“Magister Ludi” is serious comedy game that puts a twist on the escape-the-room genre, with a wry narrator and design that interrogates our role in needing to escape. It is an art game created for Experimenta's International Biennial of Media Art: Recharge.
This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.
Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.
This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text was added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker was published in December 2018.
This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.
Winner of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People's Choice Award 2018
Shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Digital Literature 2018
Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018
(Source: Author's Description)
January.
Mists make dangerous travel. The air loaded with freezing particles. Attached to fixed objects. A blade of grass. Some garden shrubs. Spreading tufts of crystals. Gigantic specimens of snow-white coral. An elegant fringe. The rime falls. Transparent. In heaps beneath the trees.
February.
It’s still raining. It has always rained. We are silt dwellers, tide chasers, puddles, floods, mud. The river runs brown topsoil down and out to sea. From a fir erupts a murmur of starlings. By fir I also mean fur. A pelt of needles, hackles raised. Gale force ten at the river mouth. The scale goes up to twelve. After that the sky breaks. The fir comes down and takes two eucalyptus with it.
DO IT is an interactive app. of Electronic Literature for smartphones and tablets (both for Android and iOS). DO IT offers four interactive experiences: adapt, rock, light up and forget. Each scene comes as an answer to contemporary injunctions: being flexible, dynamic, finding one’s way, forgetting in order to move forward… You will have to shake words - more or less strongly - in the Rock scene, or to use the gyroscope in the Light up scene. These four scenes are integrated into an interactive narrative (Story). They can also be experienced independently (Scenes).
Not quite a book, not quite an app, Spot is a visual adventure. Pinch-and-zoom through the spot on the back of a ladybug to begin exploring the five fantastical worlds. Continue to pinch-and-zoom through glowing hotspots to dive deeper into five interconnected worlds. You sit in the driver’s seat of this storytelling experience: one filled with interesting characters and beautifully illustrated settings, ready to be part of your story.
Spot was devised by David Wiesner, three-time winner of the Caldecott Medal, the honor awarded to the most distinguished American picture book for children.
(Source: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/david-wiesners-spot/id963746523?mt=8)
TOC's promotional tease – “You’ve never experienced a novel like this” – became awkwardly literalized when, after a Mac OS update, I could no longer open the novel. The tease inadvertently highlights the obsolescence that locks away so many works of electronic literature from present day readers. Even an exceptional work like TOC – exhibited internationally, prize-winning, the subject of many scholarly articles, underwritten by a university press – is no less subject to the cycles of novelty and obsolescence that render many works of electronic literature only slightly more enduring than a hummingbird. “The accelerating pace of technological change,” N. Katherine Hayles observes, “may indicate that traditional criteria of literary excellence are very much tied to the print medium as a mature technology that produces objects with a large degree of concretization”.
TOC’s adaptation to Apple’s mobile operating system (iOS) in 2014 is an end-run around a “generation” that lasts “only two or three years.” It’s a preservation strategy that achieves its absolute goal of restoring this brilliant, canonical work to readers. But this novel that was once available to anyone running one of the two dominant operating systems (PC and Mac) is now accessible only to people who own or can borrow an iPad, an expensive device that commands less and less of the tablet market share. TOC is too large a file set to load on the more commonly purchased iPhone; Apple doesn’t offer that option. The glutted Apple App Store surpassed 1 million apps for sale in October 2013, which means TOC must vie for smaller slice of the already-niche iOS population alongside productivity apps and unironic variations on Cow Clicker. TOC on desktop possesses an ISBN, which aligns it with books and makes it eligible for sale on sites like Amazon. But only e-book apps are eligible for ISBNs in the App Store, and Apple has a lock on all iOS app distribution.
What does TOC gain and lose in adapting to the iPad? This is rare opportunity to examine a canonical work of electronic literature where the identical content has been ported from desktop to iPad. In doing so, TOC programmer and co-author Christian Jara transformed its reader interface from click to touch, which in the iOS environment is stylized into a lexicon of eight gestures. The reader’s touch is a performance not an “end-point,” as performance theorist Jerome Fletcher puts it; touch is an act of writing that “performs throughout the entire apparatus/device”: story, machine, code, human body and the physical setting in which the performance transpires. TOC on desktop (2009), iPad (2014), and printed short stories (1994, 1996) is a medial evolution that prompts me to propose a device-specific reception history examining what's at stake in porting desktop-born works into the touch-intensive mobile environment.
(soucr: ELO 2015 conference catalog)
This roundtable interrogates whether creative computational work can conjure aura, and to what extent the authoring and distribution systems those works rely on foreclose upon or enable "aura." Benjamin’s seminal "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) describes fascistic modes of production and mass deception that forecast -- in very specific ways -- iOS. Co-chairs Berens and Flores will frame the discussion by centering on the authorial contexts afforded by PC and iOS. The other participants are all accomplished writers of electronic literature, actively creating works in a variety of computational environments and distribution models. Each presenter, including the co-chairs, will have 5 minutes to present their own critical and artistic insights on this topic. Once the roundtable discussion begins, they might comment on how Berens' and Flores' theoretical model plays out in their own artistic and commercial works.
This new entry in the PoEMM series was recently published as a free iOS app, following closely a redesigned website and a booklet documenting the series. Designed for touchscreen devices, this poem fills the screen with its lines scrolling from one side to another at different speeds and in different directions. Readers encountering this wall of text may find it a bit overwhelming— too much language at the same time to apprehend.
(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)
Put yourself in Morris’ shoes as you dive into the story of Mr. Lessmore and his flying friends through Moonbot Studios’ first Interactive Storybook. In this reinvention of digital storytelling you can repair books, tumble through a storm, learn the piano and even get "lost in a book," flying through a magical world of words, giving you a dynamic journey through the story.
(Description from morrislessmore.com)
The year is 1792 and in his Paris laboratory, Victor Frankenstein is building a man... Guide his tale with your choices in this unique literary app.
Written by best-selling author Dave Morris, designed and developed by creative studio inkle and published by award-winning independent publisher, Profile Books, Frankenstein is a new way of experiencing Mary Shelley's classic tale of terror and revenge.
The original text has been fully adapted into interactive form, allowing you the reader to visit Frankenstein's workshop, help him make his monster, and guide him through the disastrous events that follow.
(Source: Publisher's description in the iTunes store)
The Great Migration is a poem about leaving, about the excitement of heading out into a great unknown. It's also a poem about expulsion, about diaspora, about being forced to from home, in some sense about my emigration to Canada. Or it’s about the migration of spermatozoa up the fallopian tubes, ever hopeful of successful fertilization. To be truthful, this is a work that remains somewhat mysterious to me.
The viewer reads the poem by touching one of the beasties. Each of them is built from a different line of the text. When a beastie is captured, it begins spawning the words from that line, one by one.
(Source: Author's description in iTunes store)
