infinite canvas

View from Within is an experiment in storytelling using an infinite canvas framework. The project was inspired by Scott McCloud’s vision for the future of webcomics as an infinite canvas, with the browser as a portal to an experience unbounded by the traditional borders of the printed page. The work is constructed from layers of hundreds of hand-drawn illustrations all viewed as if at one scale, and thus incapable of forming a coherent scaling scene without a zooming digital framework. When used continuously in this manner, the infinite canvas does not resemble the panel-based methods of sequential art: the space in-between, along, and outside the path are as or more essential than the linear chain of nodes. This iteration is built in Unity as a 2D canvas designed for viewing through a prototype augmented reality headset, the Seebright. The Seebright uses a set of mirrors and optics to overlay a stereographic view of a smartphone screen in front of the viewer. By eliminating the physical screen, we can explore the idea of the infinite canvas as a virtual construction, fully removed from the metaphor of page and portal. (Source: ELO 2014 Conference)

Screen shots

( Source: http://silentbard.com/TheViewFromWithin/ )

Read more about View from Within

By Jill Walker Rettberg, 23 August, 2013

Spirals of Meaning: Exploring Nonlinearity through Prezi’s Infinite Canvas

Author

Anastasia Salter

Publication Type

Conference paper or presentation

Language

English

Year

2013

Presented at Event

Electronic Literature Organization 2013: Chercher le texte

URL

Spirals of Meaning (Abstract and full text)

Record Status

Incomplete record (stub)

Tags

infinite canvas

sequential art

environmental storytelling

Abstract (in English)

Our linear expectations of digital presentations (and the scorn associated with “Death by PowerPoint) have been transformed by the availability of tools such as Prezi, an editor that allows for the juxtaposition of images, text, and other media on a telescoping canvas that relies on linear paths for exploring nonlinear content. Prezi acts an infinite canvas, recalling Scott McCloud’s model for a future of sequential art on the web defined not by pages but by the screen as portal to an expanding and linked storyspace, allowing for continual layering of meaning and data using the methods of what Henry Jenkins describes as environmental storytelling. Alexandra Saemmer's use of Prezi as a space for experimenting with electronic literature breaks our expectations of a tool originally designed for presentations. The adaptation of tools of this kind towards the development of literary experiences reveals the fundamental transformations of procedural expectations and linked structures in online spaces: the co-location and linking of ideas to create meaning is now a matter of course. A similar limited model of the expanding canvas is used in Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, a work whose digital iPad form more clearly conveys the extent of its connected and intertwined threads than the pages of its corresponding codex can contain. In considering the evolution of text within electronic literature, the nonlinear and interactive natures of a work often make even the most textual of electronic literature defy easy translation to printed codex. I’ll examine the juxtaposition of linear and nonlinear in these works, and suggest how we can see the impact of evolving conceptions of meaning in web spaces on electronic literature (and vice versa) through probing at the construction of text through rejection of the page.

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/spirals-meaning-expl… )

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