adaptive narrative

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Description (in English)

The Impossible Box is an unruly crowd or an ex-dairy farm valley confused about which direction the nature should grow. It’s being lost in a city without the aid of language or lights, and being guided by a stranger whose intentions are clear and unclear, alternating every block. It controls and confuses, arranges and then destroys all manner of poetics texts. Images, sounds, words, movements, arise, grow, knock and explode with the pressing of 32 different buttons and switches.There is a sequence. There are answers inside The Impossible Box. Indeed, within the correct combination of presses and clicks, the appropriate sequence of actions and reactions, there is an answer, a final destination, a masterwork of such splendor and alarmingly wondrous perfection, your heart would hold such gravity, all things would crush into your chest. And in the most real way it is a box, a handmade wooden box with holes and wires and computing gizmos coughing sequences into a device that spits light onto walls and sound from its hollow heights. And in the most surreal way The Impossible Box is us, our lives, our daily and hourly functions, pressing what needs to be pressed to cross the street, have babies and accumulate cluttering objects.

With all this said, with all these prancing lines shoving words into other words, I am required, required by both laws, real and internal, to preface your reading The Impossible Box with a warning. Every person who truly explores the box, its contents and controls, all those who attempt to find the possibilities inside its wires and algorithms will become entangled.

On the quantum level your being, your electric cells will become entangled with those of others. The Impossible Box will change you, tether you on the quantum level to others who also read and play and explore the box. And I cannot, am not able, to either control the who and where and how the entanglement will transpire, nor can I tell you when it will happen.

But there will be a moment, at some point, after pressing a certain button, after a certain sequence, with poetic texts rushing into your brain, when you will become The Impossible Box. And careful intention is the quickening of the valley fires, and the river is always the safest place to hide.

(Source: http://elo2016.com/jason-nelson/, Artist's Statement)

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By Dene Grigar, 6 October, 2011
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359-378
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36.3.
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All Rights reserved
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Abstract (in English)

Looking specifically at the genre of adaptive narrative, this article explores the future ofliterature created for and with computer technology, focusing primarily on the trope of mutability as it is played out with new media. Some of the questions asked are: What can the medium of a work of literature, that is its material aspect, tell us about the text? About character? What can it possibly matter if narrative is recounted on papyrus, retold on parchment and rag, and then remediated in pixels? Isn’t it the message carried by the medium we are most concerned with, stable or unstable the process of inscription, reinscription, encoding and decoding, translation and remediation? This paper speculates about possibilities rather than attempts to answer these questions, but the structuring and mean-making components considered here stand as examples of some we may want to think about when developing future theories about literature – and all types of writing –generated by and for electronic environments.

Source: Author's Abstract