Published on the Web (online gallery)

The second of the Ambient Literature commissions features a story written by James Attlee, author of titles including Isolarion, Nocturne, Station to Station, and Guernica: Painting the End of the World (forthcoming October 2017). His new ambient literature work, The Cartographer’s Confession, combines fiction and non-fiction, imagined and real locations, to create a story of migration, loss, betrayal, and retribution that builds to a savage denouement.

The smartphone app allows you personal access to source materials for the film The Cartographer’s Confession, collected by screenwriter Catriona Schilling (CS). It features audio, prose, illustrations, an original collection of 1940’s London photographs, 3D soundscapes, and a bespoke musical score by group The Night Sky.

Readers in London can immerse themselves in the film’s locations, experiencing elements of the plot in the places where they happened. A chapter at a time, cassette tapes of Thomas Andersen’s memories, contemporary photographs taken by his childhood friend Alessandro, personal letters, and Schilling’s research notes are released, leading you on a journey to the dark secret at the story’s heart. 

The app’s ‘Armchair Mode’ offers a different experience, enabling the reader to explore the research materials and construct their own narrative, anywhere they may be.

(source: https://ambientlit.com/cartographersconfession)

picking figs in the ˚̥̞̞̽̽ͯ garden while my world eats Itself is a curatorial poetry collaboration with a large number of algorithms, bots, generators, and code snippets. Using a shifting set of parameters to define possible poem shapes in a letter-as-atomic-particle ruleset, these programs dissect and reassemble language according to a set of meanings intrinsic to their existence.

This VR Literature work is an allegorical poem deliberately designed to emulate conventions established in early cinematographic days (the silent soundtrack, white on black intertitle-like text, parallels to Kinetoscope viewing) so as to echo a similar sense of creative pioneering/exploration. Our Cupidity Coda is designed for read through multiple times in order to unstitch its poetic denseness. It’s a slow burn work for those that click with it.

Instructions and Navigation: Our Cupidity Coda is designed for viewing via an internet browser using a VR headset – no hand controllers are necessary. The work is designed for (initial) quick sharp consumption, then repeat plays for those with which it resonates. It is also viewable using only a desktop browser/monitor, but the recommended setup is a HTC Vive using the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.

The Required Field is an expansive interactive digital poem exploring the impact of policy documents, bureaucratic forms and the river of applications on our lives and our daily culture. Using twenty found and remixed government and corporate documents, the work poetically translates those overly complex and confusing forms. For example, a Tax Form for farmers will be recontextualized through an interactive image-­‐map tour, transforming specific sections of the forms into poetic text and animated elements. Or a page from a Work Visa application will be created into a platform game, where the reader/player triggers poetry blasting bureaucracies through their game play. And in the end, The Required Field, builds from and then poetically destroys the bureaucratic cultures and their fields of red-­‐tape, laws and policies for the sake of policies, the sub-­‐section to a sub-­‐section, part B stroke 9 for breathing.

Nine Billion Branches is an interactive digital poem and fiction hybrid. It explores the unexpected beauty hidden in the seemingly mundane objects and places around us. And the desires is for this digital poem to open a curious hope in the reader, that in our local and immediate worlds there are wondrous and interesting narratives and poetics, streaming out from and around us.

Note: Nine Billion Branches refers to a hypothetical number of the narratives within reach of all of us. And to experience it is to experience a book of poetry if that book was mutated and recreated as wondrous interactive creatures! Each section is different, each section is its own creation.

This digital poem won the inaugural digital writing prize at the Queensland Literary Awards. The prize of $10,000 is the largest of its kind internationally.

w: http://media.hyperrhiz.io/hyperrhiz17/gallery/nelson/index.html

d: The world, its politics and environments, conflicts and economies, is in peril, in disarray. We are flooded with tragic tales and the shameful deeds of others. And because of this we have lost sight of the beauty, the story and narrative hidden in the local, in the landscapes around us. We filter out the seemingly mundane of our immediate world. And yet it is in this immediate world where beauty lives, and change begins.

This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.

Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text was added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker was published in December 2018.

This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.

Winner of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People's Choice Award 2018

Shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Digital Literature 2018

Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018

(Source: Author's Description)