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Phantom Agents
Phantom Agents is an episodic fiction that programmatically weaves sequential narration with random selections of text and image. Li and Pym are partner agents inside a broken augmented reality game. They solve complex plot problems in a plot that is proliferating beyond all reason. They collect data at virtual parties and forget all about their first bodies. They observe and are observed observing. Agency, identity, point of view and reality are slippery as both the fictional characters and the reader/user navigate cine-poetic juxtapositions, make meaningful narrative connections and progress, episode by episode, towards an understanding of the network that includes them.
Hannah Ackermans - 05.09.2015 - 10:51
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Gateway to the World
Gateway to the World is a mobile application designed to run on an iPad2 / iPad mini or later models. This work was created specifically for the SILT exhibition, hosted in Hamburg, Germany in June 2014. I took this exhibition as an opportunity to research the city of Hamburg and discovered that it had one of the largest ports in the world; its name Gateway to the World (GttW) seemed like a great title for the app. The vast and busy port served as a metaphor for the immensity of the Internet, the flow of information and its meaning of openness and outreach to the World Wide Web. The aim of the app was to use open data from the maritime databases to visualize the routes of the vessels arriving to and from the Port of Hamburg, as well as have the vessels’ names mapped to Wikipedia entries. As the vessels move they act as writing tools to reveal a string of text creating calligramatic forms of information pulled from Wikipedia entries about the name of the vessels.
Hannah Ackermans - 05.09.2015 - 11:15
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A Nervous System
This is an interactive poem-fiction hybrid exploring unexplored taxonomies through a touch focused 3-D depth experimental interface. To understand, to translate the world, the objects and creatures and geographies around us, into meaningful (meaningless?) symbols, shareable concepts, we developed language. Then to further understand the differences and similarities of everything around us, to narrow down and dissect function and association, we created labels, categories and systems of taxonomy. And while these developed taxonomies and hierarchies are useful to organizing and departmentalizing our complex land/city/culture/art/literary-scapes, they can also hinder new possibilities and understandings. What if defining the function of the lung or leaves limits alternative and possibly powerful uses, keeps us from exploring what some might call “fringe” science? A Nervous System explores these alternative understandings of biological organisms, systems and organs.
Hannah Ackermans - 05.09.2015 - 11:19
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infloresence.city
inflorescence.city is an exploration of a shifting virtual city from multiple vantage points. The publication is generated live using a variety of different approaches. Each time you refresh your browser, the publication rewrites itself. The different sections of the work each offer a unique window into the city. These sections take the form of paper ephemera, census documents, a virtual graveyard with generated tombstones, visits to city landmarks, and various other artifacts. It was important to us that we give each of these separate perspectives a unique sensibility and a voice of its own. To that end, each of these sections is written by a different set of algorithms. When writing this piece, we treated these software processes as honored collaborators rather than as tools. Each has its own texture and tendencies. Getting to know each of these algorithms is an intricate back and forth process of listening and refining. The bodies of text they use as source material are carefully picked and hand-refined to match the tone of the algorithm. As the document is written, sections of the document are passed to a program that is responsible for the illustrations.
Hannah Ackermans - 05.09.2015 - 11:38
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The ChessBard Plays
In short, the ChessBard inputs the algebraic notation for a chess game in .PGN format (digital file format for archived chess games) and outputs a poem. The poems are based on 12 source poems I wrote, 6 poems for the white pieces, 6 poems for the black pieces: there is a 64 word poem for each colour’s pawns, knights, rooks, bishop, queen and king. When a piece lands on a square it triggers a word from the source poems and the translator compiles them together and outputs a poem. For more, see http://chesspoetry.com/about/about/. The site itself includes a translator capable of inputting any chess game in .pgn format as well as a playable version that combines the translator with a chess-playing AI. In my performance I play a game versus the ChessBard on chesspoetry.com and project it and the subsequent poems that are translated in real-time.
