observation

Eyecode is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system records and replays brief video clips of its viewers' eyes. Each clip is articulated by the duration between two of the viewer's blinks. The unnerving result is a typographic tapestry of recursive observation.

Concept "The End of the White Subway" is a strange little text-game that bears some resemblance to a text adventure or interactive fiction... more or less the way a toadstool resembles a geranium. Is this a game? If being a game requires consequential decisions, controllable actions, differential outcomes, and quantification (score), then it's a game. If your definition includes fun, well... This project is really more like a time simulator -- though in some ways every game is that. It invites you to think about the passing of time (all those moments you'll never get back), the way things change even as they stay the same, what you think you are doing when you can't do much of anything, and how you know when it's time to leave the train. What You Can Do Ride the train from station to station: either click Continue or simply press any key while you are in Train mode. (You'll need to click once in the text window, or use the Continue link initially, in order to set focus.) Each station of your passage comprises a screenful of text. The text is always different, or perhaps always the same. Look at things: The Earth is full of them. Examinable objects show in red when under the cursor. Click to inspect. Some objects are described in text, some with images. Collect things: You may add objects to your Inventory after you inspect them. Clicking the Inventory link at left shows you what you have. You are only allowed to hold seven things. The system will automatically delete the oldest item if you exceed the limit. Delete or Expend things: Every item in your inventory is preceded by an X. Click here to remove the item. Some items go quietly. Others perform certain actions before they disappear. Read (or not) a story: Occasionally the view will change from Train mode to something more coherently narrative. Read (or not) and then follow the link to return. This story has a beginning and an end, and a beginning and no end. Ask for help: Use the Help link at left. Ask for as much help as you can stand. Exit: Use the Exit link whenever you feel you are ready. Leaving the train ends the game. Technical Notes The game is built entirely in Javascript and plain-vanilla HTML/CSS. This means it is stateless, so remember that leaving the page means wiping out your game. Recommended browser is the current build of Firefox (Mozilla). The game will run in Safari with minor visual glitches. Internet Explorer doesn't recognize keystrokes to advance the game, but seems to handle all other aspects. I haven't even started debugging this thing, so expect trouble. (Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Quantum Collocation is a work of experimental writing designed as an application for mobile digital devices. An interactive erasure of an excerpted page from a foundational essay by preeminent physicist Niels Bohr, Quantum Collocation applies the laws of quantum mechanics to the user’s experience of the work, allowing her to uncover a range of unique poetic possibilities within Bohr’s original text through her positioning and repositioning of the mobile device in space. The work embodies Bohr’s notion of “complementarity,” in which the way an experimental apparatus designed to measure a particle’s properties is configured is crucial to determining precisely which of those particle’s characteristics become determinate at the moment of observation. In Quantum Collocation, Bohr’s words are the particles under observation, and the mobile device is the experimental apparatus through which those observations are made possible; each of the device’s unique positions in space uncover a unique poetic possibility within Bohr’s original writing. Quantum Collocation deploys probability functions that determine how poems become legible to the user, creating a dynamic, non-linear text distributed across space and time. Yet rather than being algorithmically generated, each poem has been carefully crafted by the author, providing a unique series of literary reflections on the philosophical implications of quantum physics and the indeterminate nature of physical reality. (Source: ELO Conference)

As a poetic mediation on place and experience, Window encourages you to explore the things at the edges. The ordinary moments—sounds, sights, memories, thoughts—that make an environment familiar, that make it ‘home’. My inspiration came, and continues to come so often, from John Cage—and I made this work in 2012, the centenary of his birth. His music, writing, and thinking—the way he lived his life—are a wondrous integration of art and ordinary experience. Interwoven with fragmentary texts, themselves hidden at the edges, and only available through exploration, are a separate series of short essays. Some are about John Cage and some are personal reflections as I looked, listened and collected the sounds and images that provide the material for this piece. I did this over a period of a year—listening, looking, snapping photos and recording sounds. Arranged in ‘months’, there are various ways to interact with Window. The choice is yours—listening, reading, looking, and travelling from one time of year to another. For each month the images and sounds were actually recorded in the month concerned. So by moving the sounds around, louder or softer or from left to right, you may come to notice how subtly sound changes as time, and life, goes on. More information on Katharine Norman's work at www.novamara.com