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1. Regime Change

   Textual instruments make text playable in a new way. At first, as one encounters their workings, they are toys for exploring language — more flexible than link-node hypertext, more responsive than batch-mode natural language generators. With growing experience, these instruments can also become tools for textual performance. Regime Change begins with a news article from April 2003, following the bombardment that began the U.S. invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush cites "eyewitness" intelligence that Saddam Hussein was assassinated by targeted U.S. bombing and clings to the contention that the Iraqi president was hiding "weapons of mass destruction." Playing Regime Change brings forth texts generated from a document that records a different U.S. attitude toward presidential assassination and eyewitness intelligence — the report of the Warren Commission. This instrument operates using the statistics of n-grams, a technique used for textual games for more than 50 years, beginning in Claude Shannon's 1948 A Mathematical Theory of Communication.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 08:44

2. White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares

   White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares is a JavaScript investigation of literary variants with a new text generated every ten seconds. Its goals are as follows. (1) To present a poetic evocation of the images, vocabulary, and sights of Costa Rica's language and natural ecosystems though poetic text and visuals. (2) To investigate the potential of literary variants. Thinking of poems where authors have vacillated between variant lines, Bromeliads offers two alternatives for each line of text thus, for an 8 line poem, offering 512 possible variants, exploring the multi-textual possibilities of literary variants. (3) It explores the richness of multiple languages. (4) It mines the possibilities of translation, code, and shifting digital textuality. Having variants regenerate every ten seconds provides poems that are not static, but dynamic; indeed one never finishes reading the same poem one began reading. This re-defines the concept of the literary object and offers a more challenging reading, both for the reader and for the writer in performance, than a static poem. The idea is to be able to read as if surfing across multiple textual possibilities.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 10:42

3. Strings

   The author quotes Jim Andrews's description: "Strings is a playful series of Flash pieces about relationships. It also raises questions about the presence/absence of the hand in this medium. Visual artists often criticise the lack of presence of the hand in digital art. In Strings, the hand is and is not present, is transformed, is transforming, is writing, is written, coded. Tis morphed." (Source: Author description, ELC, vol. 1).

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 14:40

4. Storyland

   Storyland (version 2) is a randomly created narrative which plays with social stereotypes and elements of popular culture. Each sentence is constructed from a pool of possibilities, allowing each reader a unique story. The reader presses the "new story" button, and a story is created for that moment in time. It is unlikely that any two stories will be identical. Storyland exposes its narrative formula thus mirroring aspects of contemporary cultural production: sampling, appropriation, hybrids, stock content, design templates. It risks discontinuity and the ridiculous while providing opportunities for contemplation beyond the entertainment factor.

   The computer-generated combinatorial story is one of the oldest forms of digital writing. Storyland, with its simple circus frame, plays with this tradition by performing recombination of the sort seen in cut-up and in Oulipian work. The system repeatedly plots amusingly repetitive stories, inviting the reader to consider, to read its scheme for composition.

   (Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One).

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 14:57

5. Savoir-Faire

   One of the strengths of interactive fiction is that it is able to simulate a rich world, even one that has unusual physical and magical laws. In Savoir-Faire, the (usually cliché) elements of a treasure-hunt and a world suffused by magic are situated, unusually, in 18th-century France; a young man has come back to his childhood home to ask for a loan and has found it oddly abandoned. The special workings of Savoir-Faire's world open memories and unlock relationships between things, adding resonance to this intricate, difficult play of puzzles.

   (Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1).

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 15:13

6. The Set of U / La Série des U

   The Set of U is a typical example of adaptive generation. It is an association of a combinatory generator of sound and a syntactical animation of text that changes its tempo according to the speed of the machine. So, it is not possible to synchronize the sound and the visual. But the reader often has the impression that the sound is designed for the visual process. This result is obtained by a programmed communication between the visual and the sound that uses programmed meta-rules in order to preserve the perceptive coherence. These meta-rules also create a new kind of non-algorithmic combinatory generator by focusing the attention at different moments of the reading. In this situation, the sense created by reading can vary slightly from one reading to another. The reader himself makes this combinatory by rereading. So, this work is interactive, not by managing input devices but through meta-rules. Meta-rules are not "technical rules," but the expression of a complex esthetical intention that lies in programming and can only be perceived by looking at the program.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 15:25

7. RedRidinghood

   Leishman's playful retelling of the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale makes use of comic book vernacular, limited forms of explorative interaction, optional narrative paths, and a jazzy soundtrack. RedRidinghood is the type of Flash piece that suggests the potential for complex forms of interactive storytelling without typographic text.

   (Source: Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. 1)

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 29.04.2011 - 09:55

8. open.ended

   Author description: open.ended is an interactive three-dimensional poem experienced through the interplay of shifting geometric surfaces. Verses appear on the faces of separate translucent cubes nested within one another. The reader manipulates a mouse, joystick, or touch-screen to bring stanzas on different surfaces into view. As cubes, faces, and layers are revealed, dynamically updating lines of text move in and out of focus. The structure of the poem facilitates a multiplicity of readings: from single verses on cube faces, to sequential verses across faces, to juxtapositions of verses across multiple cubes. Meaning is constructed actively through collaboration between reader, author, and mediated work. An audio track of the authors' layered voices extends the experience, enveloping the reader in the atmosphere of the poem, organically complementing the visual and tactile components of the work.

   (Source: Author description, ELC vol. 1).

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 29.04.2011 - 10:01

9. TLT vs. LL

   The z dimension in this work is important to the conceptual as well
   as the physical operation of the work. Normally, I am not so much
   concerned beyond the xy. My work is first graphic, then literary,
   interactive, and whatever else, so a concern beyond 2D is not high
   priority – until now, and with thanks in part to Rita Raley’s z
   queries.
   The idea of 'versus' (as opposition) demands at the
   least two sides, so, it could be represented visually with just xy.
   Previous 'dual' examples (and these are xy representations):
       warnell.com/pbn_io/dialog04.htm. Subject: dialog
       Email from John Cayley (/w Rita Raley), 2004
       warnell.com/real/dialog.htm. Dialog
       Email exchange with visual poet Jim Andrews, 1997
   So, thinking along that z line... the opposition
   comes not from the left or right, but from back to front ( 1 white from
   9 x white moves to top )
   

   Rita Raley - 05.05.2011 - 14:56

10. Torus

    This video provides limited documentation of the
    “Torus” project. Unfortunately, however, it does not give a good
    impression of the reader’s experience of Torus as an instance of
    immersive VR. Constrained by the requirements of Cave technicians, the
    video is shot from a single point of view and without the stereo imaging
    that would usually be in operation. Moreover, the camera’s point of
    view is different and significantly distant from the reader’s point of
    view and this compromises the immersive illusion. For example, and most
    obviously, planes of text which should appear to extend behind the
    reader and out through the screen appear to be folded back away from
    both the camera’s and the reader’s point of view. Please bear this in
    mind when reviewing this material.

    A pdf version of the interview is in the Brown Digital Repository (which is supposed to guarantee its links for as long as the institution lasts):
    https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:383674/

    Rita Raley - 05.05.2011 - 15:06

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