interactive

"'Portal' is an interactive net.dance in three parts that follows a traveler passing from the physical world to a virtual world called the Sunset/Sunrise. The work touches on the spatial and aesthetic relationship between virtual and physical spaces, as well as the relationship between user and digital content. Cinematic and kinetic, the traveler uses dance as the main mode of communication and means to travel between worlds. This ambiguity between the real and unreal is reflected in the content: analog footage is mixed with digital resolutions as the figure moves from a New York City street to a digitally created desert landscape. Traditional dance film techniques, as seen in kinesthetic editing and image creation, are combined with interactivity and screen design."--From Turbulence

What if a machine is smart enough to notice that it does dull work? Dustin is an interactive smartphone story which encourages the reader to think about the moral implications of smart machines. The main character is the smart vacuum cleaner Dustin. Dustin does not feel happy with his rol as cleaner and tries to escape his faith. The reader activitely participates through small interactions, game-play, and decisions. Would you like to be friends with Dustin or do you see him merely as a machine? Would you give him a break or do you not have sympathy for him when he wants to take a rest?

Speak, Pen is a web-based art tool programmed in JavaScript. It’s a drawing tool that replaces the traditional paintbrush with custom text inputs. Users are free to use text on the canvas to make visual poetries, interactive drawings, and performances, etc. The work explores the materiality of text, and ways in which users experiment with texts beyond their semantic functions.

Created during a radical tool workshop at SFPC, Speak, Pen takes inspiration from other “radical” tools that encourage DIY spirit and playfulness. It is not just a digital drawing tool, but rather, a community that aims to inspire makers to experiment with texts beyond their daily functions. It is something that can be performed, alone, or alongside others. I intend to blur the lines between users and the creators or mediators of a platform. Our community guidelines are based not on rules for how to use the text brush, but examples of how past audiences have experimented with it. The meaning of the works lies not within the interpretation of the texts in the drawings, but the different engagements with the tool within and outside its community.

(Source: ELO 2021)

Me, Myself and I in Dystopia is part of the large project called, “Humanity: From Dystopia to Survival” which is an interactive survival game and audio-visual music performance. Although the original concept of this project was to involve audience members to play the real-time interactive survival game, this version explores how the pandemic has shifted the sense of collectivity to individuality and depicts what it means to remain in a dystopian society alone by re-creating my own versions of self. In this video, I take multiple shots of my own photos (represented as an outline of faces) and speak to the microphone to interact with the video in real-time. The voices and air that I blow to the microphone affect my own photographic representations in the video by blurring the image. I will be saying random words to the microphone and also exhale air as a gesture of meditation during the crisis. The interactive video will demonstrate how an individual yearns to survive dystopia as he/she struggles to fight the solitude, controls, and chaos of society. As each photo of myself is taken, it will also trigger a new sound file as a way to intensify the mood of being alone. This work was created by an interactive design prototype for Max-MSP software (programmer: Martin Ritter), whereby I design how people can talk to the microphone and affect the visuals to symbolize saving one another and humanity as a whole. While demonstrated this work alone, it also powerfully suggests what it means to adapt in the constantly evolving covid era.

Source: exhibition documentation 

The British Library Simulator is a short browser-based game created by Giulia Carla Rossi during the 2020 lockdown using Bitsy, a free game engine developed by Adam Ledoux. It was published online in June 2020, while the Library buildings were closed. The British Library Simulator was created as a fun way to engage with our audience during the pandemic, giving them a chance to visit a different version of the Library, while learning interesting facts about the physical building and the Library as a whole. It was also a way to make the public aware of the services we continued to provide even during lockdown, by highlighting ongoing projects and the digital content that could be accessed from home (such as the Sound Archive and the UK Web Archive). Finally, it provided an example of the digital interactive narratives we are collecting as part of our work on emerging formats and new digital media.

