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1. Death of an Alchemist

   Death Of An Alchemist is a multimedia novel written by Big Data—a detective story generated in real-time from live online content. The installation consists of an 8m wall displaying 128 pages of projected text, symbols and charts. This content is generated by scraping Twitter, Google and social platforms for today’s headlines, social media conversations, memes and more. The text flickers and updates as new data is received, yet still creates a coherent narrative that can be read from beginning to end. This is thanks to a bespoke technique we have termed the “poetics of search”: using a combination of search operators and algorithms to mine data, then string manipulation to fit it cohesively into a new plot. In the story, readers investigate the death of 16th century alchemist Trithemius. He has left behind a supposedly magical book, Steganographia, said to reveal the “clavis magna”: the idea from which all knowledge flows. Readers must decode the book to find the clues to Trithemius’ murder.

   Hannah Ackermans - 10.09.2015 - 10:16

2. 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

3. The Not Yet Named Jig

   The lexias for The Not Yet Named Jig appear at the will of the computer, one at a time, or, most effectively, in pages of five, where their meaning is magically changed by the lexias that randomly frame them. Thus, in the generating of many small scenes, a mise-en-scène for a larger narrative emerges. The time is the morning of April 24, 1660. The place is “Mystick Side” in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The question was: How could I create a world model of a time and place when many details were simply not available? The answer was to write all known details into lexias, fictionalize only when necessary, and allow the computer to bring up the lexias at will. Building on the authoring system developed for file three of Uncle Roger in 1987–1988, generative hyperfiction was used in Its name was Penelope to create a whole picture of a photographer’s life by accumulating details as seen through her own eyes. In The Not Yet Named Jig, it is used to create a world model of a certain place at a certain time by accumulating historic details of the people and the environment in which they lived.

   Hannah Ackermans - 30.11.2015 - 08:41