Presented at conference or festival

This hybrid print- and web-based work work aims to address the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ computing through the oblique strategy of calling attention to the materiality of the clouds in the sky. Both are commonly perceived to be infinite resources, at once vast and immaterial; both, decidedly, are not. Fragments from Luke Howard’s classic “Essay on the Modifications of Clouds” (1803) as well as more recent online articles and books on media and the environment are pared down into hyptertextual hendecasyllabic verses. These are situated within surreal animated gif collages composed of images materially appropriated from publicly accessible cloud storage services. The cognitive dissonance between the cultural fantasy of cloud storage and the hard facts of its environmental impact is bridged, in part, through the constant evocation of animals: A cumulus cloud weighs one hundred elephants. A USB fish swims through a cloud of cables. Four million cute cat pics are shared each day. A small print iteration of “The Gathering Cloud” shared through gift, trade, mail art, and small press economies further confuses boundaries between physical and digital, scarcity and waste. (Source: Author's description)

Novelling is a digital novel from 2016 by Will Luers, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean and it is about fiction itself, and how we read and write it. The authors' aim is to analyze and combine the performances of reading-fiction and writing-fiction in order to create a "common system" in which the two activities work together. To make it possible, they employed three key-elements, as text, video and sound. Novelling has been written on a website using the languages of HTML5 and JavaScript and it is available on its website (novelling.newbinarypress.com). The authors created several interfaces which last 30 seconds - then, new interfaces will appear. Anyways, the user may change it whenever he/she wants just clicking on the screen. After 6 minutes, the novel restarts allowing the reader to experience a new reading direction. In this way the reader has the chance to try different "key-lecture" time by time. Novelling unfolds through the narrative connections between four characters, which are all immersed in their isolated-life-worlds. On the screen appear several 'he' and 'she' and never real names. This give you the feeling of a lot of voices that speak with any specific direction or purpose - consequently you do not really understand what is going on. At some point, it became easy to me to identify the four characters: even if they seem to be insulated in each of their words, it is clear how they are seamlessly connected to each other. There is no real or specific plot and neither a point from which the story can be spotted. It is funny to try to guess who the main character in every different text is. In this way the entire project is like a test of every possibilities of narrative.

---

Novelling is a generative interface that renders a semiotic arrangement of sound, image and text. Readerly and cinematic, narrative and poetic, its sequential structure is variable. It unfolds without a strongly delineated plot, character or narrative structure and yet is suggestive of “novelistic” spaces. These are spaces of interior reflection and exterior gestures, intimacy and estrangement, things said and unsaid, action and desire, reading, writing and looking.Continuing an exploration of generative multimedia and potential narratives, this third collaboration of Will Luers, Hazel Smith and Roger Dean, takes up the subject of the novel as a virtual space of co-mingling subjects and settings. (Source: http://elo2016.com/will-luers-hazel-smith-roger-dean/, Artists' statement)

---

novelling is a recombinant digital novel that employs text, video and sound. It poses questions about the acts of reading and writing fiction, and inhabits the liminal space between the two activities. The work is a generative system that algorithmically orders and spatially arranges fragments of media (design elements, text, video and sound) in 6-minute cycles. Every 30 seconds the interface changes, but the user may also click the screen at any time to produce a change. Straddling the lines between literature, cinema and music, novelling evokes the history of the novel (remixing and rewriting 19th and 20th century sources), but it also questions the form's basis in plot, character and words alone. novelling unfolds through suggested narrative connections between four characters. The characters, immersed in their isolated life-worlds, appear to be transported elsewhere by what they are reading. Are they reading and thinking each other? How does the writing relate to the reading? Are the words on the screen versions or even drafts of the novel? Do the sounds come from a different interior world? The work is suggestive of "novelistic" spaces, spaces of interior reflection and exterior gestures, intimacy and estrangement, gazing and being gazed at. The variable and deterministic system of selection and arrangement produces a fluid, ever-novel and potential narrative.

