Application

Lines and Curves

Lines and Curves is a collection of electronic poems for PC andApple Macintosh available on Internet. I needed a player everybody has on his computer which could be downloaded easily, even with a slow connection. These conditions once performed, my purpose was to focus on one of electronic poetry Fundamentals : moving shapes generated by algorithms. The items which appear upon the screen will be different for each computer. Letters are made of lines, thick or thin, up or down strokes, round or straight, vertical, or horizontal. Words are made of letters, and sentences are made of words. Lines and curves are the basic units of all writing and printing. The most elementary written (or printed) poetry is the combination of lines and curves. « A » is line-line-line « B » line-line-curve-line-curve-line. Only the « O « is a single closed curve, a circle impossible to write perfectly but by Raphaël. This reminds me that writing is drawing. Young children know this very well. Lines and Curves is drawn poetry; not drawn by me or somebody else, but by a device.

The aim of this piece was to work with a group of people from Ashworth a high Security Mental Hospital to produce an interactive programme embodying the life experience of those involved. This is manifested in the form of an anonymous computer personality made up of the collective experience of the group. Ashworth Hospital is located in the north of England near Liverpool and is home and prison to people who are a danger to themselves or to people outside the hospital.The group of patients I worked with ranged from serial killers to rapists, potential suicides and casualties of the excesses of society. The staff I am worked with included psychiatric nurses of twenty years experience and orderlies.This artwork is about the recording of the life experiences of the client group that are a mirror to ourselves ("normal society") and our amnesia when confronted with the excesses of our society. This forgetting is a dark shadow cast by plenty, a nightmare for some that constructs misinformation and fear about insanity, violence and victims.

(Source: Project description)

In Erik Loyer's Strange Rain touch, sound, color, narrative and haptic play (the tilt of the device) blend into a tightly choreographed story driven by the gamer/reader's input. Alphonse the protagonist is standing out in a rainstorm contemplating his ailing sister and his role in her recovery. User touch controls the pace of raindrops falling on Alphonse and calls forth phrases of Alphonse's interior monologue. Tap the screen twice to ask Alphonse whether he's ready to go back into the house.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)

RKCP reads a selection of poems by a particular author or authors and then creates a "language model" of that author’s work. The language model incorporates computer-based language analysis and mathematical modeling techniques. RKCP can then write original poems from that model. The poems have a similar style to the author(s) originally analyzed, but are completely original new poetry.

RKCP can combine authors by creating language models using more than one author file. In addition, RKCP allows the user to create "poet personalities," each of which specifies a specific language model (which RKCP has created from one or more files of an author’s poems) and a set of parameters which control certain aspects of the poetry generation process. There can be multiple poet personalities derived from each language model. One of the parameters specified in a poet personality is the type of poems, which includes haiku, free form, and several other styles.

(Source: Project site, "How it works")

Possibly Short's most polished work, and that's saying something. In a city based on both high technology and magic, trains and robots and illusions, an innocent traveller gets swept into the center of a clandestine power-struggle which will forever change the city and how it is seen. Excellent world-building, not just in that the environment is highly explorable and implemented in great detail, but in that the city has a distinct foreign-metropolis-through-tourist-eyes flavor, and a history which makes itself known in various and subtle ways. Good sense of choice: although there's basically only one ending, much of what happens along the way is variable. Uses the conversation system from Pytho's Mask: a combination of menus and ask/tell that's sensitive to context and lets you change topics arbitrarily. Even though most characters will respond to a wide variety of topics, it's still easy to run out of things to say. Features a "novice" mode, but the standard mode is recommended for anyone but the absolute newcomer to IF.

