BA-Tale

BA-Tale is an interactive, intermedial electronic literature piece, whose narrative is a fake myth about the formation of Slovakia’s capital—Bratislava. The way the reader engages with the piece brings about the concept of myth as an oral narrative and re-contextualizes it. The story is read in fragments—semantic units from the scattered moving text. The aspect of catching a fragment in time reminds one of listening to the oral story, although the necessity to remember the subsequent words in order to proceed adds a new aspect to this tradition. The sound is randomly computer-chosen from our database that defines for each unit a number of sounds. The semantically most important word of the unit was used as a keyword to find several corresponding sounds in freesounds.org.

Interaction: The first line of the story is marked white. You mouse over the first line and then you follow by mousing over any of the white marked words. These words group into a string. When mouse-released, another group of words turns white. By following the marked units, you can read the whole narrative string in a sequence. But you do not have to—and can create your own.