Presented at conference or festival

This satirical game poem creates a small deterministic universe— a system into which a player is faced with choices, real and illusory, as they shape their “life.” Conceptually patterned after the Hasbro “Game of Life,” this hypertext version presents similar choices to its players but using an interface that lays out the general structure yet retains the element of surprise. Coverley uses this to drive home a critique of gender roles, career choices laying bare how they determine and limit one’s choices in a supposedly free and open American society. Her tongue-in-cheek tone, hokey music, prosy lines of verse, and a humorously generous ending soften the biting commentary enacted in this game, inviting readers to play, explore, and reflect.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This modest work is an essay which engages non-linear narrative and includes multimedia elements such as sound and image. The title is taken from Gayatri Spivak's essay, "Can the subaltern speak?." Variously, postcolonialism and feminism as discourses of 'otherness' have addressed the notion of 'speaking' and 'speaking position', asking questions such as 'who speaks for whom?', 'who is authorised to speak'. Such questions displace the idea that the 'other' is absent or silent, or that the 'other' is indeed 'other'.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

Lo·go·zo·a n [fr. Gk logos word + zoia animals] (2005) 1 : word animals : textual organisms 2 : a phylum or subkingdom of linguistic entities that are represented in almost every kind of habitat and include aphorisms, anti-aphorisms, maxims, minims, unapologetic apothegms, neokoans, sayings, left-unsaids, shamelessly proverbialist word-grabs, epigrammatological disquisitions, lapidary confections, poemlets, gnomic microtales, instant fables, and other varieties of conceptual riffs

Words change everything. We create poems and stories to free the world from itself, to reveal the many feral faces of life. But ironically these liberating words are usually imprisoned on the page or computer screen. Out in the “real” world of day-to-day activity, we use words more bluntly. We put labels and signs on things to tame them—identify, categorize, explain, instruct, proclaim ownership. What if instead the labels could liberate the everyday world from the literal, proclaim rather than cover up the mysteries? What if they could become Logozoa—textual organisms that infest the literal with metaphor and give impetuous life and breath to meaning?

Adopt-A-Zoa

Find out what happens when you let word animals infest your daily life. Download Logozoa, print them onto your own stickers, and let them loose in your home or neighborhood. Bring a little metaphor into your routine. Keep them around the house and discover why they make fascinating pets or release them into the wild. You have 379 different creatures to choose from.

E-Dopt-A-Zoa

E-dopt a Logozoan and add it to your Web site. Your Logozoan will change every time it’s viewed, taking one of 379 different forms.

Logozoo

The next best thing to Logoz in your own hood is a visit to the Logozoo. Here you’ll see Logozoa in a natural-habitat preserve made from the nooks and crannies of daily routine, the unexpected exoticisms of everyday life, the out-of-the-ordinary often lurking in ordinary places. No bars and cages here. From the safety and comfort of your own browser, you can witness one of Nature’s true spectacles—the figurative overrunning the literal. Our zoo contains 1153 photos of 629 inhabitants, with more arriving almost daily from the US, Europe, and South America. One made it all the way from Hell. Another came from a place even more frightening—the Massachusetts Department of Motor Vehicles in Waltham.

Logoshow

Some Logozoa display a remarkable ability to slip the bonds of textual stasis and achieve flights of logomotion. Come enjoy the animated show.

Save-A-Zoa

Stickers in the wild face numerous man-made and natural threats. Determined preservation efforts are necessary to ensure that these unique creatures do not go the way of so many once-endangered, now-extinct species. Photograph your Logozoa and send these offspring to us where they will find a happy, safe home in our Logozoo.

Soothbooth

Bring those vexing questions to the Soothbooth and let us turn them into vexing answers. We have a unique colony of Logozoa on duty here that responds to any sort of question you might want to pose.

Soothcircuit

If you want deeper, less direct answers than those offered at the quick-service Soothbooth, take your questions to the Soothcircuit. The Logozoa here are guaranteed to provide insights and prognostications of the most thought-provoking quality.