(Source: Carl Muckenhoupt, Baf's Guide to IF Fiction Archive)

Fictions d’Issy is a generative novel, its narrative being gradually composed as it is presented to the readers. It was first shown at the 2005 edition of the 1ER CONTACT FESTIVAL.It retraces the story of two characters – he and she – and their relationship, oscillating between breaking-up and being involved. The story - continuously generated, sentence after sentence - is published in Issy-les-Moulineaux’ eleven urban e-newspapers, alternating with municipal information. The story takes place in the town of Issy; the names of public establishments, streets and squares are memorised by the text-generating device and appear regularly throughout the narrative. The local population is thus able to follow the characters’ adventures as they take place in familiar places.

Readers can shape the narrative, whether they live in Issy or not, by calling a toll-free number, as messages regularly invite them to do. When calling this number, they are asked to press a key on the phone’s keyboard, which then acts as a symbolic map representing both the town’s territory and the emotional territory of the characters’ relationship. The choices made by readers either bring the characters together or pull them apart; readers then receive a text message with the narrative piece they have helped to generate. Piece by piece, contribution by contribution, the readers are able to modify the novel-generating system, which will ultimately decide whether the couple splits up or reunites.  All the generated pieces are also stored online on a dedicated website.

(Source: Le Cube)

Author's description:Winchester's Nightmare is a work in Inform, premiered at Digital Arts and Culture '99 on October 29 in Atlanta. In its "hardback" form, it is a novel-length interactive fiction which includes a computer running software: a novel machine. The work consists of a primitive portable computer running this cybertext in the literary fiction genre, with a text-adventure interface. Ten hardbacks were manufactured for sale;some are still available. The softback, available free, contains the entire text of the hardback edition.The main character of Winchester's Nightmare is the historical figure Sarah Winchester, née Pardee, 1837-1922. Sarah is remembered for building onto her San Jose house constantly for more than thirty years. The official, and rather simplistic, explanation for this eccentric enterprise is that she was following the instructions of a spiritualist, seeking redemption for the many killings effected by the Winchester rifle, made by her husband's company. Sarah was made rich by the mass production of weapons, gave her name to the Winchester hard drive, and built an ever-sprawling house that serves as a metaphorical target for today's American city. In this work which treats themes of technology and American urban life, the interactor acts and explores through her.Winchester's Nightmare is about Sarah's psyche, and does not portray her house directly. While the Winchester Mansion seems rich in narrative possibilities, Winchester's Nightmare takes place instead in the composite metropolis of Sarah's dream, United City. This city is peopled with other characters and a plot (driven by Sarah's search for redemption) organizes the narrative. The setting, however, is the dominant element.United City is like Rockvil in Steven Meretzky's A Mind Forever Voyaging. It is an American city, one which the main character sees as home, and it is transformed through time. It is also like the landscape of Robert Pinsky's Mindwheel, in that it is a "mental map" of a character's psyche. Exploration of the world reveals aspects of the protagonist and her particular obsessions. The interaction with and completion of the text is motivated by series of challenges, as in text adventures. The puzzles presented are constructed for thematic appropriateness, and present to motivate exploration and reflection. The interactor will hopefully be able to engage with the work as literature, rather staying in a jigsaw-puzzle mode of thinking during all of the interaction.

(Source: http://nickm.com/if/wn_description.html)

Composition No. 1 is a re-imagining of the little known classic by French writer, Marc Saporta. Saporta writes about the interconnected stories of a group of Parisians, centred around the Sorbonne. Quite literally, Composition No. 1 is made up entirely of stand alone pages. Each has its own self-contained narrative, leaving it to you to shuffle through and decide which order to read the book, and how much or little you want to read before you begin again.Key features:> Randomly shuffled pages, allowing you to play and read however much or little you want.> Randomized, interactive cover; slide letters around like fridge magnets.> Explore a typographic artwork, using the book's entire text.

(Source: iTunes App store)

Ad Verbum is a Oulipo-inspired wordplay-based game.

Eliza (Weizenbaum 1966) is the first chatterbot -- a computer program that mimics human conversation. In only about 200 lines of computer code, Eliza models the behavior of a psychiatrist (or, more specifically, the "active listening" strategies of a touchy-feely 1960s Rogerian therapist).

(Source: Dennis G. Jerz's site)