loss

c ya laterrrr is the first in a series of exploratory works by Dan Hett covering his experiences during and in the aftermath of the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack, where his younger brother was one of 22 people killed.

As summarised by Hett himself:

This game expresses some of the experience, along with exploring some of the what-ifs of choices I ultimately didn't make. All identifying information is removed, there are no names or locations specified anywhere. There are many choices within this game, and one of the many possible pathways does reflect my actual experience. This isn't marked or confirmed anywhere, and all pathways ultimately lead to the same endpoint. 

c ya laterrr  garnered press coverage, including articles in UK publications The Guardian and The Big Issue, and later won the New Media Writing Prize 2020.

Hett released second and third works to the series, The Loss Levels and Sorry to Bother You, in 2018. 

How does a town just disappear?

What does it feel like to be cut off from your roots in a digital age where people have so many tools for recording and documenting their lives?

How do those of us who grew up in a pre-digital age recover and maintain a sense of belonging that is becoming increasingly so hard to hold on to?

'In Search of Oldton' is an attempt to use other people's digital documentary in order to recapture and re-invent my own personal history.

Tim Wright will be touring the UK during 2004 in search of Oldton – his lost place of birth - and uncovering along the way the possible causes of its demise and the subsequent loss of his past.

Working with groups and individuals Wright wants to build up a substantial online archive showing people taking their leave of a place or a person - a range of personal stories about ‘saying goodbye’ and ‘moving on’.

Through texts, pictures, videos and oral testimony, he will build up a digital archive of fictional remembrances, tributes to numerous places and situations left behind.

And ultimately (he hopes!) his own digital story of memory and loss will emerge.

(Source: Project description, Incubation3 site, trAce Archive)

This haunting narrative about a summer vacation turned tragic uses a slim strip of moving images as the background for a stream of language flowing from right to left as a series of voices tell a piece of the story. The sound of waves on the shore serve as a soothing aural backdrop to each character’s whispered voices, perhaps suggestive of what happens when the sea raises its voice. Each character involved with the tragic turn of events brings a different perspective to the situation, yet they are all so involved in their own affairs, much like the ending of Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out.” In the final lines of the poem, as the speaker (whisperer) seeks to tie up the events in a neat little package that can provide closure, we realize that closure eludes all the characters in the story, who must continue to live on haunted by their memories and regrets.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

A kinetic poem reflecting on the death of the author's father that uses the car wash as a metaphor for passing between worlds.

Author's description from The New River: 

This piece tells the story of a character's response to her father's death. In creating this piece, I worked in Flash ActionScript 3.0 to code a random trigger function, so that when you click on the suit icon a random sound file plays and an associated text appears on the screen.

The randomness of the click is not accidental; in generating this piece I worked to explore the nature of narrative and the development of a coherent story. The majority of stories that we hear, read, or tell are linear in pattern or chronologically organized (A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to D, End of Story). Yet our self-narratives, as we experience them and as we remember them, are rarely so neatly packaged. Frequently, we come to know to the stories of self only through loosely-connected, non-temporally located vignettes. When we think of who we are, we do not first think of the first day that we were born, and work our way up from there. Instead we construct our sense of self, like a patchwork, in bits and pieces that fragment our autobiography. Yet when we present this personal narrative to others, we clean it, presenting an amalgam of what actually happened and what we think we remember happening. As history has shown time and again, frequently these remembrances are, objectively speaking, faulty in some way or another. This piece is a reaction to that “faultiness,” suggesting instead that in terms of the truth of any event and its impact on an individual person, these linked, yet scattered remembrances may be significantly more factual. Frequently this piece pulls up a single scene more than once, occasionally returning to it several times. I made the decision to allow repetition within the piece consciously, again in deference to the rhizomatic, nodal structure of the mind and memory and the process of narrative creation.

This piece works in conversation with other new media art, such as Deena Larsen’s “Carving in Possiblities,” which reveals snippets of text only as the user mouses over parts of an image to reveal the sculpture of David underneath. Another piece that I drew inspiration from while working on this narrative was Thom Swiss, Motomichi Nakamura, and Robot Friend’s 2004 “Fresh Icons,” in which the user interactions causes doors to open and close and reveal figures in silhouette having short bursts of conversation with each other. Both of these works integrate user participation with the process of uncovering, revealing their full text only as the user makes use of the apparatus before him or her. The narrative, then, for these texts and my own, is stunted, fragmented, changing and reliant upon someone else to be made whole, to become understandable in any true sense.

