virtual environment

In the form of an interactive text projection installation, the proposed project will utilize the language of the contemporary algorithmic ‘user culture’ to create a dynamic second-person narrative. In doing so, it seeks to examine the relationship between an ubiquitous virtuality, the logic of quantification and data-based representation, and the possibility of a remaining physicality. This project stemmed from a conversation with a student, where we talked about an existing application designed for food delivery, such that one would not even need to move anywhere for basic needs. This prompted my comment, "the last physical space will just be where you are standing." Anchored by this statement, the project consists of an application that will be activated when the viewer/user steps into a particular spot in the gallery and their presence is detected. The projected application would simply be a blank screen that, when activated, types out random, fictitious, and absurd ‘you-statements’ that would resemble the language utilized in contemporary data-mining and the algorithmic quantification of users (ie.  you might also enjoy…, you have a pattern of…). The result is a projection that mimics the process of data extraction, displaying text that is part fictional characteristics forcefully prescribed onto the viewer/user, and part second-person narrative, imperious and coercive, questioning what it means when information represents the populace. It tells the viewer/user a narrative about themselves, that is most likely untrue, but perhaps eerily familiar. Much primacy has been given to the role and place of the ‘user,’ with ideas adorned by this prefix becoming commonplace: user-generated content, user-friendly, user-interface, user experience…etc. UX (user experience) denotes a sense of the user-centric, of working for the user, designed to make the user’s life better. Despite this claim, UX is conceived to better understand the user for the benefit of the state and corporate administration. What was once on the peripheries (the user) is now the main source of value-extraction. The project is partly an examination of the dominance of a supposedly user-centric, individualized, customizable big data society, by placing certain attributes and data onto the viewer/user that are false, while constructing a situation that resembles and emphasizes the violence of data-extraction and databased representation, in particular its fallibility. Through linking the physical presence and location of the viewer/user with the apparatus that extracts and prescribes (false) attributes, the project intends to emphasize the polemics of data extraction from users and their subsequent representation by such information, while insisting on the fraught linkage between these virtual enterprises and the persisting physicality.

L.A. Noire (pronounced /ˈnwɑr/) is a neo-noir detective video game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games. It was initially released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms on 17 May 2011; a Microsoft Windows port was later released on 8 November 2011. In 2017 it was announced that a remastered version would be released in November for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and HTC Vive.

L.A. Noire is set in Los Angeles in 1947 and challenges the player, controlling a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer, to solve a range of cases across five divisions. Players must investigate crime scenes for clues, follow up leads, and interrogate suspects, and the players' success at these activities will impact how much of each cases' story is revealed.

L.A. Noire is an action-adventure neo-noir crime game played from a third-person perspective. Players complete cases—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story. The game also features a mode which allows players to freely roam the open world. In this mode, players can also engage in optional activities. The game assigns players with cases that they must solve. After each case, players receive a rating of 1–5 stars depending on their performance in both interrogations and searching for clues. Suspects and witnesses in a case can be interrogated for information, when the interviewee responds, players are given the option to either believe them, doubt them, or accuse them of lying. If players accuse them of lying, they must submit evidence to prove it. When interrogating two suspects at the police station, players may decide who to charge with the crime; charging the wrong suspect affects players' end rating. 

The game draws heavily from both the plot and aesthetic elements of film noir, stylistic films made popular in the 1940s and 1950s that share similar visual styles and themes, including crime and moral ambiguity. The game uses a distinctive colour palette, but in homage to film noir it includes the option to play the game in black and white. Various plot elements reference the major themes of gum-shoe detective and mobster stories such as Key Largo, Chinatown, The Untouchables, The Black Dahlia, and L.A. Confidential.

(Source: Wikipedia)

In the framework of "Unternehmen Capricorn" project we developed a virtual knowledge space ["Virtueller Wissensraum"] in collaboration with 10 Austrian museums. The programme, built with EPIC Megagames' UNREAL Game Engine enables 3 users to enter a cross-disciplinary environment based upon objects from the Technical Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Natural History, Museum of Modern Art amongst others. The content provided by these museums had to be made accessible and comprehensible to users of different age, educational background and computer literacy. fuchs-eckermann developed a system of connotations amongst the objects, which then was translated into a spatial structure of rooms, corridors and places of different size, shape, remoteness or proximity. The viewer/ listener explores a semantic structure by navigating virtual spaces with the topics being contained in these rooms. The connecting architecture between these rooms resembles staircases, passages, elevators, hidden doors or portals according to the nature of the connotation. Quite contrary to web-based databases and hypertext structures, the links therefore possess a quality of their own, carrying much more information than just "is connected with".

#Carnivast is an interactive electronic literature application for desktop computers and Android devices that explores code poetry as a series of beautiful and complex 3D shapes and textures.

An thorough encyclopedia to the future city of Copenhagen, as it is fictively evolving with nature, volcano outbreaks, extensive population and urban development. See Christian Yde Frostholms extended report on Radiant Copenhagen: http://cyf.dk/klumme/etvirkeligtparal.html 

A conversational labyrinth where the walls are lined with phrases composed, in real time with sound and words, in a virtual environment.

Labylogue, a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges' The Library of Babel, was a simulated three-dimensional large-scale visual poetry performance. Created from different French language speaking Internet nodes, it incorporated software-generated text, triggered by algorithmic recognition of words spoken by participants meeting virtually in the labyrinth. Maurice Benayoun explains that in art spaces and museums in three different French speaking cities -- Brussels, Lyon, and Dakar -- Labylogue developed eight main themes that invited visitors to meet in the labyrinth and as they conversed, immerse themselves in the accompanying text on the walls.Source: Narrabase

Palavrador is a poetic cyberworld built in 3D (Palavrador comes from the Portuguese word palavra, which itself means "word"). Directed by Francisco Carlos de Carvalho Marinho (Chico Marinho), it was nonetheless conceived and implemented as a result of synergetic collective assemblage of ideas and activities of a wider group of authors with backgrounds in the arts, literature, and computer science. Six flocks of meandering poems autonomously wander through the three-dimensional space. The readers may choose how many flocks of poems they want to see wandering through the environment, and the poems (botpoems) are able to turn around obstacles to keep their unveiling cohesion while moving through the space. The logic of movements was implemented using artificial intelligence procedures based on swarm behavior and steering behaviors of autonomous locomotion agents. Among the virtual objects of the Palavrador there is a labyrinth whose architecture is generated by mathematical procedures (fractal). There are also video poems, the sounds from which are modulated in relation to the distance of the readers, thus creating an immersive journey with a musical dimension. Readers choose between two avatars to represent them inside the virtual environment, one of which flies, and the other which meanders through the space. Additionally, it is possible to make the avatars "throw up" flying poems by using the joystick. Palavrador implies action; the creative achievement of words in symbiosis with humans and the autonomous poems (bots) adding new perspectives to art and literature by incorporating ideas from others disciplines such as computer science and biology.

(Source: Author's description from the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)

Trope creatively intervenes in the ways that readers engage with literary texts by creating a virtual environment that is conducive to and assists the experience of reading the poetic text. The physicality of the text itself is key. Poems and short stories are repositioned rather than illustrated in spatialized, audio and visual format/s not possible in “real” life. In the trope landscape, Second Life users can negotiate their own paths through each creative environment and for example, fly into a snowdome, run through a maze in the sky, listen to a poem whispered by a phantom pair of dentures, or stumble upon a line of dominos snaking around the bay. Trope aims to expand writing networks and further develop the virtual literary community.

(Source: Auithor's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)