non-fiction

The criminal punishment system in the United States confines over two million people in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe environments where they cannot practice social distancing or use hand sanitizer and are regularly subjected to medical malpractice and neglect. EXPOSED documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside these prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine. On July 8th alone, there are over 100 statements included in the interface — statements made by prisoners afflicted with the virus or enduring anxiety, distress, and severe hardship. Unfortunately, their words are all we have. Since the first reported coronavirus infection in the US, incarcerated people have been subjected to extreme forms of isolation — visits have been suspended, phone privileges restricted, and the use of solitary confinement expanded exponentially. Prisoners are stranded in quarantine without adequate food or medication — abandoned and unseen. EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of this humanitarian crisis. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, and signal that the injustices they endure are structural.

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The quotes, audio clips and statistics included in EXPOSED are excerpts from a wide array of online publications and broadcasts. All excerpts are linked in the interface to the original source.

(Author's description on project site)

In boxing “the distance” refers to the scheduled length of a fight, 9 rounds or 12. For the boxer, as for all of us, the goal is to stay standing, inside the distance. Inside the Distance—a web documentary and an installation with video and a touch-screen interactive interface—documents victim/offender mediation practices in Belgium, where Restorative Justice is institutionalized within the criminal justice system. The project examines how mediation poses a potential cultural alternative to dominant modes and theories of retributive justice and punishment. The interactive interface, which includes interviews with Mediators, Criminologists, Victims and Offenders conducted in Leuven and Brussels, focuses on the subject positions of victim, offender and mediator and the notion that those subject positions are fluid. The content of the project is organized into three parts: • “The Accounts” – presents the narratives of mediation cases as described in interviews with Mediators. • “The Positions” – addresses the instability of subject positions – as articulated by Victims, offenders and mediators • “The Spaces” – takes up the ethical, theoretical, and discursive space of justice and punishment in statements made by mediators, psychologists and criminologists. The mediators interviewed for this project described how mediations almost always begin with a focus on the detail—victims and offenders wanting to confirm each others’ understanding of what happened—who was hurt and how—followed by attempts to find some way to understand why. Inside the Distance stages reenactments of this encounter as described by victims, offenders and mediators. It explores the subject position of each party—and the many ways in which those positions are fluid. Within the project, the space of mediation, the mediation table, is represented as a boundary object—a place of cooperation without consensus. Criminal acts are rents in the fabric of the social order—expressions of something that doesn’t fit. At some level, at some moment, we are all victims—we are all offenders. Inside the Distance is a co-production by LINC-KU Leuven, STUK Arts Centre, Courtisane, University of California Santa Cruz, European Forum for Restorative Justice, Suggonomè – Flemish Mediation Service, and funded by OPAK (Belgium/EU). (source: ELO 2015 catalog)

Children’s literature can include non-fiction texts, and this app, developed by Spinfy, is an example. It is a creatively retold version of the The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Rights in a way that is aimed at young children. Each spread is read aloud, and when the reader touches one of the illustrations, a sound is heard, or the speech bubbles that many illustrations have are read out. For instance, the page explaining that all children have the right to privacy shows a girl with a diary, and when you touch the diary, a voice whispers: “Ssh, don’t tell”. The app is an adaptation of a picture book Pernilla Stalfelt’s wrote and illustrated in 2010. (source: ELO 2015 Conference Program and Festival Catalog)

The Computer Wore Heels is an interactive book app for the iPad that shares the little known story of a group of female mathematicians, some as young as 18, who did secret ballistics research for the US Army during WWII. A handful of these human 'computers' went on to serve as the programmers of ENIAC, the first multi-purpose electronic computer. The app is based on the documentary film Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII (LeAnn Erickson 2010), and aims to bring this story to younger students in the hopes of giving today's teens role models that might encourage them to study math, science and computer science. The app's design resembles a girl's diary from the 1940's with the narrative unfolding as an adventure story. Readers may access primary research documents such as original WWII era letters, photographs and mathematical equations actually completed by the story's subjects. There are also numerous audio and video clips that expand on story plot points or events.