Color Yourself Inspired™ is a generative artwork that creates unpredictable poetic phrases from Benjamin Moore’s paint color database; it is an interdisciplinary exploration of sound, color and language. An online collection of over 1000 unique color names are poetically sequenced using phonetic analysis and parts of speech analysis in a computer program designed by the artists. Instead of labeling color with language as the marketing team has done in the original database, Color Yourself Inspired™ (a marketing slogan from the Benjamin Moore website) inverts this relationship and uses language to generate visual information. (Source: http://thenewriver.us/color-yourself-inspired/)

To understand desire, one needs language and flesh.
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

This physical installation explores hypertext on a granular level: playing with the DNA of the English language: letters with Rose, a symbolic written language based on roman characters. In Rose, each letter takes on a concept, and permutations of that letter indicate various aspects of the concept. This influences word choice and inflection: you can choose to put one letter into Rose or entire words. Toy blocks emblazoned in QR codes [1] allow participants to explore Rose and connect with the explanation of each letter on the www.thinkingrose.com site.

The work repurposes books we may have known and loved as children, books that were so loved that they became as real as the Velveteen Rabbit, prancing off into the wilds of our imaginations. Each book is scribbled in with Rose translations and commentaries, [2] transforming the child’s simple language into a complexity of thought and connotation. Toys are attached to the works, harking back into the depths of our primordial connections of language to objects. These connections besiege the question: At what point did words become real to us? When did texting and language become flesh?

This work provides a choice of interactive levels:

- a simple conundrum of contrasting overarching ideas with childhood embodiments of those ideals
- a quick dip into the complex nuances that Rose translations and alphabets can shade text with
- a deep and intensive un-coding and re-coding of the words and works

This installation is a one-off: the installation will only ever be shown at ELO 2016. It will be auctioned off to benefit ELO and the Rose Project Scholarship fund.

“A Change of Heart” asks the question, Is there life after college? For Danny Clay, there is no easy answer as his job, dreams, love life, and health devolve into chaos. Refusing to be molded, “Clay” navigates through one strange event after another on his predestined path to what he has always rejected: change.”A Change of Heart” is linear in plot and uses other elements of fiction (character, symbol, etc.) typically found in conventional print-based works. This is a deliberate attempt to bridge the “audience gap,” where we still see a mainstream audience for print-based literature, but a limited audience for electronic works. This bridging is an important concern in our field: with works using linear plots and other standard elements of fiction, we can expand our audience among readers who are more comfortable with the conventions of traditional literature; at the same time, we can also show younger writers a path, with its historic antecedents, that connects the past and future of storytelling. This mixed brand of electronic literature—technically savvy in its use of multimedia but borrowing elements of traditional story telling—empowers our field with an inclusiveness that embraces beginning writers and widens the potential for popular engagement.

VR novel for Oculus Rift

Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask & President Akimbo is a novel translated into virtual reality (for Oculus Rift) – a political fable of robots, sex work, hallucinogens and the consequences of power. The viewer is transported through mental hospitals, taxis, hotels and palaces mostly on rails, but with some space to explore the scenes in sandbox mode, enabling an encounter with hundreds of archival photographs and pencil sketches and found audio from across asia. The narrative – disturbing and comical and haunting and revelatory – is encountered through the spoken word of a single narrator.

Experience the troubling, bizarre and absurd life of Sheila Carfenders, a 22-year-old mental patient who is abducted by her abusive San Francisco psychiatrist, Doctor Mask. With the Oculus Virtual Reality system, go with Doctor Mask as he takes Sheila to an impoverished Asian country decaying from a violent insurgency. The Mask hopes to build his own experimental psychiatric institution after making deals with the corrupt regime’s delirious leader, President Akimbo.

Sheila’s fate?

Unexpected amid a coup.

The characters’ three-dimensional models are built on structural skeletons, and the game environment is undermined and rendered uncanny through the use of hundreds of documentary photographs from Ehrlich’s personal archives.

With Oculus, you can explore the labyrinth of Sheila’s struggle and innocence, her psychiatrist’s brutal behavioral techniques, and the realpolitick of an American-backed coup against a deranged dictator. All of the people — including Sheila Carfenders, Doctor Mask, President Akimbo and the story’s other characters — are derived from interviews, events, documents and composites of real individuals. With Oculus Rift, you can explore the labyrinth of Sheila’s struggle and innocence, her psychiatrist’s brutal behavioral techniques, and the realpolitick of an American-backed coup against a deranged dictator.

