Lede is a text generator that produces absurdist lede lines describing narrative situations.
The Pleasure of the Coast: A Hydro-graphic Novel is a bilingual web-based work in English and French. This work was commissioned by the « Mondes, interfaces et environnements à l’ère du numérique » research group at Université Paris 8 in partnership with the cartographic collections of the Archives nationales. The title and much of the text in the work détourne Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973), replacing the word ‘text’ with the word ‘coast’. The images are drawn from an archive of coastal elevations made on a voyage for discovery to the South Pacific by the French hydrographer Beautemps-Beaupré (1793). In French, the term ‘bande dessinée’ refers to the drawn strip. What better term to describe the hydrographic practice of charting new territories by drawing views of the coast from the ship? In English, the term for ‘bande dessinée’ is ‘graphic novel’. In this hydro-graphic novel, Barthes’ détourned philosophy inflects the scientific and imperialist aspirations of the voyage with an undercurrent of bodily desire. Excerpts from An Introduction to the Practice of Nautical Surveying and the Construction of Sea-Charts, written by Beautemps-Beaupré intermingle with excerpts from Suzanne and the Pacific (1921), a symbolist novel by Jean Giraudoux written in direct opposition to the mechanistic view of science based on the assumption of an objective reality. This three language system unfolds in long horizontally scrolling web pages, mimicking the coast as it slips past the ship. This is a work of overlapping peripheries. It takes place, as it were during a period of imperialist expansion. These newly discovered coastlines are written over the surface of a topography which had already been inscribed by its inhabitants through thousands of years of use. The practice of hydrography sits at the peripheries of our contemporary understanding of the technology underpinning the maps of the world we know today.
I summon simply a circular memory: the impossibility of living outside the infinite coast.
I left for another world as for a coasting voyage, innocently; trying to see all of France, like an island, as I left it behind. I made a sketch of the land commencing with those parts which, being most remote, were the least liable to change in appearance. I savoured the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior coast out of the subsequent coast. At last the sky appeared, the whole sky, so pure, so laden with stars.
this work is not optimised for phones
"Hologram Will" is an interactive science fiction game. Businessman and millionaire David Mann has passed away, but before his death he recorded a hologram that acts as his will and testament. The hologram has been given to one of his heirs who has become the will's executor. The player can choose between three different heirs who each has their own unique message recorded for them. The inheritance consists of several rare and valuable items collected by Mann, in addition to company shares. As the executor, the player can also increase their inheritance by claiming the other heir's shares. However, legal and other fees will be incurred during this process and can exceed the net benefits of the will, making this a costly affair. (Source: Author's description)
The game is a remix and based on the code from Living Will by Mark C. Marino.
The gladiator Spiculus enters the arena one last time in this text-based simulator. Armed with a sword and shield, he fights gladiator after gladiator until he is killed. The character Spiculus is inspired by one of the most famous gladiators of the 1st century AD Rome. Spiculus won many great battles and was well-known by audiences. He was particularly admired by the emperor Nero who rewarded him with palaces and riches for his heroics.(Source: Author's description)
The simulator is a remix and based on the code from the Boromir Death Simulator. It uses Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition rules.
Bewegende Gedichten (Poems in Motion) is a collection of moving poems that fade-out and have portions of text being replaced.
Published by Tonnus Oosterhoff between 1998 and 2014, they have been translated into English Karlien van den Beukel.
Chimeria: Gatekeeper is a playable interactive conversational scenario, authored using the Chimeria Platform It uses a cognitive science-grounded model of social category membership to customize how conversational narratives unfold. Conversations between characters are important aspects of many videogames. However, most such conversational interactions in videogames are quite limited in how they take into account the identities of those characters. Conversation in videogames typically varies, if at all, based only on one aspect of the character such as an NPC referring to the character by race, class, or a gendered pronoun. Chimeria: Gatekeeper is an application of the Chimeria Platform, which seeks to developing conversational narratives that addresses such limitations.
(Source: Project site)
Tales of sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault are bubbling angrily through the wires. In late 2017, the media attention to this perpetual ill and the harrowing #metoo stories sparked us to share our own computational tale of fiction that we humbly hope can participate in this dialogue. The computer as a medium offers a unique expressive palette for storytellers. With it, we can build models of crucial and moving issues in our world.
