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1. 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

2. 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

3. Blue Lacuna

   Author description: Blue Lacuna is a long-form work of parser-based interactive fiction containing nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, an explorable novel telling a serious story about the nature of choice and happiness. Lacuna simplifies standard IF syntax with a unique interface: to advance the story, readers type highlighted keywords indicating objects of interest, directions to explore, or topics to pursue during conversation.

   Blue Lacuna’s story revolves around a complex reactive character, the castaway Progue, who evolves over the course of the story based on the reader’s interactions with him. The climax of the story and resolution of Progue’s character arc—whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes—is dependent on how the reader treats him in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work’s ten chapters. The structure of Blue Lacuna is thus best represented not by a branching tree but a braided rope, with countless ways each reader may braid the threads of story into a personal and meaningful narrative.

   Aaron Reed - 20.06.2012 - 18:59

4. Game-Based Digitally Mediated Narrative Construction

   There are various ways of constructing a short story or a novel ranging from detailed planning of characters, back story, and plot before beginning to write to fluid writing. Somewhere in the middle, but near fluid writing, is the approach taken by the late television writer Sydney Sheldon who visualized the flow of the story and narrated what he saw and heard to a secretary. The paper surveys practices in narrative construction both current and speculative, such as a possible future use of advanced functional brain imaging, but emphasizes a particular game-based approach currently being attempted in a pilot project.

 At the Virtual Environments Lab researchers are developing a system that generates a text based on game play. The game has two purposes: entertainment for the player and generation of a work of fiction that describes the experiences of the player. Many of the characters and situations come from Through the Looking Glass. The player character, as Alice, explores an 8x8 grid and interacts with non player characters. The NPCs ask questions, and the PC gives free response answers. The PC can also ask the NPCs questions.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:09

5. The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s Vas

   In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images.

   Audun Andreassen - 10.04.2013 - 13:12

6. Why Some Dolls Are Bad: a generative graphic novel for the iPhone

   Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a generative, permutational graphic novel which engages themes of ethics, fashion, artifice and the self, and presents a re-examination of systems and materials including mohair, contagion, environmental decay, Perspex cabinetry, and false-seeming things in nature such as Venus Flytraps.

   Why Some Dolls Are Bad was originally launched on the Facebook platform but has been adapted for the iPhone and relaunched in 2010. The project collects images from a tag-constrained stream of public Flickr images and combines them with fragments from the original non-linear text. Once the application is downloaded, image and text come together into a frame which is read and then advanced, creating an ongoing dynamic narrative.

   Readers can capture frames and send them to an archive, where each frame becomes a “page” in the novel. The collective archiving of iterative captures from the project means that a version of the book can be read in a linear order.

   Scott Rettberg - 10.04.2013 - 22:49