Chantalla Pleiter, together with Jean-Pierre Rawie, created a virtual reality experience of the poem 'Aa-Kwartier' by the poet Jean-Pierre Rawie. The poem can be found on the colourful city letter card 'Leesbaar Groningen.'
Voor Het Grote Gebeuren maakt Chantalla Pleiter, met medewerking van de dichter zelf, een virtual reality bewerking van het gedicht ‘Aa-Kwartier’ van Jean-Pierre Rawie. Het gedicht heeft een plekje gekregen op de kleurrijke letterenkaart Leesbaar Groningen. In de vr-versie kunt u gedicht in woord en beeld aan den lijve ondervinden.
Het gedicht is een van de vele honderden citaten die een plek kregen op Leesbaar Groningen, de nieuwe letterenkaart van de provincie en stad Groningen die tijdens Het Grote Gebeuren wordt gepresenteerd.
Tenure Track is a postmodernist critique of 21st-century academia in the form of a simulation game. In the vein of satirical games like Cow Clicker—a product of “carpentry,” or a strategy for creating philosophical, creative work, according to its designer Ian Bogost—Tenure Track also borrows game mechanics from popular puzzle simulators like Papers, Please, merging the finite potentiality of a critical text with the lightheartedness and non-prescriptiveness of play. Additionally, the simulation game as a genre harkens back to philosophical toys of the 19th century, such as the thaumatrope, the purpose of which was demystification through wonderment. The proposed poster would include imagery from the game, as well as links to interactive components (gameplay footage, demos) and brief descriptions of the mechanics and concept of the game.
Developed in Unity for desktop and VR over the past year, Tenure Track visually consists of a 3D re-creation of a nondescript office, viewed from a first-person perspective, with every object in the space being manipulable. The goal of the game is to achieve tenure by completing research, grading papers, and communicating with students and administrators. Much of this “work” is mediated through a variety of simulated digital platforms, which are accessed via a desktop monitor and a mobile phone. The centering of platforms underscores the degree to which they are essential to what constitutes labor. Post-pandemic, this can be read as referencing a potentially obsolete “platform”: the physical office.
As the player performs a litany of menial tasks over the course of a series of seconds-long days, they are interrupted constantly by notifications and knocks at the door. Over time, this produces a simulacrum of the frantic yet mundane administrative role many modern-day academics find themselves “playing” as they strive for the promised land of tenure. The sequence of predefined yet somewhat open-ended steps in the tenure process lends itself to this kind of gamification, which resists the interpretation of a prescribed process as fair or logical. The many small but cumulatively important decisions players make imparts a feeling of decision fatigue common to most knowledge work, playing with the assumption many outside of academe have of the professoriate as belonging to an exceptional, noble profession. What is not known until the game’s conclusion is that, once a player reaches one of several possible “endings,” the days continue to loop continuously.
While the game rewards literacy of both games and academe by subverting the former and reifying the latter, arguably the most satisfying interactions are the ones that are, in reality, the most disruptive (dropping the mobile phone and cracking the screen) or least salient (disposing of empty beverage containers in a recycling bin). Those who misunderstand the tenure track job as a stairway to heaven, or even as fundamentally different from other types of white-collar jobs, stand to see it in an uncanny light.
were forced into situations somewhere between Brazil and The Matrix, in which workspaces become the world. Also this evinced Paul Virilio’s notion of technological acceleration while confining to one spot (ZOOM!) undifferentiates the technologically enabled person without disabilities and the technologically au and the technologically augmented paraplegic (The Third interval).These existential effects led to my creation of a visualyl narratological immersive experience entitled Confinement Spaces, which consisted of 3D scans and renders of the UAE quotidian landscape, first of places immediately around me. But as I was able to expand my tr avels, more spaces were scanned in, creating a form of “narrative molecule” based on experience in the 1990’s with designer Roy Stringer’s Navihedron interface regime.In Confinement Spaces, six months of expanding explorations into iconic spaces of the United Arab Emirates as an allegory of confinement in space and the fracturing of reality as depicted by the glitches in the 3D scans.All of these elements (technological collapse of space and time, the freezing of existence into a timeless space, and all of these spaces collapsed in to a form of momentary narrative are consistent with my studies of spatial narratology and form as proposed by Joseph Frank. In this paper, I wish to discuss the spatiality of pandemic time, the similarities of Covid time to Joyce and Proust, and the modes in which Confinement spaces develop these ideas.
Recent pandemic-imposed restrictions on face-to-face exchanges have required that we find new ways to connect, often through networked platforms. Without classrooms, labs, and conference environments, ELO has embraced platforms such as Discord and Zoom for communication, and has also looked to online platforms for collaborative writing.
As we contemplate how platforms can keep us connected with our work and with each other, as well as the ways they may limit our interactions and thus arguably “disconnect” us, this panel explores what happens when e-literature—as research, practice, and field—is bound to platforms. E-literature scholarship and creative works that do not have the opportunity for in-person exchange provoke re-examinations of platform affordances and limitations. We ask: how may platforms may shape e-literature through their pre-set parameters, interfaces, and infrastructures? What are the promises and perils of platform-specific e-literature? Can we bring attention to platform through works of e-literature? Led by Marjorie C. Luesebrink, five speakers will answer these questions.
Lai-Tze Fan will trace the platform of a work of e-literature to its infrastructural origins. Nick Montfort’s generative poem Round (2013) is accompanied by a Note that describes the computational processes behind the poem. Fan will trace the specific hardware components’ production, manufacturing, assembly, and natural resource origins that support Round; in so doing, she provides an ecological understanding of the physical platforms that support e-literature.