As a step toward this aim as it relates to sexism, we are announcing the launch of our interactive narrative called Grayscale. The experience is intended to provoke players to reflect critically on sexism in the workplace, both overt & hostile and more subtle.
In Grayscale players take on the role of a recently hired Human Resources manager and must navigate ethical tensions around sexism. Players are granted agency through a streamlined, aestheticized interface made to resemble a corporate e-mail client. Over the course of an in-game week, players will read and respond to e-mails from co-workers with varying outlooks in a toxic, melancholy workplace. Emphatically: our aim is neither to simulate the experience of a woman in the workplace nor to create a training tool. Instead, we aim to help users reflect upon a model of "ambivalent sexism" through storytelling.
Eververse is a project which synthesises perspectives from disciplines in the humanities and sciences to develop critical and creative explorations of poetry and poetic identity in the digital age. Eververse sends biometric data from a fitness tracking device worn by the poet to its custom-built poetry generator. This generator utilises NLG techniques to output poetic text published in real time, and 24/7, on the Eververse website.
The Eververse application consists of three main modules. The first module interfaces with the Fitbit device and its data through its Application Programming Interface (API). The activity data of the poet wearing the device is then sent, in JSON form to the NLG module referred to as the 'generator.’ This generator carries out a number of steps in order to generate and return a poetic couplet based on a conceptual model of states based on the activity information contained within the passed JSON data. The number of words and the frequency of the generated couplets correlate with the heart rate of the poet, whereas the textual content of the couplet is generated from the input corpus which is fed to the generator. The input corpus currently comprises fifty nine poems on the topic of the body; all are previously published and none is composed by the Eververse poet; a separate, nocturnal corpus is deployed when sleep data is passed to the generator. In order to disassemble and reassemble the corpora for publication in EverVerse, they are arranged in a reverse ngram matrix and further shaped into a frequency lookup table by Poesy, a Markov Model-based Natural Language Poetry Generator. The lookup table is used to create verse lines and a python library is deployed to rhyme the verses. In short, our method takes a language model approach similar to Barbieri, et al. although we do exploit some semantics, specifically alignment of couplets with fitbit activity states. Future work will involve experimenting with exploiting language resources such as WordNet and SentiWordNet similar to previous work by Tobing and Oliveira.
The generator is written mainly in the Python programming language using the micro web framework, Flask. It consists of a web interface to display the generated poetry and an administrator interface that is used to define heart rate parameters for different zones and to determine the form and content of the verse that corresponds to these zones.
The public user interface created to display the generated poetry relies heavily on a number of Open Source JavaScript libraries. These libraries enable display of the generated text (Handlebars.js, Textillate.js), the retrieval of data from the web application’s API and user interface animations (jQuery), and the creation of generative background images (p5.js). The dynamic background images are created in realtime, and utilise the activity data as an input to affect their form and colour, representing a visual correlate to the generated poetry.
Multiple versions of this interface were created for deployment on the web, in a live performance environment, and for display in a standalone exhibition setting. Each interface was adapted to take into account the context in which it would be experienced, for example, differences in how, or if, user interaction was required, and addressing the differing requirements for text size, line spacing, and overall page layouts.
"Beyond Tomorrow" is an interactive text-based science fiction game made in Twine. The player assumes control of a wealthy business empire whose goal is to lead a successful expansion into space. The story revolves around the different choices and consequences one must face when encountering new planets and worlds. The game includes four unique planets that each has its different expansion possibilities and conflicts. The style of play is entirely up to the player and allows for either a violent or peaceful playthrough, as well as a combination of the two. Some of the themes explored in the game are power, imperialism, law and order, and warfare. (Source: Author's description)
The game uses the network hypertext structure and includes loop passages to avoid a complete restart after finishing one storyline. Several passages also use a 'either' function that allows them to have different outcomes.
"Future Lore" is a poetry generator that remixes Nick Montfort's poetry generator "Taroko Gorge". It presents a futuristic free-for-all world where chaos rules.
The human breaks the machine.
The posthumans win.
Exiles delete the observers.
eliminate the artificial digital mysterious unforgiving —
The leader destroys the cyborgs.
Machines conspire.
Drones kill.
The exile corrupts the program.
infect the surrounding —
