distributed narrative

A science fiction story set in the town Derby in the year 2061, told through Foursquare. Fictional venues were created in the same geographical location as existing places, and the story's protagonist, "Girl X", left tips in the places, which read together tell a story of the future world. For instance, the university student centre has a double called the [2061] Pre-Freedom Public Service Centre, where Girl X's tip explains: "Before you're a free citizen you have to go here. It's kind of like school, but since knowledge is now installed rather than learned, it's more like medical and social public service..."

A Google maps-based narrative, set in London.

Partly based on Szilak's experiences as an HIV physician, Queerskins tells the story of Sebastian, a young gay physician from a rural Missouri Catholic family who dies at the beginning of the epidemic. Queerskins harnesses the odd intimacies afforded by the Internet (collaborations formed via Craig's List and access to strangers' personal images and videos from the Creative Commons) to explore the human urge for transcendence via love, religious faith, sexual ecstasy, storytelling, and technology itself. The interface consists of layers of sound (two hours of audio monologues from five characters), diaristic text (40,000 words), and more than a hundred banal, quotidian photos curated from Flickr Creative Commons and videos (downloaded from YouTube and the Internet Archive) as well as ephemeral Flip videos of life in L.A. (commissioned from Iris Prize nominated filmmaker Jarrah Gurrie) that users can navigate at random or experience as a series of multimedia collages.

Holzer began her career as a text artist in the late seventies by writing out phrases–truisms–on stickers and posting them around Manhattan. Later her truisms and subsequent writings have been displayed on tickers on Times Square, they’ve been carved in granite and published in books and posted on the web. Holzer’s works sometimes present micronarratives, but open, viral distribution by the general public has not been a focus in her work. Instead, she herself has planned each new spot her words are displayed.

The project is ongoing.

The Precession is a data-driven networked poem being developed simultaneously as both a large-scale installation and live performance. The work makes use of original writing and real-time data collection to create visual-poetic arrangements based on inquiries into architecture and the night sky. The piece mixes databased sources, real-time interruptions, and algorithmic composition in an evolving ecology.

The Precession considers as a primary source Oskar J.W. Hansen's sculpture Winged Figures of the Republic permanently installed at the Hoover Dam. Hansen's 1935 work commemorates the building of the dam and includes a complex celestial map. Beginning with the date of the dam's dedication, the map contains the data for someone skilled in astronomy to accurately trace the position of the polestar each subsequent night for the next 26,000 years.

The online work, in its current state of development, is mainly time-based taking approximately 20 minutes (with links to individual areas also accessible).

The Precession is a collaboration of Judd Morrissey & Mark Jeffery and is partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. The Precession is being developed in part for Hyde Park Art Center's ten-screen digital facade where it will be featured for eight weeks beginning in January 2011.

(Source: Artists' description from Mark Jeffery's website)

Implementation was written collaboratively and sent serially through the mail in the form of eight roughly chronological installments, each consisting of texts on thirty stickers. The stickers were also made available online in different paper sizes, so that people could print them out on standard sheets of business-size shipping labels. Participants attached stickers to public surfaces around the world, so that whoever happened to wander by the stickers could read them. Some of these placements of stickers were photographed by participants, and the photographs were sent back to be archived on the Implementation website.Because of the origin of this novel on sheets of stickers, and because of the way these stickers have been situated on public surfaces, Implementation consists of 240 short texts, any number of which can be read in any order. In the 2012 book version, all these atomistic texts have been arranged with a cohesive narrative flow in mind. Each page includes placements of the narrative stickers on various public surfaces. It is a book to be read in photographs.Implementation is about four main characters: Frank, Samantha, Kilroy, and Roxanne, who live in a Midwestern town. The action of the novel begins in September 2001 and runs through the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. One of the characters, Kilroy, is a reservist who is called up and then sent to Iraq, but the other characters are affected in much more oblique ways by the attack on the World Trade Center and the changes that follow. They continue to dine at restaurants, drink at bars, work, worry about their jobs and careers, have flings and relationships, and go to celebrations and funerals. While even a bombing in town changes little on the surface of these lives, the effects of the war can be read in shifts in their gestures, longings, and language. Implementation is a novel about the peripheral, everyday, psychological toll of the war on terror.

(Source: Project description from the Implementation book)