Published on the Web (online journal)

DO IT is an interactive app. of Electronic Literature for smartphones and tablets (both for Android and iOS). DO IT offers four interactive experiences: adapt, rock, light up and forget. Each scene comes as an answer to contemporary injunctions: being flexible, dynamic, finding one’s way, forgetting in order to move forward… You will have to shake words - more or less strongly - in the Rock scene, or to use the gyroscope in the Light up scene. These four scenes are integrated into an interactive narrative (Story). They can also be experienced independently (Scenes).

Opening in the center of the international refugee crisis, this playable story places the interactor in the position of the refugee. As the tale opens, an explosion sends the interactor from the comfort of a ship into the salt immortal sea. Rescued by a mysterious boat the player encounters eight other passengers, drawn from the present and the ancient past. However, one of these passengers has angered the gods, and unless the player can discover which, all will face their wrath. However, finding that secret is no easy task. Each passenger harbors secrets that pit them against each other in an allegory of contemporary global crisis. Choosing from one of nine iconic positions in the refugee crisis, the interactor can explore tales of misfortune while trying to keep the shipmates in balance by collecting and circulating secrets. In this tale, we recast figures in the contemporary refugee crisis against the mythos of the quintessential traveler, Odysseus, for the refugee likewise travels cursed, unable to return home. It is a tale of the eternal return to proxy wars and the challenge of achieving some semblance of world peace. The story of the refugee is a harrowing reality reimagined here in terms of sirens and cyclops, not to make the horrors of war fanciful but to render the tale of the contemporary global conflict in timeless, epic terms. What does it take to survive this existential journey with humanity in tact? How can one negotiate the turbulent waters and the whims of unseen gods and foreign powers in the human tragedy of a proxy war? The Salt Immortal Sea will be set up as an installation that invites a primary interactor to make choices while a larger group can watch the story’s progression play out.

The primary interface will be an iPad. LED lights spread in the room will represent the characters aboard the ship, lighting up when the player interacts with them. The reading experience can take 5-30 minutes, depending on depth of exploration. Platform: Ink + Unity Displays on IPad, (also PC or Mac).

(Source: ELO 2017: Book of Abstracts and Catalogs)

"Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is the 18th century’s answer to Douglas Adams — irreverent, funny, and surprisingly hypertextual. Shandean Ambles (drafted at the Shandy Hall under Sterne’s imposing nose) parodies this work of nine volumes in nine short steps. [It] explore[s] indecent ghosts and sexual harrassment, quills and LCD screens, marbled papers and marble halls where the sauce and the plot never thicken" (ELO).

Mark Ditto Mark is a conceptual novel generated by a browser extension. When installed and activated, the extension will alter any names of people which appear on the currently displayed Internet page: first names are changed to “Mark,” and last names are changed to “Ditto.” In this way, Mark Ditto Mark transforms the Internet into a gigantic, sprawling novel about someone named “Mark Ditto.”

Ian Hatcher’s online and kinetic poem ⌰ [Total Runout] (2015) critiques corporate and governmental black boxing, at the level of its code, text, visual output and live sound performance. The poem is part of the series Drone Pilot, and it is presented in different versions: a Web-based work, a sound piece and a performance. It remixes appropriated text from a WikiLeaked manual by the UK Ministry of Defense, essays on artificial intelligence, and Hatcher’s own text. The overall versions of the work, understood as variable events, boldly problematize communication and cognitive processes in networks—whether they are implemented in computer systems by secret agencies or corporations. Hatcher’s critique to black boxes entails recreating issues of security, control and surveillance, as controlled systems are increasingly paving the way for less privacy and less knowledge about their inner workings. As a result, the poem questions the essence of privacy, redaction, and systemic violence, when access is a privileged asset of agents with security clearances or those with a deep knowledge of programming.

(Source: Álvaro Seiça)

Przemówienia (Speeches is a program written in Amiga Basic which procedurally generates Communist propaganda. The rote repetitions and word salad satirize political speechmaking by pushing language to its automated extreme. First published in 1993, Przemówienia appeared in a special issue of Magazyn Amiga dedicated to "grafomania" – the compulsive impulse to endlessly write. Marek Pampuch, who was also the magazine’s editor-in-chief, presents a satirical method for winning the Nobel Prize with the help of an Amiga computer. Pampuch writes: "We know that the level of intelligence of our leading politicians only allows them to read out something already written by someone else".

With Przemówienia, Pampuch succeeds in effectively imitating the empty political rhetoric (or what translates from Polish as “grass talk”) by not only producing text which is pre-written and plentiful, but also devoid of any meaning or message beyond its performative utterance.