Application

Minitel animated poem shown online in the group exhibition Brazil High-Tech (1986), a minitel art gallery organized by Eduardo Kac and Flavio Ferraz and presented by Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo. Upon close scrutiny, the apparently random letters and numbers that form the bardcode reveal hidden meanings (in Portuguese). When viewers logged on they first saw a black screen. Then, a small white rectangle appeared in the middle of the screen. Slowly, vertical bars descended inside the horizontal rectangle. At the bottom, viewers saw apparently random letters and numbers, reminding one of conventional bar codes. Upon close scrutiny the reader noticed that the letters formed the word "Deus" (God, in Portuguese). The spacing of the letters revealed "eu" (I, in Portuguese) inside "Deus". The numbers were not random either. They indicated the date when the work was produced and uploaded to the Brazilian videotex network.

(Source: Author)

Minitel animated poem shown online in the group exhibition Brazil High-Tech (1986), a minitel art gallery organized by Eduardo Kac and Flavio Ferraz and presented by Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo. Letters forming the word "caos" (chaos, in Portuguese) ricochet off the edge of the screen to simultaneously form the open-ended hourglass outline and the infinity symbol. As they zigzag, the letters overlap suggesting new meanings.

Minitel animated poem shown online in 1985 in the group exhibition "Arte On-Line", a minitel art gallery presented by Companhia Telefônica de São Paulo. An incantatory word of Kaballistic resonance is rendered as a cosmic monolith following the atomic model (the vowel as nucleus and the consonants as orbiting particles).

Created in 1982 and presented on an electronic signboard in 1984 at the Centro Cultural Cândido Mendes, Rio de Janeiro (in Portuguese). "Não!" is organized in text blocks which circulate in virtual space at equal intervals, leaving the screen blank prior to the flow of the next text block. The visual rhythm thus created alternates between appearance and disappearance of the fragmented verbal material, asking the reader to link them semantically as the letters go by. The internal visual tempo of the poem is added to the subjective performance of the reader. The poem was realized on a LED display.

(Source: Author)

nobody knows but you was written for Double-Cute Battle Mode, an application prototype for a VJ (video jockey) remix battle. DCBM allows two players to combine visuals and special effects in a playful competition for screen space. Using joysticks, players plug their imagination into their computer and share a creative space in an intuitive video-game style interaction. The piece was conceived as a way to ease text back into an image-dominated culture by treating it simultaneously as a visual special effect and as a poem. The twenty-three verses appear on a plane in three-dimensional space. A cube shape displays additional visuals. Both the cube and the plane may be scaled and rotated, and the reader has control over which verse or image is displayed. You may notice in the image at top left, or while watching the installation video, a twelve-year-old girl plopped down in front of the installation. She played with the piece on and off for three hours. She began singing the words, making up melodies and turning certain verses into refrains. There is a clear lack of literature that responds to the intellectual and creative needs of young people today. I hope that interactive writing can help to fill that gap. (Source: author)

sniff_jazzbox creates an audible city. it converts the wlan-waves into sound waves. the wlan conversion uses a streamsearch algorithm which was also used in streamfishing and searchsongs. the extended version for iphone will let the user control instruments and speed of the melodies.

sniff_jazzbox captures the wlans in the immediate area like a wardrive-tool and produces a stream of wlan-names. this stream of words might be understood as a subconscious expression of the presently existing communication networks. sniff_jazzbox renders private data visible, translates it and makes it audible as a melody of yearning for contact and exchange.

the names of the captured hotspots contain playable tones of the musical notation system (c, d, e, f, g, a, h, c, fis, ces ...). as you walk, ride or drive through town you will inevitably encounter loads of hotspots which are accessible for your little machine. sniff_jazzbox.audible_city is made for the iphone, it registers all the hotspots and turns them into music. through a set of instruments and different speeds for the tunes the user can interact with the tunes and adapt the music. Try it out! Walk through your neighbourhood or any town - preferably in the evening - and hear the wireless and invisble communication around you!

The Mystery House Advance Team has reverse engineered Mystery House, the first text-and-graphics adventure game. Members of the Advance Team have reimplemented it in a modern, cross-platform, free language for interactive fiction development, and have fashioned a kit to allow others to easily modify this early game.

Modified versions of Mystery House have been created by the elite Mystery House Occupation Force, consisting of individuals from the interactive fiction, electronic literature, and net art communities:

• Adam Cadre (Varicella, Photopia)
• Daniel Garrido, a.k.a. dhan (Ocaso Mortal)
• Michael Gentry (Little Blue Men, Anchorhead)
• Yune Kyung Lee & Yoon Ha Lee (The Moonlit Tower, Swanglass)
• Nick Montfort (Ad Verbum, Implementation)
• Scott Rettberg (The Unknown, Implementation)
• Dan Shiovitz (Lethe Flow Phoenix, Bad Machine)
• Emily Short (Savoir-Faire, City of Secrets)

Visitors to the Mystery House site can play these modded games and can also create their own versions to offer online there. The Mystery House Occupation Kit allows artists and authors, with or without programming experience, to hack at and reshape Mystery House, easily modifying the "surface" aspects. Artists and writers may also choose to undertake more substantial renovations, engaging with, commenting on, and transforming an important interactive program from decades past.

Mystery House is a primitive interactive fiction for the Apple II by Ken and Roberta Williams, who published the game in 1980 through their company, On-Line Systems (later called Sierra). The game was a hit -- Sierra sold more than 10,000 copies in a very small, new market for home computer software. Mystery House accepts one- or two-word typed commands from the user and presents crude, monochrome line drawings and terse textual descriptions. In 1987, in celebration of Sierra's 7th anniversary, Mystery House was placed in the public domain. The modifiable Mystery House Taken Over reimplementation has likewise been placed in the public domain by the Advance Team.

(Source: About MHTO page on the project site)