In order to experience this piece, click the suit. Continue clicking the suit to hear short fragments that work to present a fuller picture of the scene being described. If you are keeping track, there are 14 total extracts within the larger piece.

ii — in the white darkness is an interactive piece about memory. The work was created by Reiner Strasser in collaboration with M.D. Coverley (Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink) over a period of 9 months in 2003/04. It assimilates and reflects the experience with patients fallen ill with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's diseases, showing the fragility and fluidity of memory from a subjective point of view. "It was not the erasure that mattered so much as the act of trying to recover what we no longer can identify." (M.D. Coverley) From the pulsing dots of the background-interface different events can be started, played, and combined. In this process the experience of remembering and loss of memory can be re-created in the appearance and disappearance of words, pictures, animations, and sounds. Memories (readable with a general metaphorical meaning) are unveiled and veiled in transition at the same time, arranged by or using your own memory.

(Source: Author Description from Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

This work allows readers a new way to conceptualize and empathize with patients who experience an illness related to memory. The interactive component serves to strengthen this empathy by giving the reader some amount of control over the memories, but not at all an absolute control, similar to the struggle an individual with Parkinson's or Alzheimer's might experience. This work could also serve as a means of spreading awareness about the illnesses by giving a real-life representation of the tragic feelings that come with losing your memories. In the modern day people may take this for granted, and it could be beneficial to have such a vivid reminder.

In Erik Loyer's Strange Rain touch, sound, color, narrative and haptic play (the tilt of the device) blend into a tightly choreographed story driven by the gamer/reader's input. Alphonse the protagonist is standing out in a rainstorm contemplating his ailing sister and his role in her recovery. User touch controls the pace of raindrops falling on Alphonse and calls forth phrases of Alphonse's interior monologue. Tap the screen twice to ask Alphonse whether he's ready to go back into the house.

(Source: Description from the Electronic Literature Exhibition catalogue)

Pond is the result of a writing experience I have had with a friend. Just like my father, hers had died of a serious illness. For several weeks, we would meet and talk about our experience. Through short texts revolving around several themes, we would try to imagine each other’s experience. Some years after this experience in writing, I had the opportunity to take pictures in a burned-down house. On insurance grounds, the former inhabitants had had to leave all their belongings in the burned rooms. I decided to fill these rooms with the voice of my friend’s father, as well as with his daughter’s voice.

By interacting on manipulable elements, the reader moves from room to room in this soot-covered house. But the images are just reflections, vague memories, completely conditioned by the subjective eye of the photographer. The "voices" floating on these evanescent images are equally labile, i.e. constructed and deconstructed by fragile textual animations. The author's voice is sometimes superimposed on the animated text; in German, this voice tells her own experience of her father’s death.

Death, forgetfulness, the slow but sure decay of memories are both suggested on a "visual" level and denied by the circularity of the "wandering" experience. The digital work tries to preserve these memories, even if they are to fall inevitably into oblivion. The work invites the reader to become a party to this desperate attempt to prevent the stream of oblivion from leaking.

“Loss of Grasp” recreates the loss of self-control. What happens when one has the impression of losing control in life, of losing control of his/her own life? Six scenes tell the story of a man that is losing himself. “Loss of Grasp” plays with the self-control and the loss of self-control and invites the reader to experiment with these feelings in an interactive work.

database is an electronic reading device that deals with the inversed functionality of three electronic devices: a printer, a video camera and a database. Consequently, it raises issues about the erasure of text, the act of reading in real time (i.e., listening to a printed text), and physical databases. Through the opposition between presence x absence, recording x erasing, memory x forgetfulness, present x continuous time and reading x listening, we challenge the idea of the database as a non-linear and digital structure, and the printer as an output device as well as an information recorder. Critical for the connection of all these concepts is the idea of present time as a time that is always passing by.

(Source: 2002 State of the Arts gallery description)