A collaboration with the Queensland State Archives, this is a collection of digital poems using archival material built into a physical space. Interactive elements cleverly repurpose old archive equipment such as card index drawers and microfiche machines. The poems draw on Brisbane’s past and recreate the experience of losing yourself in archival material.
[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants' interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym "seeds," each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants "plant" their interests, each becomes a tree that "grows" over time. Each organism's leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants' trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.
Thank you for your interest in this app. Ironically, this page gets more interest now that Hilda Bewildered is unavailable!
Hilda Bewildered was released 30 January 2015. Apple removes from sale apps which have not been regularly updated, regardless of whether they continue to work or not. In order to update Hilda we need the latest XCode, which requires a newer Mac. When we buy a new Mac, we’ll update XCode and resubmit Hilda Bewildered to the App Store. But we recently updated our PCs, so… we don’t actually need new Macs right now, apart from this one annoying thing.
See the Hilda Bewildered Book Trailer on YouTube.
Author notes are available from within the app. Various extra notes can be found published on this blog — click on a Hilda Bewildered tag or do a search for “Hilda Bewildered” to see them all in one place.
Hilda Bewildered is a shortlisted work for the 2015 Cybils Book App Awards.
Children’s Technology Review awarded Hilda Bewildered an Editor’s Choice Award
Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2017
"The Hilda bewildered app requires iOS 5.1.1 or later, is compatible with iPad and utilises multiple functions such as intuitive navigation, hand-coded interactivity, painterly style artwork, an original soundtrack and hyperlinks. This can be classified as an interactive storybook due to the audio, visual and touch features, used to enhance the reader's experience (Lamb, 2011, p.14). Hilda bewildered is a complex narrative that requires the reader to interpret events, characters and themes through written text, images and the exploration of digital features." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25067103-hilda-bewildered Goodreads review 03.09.2019.
This paper reports on an the initial stages of compiling a comprehensive, historically deep "atlas" of the structures of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and Twine games. In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io. What do we find when we consider these forms of electronic literature (and their crucial precurors) as one comprehensive atlas of a vast transmedia territory of interactive storytelling? Which methods may be adapted between print and digital works, and which demand new approaches?In summer 2017 the Transverse Reading Project began surveying an archive of over ~2500 interactive gamebooks in the Katz Collection at UC Santa Barbara -- and began building a collection of visualized interactive plot structures that shape a reader's choices. Mapping interactive stories is a tradition in gamebook culture, with examples of mapping by authors and readers dating back to at least the 1930s. Writers created hand-drawn maps as an aid to writing -- and then readers re-created their own maps as an aid to tracking the explored and unexplored options of interactive reading. In this project, data visualized "story maps" use similar network graphs that simultaneously reflect the branching plot structures of each gamebook or digital game, the way scenes are ordered in the pages of the codex, and the order of individual choices on each page. In addition, the patterns of an "interactive periodic table of elements" are extracted for each work.In print, data was collected by student researchers using a custom format for rapidly encoding gamebooks (~30 minutes on average), and data-mined / visualized using the open source and cross-platform software tool Edger -- which was custom written for this project. These techniques of data collection, visualization, and exploration will are of particular interest to scholars in related popular interactive genres such as visual novels, Twine games, or life sims. In the second case study, on Twine, automatic harvesting and mapping methods where used to extract network patterns from a large subset of publicly available Twine works -- with results bringing in to focus both the deep similarities and the surprising differences in interactive works from the 1930s to today.
(source: ELO 2018 website)
In particular, it considers the "gap" between approaches to two highly related yet radically different archives of branching works: an archive of over 2500 interactive print gamebooks stretching from the 1920s to the present, and contemporary collections of the approximately 1500-2000 extant Twine games available in popular public repositories such as the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) and itch.io.
