flow

Description (in English)

The Mandel.brot Project (http://www.mandelbrot.fr, in French) has existed online since 1999. From the beginning, we dedicated our project to an experimentation with the aesthetics of the ephemeral and the flow; we thus refuse any archiving of the source files of our creations. The creations remain on the web for a few months. Then they are removed forever. And even when they are online, they permanently face extinction: the instability of the digital device is integrated as a fundamental aesthetic principle in all our works (see « Flux »: the movement of the words was supposed to be calm and relaxing; but on powerful computers, the flow is transformed into a wild torrent). Each creation on Mandel.brot thematizes this instability in a specific way.The Mandel.brot Project is a dialogue (we invite you to compare for example « Soleil Amer » and « Inexorable »), which sometimes becomes animated, and sometimes stops for a long time. None of the creations on Mandel.brot can be separated from their context: the website and the device, which remains deliberately unstable.

(Source: Authors' description for ELO_AI)

By Scott Rettberg, 9 January, 2013
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Abstract (in English)

"Flow" is the movement of eyes and bodies through museums or city traffic, through instructional diagrams or branching narratives, through hypertexts or games. What is flow in electronic literature? While comics scholars have theorized linear flow (e.g. closure, trails) and hypertext scholars have theorized multilinear flow (e.g. transclusions, links), this exploration of flow in elit considers flow as a total experience or simultaneous visible landscape, beginning in the visual design tradition of flowchart art. Bill Barker or Martijn Englebregt's beaurocratic infographics, Jason Shiga or Chris Ware's narrative diagrams, and Simon Patterson or Dorian Lynskey's subway map art remixes all posit narrative as an experience occuring within a visible landscape of controlled traversals. In digital arts, this situated experience is best exemplified by performers using flow-control programming. How might the metaphors and software tools of flow-control used by audio livecoders and video jockey mashup artists (e.g. PD, Max/MSP, Quartz Composer) serve electronic textualists (e.g. Yahoo! Pipes)? What sort of eliterature and epoetry aesthetics emerge from flow-controlled textual landscapes?

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)