Hannah Ackermans - 05.09.2015 - 11:53
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Play Music for My Poem
The work plays a tension between media and treats the question of control. It is a piece of the “small uncomfortable reading poems” series. Play music for my poem is based on 2 computers that communicate with each other. The first one contains a combinatory generator of sound that plays music for the second computer. The second computer runs a set of 4 combinatory text generators composing a unique poem in 4 stanzas. The music manages the visibility of this text and the reader controls the music generator via a game running on the first computer.
Hannah Ackermans - 08.09.2015 - 09:36
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From Beyond
The installation plays with the boundaries of form and consciousness through play with the material and the immaterial. From Beyond invites the reader to interact with a digitally augmented Ouija Board. The Ouija Board (also known as the “talking board”) is well-explored in popular culture as a device that is traditionally employed in an attempt to communicate with the dead, who are themselves voiceless and thus can be “heard” only through the indication of written letters. The board is thus itself an interface that plays at the boundaries of the real and the presumed supernatural, as it operates through superstition: readers place their fingers on the planchette and it moves to answer questions, with a “Yes” or “No” placed on the board. Likewise, our digitally enhanced Ouija Board invites the user to guide a planchette (a pointer) as a tactile interface for making binary decisions while traversing a hypertextual work on a screen that serves as a lens between the reader’s world and the world of the story.
Hannah Ackermans - 08.09.2015 - 09:45
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Poetry Chains and Collocations
Poetry Chains and Collocation Nets are two intertwined projects that investigate the 1955 edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems through various interactive animated navigations of collocated words. As such, they perform what Samuels and McGann term “experimental analyses.” Each of the visualizations displays a different presentation of her work. Poetry Chains begins with two words and attempts to find a chain of words in a specified number of lines that connects them together, displaying them as it succeeds. Collocation Nets begins with a single word centered in the middle of the screen. When the user selects the word, a random selected of its collocations pops out in a surrounding ring. Any of those words can be selected, which results in collocations of that word appearing. A user can toggle into an ambient mode of this visualization that automatically eventually cycles through all of the words, forever. These visualizations offer a continuously dynamic remapping of Dickinson’s work.
Hannah Ackermans - 08.09.2015 - 10:10
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Fish Net Stockings
Fish Net Stockings is a new multimedia installation project in development and is inspired and informed by historical mermaid legends and their myriad literary variants. One discovers mermaid tales clinging like barnacles onto historic seaports, sharing themes of the cross-cultural outsider, human trafficking, economic injustice, environmental imbalance, and gender inequality. Both cautionary and emboldening, mermaid tales inhabit the blurred boundary between childhood longing and adulthood regret. In variants of the little mermaid tale, we find a story of the passage between worlds. Den lille havfrue, Hans Christian Andersen’s sacrificial rite-of-passage story screams out for alternative endings. Instead of silencing the little mermaid, Fish Net Stockings aims to give e-literature sirens a space to speak up, sing out, and hook on their stockings. In the installation, a back projection screen serves as canvas for a richly layered mix of digital video, text, and silhouettes. The participatory space allows the audience to disrupt, subvert, and make virtual waves inside this new version of an old tale.
Hannah Ackermans - 08.09.2015 - 10:35
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Mother/Home/Heaven
Mother|Home|Heaven is a magic-mirror augmented reality installation that overlays digital assets – 3D models, video, poetic spoken word and soundscape over a series of objects sourced from a pioneer village in Canada. It combines historical fact and literary fiction to weave together a series of fragments that together consider gender, space and place, private and public, loss, longing, time and place. Created with the Unity game engine and the Vuforia augmented reality plug-in, the experience uses fractal and non-linear narrative to bring real objects and accounts – notably an archive of amazing diaries – to life, while also using fictional, whispered secrets and ghosts to suggest what might haunt the neatly ordered shelves of the General Store. We wish to track 2-D images rather than physical objects. The viewer would encounter shelf after shelf of everyday objects relating to domestic material culture – teapots, kerosene lamps, spools of ribbon, wood burning stove and parlour games etcetera.
Hannah Ackermans - 08.09.2015 - 10:47