Bremen
Bibliothek Straße 1
28359 Bremen
Germany
The use of computers as tools of literary and artistic creation has produced further paradigms within literary, language and media studies, but it has also promoted the resurfacing of a series of age-old debates. Digital media and digital technologies have extended the range of multimodal reading experiences, but they have also led us to readdress deep-rooted notions of text or medium. The dynamic network of media, art forms and genres seems to have been once again reconfigured. However, practices and debates that have preceded the emergence of the computer medium have not been discarded. In fact, they have been incorporated into experiences with the medium and have contributed to shaping digital artifacts. The “International Conference on Digital Media and Textuality” aims to examine this process. This conference seeks to move beyond the “old and new” dispute and to help us identify intersections, exchanges, challenges, dead-ends and possibilities. In order to achieve this goal, the panels of this conference are designed to cover multiple topics and fields of research, from media archaeology to teaching in a digital age. This event will be sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA). For further information, please visit the conference’s website at https://digmediatextuality.wordpress.com/ or contact the conference chair, Daniela Côrtes Maduro at cortesm@uni-bremen.de.
Panel I – ‘Nothing comes of nothing’ – This panel will be comprised of presentations that link electronic literature with literary, communicative or artistic practices which have preceded and influenced digital forms and genres.
Panel II – Introspective Texts – For this panel, we will accept presentations that focus on the way texts can be self-reflexive and mirror the process of their own creation or reading.
Panel III – Where is narrative? – This panel will be dedicated to ways in which digital media can be used to tell a story or to structure a narrative.
Panel IV – Trans-multi-inter-meta: the medium – This panel will focus on the role of the medium in the production, transmission and understanding of text, as well as on the conditions of media interaction, convergence, and divergence.
Panel V – Teaching the digital – This panel is focused on digital literacy and the teaching of electronic literature.
Panel VI – Tracking and visualizing texts – This panel is dedicated to the collection, archive and preservation of literature. It also aims to address ways of analysing and categorizing large amounts of data.
Between the 3rd and the 5th of November 2016, we will welcome six keynote speakers, attend artist talks, performances and visit one exhibition. The International Conference on Digital Media and Textuality will gather artists/ authors/ scholars/ readers at the Universität Bremen. ICDMT will be comprised of the Exhibition “Shapeshifting Texts”, sponsored by the ADEL (Archive of German Electronic Literature), and an evening of performances sponsored by the Literaturhaus Bremen. All the activities mentioned above are sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization. In order to fulfil this event, we have received the financial support of the M8 Post-Doc Initiative Plus, Excellence Initiative. These events are part of the “Shapeshifting Texts: keeping track of electronic literature” postdoctoral project.
Urbanscrawl is an abstraction of everyday city life. Whilst we may be aware of some conversations that are happening around us, urbanscrawl seeks to trace the residue of digital conversations that pass by undetected.
SMS messaging enables people to participate regardless of location by texting a dedicated number. The visualisation picks these messages from the ether and uses them to construct a navigable 3D space surrounding the voyeur within a context which is simultaneously familiar but also completely alien...
(source: Vimeo)
In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses. In the realm of digital writing, there is a group of texts that seem to systematically depart from the supremacy of the author function. None of them makes this its objective nor its topic. It just happens that digital writings with a certain set of common features in their production and reception processes do away with the author function and allows to focus, as Foucault hypothesizes, on the modes of existence of these discourses, their origin and circulation, and their controller.
In my paper, I would like to look at the production and reception processes of a number of canonical digital literary texts, amongst them Toby Litt’s blog fiction Slice, the huge collaborative writing project A Million Penguins, Reneé Turner’s mash-up fiction She…, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, and Charles Cumming’s Google-Maps mash-up The 21 Steps. They all share what I call delayed textonic authorship, i.e. contributions to and modification of the text that happen further to the end in the continuum of production and reception. They also share various expressions of uneasiness with traditional authorial roles and ultimately a departure from the supremacy of the author function. Looking at the primary texts, one can see various forms of disintegration of the author function, amongst them escape from one text into another, the indistinguishability of authors and characters, scolding of the authors by the editors, disorientation over the limits of one’s own text, and the renouncement of authorship.
In my paper, I would like to visualize the structural novelties in the production/reception processes of such texts by using the new model of the textual action space. I would also like to showcase the particularities of dealing with shifts of the author function and show that the departure from the author function does, indeed, not only allow us, as Foucault has predicted, to look at the modes of existence of discourses, their origin and circulation, and the underlying power structures; this is precisely what we are forced to look at when the author function is absent in aesthetic discourse. The insights gained by analysing electronic literature this way enable us to fundamentally rethink the possible commercial ends of literary production.
