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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
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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
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Aaron A. Reed
Aaron A. Reed has worked as a travel writer, web monkey, offensive t-shirt designer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and murder mystery producer. His fiction has appeared in “Fantasy & Science Fiction” magazine, and the story “Shutdown/Retrovival” was selected for that publication's “Best of 2003” audio book compilation.
More recently, Aaron has created groundbreaking works of interactive fiction. His IF “Whom the Telling Changed” competed in the 2006 Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemakers Competition in Park City, Utah, was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, and was nominated for Best Script in the GameShadow Innovation in Games Festival. “Telling” has since been studied in new media courses in Australia and Sweden.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.04.2011 - 14:23
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 Launch
On 2 May 2011, the Electronic Literature Research Group at the Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies, University of Bergen hosted two special events at the Bergen Public Library celebrating the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2. The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2 is an international anthology of more than 60 works of electronic literature published under a Creative Commons license online and on DVD.
The publication of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 in 2006 had a significant impact on the field of electronic literature, giving readers and educators a common set of referents in the form of a diverse collection of literary works made for digital media. The ELC, Volume 2, published in 2011, offers new digital poetry, hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, multimedia documentaries, and a variety of other forms of electronic literature. The University of Bergen program in Digital Culture was one of the sponsors of the publication of the ELC 2 and will make use of it in its future courses.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 03.05.2011 - 14:13
