This workshop presents a hands-on introduction to the RiTa v2.0 tools, including the new RiScript language. Version 2 of RiTa is a complete rewrite of the library that is easier-to-use, faster and more powerful. The workshop will cover the basics of RiTa and RiScript in JavaScript, with a specific focus on the Observable notebook environment.
Chris Crawford walks through Deikto, an interactive storytelling language that "reduce[s] artistic fundamentals to even smaller fundamentals, those of the computer: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division."
The source is the essay-review on www.electronicbookreview.com written by Chris Crawford
"The personal computer has been with us for twenty-five years now, and it has revolutionized the world around us. But in the arts, the computer has yet to approach its potential."
"Yes, the computer has dramatically changed the execution of ecisting artistic fields (...). These, however, are matters of applying the computer as a tool rather than exploiting it as a medium of expression."
"Yes, many artists have attempted to express themselves directly through the computer, but their efforts, while laudable extensions of existing artistic media, do not begin to use the computer as a medium in its own right."
All quotes were directly rewritten from the essay.
“E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it.” Stephanie Strickland outlines 11 rules of electronic poetry.
Combinatory poem written and programmed by Antero de Alda and Jorge Santos in BASIC for a Spectrum ZX in Sever do Vouga, Portugal, on Jan. 1, 1986. The piece was later renamed as A Memória da Água.
Combinação de texto programada por Antero de Alda num microcomputador Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Sever do Vouga, 1/1/1986.
(Source: Po-ex.net)
In the field of networks and big data, data visualization has become very popular in recent years. Scientists, artists, and software designers are working collaboratively using elaborate ways to communicate data, and visual design is playing a substantial role by making the language of science more accessible and comprehensible, through visualisations, in the form of infographics, sculptural objects, installations, sonifications and applications. But why this current outburst? Is it because of the availability of open data? The approachability of visual design? The need for new analytic methodologies in the digital humanities? Or, the fact that it is part of our collective consciousness?
This paper deals with the above questions and has evolved, as a practice-based research, in conjunction with the practical part, a mobile application designed to run on an iPad2 / iPad mini or later models. This work was created specifically for the SILT exhibition, hosted in Hamburg, Germany in June 2014.
I took this exhibition as an opportunity to research the city of Hamburg and discovered that it had one of the largest ports in the world; its name Gateway to the World (GttW) seemed like a great title for the app. The vast and busy port served as a metaphor for the immensity of the Internet, the flow of information and its meaning of openness and outreach to the World Wide Web.
The aim of the app was to use open data from the maritime databases to visualise the routes of the vessels arriving to and from the Port of Hamburg, as well as have the vessels’ names mapped to Wikipedia entries. As the vessels move they act as writing tools to reveal a string of text creating calligramatic forms of information pulled from Wikipedia entries about the name of the vessels.
The information gathered from these entries generates a remix of text going from presenting factual information about vessels (containers, cargo ships, tankers, high speed crafts) to describing their names connecting them to characters in literary works, plays and mythological stories.
Further questions addressed as part of the ongoing research process are: How is this current fascination with data visualisation to be understood? How can open data be used as the raw material for creative projects? How can graphic design, programming, and aesthetics be used to analyse databases? What contribution can design bring to the Digital Humanities in general and more specifically to the field where art, language, and digital technologies intersect, such as in electronic literature?
It is with projects like this that Electronic literature serves as a means to explore open data as cultural material, as a way to instigate new forms of communication to discuss social and political issues and bring transparency through hybrid forms of visual art, language and technological advances. GttW in particular explores new territories to develop electronic literature. These include the investigation of open data in the creation of data visualisation poetics, e-calligrams, new literacies, networked multimodal textualities and online and mobile platforms for writing, publication and dissemination purposes.
For documentation of the work see following Website: http://www.mariamencia.com/pages/gatewaytotheworld.html
(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
In this paper, I present close readings of a selection of Emily Dickinson’s poems that I propose might be best explained through an understanding of her awareness of the current scientific topics of the time. These include, for example, the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, Faraday’s and Maxwell’s numerous investigations into electromagnetism in the early to mid 1800s, and the production of Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1847. Specifically, in regards to Babbage’s computing machine, I demonstrate a connection between some of the innovations first formulated by the mathematician and proto-programmer Ada Lovelace in 1842 and 1843, including concepts of looping, modeling, and isomorphism, and Dickinson’s poems, written more than one decade later, which include references to cycles, recursion, and branching. Additionally, I show that there are clear stylistic similarities between Lovelace’s philosophical inquiries into the nascent discipline of computation and some of Dickinson’s poems that might be said to contain algorithmic structures or images. While I do not believe that Dickinson necessarily had any direct awareness of Lovelace’s writing (which she termed “poetical science”), these computational concepts enable new readings that provide insight into some of the more puzzling aspects of Dickinson’s work. Moreover, through exploring these similarities in poetry and programming at the dawn of the age of computation, I articulate relationships between the lyrical and logical that are more evidently realized in the contemporary genre of electronic literature.
(source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Gateway to the World is a mobile application designed to run on an iPad2 / iPad mini or later models. This work was created specifically for the SILT exhibition, hosted in Hamburg, Germany in June 2014. I took this exhibition as an opportunity to research the city of Hamburg and discovered that it had one of the largest ports in the world; its name Gateway to the World (GttW) seemed like a great title for the app. The vast and busy port served as a metaphor for the immensity of the Internet, the flow of information and its meaning of openness and outreach to the World Wide Web. The aim of the app was to use open data from the maritime databases to visualize the routes of the vessels arriving to and from the Port of Hamburg, as well as have the vessels’ names mapped to Wikipedia entries. As the vessels move they act as writing tools to reveal a string of text creating calligramatic forms of information pulled from Wikipedia entries about the name of the vessels. The information gathered from these entries generates a remix of text going from presenting factual information about vessels (containers, cargo ships, tankers, high speed crafts) to describing their names connecting them to characters in literary works, plays and mythological stories. (source: ELO 2015 Catalog)
In this interview Andy Campbell talks about his first works in video games programming during his teens and how he got involved with digital literature in the mid-1990s. He then gives insight into his work by focusing on the importance of the visual and the ludic elements and the use of specific software or code language in some of his works. In the end he describes the way he looks at digital born works in general.