(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was developed at the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) for the CAVE2™, the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality 320-degree panoramic environment which provides users with the ability to see 3D stereoscopic content in a near seamless flat LCD technology at 37 Megapixels in 3D resolution matching human visual acuity. The CAVE immerses people into worlds too large, too small, too dangerous, too remote, or too complex to be viewed otherwise. This project makes use of the CAVE environment for a multisensory artwork that addresses a complex contemporary problem: as American soldiers are returning from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that some of them participated in interrogation practices and acts of abusive violence with detainees for which they were not properly trained or psychologically prepared. This has in turn left many soldiers dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder on their return home, and left many unresolved questions about the moral calculus of using torture as an interrogation strategy in military operations. The project was developed through a unique collaboration between artists, scientists, and researchers from four Universities. The production team includes filmmaker Dr. Roderick Coover, writer Dr. Scott Rettberg, artist and visualization researcher Daria Tsoupikova, computer scientist Arthur Nishimoto, sound designer Mark Partridge, production assistant Mark Baratta, and senior research programmer Lance Long. Dr. Jeffrey Murer of St. Andrews University, Scotland also contributed as a consultant on the project. The project is based on interviews of American soldiers conducted by political scientist, Dr. John Tsukayama. (Source: Authors' Paper Introduction at VISAP Art Show 2014)
Built with Unity
Bacterias argentinas is a dynamic model of autonomous agents that recombine genetic information eating one each other and where the genetic information is a narrative. The energy and staff circulate. Word is energy. A version of this model was used in the exhibition Juego doble (Double Game) in Mexico D.F. (Source: Maya Zalbidea) In bacterias argentinas Colombian digital artist and data visualization developer Santiago Ortiz creates a linguistic-multicellular environment that models the interactions between basic organisms in a virtual ecosystem. In Ortiz’s words, it is “a dynamic model of autonomous agents that remix genetic information by consuming one another, and in which genetic information is narrative.” In this Flash work, Ortiz explores the question of life as information by mapping linguistic elements onto color-coded “bacteria” that circulate freely in this bio-linguistic ecology. These bacteria carry changeable fragments of sentences as “genes”—they exchange genetic material upon accumulating or losing energy through phagocytosis (the feeding method of many microorganisms)—and their feeding redistributes energy in the community, since the consumed bacteria cedes its energy (measured here in terms of the length of its genetic code) to the bacteria that consumes it. In this way, the interaction between bacteria, whose feeding strings together narratives within the bacterial community, provides materia prima for metabolic processes that write narratives and also for the decomposition of bacteria whose genetics are not favorable for the narratives, thus constituting a kind of “natural” selection. This is, however, an “un-natural” selection process, according to Ortiz, since it models a principle of “infinite injustice” that Ortiz equates with neoliberal political and economic policies. It is significant that the bacteria are “Argentine,” recalling that country’s devastating 2002 financial crisis. The user can confirm their nationality by moving the cursor over each bacteria, hearing the constructed narratives recited by the Argentine “storyteller” Edgardo Franzetti. (Source: ELC 3)
El inventor de historias -The Stories Inventor- is a net that articulates texts, images –reproductions and photography, digital audiovisual installations and diverse conferences and seminars. In the Internet we can see Edgardo’s brain-the inventor-in action. Edgardo, tells stories of every kind. This narrative emerges from the random algorithm that moves through a semantic web, recombining words and keeping correct grammar. This net is represented in 3D using visualization, with this the “brain” of Edgardo can be discovered. The complete installation is composed by the brain –digital algorithm-, the face –video- and the body –photography.
En internet puedes ver el cerebro de Edgardo -el inventor- en acción. Edgardo, narra historias de todo tipo. Esta narración emerge de un algoritmo aleatorio que recorre una red semántica, recombinando palabras y manteniendo una gramática correcta. Esta red se representa tridimensionalmente, utilizando una visualización, con lo cual el “cerebro” de Edgrado, queda al descubierto. La instalación completa se compone del cerebro [algoritmo digital], el rostro [vídeo], y el cuerpo [fotografía].