In the game, players wander around the St Pancras building in London, encountering different characters (other visitors and members of staff) on their way to the Reading Room. The game takes less than 10 minutes to complete and the gameplay is deliberately limited (the only obstacle players need to overcome is leaving their belongings at the Cloakroom before entering the Reading Room). This choice was made in an effort to make the game appealing and accessible to a wider audience, including people that don’t necessarily identify as gamers, and to keep the main focus on the information relative to the British Library and its services. Links to the projects and resources mentioned in the game were provided on the game page - including the Emerging Formats Project (https://www.bl.uk/projects/emerging-formats), the UK Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk) and British Library Sounds (https://sounds.bl.uk). 

The British Library Simulator aimed to present libraries under a different light: not just as keepers of knowledge, but also as creators of content willing to engage with new technologies, even during a time of crisis. The British Library Simulator won joint first prize at the 2020 British Library Lab Staff Awards.

The British Library Simulator was created by Giulia Carla Rossi, the British Library’s Curator for Digital Publications. She is responsible for supporting the Library in developing capacity to manage collections of complex digital objects as part of the Emerging Formats Project. Currently, the project is focusing on publications produced for mobile devices (apps) and interactive narratives, covering requirements across the collection management lifecycle. She’s in the process of curating an online collection of all shortlisted and winning entries to the New Media Writing Prize, to be hosted on the UK Web Archive. She is interested in interactive storytelling, net art and how new technologies and forms of creating and consuming content are challenging existing practices in collecting institutions.

(Source: Author's abstract)

A western con with your choice of ending.

(Source: https://webyarns.com/the-shootout-2016/)

Alan Bigelow's "The Shootout" is a wonderfully fun and interactive western tale with poetic language, immersive sound, and a surprisingly modern ending that you won't see coming. It seems, no matter where technology goes, we cannot help but love stories and puzzles. We just find new packages for them.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/17Fall/editor.html)

Retelling The Tell-Tale Heart is an interactive audio / touch game based on Edgar Allan Poe’s original short story The Tell-Tale Heart, a first-person narrative that describes a murder. The installation is a recreation of Poe’s story that questions ambiguities inherent in the classic story. The exhibition highlights how interactive artists can reconstruct original story elements to create a new work as well as ways to encourage interaction with digital games without using screens, controllers, headsets, or other common interface elements.The installation’s audio narrative follows Poe’s story, but throughout the game, the narrator asks the user three questions. The user responds to those questions by touching metallic objects that represent answers: correctly answering a question allows the player to advance. The game takes roughly five minutes or so to play depending on the user’s familiarity with the original short story, though no familiarity is required to play. The first question asks the player about the motive for the murder: in Poe’s story the narrator proposes several potential motives for the murder, such as greed, before dismissing them and settling on the old man’s “evil eye.” The second question asks the player about the murder weapon: in the original version the narrator makes the odd choice of suffocating the old man under a mattress rather than employing a classic horror cliché such as poison. The final question asks the user about the outcome, in which the narrator’s guilt is revealed and the character is arrested.The installation consists of metallic objects arranged inside a roughly 2’ X 2’ painted box that act as touch sensors. Three groups of objects represent answers to one of the three questions in the story and visual guides direct the user to the relevant group of objects at the appropriate point. When the user touches a sensor, the sensor sends an electronic signal via an alligator clip to a device that interprets these signals as keyboard presses on a laptop. This laptop runs custom software that plays the game’s audio and handles the game’s logic. The audio is output via small speakers sitting next to the installation.The aesthetic intentions of this piece are twofold. One intention is to use interactivity to create a new work out Poe’s story that enhances elements of the original: while Poe’s story contains ambiguities that create a detective fiction aesthetic, the interactive work brings those elements to the forefront by asking players to respond to questions about those mysteries. The other intention of this work is to create a digital game that users interact with in a novel way. The exhibit encourages players to think about how they typically interact with games, as it emphasizes auditory and tactile interaction instead of the kids of screen or headset-based representation usually found in video games. Overall, the work combines these two intentions with a goal of having users reconsider both the kinds of stories that can be told through digital interactivity and the kinds of interaction the digital can enable. 

Source:(https://projects.cah.ucf.edu/mediaartsexhibits/uncontinuity/)