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The Flat
Inspired by the author’s own dreams and experiences, The Flat presents users/readers with a challenging mouse-controlled environment in which narrative fragments left behind by an abandoned building’s previous inhabitants still linger. Through a combination of atmospheric photography, parallax scrolling techniques, snippets of written fiction, and an evocative soundtrack, the work allows various rooms in the flat to be explored by panning around with the mouse; the transient textual narratives themselves often changing and/or progressing when the rooms are revisited. To add to the feeling of tension and urgency, and to encourage the work to be revisited, a timer ticks down in the top right hand corner of the screen before the user/reader is ejected from the narrative and shown a final, enigmatic scene: a white hooded figure in the back garden.
Andy Campbell - 13.05.2011 - 16:13
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The Heuristics of Automatic Story Generation
The intelligence of a story-generating computer program can be assessed in terms of creativity, aesthetic awareness, and understanding. The following approaches are evaluated with respect to these three criteria: simple transition networks, grammar-driven models, simulations, algorithms based on problem-solving techniques, and algorithms driven by so-called "authorial goals." The most serious deficiency of the discussed programs resides in the domain of aesthetic awareness. In order to improve on this situation, story-generation should not follow a strictly linear, chronological order, but rather proceed from the middle outwards, starting with the episodes that bear the focus of interest. The program should select as top-evel goal the creation of climactic situations, create the preparatory events through backward logic, and take the story to the next highlight, or to an appropriate conclusion through a guided simulation. This strategy is ilustrated in a "reverse-engineering," or generative reading of Little Red Riding Hood that simulates the reasoning of an imaginary computer program.
(Source: Author's website)
Scott Rettberg - 19.05.2011 - 17:03
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Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies
What matters in understanding digital media? Is looking at the external appearance and audience experience of software enough—or should we look further? In Expressive Processing, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that understanding what goes on beneath the surface, the computational processes that make digital media function, is essential.
Wardrip-Fruin suggests that it is the authors and artists with knowledge of these processes who will use the expressive potential of computation to define the future of fiction and games. He also explores how computational processes themselves express meanings through distinctive designs, histories, and intellectual kinships that may not be visible to audiences.
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 11:26
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This Is Not A Poem
This work takes the poem "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer and, transcribing it onto a "scratchable" disk, makes it into a toy, a game, and a language engine.
(Source: Author's description)
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 12:35
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GENERATION[S]
GENERATION[S] expands upon a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort, and incorporates GORGE, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire, a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge. There was only one rule in creating GENERATION[S]: No new texts. All the texts in this book were previously published in some way. The texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators’ source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. Most of the sentences in the fiction generators started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some led to comments that led to responses that led to new texts. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION[S].
(Source: Author's website)
Scott Rettberg - 20.05.2011 - 14:44
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Editor's Introduction: Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing
This installment of the Iowa Review Web explores the function of place and space in recent new media writing. Each of the four interviews concern works that in some way attempt to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between space and storytelling. Each of the primary works discussed in these interviews also pushes space in another sense, in that each attempts to explore a new "possibility space" on the boundary between different forms and fields of multimedia experience: between story and game, between game and drama, between literature and conceptual art, between game and performance. The introduction contextualizes the narrative function of space in a number of recent works of electronic literature.
Scott Rettberg - 21.05.2011 - 09:53
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Locative Narrative, Literature and Form
The essay addresses the theoretical background and artistic inspiration for the author's engagement with locative narrative.
Scott Rettberg - 23.05.2011 - 16:04
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Grafik Dynamo
Grafik Dynamo is a net art work by Kate Armstrong & Michael Tippett that loads live images from the internet into a live action comic strip. From the time of its launch in 2005 to the end of 2008, the work used a live feed from social networking site LiveJournal. The work is currently using a feed from Flickr. The images are accompanied by narrative fragments that are dynamically loaded into speech and thought bubbles and randomly displayed. Animating the comic strip using dynamic web content opens up the genre in a new way: Together, the images and narrative serve to create a strange, dislocated notion of sense and expectation in the reader, as they are sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes perfectly in sync, and always moving and changing. The work takes an experimental approach to open ended narrative, positing a new hybrid between the flow of data animating the work and the formal perameter that comprises its structure.
(Source: Project site)
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 25.05.2011 - 10:46
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Grafik Dynamo (Catalog)
Catalog published by The Prairie Art Gallery, with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, featuring a printed sample of panels from the net art work Grafik Dynamo and a critical essay, "Graphic Sublime: On the Art and Designwriting of Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett," by the literary and media-arts scholar Joseph Tabbi. Tabbi argues that Grafik Dynamo, like Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics, enables readers to recognize how perception works and why a reduction of sense experience is necessary for the development reflection, communication, meaning, and narrative.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 25.05.2011 - 11:37
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With Love, from a Failed Planet
A satirical piece of netart featuring multiple short fictions detailing the failure of well-known, contemporary institutions, primarily corporations such as Apple, IKEA, and CNN, though corporatized political entities (Canada, France, and the White House) and individuals (author Neil Gaiman) are also ribbed. Readers access the prose narratives by hovering over iconographic logos, affixed to a rotating, transparent globe. A minimalist, electronic soundtrack, reminiscent of those used in planetarium productions from the late 1970s and early 1980s, enhances the work's retro-futurist commentary on the factors leading to obsolescence in the capitalist world-system.
Eric Dean Rasmussen - 28.05.2011 - 09:55