(source: Kid e-Lit booklet)

daddylabyrinth is an interactive new media memoir, a combination of traditional writing and personal video assembled and delivered through the authoring system SCALAR <http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/&gt;. It exists at the cusp of several forms—the lyric essay, the archive, the family history, the home movie—and delves into questions that shape our contemporary narrative practices, such as navigational readership and new ways of experiencing the cinematic. daddylabyrinth is a father/son book, in a long tradition of such, refracted through the lens of new media’s narrative possibilities. The legacies of my father that I carry—objects he left behind and a flotilla of unresolved emotions that continue to vex my self-identity nearly forty years after his death, when I am a father myself— resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR for this project because it lets me create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions. These two legacies have with time become inextricably bound, and the stories that I weave from them resist any single linear narrative. I turned to SCALAR to write daddylabyrinth because it allows me to create multiple, interlocking narrative lines, through which I could track and explore interrelationships between objects, incidents, and impressions—ranging from objects of his that I’ve given my children to ways that my father has shown up in my fiction. A portion of the work is currently up to view on demo at http://scalar.usc.edu/anvc/daddylabyrinth/index. Approximately 25% of its pages are available at the moment, and I will have a significantly more robust version of it available for the ELO conference next spring should my proposal be selected for the Media Arts Show—ideally a premiere of the whole work before I seek a publisher for it. Exhibition at ELO could take one (or both) of two forms. Internet-connected desktop, notebook, or tablet computers with headphones could be used in a stationary gallery situation, where readers could explore the work at their own pace. I could also present it in a live venue, talking my way through the labyrinth as I navigate it live and play some of its short videos. A combination of these two exhibition approaches would be ideal, and I am amenable to either a full presentation or a split one with another artist. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

This public research/community project explores the use of database narrative in the process of “counter-storytelling” using oral history and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in a public history touch-table project. The research is based on a case study of an ongoing digital humanities project at the historic Kimball African American War Memorial Building, built by black veterans of WWI in 1928 in the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The Kimball Project’s aim has been to further develop the significance of the renovated Kimball African American Memorial, which was once a vibrant center of local community life for all ethnicities and races. A central goal of the project is to create an identity as a national treasure and unique destination for historical tourism through the innovative use of digital information technology. One of the objectives of the project has been to involve the community in telling their own historical narratives using iPhone and iPod-based mobile journalism tools for incorporation into the Memorial’s exhibits, digital content, and to upload these stories to the Memorial website. The focus of this presentation is the research, development and design of an interactive, database narrative-driven touch table experience physically located in the Memorial’s exhibition space, as well as an interactive website. The database narrative uses a rare book discovered in the process of research and collection of artifacts and documents – a book of social protest poetry, entitled War Poems, written by two young black women, sisters Ada Tessabell Peters (age 18) and Ethel Pauline Peters (age 17) while students at the West Virginia Negro Collegiate Institute in 1919. The research and project present a paradigm shift in theory and practice for cultural workers engaged in mining invisible voices of the “Other” vis–à–vis “majoritarian” representations of race in digitally interactive public histories. (Source: author's abstract)

Writing (2012) was inspired by and built with Joe Davis’s Telescopic Text, pairing the possibilities of expanding, effacing essay with the musings of a Monson or a Mezzanine. An introspective, interactive non-fiction, the work unfurls, an exploration of the processes of composition as much as a finished literary product. As the piece grew to dozens of junctions and thousand of words, the editing interface slowed dramatically, each erasure oredit taking a minute or more. This in turn forced an accountability to first thought – it became easier to publically ‘rewrite’ mistakes, misspeaks and infelicitous phrases than to invisibly edit them away. The result is a thinking aloud on the (web)page, a map to the writer’s trains of thought for the reader to unfold and explore. Writing featured in the 2013 electronic poetry edition of Australian literary journal Overland.

(Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Socrates in the Labyrinth is a wide-ranging exploration of the relationships between hypertext, thought, and argument. Does hypertext present alternatives to the logical structures of if-then, claim and support? Is hypertext a mere expository tool, that cannot alter the essence of discussion and proof? Or is hypertext essentially unsuited to rigorous argument?

Kolb's discussion is a nuanced, creative approach to these and other questions. Kolb points up the history of nonlinearity in philosophical work, from the Socratic dialogues through Hegel, and the variety of forms that philosophical discussion can take. Kolb's discussion -- and the structures of Socrates itself -- show that hypertext is not only a "super-encyclopedia" that leaves the essence of argument unchanged. But his keen understanding of both hypertext and postmodernism also shows that the relation between hypertext and "the end of the text" is more complex than is sometimes claimed. Socrates in the Labyrinth embodies several hypertext structures showing possibilities for writing and thought in the new medium.

(Source: Eastgate Systems Inc., catalogue copy)