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The Numberlys: An Interplay Between History, Urban Life and Technology in a Children’s Story App
The presentation will explore narrative, intertextual and ideological aspects of The Numberlys iPad/iPhone app (http://www.numberlys.com/). The app, produced by Moonbot Studios and released in 2012, received an American Annie award for excellence in the field of animation in 2013.
The Numberlys is a fanciful tale about the origin of the alphabet. In a world where ways of organization and communication are based on numbers and nobody has a name, only a number, five friends decide to build the alphabet by transforming numbers into letters. By inventing the alphabet the five protagonists let the inhabitants acquire a personal name. Thus the app raises existential questions concerning the construction of identity and our needs for recognition.
The story is set in a futuristic cityscape inspired by the German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 silent film Metropolis. Other intertextual references include ABC books, German expressionism, popular early fantasy epics like King Kong, Flash Gordon and Superman, the Macintosh tv-commercial 1984 and more. Thus The Numberlys seems to address both children and adults.Hannah Ackermans - 03.11.2015 - 11:28
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Remediating a Hyperfiction in ePub3: When Digital Literature Meets Publishing Models - The Case of Children’s Literature with The Tower of Jezik
Many publishers—pure players or “traditional” publishers—are now exploring the field of digital literatures by producing enhanced e-books aimed at young readers. Whether they are ePub3 e-books or apps for mobile devices, more and more of these digital works are created for commercial purposes and try to settle in the cultural industry market by adapting to the evolution of digital reading. This new generation of publishers is only now discovering the poetic potential of hypertext narratives and the endless possibilities that derive from the hybridisation of text, image, sound and video. Yet they find themselves facing many obstacles throughout the design process. Psychologically, digital reading is often associated with disorientation, cognitive overload and discontinued ways of reading (as opposed to the immersive reading experience known with printed novels) (Gervais 1999 ; Baccino 2011). Economically, few examples of profitable models exist. Technically, many constraints emerge, on the one hand from the open and standardised ePub format, on the other from the ideology imposed by the software and hardware industry.
Hannah Ackermans - 03.11.2015 - 11:35
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Electronic Literature as a Means to Overcome the Supremacy of the Author Function
In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses.
Hannah Ackermans - 16.11.2015 - 10:07
