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1. Senghor on the Rocks

   Senghor on the Rocks (SOTR) was published online under a creative commons license as the first novel illustrated with Google Maps. Every page of the virtual book that was created for the online presentation of the novel is accompanied by a satellite view of the current location of the story. Readers experience the novel’s action as a journey on the map, including smooth panning from location to location as the characters travel around or different zoom levels showing areas in close detail or as an overview. The novel itself is written in German and deals with an involuntary journey of young assistant cameraman Martin “Chi” Tschirner taking him through Dakar and the Senegal. In the first chapters Chi is busy shooting a promotional film in Dakar and does not care too much about where he is or what the city he is hurrying through may be like – other than loud, dirty and inscrutable. Chi doesn’t like his job or the people he works with too much and the routines of his work prevent him from seeing the world instead of a series of changing locations requiring different light filters and lenses.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 16.02.2011 - 14:37

2. TOC: A New-Media Novel

   TOC is a multimedia epic about time: the invention of the second, the beating of a heart, the story of humans connecting through time to each other and to the world. An evocative fairy tale with a steampunk heart, TOC is a breath-taking visual novel, an assemblage of text, film, music, photography, the spoken word, animation, and painting. It is the story of a man who digs a hole so deep he can hear the past, a woman who climbs a ladder so high she can see the future, as well as others trapped in the clockless, timeless time of a surgery waiting room: God's time. Theirs is an imagined history of people who are fixed in the past, those who have no word for the future, and those who live out their days oblivious to both.

   (Source: Author's description on TOC website)

   Scott Rettberg - 02.03.2011 - 22:07

3. Reconstructing Mayakovsky

   Inspired by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, this hybrid media novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and discord have been eliminated through technology. The text employs storylines derived from lowbrow genre fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, the detective novel, and film. These kitsch narratives are then destabilized by combining idiosyncratic, lyrical poetic language with machine-driven forms of communication: hyperlinks, "cut-and-paste" appropriations, repetitions, and translations (OnewOrd language is English translated into French and back again using the Babelfish program.) In having to re-synthesize a coherent narrative, the reader is obliged to recognize herself as an accomplice in the creation of stories whether these be novels, histories, news accounts, or ideologies. The text is accessed through various mechanisms: a navigable soundscape of pod casts, an archive with real-time Google image search function, a manifesto, an animation and power point video, proposals for theatrical performances, and mechanism b which presents the novel in ten randomly chosen words with their frequencies.

   Scott Rettberg - 15.04.2011 - 15:38

4. Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw

   Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw is an animated interactive graphic based on the historical story of Christian Shaw and her demonic possession. Set in 1696 amongst the witch trials, this project explores new ways of experiencing a story — harnessing the allure of mystery and uneasy tensions and plucking the participant's sense of social responsibility. (Source: Author description, Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One.)

   It’s a visual game and almost non-textual. You play by clicking on the active areas. It’s not always easy to see the areas so you need to click around and just try for a while. There are sounds when you click on different areas. The game takes place in something looking like a small town, and smaller images pops up when you click on items.

   Eric Dean Rasmussen - 27.04.2011 - 12:28

5. 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