Presented at conference or festival

In the film ”when” Ottar Ormstad is transferring his practice as concrete poet to the realm of a programmable networked space, blending his poetry with specially composed modern music with electronic elements. His b/w photographs developed in the darkroom are presented in combination with words in different languages, some of them exceeded into ”letter-carpets”. Some sentences are from well known songs or films, other letter-combinations are invented by the author.

The film is telling a story about life and death, basically from the standpoint of cars, rotten in a field in Sweden. The narrative is very open, and each viewer may experience the film very differently. This is also dependent upon the language background, any translation is – intentionally – not given.

when has been screened at festivals for experimental short film, so far in France, Romania, Russia and Norway.

Explore a dark, mountainous landscape dominated by a gigantic tower. 

Set in a dark and abstract dream world that revolves around a crashed bus, the atmospheric literary game environment The Dead Tower can be freely explored at full-screen with the mouse and keyboard. Leonardo Flores says about the project: “This narrative poem is arranged on a darkly atmospheric virtual world designed to both creep you out and pull you in…“. Like the proverbial moth, the reader’s attention is drawn towards the brightest things around: white words float in the air, static or rotating. And the lines of mezangelle verse both heighten the dread by telling fragments of a ghostly narrative prefigured by the bus crash site the reader finds herself in and soften the tone with hints about the interface that nudge the fourth wall. (Source: GalleryDDDL description)

An animated adaptation of a poem written by Claire Donato. Cascades of textual progressions -- appearances, disappearances, fades, mirrorings -- are scripted in detail and played back by a custom Java engine across two "pages." The work was presented and read by Claire Donato and Ian Hatcher at ELO_AI 2010 in Providence.

This piece takes us inside the brain and mind of a speaker in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Bigelow roughly maps the initial four parts of the poem on a superior view of a human brain: “My Brain Is” on the frontal lobes, “What My Therapist Said” on the parietal lobes, “The Metaphor Room” on the temporal lobes, and “How to Dream a Suicide” on the occipital lobes. The final section (verse? movement?) focuses on different types of treatment: religion, medication, therapy, and exercise. Overall, the work is richly layered with video clips, language, sound, and minimalist interactivity to examine the speaker’s mindset as a biological, psychological, and social subject. The combination of fact, dream imagery, and creative exploration of suicide all showcase Bigelow’s expert hand in crafting blended metaphors and balancing the tone with delicately understated humor.

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

"Lord's Prayer, The" (2007) takes the original English version of "The Lord's Prayer" (in this case, a variation of the King James Version) and, using the same words, creates an entirely new poem. 

(Source: Artist's description, 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

(Author's description.) 

“maybe make some change” merges parser-based interactive fiction with textual and multimedia layering to produce a confrontational exploration of a true event. Inspired by the trial of Adam Winfield, a whistleblower soldier accused of murder, the piece freezes a single battlefield moment and replays it from half a dozen violently conflicting perspectives.

“change” questions the trust we place in narrators, and explores the fine edge between moral and immoral acts in a war zone. Juxtaposing its text narration with both footage of first-person shooters set during contemporary wars and online social networking pages of the accused soldiers, the piece also challenges the representation of and engagement with current events in mainstream interactive media.

“change” was part of the jury-award-winning “‘what if im the bad guy’ and other stories” exhibition at the 2011 UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts & New Media MFA show.

(Author's description:) Almost Goodbye is an experiment in minimalist procedural content generation for interactive narratives. It does not try to generate a whole story or plot points from scratch, but instead asks what is the minimum amount of procedural generation that can be added to a hand-authored story to produce something both computationally interesting but still narratively sound. The resulting narrative, about a scientist leaving Earth forever and saying her final goodbyes, generates “satellite” sentences that color the narrator’s description and perception of her conversations based on the choices made by the player in prior conversations and other player-influenced contextual cues.

Modern Moral Fairy Tales is a tale told in 18 (chai) nodes. The story has two main lines--an upfront fairy tale dealing with greed, isolation, Nigerian scams, and online learning.  The shadow story for this main line concerns a sentient internet cafe and a state run dissemination of information or suppression of information, depending on how you approach it.  MaJe thought this was waaaaay too dark, and hid an Official History of Salmon in Clear Water Ravines, which posits a much better society--under the waves. Her shadow story handles the day to day life of salmon, from financial news to recent literary acquisitions.

Author description: Blue Lacuna is a long-form work of parser-based interactive fiction containing nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, an explorable novel telling a serious story about the nature of choice and happiness. Lacuna simplifies standard IF syntax with a unique interface: to advance the story, readers type highlighted keywords indicating objects of interest, directions to explore, or topics to pursue during conversation.

Blue Lacuna’s story revolves around a complex reactive character, the castaway Progue, who evolves over the course of the story based on the reader’s interactions with him. The climax of the story and resolution of Progue’s character arc—whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes—is dependent on how the reader treats him in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work’s ten chapters. The structure of Blue Lacuna is thus best represented not by a branching tree but a braided rope, with countless ways each reader may braid the threads of story into a personal and meaningful narrative.