Sixteen is a classic web-based project which allows the user to engage with a series of dreamscapes of a teenage girl that come together to form an interconnected story. The piece makes heavy use of video, Aftereffects, and an overarching spoken word poetry thread that unites the dream videos. Along the way, a close reader can discover a secret.The creators of 16 are two sisters, age 15 and 12.
This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.
Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.
This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text was added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker was published in December 2018.
This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.
Winner of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People's Choice Award 2018
Shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Digital Literature 2018
Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018
(Source: Author's Description)
January.
Mists make dangerous travel. The air loaded with freezing particles. Attached to fixed objects. A blade of grass. Some garden shrubs. Spreading tufts of crystals. Gigantic specimens of snow-white coral. An elegant fringe. The rime falls. Transparent. In heaps beneath the trees.
February.
It’s still raining. It has always rained. We are silt dwellers, tide chasers, puddles, floods, mud. The river runs brown topsoil down and out to sea. From a fir erupts a murmur of starlings. By fir I also mean fur. A pelt of needles, hackles raised. Gale force ten at the river mouth. The scale goes up to twelve. After that the sky breaks. The fir comes down and takes two eucalyptus with it.
Haakon Sheteligs plass 7
5007 Bergen
Norway
An exhibition addressing various aspects of the festival’s theme, the End(s) of Electronic Literature Festival exhibition at the University of Bergen Arts and Humanities Library includes kiosk displays of international web-based electronic literature, installations made specifically for the library context, an “Emergence of Electronic Literature” exhibit (documented in a separate catalog) featuring early works of electronic literature, antecedant works of print literature, posters and other ephemera from the history of the field, and an Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3 preview exhibit.
(source: ELO 2015 catalog)
Opacity is a 4-part short interactive story.We live in an age of obsession with transparency especially in politics and business.But in our personal relationships, what is the point of being transparent to oneself and to others ? The following interactive narrative commends a kind of opacity which is meant as an in-between. It is the story of a journey from a dream of transparency to a desire for opacity.(Source: Author's description on work's website)
The work is produced in HTML5. A version of the work for smartphones and tablets is in development
Sound Design: Hervé Zénouda
Opacity is a 4-part short interactive story.We live in an age of obsession with transparency especially in politics and business.But in our personal relationships, what is the point of being transparent to oneself and to others ? The following interactive narrative commends a kind of opacity which is meant as an in-between. It is the story of a journey from a dream of transparency to a desire for opacity.Source: Author's description on work's website
The work is produced in HTML5. A version of the work for smartphones and tablets is in development
Opacity is a 4-part short interactive story.We live in an age of obsession with transparency especially in politics and business.But in our personal relationships, what is the point of being transparent to oneself and to others ? The following interactive narrative commends a kind of opacity which is meant as an in-between. It is the story of a journey from a dream of transparency to a desire for opacity.
Source: Author's description on work's website
The work is produced in HTML5. A version of the work for smartphones and tablets is in development
Matko Zawrotna is a Flash rotary poem in which poetic sentences are spread out in separate spheres around the centre of a rotating wheel. While the wheel rotates the verses constantly realign each other, forming variable configurations.
May change web addresses in time, google search recommended if that happens.
The Living Liberia Fabric, initiated in affiliation with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Liberia, is an interactive, web-based narrative supporting the goal of lasting peace after years of civil war (1979-2003). It links concerns for liberation, dignity, and the future with needs for cultural foundations, human rights, truth, and reconciliation. Our system is based in Liberia's culture and the specifics of the conflicts, hence representing our cultural computing perspective. (source: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/content/living-liberia-fabric)
The Fragments of Distances is a short, only 5 web pages long browser based narrative focusing on the inner world of the main protagonist as he (it as well might be a she) meets the tourists asking him for a direction in his hometown. In other words it’s about the difference of the remembering and experiencing self and how they get along in forming of the self image. Or perhaps it’s just about the streets of Ljubljana. After all there is a lot of Google Maps API involved in the narrative. Actually, I’ll leave it up to you to make your own take on it.
It involves the Google Maps API. In case that Google changes it the whole piece will collapse (or if there is more request to the API than allowed).
A detailed review of Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery’s The Precession. Published July 14, 2011.
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Judd Morrissey’s newest work, theprecession.org is a website that redefines the act of reading literature on the internet in order to draw attention to the ways that reading is changing in our world. The website truly functions as the new book, with chapters that organize his intentions within the project into discrete capitulations of his ideas. My paper is mostly an analysis of the centerpiece of the website, POLI, because of its time-based nature: it uses real-time data capture and provides an extended period of time for the reading of the piece itself. POLI is a significant piece of contemporary literature because of its consciousness becomes political comment through the uses of our various languages.
My primary concerns with this paper are outlining the ways that Morrisey’s work fuses the language of popular media and that of poetry on the platform of web technologies, creating new forms and new standards for writing in contemporary contexts, both electronically and traditionally. Media, according to McLuhan’s definition, has always served large populations of people in ways beyond the content that it provides. Most importantly, media creates modes of reception that utilize the most current technologies and ultimately define demographics and ideologies. Poetry, on the other hand, has always had the reputation of using language that exists outside common usage in order to provide critical reflection for society. Modern forms of poetry seek to create a more ironic commentary that necessarily brings these genres closer together. Poetry that recognizes its proximity to other kinds of media is much more useful in our contemporary age of overlapping modes of perception and increasingly layered information. Key to this insight is the use of form. Morrissey’s work engages with multiple aspects of social forms: he examines new web-based social contexts in which language emerges, and incorporates those same modes into his work. He samples live examples of language that are then integrated into the ongoing fabric of the poem’s structure. What emerges is a piece of work that includes an ironic commentary on the state of and our use of language itself, as well as how we choose and voice our concerns with it to each other.
The play with the term POLI that Morrissey engages with the central poem demonstrates his fascination with larger social structures (polis is a Greek root meaning both city and its citizens) as well as the most basic units of life (poli is the human gene responsible for the production of a DNA enzyme). The title then serves as a catalyst for the understanding of the poem on both its macro and micro levels. Morrissey scatters words and their letters, making patterns to challenge and facilitate comprehension, increasing our awareness of the role of our own facilities. So, most importantly, he involves the reader in a real-time construction of the meaning of the poem from fragments of their own social structures of language and his accurate representation of our haphazard apprehension of them.
This is not something that I feel is limited to Electronic Writing at all, but that Electronic Writing has a crucial role in demonstrating to the entire Writing community.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)
As a piece of literature, theprecession.org connects the social context of reading on the Internet to the traditional question of how form provides meaning to content. The piece is specifically engineered to use language in very particular ways as a test within/against the context in which it is presented. The multiple elements of the duo’s practice — travel and experience, writing, programming, performance, and documentation (both of experiences and performances) — suggest the act of making art as a powerful analog for action in the world: civic action, exploration, and participation in the world, and the subsequent creation of community.
The jump to using a computer as an element in the composition of literature, not merely to transcribe it, was the invention of a new genre. As with the inception of many new genres, electronic literature is the fusion of a more traditional genre with a new technology, responding to a new need in the community for a more accurate perspective on our current world.