(Source: Author's descripiton on the project site)

In a slowly revolving and evolving animated double panorama that takes the form of a mobius strip, the work follows a female protagonist, a male counterpart, and other characters in a manner that suggests narrative but never becomes it; instead it's an expression of temperament or a consciousness—a searching, a longing, a loneliness. 

"The Madeleine Effect" is a digital story project, an artistic look at ways to incorporate a creative text based story in the linear format and language styling of a novel into the game world. I believe that when a primarily text-based fiction story is created in a visual narrative medium, it can be utilized to prompt the user to act as a character. The user therefore may be guided to perform through a narrative. I am interested in looking at interactive fiction from the perspective of a writer aiming to invite meaningful interaction leading towards playful behaviors, or acting, on the part of the player. "The Madeleine Effect" is a fiction story that is experienced through both digital and print media. The story interface aims to be interactive through the player's performance, which is demonstrated by inputting text into the story while playing a defined role. The interactivity in this project is focused at this time so as to more easily observe the ideas I am exploring. My hope is that this project will spur thought and conversation about ideas for increased interactivity and a more intelligent technical structure.

(Source: Author's description, 2008 ELO Conference)

Hors Catégorie is an interactive fiction by Chris Calabro and David Benin developed in 2007.

It is possible to play it on almost every system, even on Smartphone.

The used Software is a z-machine Interpreter, which is a game’s requirement as the player needs it in order to emulate an Infocom machine.

It takes place entirely in a single hotel room, with several subrooms. Unlike many adventure-like interactive fictions, location, possessions, and strength are not the main obstacles of this game, but rather player knowledge and moral choices. The point is to explore the inner conflict of the protagonist and shape his character. This is why the typical presence of interactive fictions’ obstacles makes Hors Catégorie innovative and different because here they are the player moral choices.

The title of the game comes from the 'out of category' classification of difficult climbs in the Tour de France, where the game is set. The protagonist is a rider in the Tour, just waking, getting ready to take on the day's current stage.

How to play:

Like most interactive fiction, the game is played in rounds, each consisting of typing an English-language command at a prompt and getting a response, telling you how the state of the world has changed. Only commands that the parser allows cause game time to pass. By the way, not all the commands are accepted by the parser. There are two reasons why: the command has not been understood or it cannot be allowed by the rules of the game. It is up to the reader to figure out what is allowed or not. The use of imagination is a mandatory requirement.

The game ends when the protagonist's charater is sufficiently determined and so his behavior and attitude has reached a high level of determination.

(Source: Author's description)

Poetrica is an investigation about reading and reception in entropic and cybrid situations and a practice of appropriation of the advertesing sytem as public space. It was launched at Galeria Vermelho, in São Paulo, 2003, and closed in P0es1s, at Kulturforum, Berlin (2004).

The project involves a series of visual poems conceived by myself with non-phonetic fonts (dings and system fonts), a DVD, digital prints, movie trailers and a teleintervention which allowed anyone to send messages, by the Web or SMS, to three commercial electronic billboards located in downtown São Paulo, using the same typographic background I used in my nomadic poems. Messages were transmitted from 4 to 8 PM for 10”, every 3 minutes, following the order of ads scheduled to be broadcast in the same billboards. All users were notified by e-mail or SMS confirming the transmission in the electronic billboards. Poetrica website archived all messages with captions that identify the original text written before its conversion in an iconic font family, revealing in some ways a community of poetic hackers of the telecommunication system who acts in public spaces. A projection inside Galeria Vermelho transmitted back to visitors the action in the electronic billboards and street images.

For P0es1s exhibition at Kulturforum a documentary about the teleintervention on DVD was produced and a series of “ad_oetries” (ads + poetry) was conceived to announce Poetrica at P0es1s on Ku’damm electronic billboard and as trailers in Berlin movie theaters.

(Source: Author's description)