audio experience

+ What is a V[R]erse?

A V[R]erse is a microstory. Each story consists of a storybox that can be experienced in 3D via a WebXR enabled mobile device, desktop PC and in Virtual Reality.

+ Who’s Behind the V[R]erse Curtain?

Each V[R]erse is created by different digital literature authors [text] and Mez Breeze [development + design, model + concept creation, audio].

+ Halp! I Need V[R]erse Navigation Tips:

Press the white arrow in the middle of each storybox below to begin. After clicking on the white arrow, you can then click on the “Select an annotation” bar at the bottom of each storybox screen, or on either of the smaller arrows on each side of the storybox if viewing vertically on a mobile [and also make sure to click the “+ more info” option for a full readthrough too], or navigate through the annotations manually. If you need help with the controls, please click the “?” located in the bottom righthand side – you’ll find other controls here like too “View in VR”, “Theatre Mode”, “FullScreen”, “Volume” etc.

If interactivity isn’t your thing, you also have the option of a static playthrough of each V[R]erse by clicking on the annotation bar and selecting “Start Autopilot”, or if you’d prefer just to experience the work without the text, “Hide Annotations”.

+ How Many V[R]erses Are There?

How long is a piece of digital string? [In other words, we don’t know just yet, so stay tuned.]

+ Feedback About the Project:

“This work represents a novel association between the text and the image, as the three-dimensional space gives a new perception of the text and its possible sequences. Breeze assembles then a new type of digital literature reading environment, with an intriguing composition of form and texts.” – From this review at Neutral Magazine: Critical Digital Culture and Media Arts.

“V[R]erses, as a broader work, is an XR (extended reality) story series…a V[R]erse is a microstory. What is intriguing in this case is that text in electronic literature is not necessarily central or authoritative. In fact, in this work…the text is supplementary to either code or other media.” – From “Collaboration and Authority in Electronic Literature” by David Thomas Henry Wright, TEXT Special Issue 59: Creating Communities: Collaboration in Creative Writing and Research.

It Must Have Been Dark By Then' is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no preset route, the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing. 

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/1465/It+M…

It Must Have Been Dark by Then is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no preset route, the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing.

In January and February 2017 Duncan Speakman travelled with collaborators across three countries on three continents, visiting environments that are experiencing rapid change from human and environmental factors. What he created on his return is somewhere between a travel journal and a poetic reflection on connection, progress and memory. The experience asks the listener to seek out types of locations in their own environment, and once there it offers sounds and stories from remote but related situations. At each location the listener/reader is invited to tie those memories to the place they are in, creating a map of both where they are right now and of places that may not exist in the future.

(source: https://ambientlit.com/index.php/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then/)

The hypertexts of this project were written by interns from the psychiatric building Emil Kraepelin. These real stories are distributed in four sections: past, future, darkness and light. The genre is hypertext fiction, it is made of hypertextual confessional fragments like Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls (2001) with interactive elements like Belen Gache’s Wordtoys (2006). In the section named “darkness” the mouse is used as a lantern which lights up only parts of the text, a technique also used in Speeches and Poemas (2006) by Félix Rémirez. Yolanda de la Torre organized a literary workshop in which she explored with the patients the therapeutic possibilities of writing. References to God are common in the patients’ confessional texts, a sign of the importance of religion for many Mexican people. The technique of changing the text allows the reader to make up different stories, drawing makes the reader a participant of the story who can draw his/her own future like another patient or character and the audio effects recreate the sounds of a psychiatric hospital making the reader feel as he/she was in the place the patients were. (Source: Maya Zalbidea)