Will Luers will sketch out some principles for a theory of recombinant fiction by exploring algorithmic flux (scripted variability) as something experiential within the digital text itself. His question for authors and readers of platform-based fiction production is: why is this play of forces between chaos and order thematically and formally important? Luers argues that algorithmic flux in digital fiction has a history, but that it presently lacks a theory and poetics for contemporary practice.
Erik Loyer will examine Google Sheets for how it enables users to treat spreadsheets as databases which can drive whole applications, effectively turning documents into platforms. He asks: what happens when we apply the same approach to digital narrative, giving individual stories the potential to function as their own platforms? Drawing on his experience developing creative tools for the digital humanities, digital comics, and e-lit, Loyer will sketch out some of the potentials and pitfalls of this mode of creation, and how our practices might better encourage it.
Christy Sanford reflects upon the processes for combining images and texts in some of her creative works. Sanford finds herself prompted by various platforms and platform-based texts around her, noting that in order to combine images and text, she needs technology’s assistance and inspiration to let unique characteristics of programs and platforms contribute to the development of her work.
Finally, Caitlin Fisher will discuss the promises and perils of disconnection and connection inside VR platforms that support literary and artistic co-creation. As we consider the use of virtual environments and spaces in place of in-person meetings and engagements, Fisher explores the futures of these platforms as a novel means of creative exchange.
Addressing conference themes of platform utopias, determinisms, identities, collaborations and modes, this conversational presentation discusses ways that concepts of time, space and narrative are expanded in The Key To Time https://unknownterritories.org/keytotime/. The Key To Time is a surreal and lyrical work for immersive, cinematic art experiences such as domes and 360 degree cinemas as well as for individual viewing on head-mounted virtual reality devices. Bridging 1920's silent film and virtual reality, the surface story draws viewers into a playful exploration of genre, identity and desire. In doing so, the work unravels narrative underpinnings of myths, genres, and technological constructs of time.
The Key To Time is created by media artist/filmmaker Roderick Coover (FR/US) and composer Krzysztof Wołek (PL) as part of a program designed to build cross-cultural, composer-artist collaborations. The dreamlike story follows a scientist who is trapped in the future due to a time-travel experiment gone wrong. His only hope to escape his predicament is to travel through dreams. His dreams, however, are troubled by anxieties, fears and anger. As the scientist travels through time, aesthetics change from those of silent film of the early 20th century to those of VR and a future cinema. There is also slippage between these times, with figures from memories walking into color settings as black and white figures or cartoon ones, and visual references draw upon early cinematic works like Louis Lumiere's Arrival of a Train at Ciotat (1895) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).
Through montage and collage, a mix color and black and white images, animation, intertitles, and sudden changes in dimension and perspective, The Key To Time toys with conventions and expectations. Song and dialog combine with layered and collaged imagery filmed in greenbox studio settings and natural settings. As with works like Guy Maddin's The Forbidden Room (2015) and David Blair's Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees (1991), this experimental artwork plays with the ways differing visual technologies shape consciousness, language and narrative forms.
Whereas in many films, sound composition comes after the film is written, shot and edited, in this case the music was part of the process of invention rather than an afterthought done only in post-production. Five songs were at the center of design. The songs hold essential roles in the movement of the story, which is driven my emotional tensions and unseen forces rather than rational thought. Second, we decided to record the script in advance of shooting the film. This decision enhanced a creative freedom and allowed for lots of play between dialog, images and sounds. The result disconnect between voice and image is evocative of early film and radio drama, and the approach is also similar to a workflow frequently used in animation; in this way too, the platform stimulated news ways of thinking about the collaboration and the creative process.
In Far inside, the visitor experiences life with schizophrenia. In this spatial experience you feel the lost of control on reality. The original interviews with Ton are the red line in this installation to give an impression of reality through his eyes. Writer Karin Anema describes how Ton battles his psychoses to get his life together in her book ‘ Today I will buy all colours’.
De belevingswereld van iemand in een psychose is nauwelijks invoelbaar; ook niet voor degenen die elke dag met ze werken. Tijdens deze Virtual Reality workshop ervaar je de beangstigende denkbeelden, visuele hallucinaties, en de impact op het leven van iemand die langdurig psychotisch is geweest. Het is tegelijkertijd een illustratie van controleverlies en angst.
“I am Ton. My whole life I searched for a true connection with somebodyto share my thoughts and feelings. I’ve had psychoses, which manifestedthemselves visually in fears and delusions. After this, a second periodcame which opened an unconsciously reservoir filled with an endlessflood of all kind of data, names and places. The psychoses repeated themselves.In contact with other, there still seem to be a gap between them and me.
It took more than thirty years to bring outside and inside closer together.I took controle of my fears by painting and ordening. An outsider mightnotice some oddity but I am capable of living a normal life, despite the social isolation.”
The Hollow Reach is a choice-based virtual reality (vr) experience built on becoming posthuman to overcome the trauma of emotional and physical loss. What at first appears to be an adventure game turns out to be an exploration of psychological and physical recovery, not a retreat from reality but a coming to terms with it. In this interactive puzzle game, virtual reality offers a space of recuperation through adaptation and prostheses. In this piece, the player progresses from the human to the post-human only by letting go of their notions of what is and is not under their control to encounter a life augmented and transformed by the digital.
Meet Me At The Station is a surreal and lyrical 10 minute experience for for 360 cinemas, domes, virtual reality headsets. A scientist is trapped in the future due to a time-travel accident. His only hope is to travel through dreams, but dreams can also turn into nightmares.