(Source: Artists' statement)

Based on an earlier installation, Read for us … and show us the pictures, which debuted at ISEA 2015, The Readers Project presents the work of a software entity that generates digital video montage, with visual content sourced through live image search.
The Montage Reader analyses its text and first establishes a overall visual grammar based on closed-class words that underlie linguistic structure.
The reader then searches for images corresponding to phrases – ‘longest common phrases’ whenever possible – finally composing a sequence of still and animated images and video, that corresponds with the written language of the text both structurally and also semantically – at least in so far as contemporary image search proposes a correspondence that is meaningful for the human user-readers of network services and their aggregation of crowd-sourced indexing. The chief text read by the Montage Reader is ‘Some Thing We Are,’ a short story by Daniel C. Howe.

(Source: Artists' statement)

Sherwood Rise is the world's first augmented novel. It's an Augmented Reality (AR) transmedia interactive graphic novel/ game, told over 4 days through a range of media and formats: printed newspapers, AR on mobile phones, emails, hacker websites, blogs, sound, music, graphic novels and illustrations.

Inspired by the current financial crisis, and the Occupy movement, the story is based on the traditional Robin Hood tale. The traditional tale of peasant revolt and dissent is brought up to date, and adapted for AR and transmedia. In our adaptation, austerity is imposed on the poor by a privileged elite, but resisted by a gang of hacker outlaw terrorists called the 'Merry Men'.

Each day you receive a newspaper (via email) which you interact with via AR. Your interaction (how much you support the establishment or the Merry Men) updates a database, which then determines the version of newspaper you receive the next day. My intention was to make a physical book interactive, and in this way explore the future of the book.

The project explores the future of the book and transmedia storytelling:

• It's a story told in a range of media on multiple platforms
• It expands a traditional printed story, adds additional layers of story through AR
• It adds augmented digital artefacts onto a printed story.

The objectives of the project are:

• To add virtual elements to the real world page by combining mobile device/ new media technology and the book
• To use mobile device based AR and transmedia, in novel and artistic ways to expand a narrative
• In creative and artistic ways to raise awareness and stimulate thought about financial fraud, corruption, austerity, politics
• To produce a book which is part static and part dynamic, and altered by the reader's behaviour
• To challenge power relations of news using AR.

My research interests for this project included:

• AR activism, challenging authority, privilege and power
• The politics of AR and storytelling/ news, contested content, critiquing ways that news is reported, revealing the "truth"
• Aesthetic, artistic, cultural and sociopolitical uses of AR and transmedia stories
• Revealing hidden stories within a fiction
• Many voices in a story - simultaneous multiple viewpoints
• Documenting the process and experience of designing, adapting and building a transmedia story from the ground up
• The reader experience - reading and navigating an AR transmedia book, moving from paper to screen, the disjointed reading experience
• Exploring aesthetic possibilities of AR, graphic novels and illustrations on mobile devices.

Sherwood Rise - the story begins here
Please note that since the AR software "Junaio" is no longer available (since 2015), then the project doesn't run anymore.

This was a research collaboration between Dave Miller (concept, code and drawings) and Dave Moorhead (screenwriter). This was a post-doc research project funded by the University of Bedfordshire, as part of the UNESCO Future of the Book project.

This poster outlines some of the key elements of PhD research currently being undertaken in Maynooth University’s Department of Media Studies. The power provides a visual overview of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries case study and its transmedia elements, highlighting the narrative’s various entry points and potential story paths. The poster also includes some initial insights from a critical comparative analysis of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Pride and Prejudice, revealing the key differences between the digital and print reading experiences. Lastly, the poster outlines the planned progression of the project during the next few years, with a particular emphasis on connecting Espen Aarseth’s theories of ergodic literature and cybertexts to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.

Artist’s Statement:
“Loss Sets” translates poems co-written by Jordan Scott and Aaron Tucker into sculptures printed by 3D printers. If language is the material from which poetry is built, what becomes of poetry when it sheds language for pure form? What, if anything, is reconciled? What is reimagined? What is lost? Within this nexus of translation and sculptural poetics, the project thus aims to respond to the multiples of contemporary loss (physical, environmental, artistic, personal). The poetic form allows Scott and Tucker to explore the dirge, lament and elegy as means to grapple with loss and, ultimately, the failure of language to adequately represent trauma. The poems, written in collaboration, therefore bring two consciousnesses to the task of what can only be the failed task of reclamation. It is hoped that when joined with the algorithm and, finally, the 3D object itself, Scott and Tucker’s poetics of loss will take on a ‘translated’ physical form to be handled, manipulated, stolen or destroyed.
(Source: http://elo2016.com/festival/2214-2/)