanwhile" works via a network of tubes connecting each panel to the next. Sometimes these tubes split in two giving the readers a choice of which path they would like to follow. Sometimes these tubes even lead off the page and onto tabs sticking out from other parts of the book. Inspired by Scott Mccloud I exploded "Meanwhile" onto a 5'x5' matrix in 2004. I'm currently working on a way to bring it to the web somehow. (Source: author website) Originally published as a book. This entry refers to the 2012 iPad adaptation, which was done by Andrew Plotkin.

'Sintext-W' (1999-2000) is a Java version for the Web of the text generator 'Sintext,' (1993) with the collaboration by José Manuel Torres. According to the Web Java demo, 'Sintext-W' can be understood as: In this space the cybernaut can have a first contact with the automatic text generator 'Sintext-W' (Text Synthesizer). The user can visualize the automatic generation of 3 generative texts available here: · 'Didáctica' (example) · 'Balada de Portugal' (extract) · 'Teoria do Homem Sentado' (fragment) For this purpose it is enough that the user clicks on the buttons located below, under the 2nd display window; in the 1st window one may consult the matrix-text which originates it. The text's flow rate may be accelerated or delayed by two controllers; the user can also choose to execute the texts in an endless cycle as a continuous creation of new meanings. (Text adapted and translated by Álvaro Seiça based on the Java demo version at http://www.pedrobarbosa.net/sintext-pagpessoal/sintext.htm)

With these probabilities, we randomly selected series of numbers, using a pseudo-random number routine, that were used to select the triads for cv and vc sets. The most common sets in Portuguese, such as CA, BO, AL, ES, etc., appeared more often than the rare sets such as ZU, UX, etc. Thus, some possible words include, for example, CACETE, BOLADA, ACABAC, etc. (all swear words, for which there was no censure!). The generated words clearly sounded similar to real words in Portuguese. A fraction of the “words” actually exist. Next, a number was assigned to indicate if the word was formed by sets of high or low probability of existing in Portuguese. If the number was high (high probability), it was in fact more likely that the “word” actually existed. Lists of words were created and, during the 1986 exposition at the MAC/USP, a computer was programmed to reproduce “BEABÁ”, and visitors could take their own printouts with words generated by the computer, which were always unique.

(Source: Author. English Translation: Luciana Gattass)

In Brazil, the first artistic experience with computer that we know was "Abecê" (Abecedary), idealized by Waldemar Cordeiro with Giorgio Muscati's collaboration, professor of Physics in the University of Sao Paulo, in 1968. It was a generating program of words composed of six letters, which worked in a computer IBM, type 360/44, with entrance for perforated cards, memory of 32 Kbytes and an exit for lines printer.

(Source: Jorge Luiz Antonio, "Trajectory of Electronic Poetry in Brazil: A Short History", 2007: 5)

"Transborder" could (and does) refer to any border: political or otherwise. Yet the use of "border" and "immigrant" in a project emanating from just north of the US-Mexico border, unmistakably signals engagement with incendiary border politics that demonize the undocumented as "illegals," as an incursion of dangerous, job-stealing invaders. This artwork inverts that narrative by marshalling empathy for the border-crosser who has already passed into the United States but who is about to die of thirst. Its tactic: drawing the audience into a ritualistic enactment of that perilous journey. However, by presenting the journey, the work does not aestheticize the undocumented as avatars for first-world observers, but instead, by reframing the journey in life-or-death terms, helps to deny the rhetorical construction of "illegals," by recasting the travelers as immigrants in search of the most human needs: water for their bodies and poetry for their souls.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool is a mobile phone application being developed by the Electronic Disturbance Theater in residence at UC San Diego as the b.a.n.g. (bits, atoms, neurons, genes) lab. When deployed, the application, or app, will help a traveler crossing the desert to the north of the US-Mexico border, presumably on foot, to find water by means of a simple compass navigation device, aural, and haptic cues. Once the device finds a water cache nearby, the tool begins its wayfinding process, leading the traveler, likely dehydrated and disoriented, to the nearby cache. These caches have been placed in the desert by volunteer organizations, specifically Water Stations, Inc. and Border Angels, humanitarian organizations that work to fill brightly-painted barrels, labeled "agua," with gallon jugs of water, organizations that draw volunteers from the right and left of the political spectrum in America.

The app uses GPS information from an inexpensive Motorola phone to find the traveler’s location. Although this tool will not provide sustenance for an entire trip across the border, it does attempt to aid the traveler in what its developers refer to as the "last mile" of the journey. The traveler activates the phone in their moment of extreme dehydration, since the phone has only approximately an hour’s worth of battery charge, and after locating its position, the phone searches for nearby water caches. It is important to note that as of the writing of this essay, the TBT has not been used by undocumented immigrants dying in the desert but instead has been tested by the EDT team and has been implemented rhetorically by fans and foes alike, for whom the mere mention of the Tool stirs strong emotions.

(Source: Mark C. Marino "Code as Ritualized Poetry: The Tactics of the Transborder Immigrant Tool" DHQ 7:1 para 1-3)

An engineer by training, Erthos Albino de Souza applied conceptual or physical mathematical models to the construction or deconstruction of texts. The graphic poem Le Tombeau de Mallarmé is a good demonstration of this process. He created a program for distributing temperatures and applied them to a heated fluid that runs through the interior of a tube. This program allowed a different design to be obtained based on the different temperatures of the fluids in the various sections of the tube. But since the engineer-poet coded his graphic system in such a way that each temperature scale corresponds to one of the letters of Mallarmé’s name, the result is that the letters are spatially arranged and form configurations that are vaguely reminiscent of Mallarmé’s “tomb.” By heating the fluid at different temperatures, he achieved different graphic schemes and thus different configurations of Mallarmé’s name, where the graphic sequence composes the poem.

(Source: Itaú Cultural. English translation: Luciana Gattass)

Bronze is a puzzle-oriented adaptation of Beauty and the Beast with an expansive geography for the inveterate explorer. Features help for novice players, a detailed adaptive hint system to assist players who get lost, and a number of features to make navigating a large space more pleasant.

When your brother Malcolm sends you a telegram inviting you to visit him at Biblioll College in the ancient university town of Christminster, you imagine that the mysterious “discovery” he alludes to is nothing more than some esoteric bit of chemistry, and that you’ll have a pleasant day out in beautiful surroundings.
But when you get to Christminster, nothing is as you expect. Where has Malcolm vanished to? What are the unpleasant Doctor Jarboe and the positively repulsive Professor Bungay up to? And what do long-forgotten alchemical treatises have to do with the modern day?