Tristessa is a narrative machine that generates short stories. Words and phrases are combined to produce a new story each time the program is run, but as you see when you read some of Tristessa's stories the structure remains the same.
Tristessa er en fortellermaskin som forteller korte noveller. Ord og fraser blandes sammen slik at fortellingen er ny hver gang programmet kjøres, men som du ser når du leser noen av Tristessas fortellinger er det hele tiden likheter i strukturen. Tristessa er et eksempel på generativ litteratur, hvor et bestemt antall ord og fraser legges inn i en database og tekster genereres etter bestemte regler.
While most social dynamics focus on the exterior of the human condition, the outward body and its many appearances, it is the interior, the cellular level of humanness that has the greatest influence on who we become. And yet, those microscopic worlds inside our bodies, the genetic codes that drive our growth and eventual dissolution have eluded any attempt at full comprehension. Yet these discoveries are, sadly, subject to power relations that claim ownership over gene sequences and sell back to us cynical futurities of an ideal human form through genetic manipulation. This new science, what some are calling 'the hinge' in contemporary human development, drives and bursts the net-based new media creation "The Bomar Gene".
The premise of "The Bomar Gene" is that within every human there is a singular gene, unique only to that individual. And with that gene comes a singular ability, a rare, mostly never realized capacity for interacting with the world. "The Bomar Gene" explores this mythical gene, through a series of ficto-biographies, with each story being re-translated and spatialized through interactive interfaces and embodied animations. Each section opens up such questions as: How are we defined by our genetic code? What does it mean to be an individual, to be unique? What are the implications of a society obsessed with rare abilities and super-powers? Each interface/section not only explores the realms of culture and individuality and genetics, but also attempts to innovate new methods of net based aesthetics and arouse alternatives for user interaction with artistic content.
The layering of ideas, of various notions of how our internal forms recreate our external reach, is explored through the multiple paths, the weaving of sound, scrolling text and dynamically explorative images. And then within the layers and stories are nine interfaces, the hands of this net-artwork, they not only serve to display information, but to alter the way the user connects with the content, to become digital fingers for fictional genes.
(Source: Author description from his site)
Brief poem presented as text slowly moving on the screen, accompanied by a white skyline of Waikiki on a black screen. Later, moon-blue images of hotel signs invite clicks that bring forth further reflections on the nighttime work of those who tend the tourists.
Editorial statement from Electronic Literature Collection:
John David Zuern’s Ask Me For the Moon is a digital poem created in Adobe Flash using juxtaposed images, words, and sounds, to create the feeling of the labor behind the scenes at a Hawaii resort.
The images and colors (black, white, and turquoise dominate) paint a picture of Waikiki that is emphasized in Zuern’s notes on the piece, which observe that at the time the piece was made there was approximately one worker for every two and a half visitors to Waikiki. The text of the piece plays over the faded gray landscape of the island, while the moving pictures depict fragments of labor moving through like waves along the shore.
The visual poetics serve as a poignant reminder of how much work is done at night, out of sight of the tourists who swarm the island.
Taglined "a revolving haiku", this poem displays a three line haiku on the screen. After a few moments, a line is replaced by a new line, until the whole haiku slowly has shifted to a completely new poem.
Author's description:
The idea for "Turning Away" came from my experience with creating animated GIFs. I was struck by the notion of using text instead of images to create a reading experience that would transcend the immutability of traditional text. The actual mechanics of the poem are simple enough. Each line is an animated GIF looping through a series of four variations. I manipulated the amount of time each line displayed before it changed in a random fashion so that the lines did not change at the same times, thus creating a poem that was constantly shifting in its arrangement of the three lines. The reason I chose a haiku stanza as the form of the poem was twofold: first, I realized the necessity of a poem short enough for the eye to comprehend in its entirety; too many lines would simply be impossible to keep up with if two or more of them were changing at the same time. Second, I have always been drawn to the epiphanic quality of the haiku. I was fascinated with the idea of creating a poem in which one epiphany evaporated into another epiphany, one intuitive sensation "turned" into another, the way that the perception of a hillside might change as it was transformed by the light and shadow of passing clouds, or the way the still surface of a pond might be transfigured by wind and light.
The difficulty in writing the poem was in creating twelve lines which would not only be coherent in any combination but also different from one another. It would be simple enough to create a scene which changed only physically, but it is another matter altogether to coax diametrically opposite meanings from the different formations.
(Source: The New River)
Animated gifs in HTML.
The Hugo Ball, subtitled Algorithmic Improvisations on the 74 unique words of Gadji Beri Bimba is exactly that. Using Hugo Ball’s Dadaist poem as a source this piece remixes the 74 unique words of the poem to generate – on the fly – countless variations.
(Source: Author's description from his site)
Flash
A short hypertext fiction set in Japan. Each node consists of a brief text accompanied by an image reminiscent of a Japanese style brush painting, and a few areas of the picture are more clearly in focus than others. These are linked to other nodes. The reader may also use back and forwards arrows to navigate.
The Dazzle as Question is an animated hypermedia poem which traces the conflict between the left and right brain inclinations of an erstwhile 'old school' artist [as] experienced via his encounter with the digital realm. This conflict notes the[digital] media/um's seemingly unrivaled sway as pitted against the narrator's right brain predilections [heralds of an identity within which he was formerly ensconced, as if such were an ethic of his very being …].The Dazzle … is a lyrical one; it's locutional marks and varied rhythmic emphases are indicative of the particular tones and dialectical nature of the question and confusion underlying this untoward 'love/hate' relationship. The poem is wrought with the haunt of a foreboding caught between fascination and an almost 'big-brother'-like fear of the 'addiction' to which the narrator is succumbing. The noted tendencies of the digital are then marked by the use of text within the piece - it is not easily read, but is rather ghostlike and obscured - thereby signifying the effect of the media/um in erasing/displacing the narrator's words/identity, undermining his marks. The effect is thus abstracted, culminating in an aura, shall we say, which is more "... impressionistic/textural than textual."
(Source: Author's statement, Poems That Go)
