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  1. Space for writing: a sidelong glance at the history of immersive spatial hypertext

    The Cave Writing Workshop is an advanced experimental electronic writing workshop founded by Robert Coover, exploring the potential of text, sound, and narrative movement in immersive three-dimensional virtual reality. It brings together teams of undergraduate and graduate fiction writers, poets and playwrights, composers and sound engineers, graphic designers, visual artists, 3D modelers and programmers, to develop, within the environment of Brown’s “Cave” in the Technology Center for Advanced Scientific Computing and Visualization, projects that focus on the word. From 2002 onward writers have explored the possibilities of spatial hypertext in an immersive environment. What this paper proposes is an exploration of the history of the twin currents of hypertext and virtual reality that merged to create this particular form of expression, going back to the early hypertext systems developed at Brown University in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson/van Dam/et al and work in immersive virtual reality at University of Illinois’ CAVE in the early 1990s.

    (Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

    Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 14:42

  2. Writing Organism: CAPTCHA as a paradigm of *literary* digital textuality

    I start from CAPTCHA, those distorted strings of letters set against colors and designs, which we all recognize and rewrite to gain access to web sites. CAPTCHA operate in a complex intersection between commercial and scientific institutions, on the one hand, and concepts of mind and being, on the other. The Turing test is the background supposition of CAPTCHA's claim that recognition and rewriting is the iterative presentation and production of a singular human self. It is iterative and weak, in that it must be repeated and rewritten, and in that it is open to failure and misrecognition. It is singular and productive in that each test ties to an event that can be leveraged commercially - as in the reCAPTCHA project or (I argue) in related "distributed work" programs such as the Amazon Mechanical Turk - and in that the "weak performativity" couples the test to a range of net activities on the part of a speaking subject. (I contrast this to the traditional linguistic "shifters," and instead approach the subject in terms of a Kleinian "psychoanalytic graphology.")

    (Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)

    Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 14:46

  3. Remediating Stretchtext

    Seventeen years have passed since Coover's inspiring call to defy the tyranny of the line through hypertext, "where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." The profound influence of that clarion shaped the development of electronic literature and attracted the scorn of critics — Sven Birkerts, Laura Miller, Michiko Kakutani – who villified hypertext in defense of the line. Overlooked in the controversy is the embarrassing fact that, even today, we know remarkably little about inventing, implanting, and cultivating the narrative line in its organic richness. We know sequence and rhizome well, but the contours of recursus, timeshift, and renewal remain, for most writers, an arcane craft.

    How may we render a satisfactory account of complex events, fictitious or historical? We want hypertext narrative to do things we cannot achieve in print, and though we may occasionally use links or actemes to introduce variation in presentation or in story, it is now clear that hypertext will most frequently prove useful in changing (or adapting) plot.

    Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:04

  4. Towards the delight of poetic insight

    I am interested in the specific nature of POETIC insight and knowledge (Erkenntnis) in relation to other systemic spheres like, e.g., science or religion. As an approach to this subject my paper will discuss how poetic knowledge is addressed by the handling of ‘innovation’. Innovation will be observed as feature between reflexivity and potentiality in poetic experimentation. These poetological categories will be related to both practical and theoretical forms of technology driven language art. As exemplary forms I will focus on the radio play "Die Maschine" (The Machine, 1968) which simulates an Oulipo computer and was written and realized by George Perec and on its poetic comment by Florian Cramer (pleintekst.nl, 2004) as well as on the historical concept of ‘artificial poetry’ by Max Bense (in respect of his 100st anniversary) in the light of recent poetological concepts of innovation.

    (Source: Author's abstract)

    Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:18

  5. The Heuristic Value of Electronic Literature

    What makes electronic literature interesting for researchers?
    Maybe not its artistic and literary value, but rather its heuristic value.
    Indeed electronic literature not only permits previous media to be reexamined (paper for instance), but it also allows several well-established notions to be questioned (cf. figure above) such as:
    - narrative in narratology;
    - text in linguistics and semiotics;
    - figure in rhetorics;
    - materiality in aesthetics;
    - grasp in anthropology;
    - memory in archivistics;
    - literariness in literary studies…

    Exploiting the heuristic value of electronic literature has two consequences:
    - an evolution of some notions in certain scientific disciplines, and maybe of the disciplines themselves;
    - a revealing effect regarding both digital technology and interactive and multimedia writing.

    Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:51

  6. Lessons Learned from Designing Children’s Interactive Narratives

    Abstract Designing interactive narrative for children requires awareness of the cognitive abilities of young readers. In this paper, we present the lessons learned from two example interactive narrative systems, Baby Duck Takes a Bath and A Little Quiz for the Little Hare. Baby Duck is a multi-sequential narrative where the user can explore how a duckling can become dirty or clean by interacting with its habitat. The agency of the characters (including a mother duck and duck friends) result from manipulating elements within the small story world. The narrative changes according to the user's interactions, allowing for change in perspective, agency and attitude in real-time. The Little Quiz system aims to teach young children the concepts of measurement and comparison through the conversation between two characters. It explores the design space of enhancing interactive narrative using a commonsense knowledge database to understand players' intention and generate relevant narration. Both works target children from 1st to 3rd grade in the early stage of learning story construction.

    Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:41

  7. Internet Literature in China: A New Literary Revolution?

    During the past 10 years, the success of Internet literature has become the most attractive phenomenon in contemporary Chinese literature. Internet literature has not only attracted millions of readers, it has also gained commercial success. How can we understand the combination of computer and Internet as a kind of global technology, and the literature, as the local and the national representation, in China? In order to answer this important question, my paper will begin with a discussion of the rising young and famous Internet literature writers. The Internet not only provides a new world of cyberspace to young people to express their feelings and lives in a new age, it has also created new possibilities for the refashioning of literature in contemporary China. By following the successful stories of Internet literature writers, we will find that Internet literature, as a kind of new folk disourse, creates a new discursive space and constructs a kind of virtual identity. Such an attempt, generally called "the spirit of new folk literature" in the cyberspace, counters the elite discourse of Chinese traditional literature.

    Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:47

  8. Narrative choice-making, literary trajectories and interactive environments: on the structure and writing of the Unknown Territories

    This artist paper examines in detail and poetic dimensions both the content and construction of the Unknown Territories project. This project incorporates two literary histories constructed along paths dissecting imagined landscapes of the western Canyonlands. The first paths follow an exploration narrative and in the second, imagined 100 years later, users take on a landscape facing development and destruction. The presentation is based on forthcoming papers in the books Switching Codes (Chicago, 2010) and Picture This (Minnesota, 2011).

    Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:56

  9. From capacity to truncation: What can happens in 30 seconds of digital poetry

    This paper makes observations about digital poetry through thematic connections derived from a 1969 short story by Robert Coover (“The Elevator”) and a poetics statement written forty years later by critic Janez Strehovec (“The Poetics of Elevator Pitch”). Strehovec’s essay addresses poetry in the age of short attention spans, and in which compositional designs are mosaics, hybrid. Contemporary works are unstable, precarious, and relations between textual components have evolved. Digital poetry is a textual, meta-textual, linguistic, and sometimes non-linguistic practice requiring new forms of perception. Because our observational skills have changed, Strehovec proclaims the importance of first impressions, getting viewers excited and immediately involved with language. He promotes the notion of an “elevator pitch” as a temporal ideal for digital poetry—the idea that the poem, “can be delivered in the time of an elevator ride (e.g., thirty seconds or 100-150 words)”, “which hooks the reader/user within a very short temporal unit”—an idea perhaps more relevant to authors of projected works than those who invite their audience to participate.

    Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:00

  10. Mobile Tagging as Tools to create Mixed Reality in eLit

    The objective of this paper is to describe the potentialities of Mobile Tagging as a tool for increasing and spreading the effects of Mixed Realities in Electronic Literature. In this sense, we will start introducing the main concepts and some examples of Mixed Realities followed by the concepts and examples of Mobile Tagging, showing that they are connected and benefit each other and can benefit eLit as well. Mixed Reality (or MR) refers to the fusion of the physical and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualizations where physical and digital objects co-­‐exist and interact in real time. On the other hand, mobile tagging is the process of reading a 2D barcode using a mobile device camera. Allowing the encryption of URLs in the barcodes, the mobile tagging can add a digital and/or online layer to any physical object, providing so several levels of mixed realities related to that object. Although Mixed Realities technologies have already existed for decades, in the past they were very expensive. Recently, mobile devices have also become tools for mixed realities.

    Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 10:07

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