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Giving form to choice: tree-structures and the question of notational systems in multimedia.
A selection of exercises de style based on Raymond Queneau’s Un Conte à Votre Façon shall serve to analyze the transitions from written text, to tree-structure, to multimedia, dialogic form. Queneau’s own rendering of the paths contained in his text is a rectangular, closed shape; it evokes both a constellation and an abstract painting, flattening out the horizon of choice. Others have diagramed “Un Conte à Votre Façon” quite differently, with metaphors that suggest alternative ways of revealing elements of Queneau’s text during an interactive “wreading”.
Annotating gesture is linked to the larger issue of how to represent interlocutors in a complex dialogic chain. Un Conte à Votre Façon includes, among others, Queneau the “scriptor”, who answers our “yes” or “no”; imaginary characters, with whom we may identify and who lend their voice to some of our choices; a more or less tacit programmed “intelligence” that determines the evolution of the interface; not to mention our own inner-voice, anticipated by Queneau but shaped by a multimedia incarnation that transforms the status of his text to that of a score.
Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 15:57
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Into the Deep End: An Approach to Generation of Formal Poetry
Depth-first searches (DFS) have enabled computers to beat human opponents at chess for decades. By constructing a search tree of future board states and evaluating them against a given rubric, chess-playing machines guide themselves toward a desirable outcome. In my paper, I examine how a DFS-based algorithm can be used to generate formal poetry (meaning verse that exists under metrical and phonological constraints) by advancing one word at a time through a library of potential choices and "scoring" the results based on formal characteristics, backtracking as necessary.
Audun Andreassen - 14.03.2013 - 16:01
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Cyborg Tactics and Perilous Hermeneutics in Lexia to Perplexia Shifts in materiality across space.
Cyborg Tactics and Perilous Hermeneutics in Lexia to Perplexia Shifts in materiality across space¬—from monitor to cell phone screen, from private bedroom to public bus—alter experience and sway meaning. But time also entails an expectation of change that sometimes never comes: works of electronic literature often go without the steady updates to security, appearance, and functionality that corporate software enjoys, turning into strange ruins that, if not broken, carry that possibility. Eight years after the publication of Katherine Hayles’s Writing Machines, my paper returns to one of the book’s case studies, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, with the goal of investigating the effects of the passing years on the hermeneutics instilled in the user by the text. Focusing on the instability that time and software evolutions have sown, I argue that in this uncertain environment, the recourse of the user is a heightened emphasis on investigation, experimentation, and attempted recovery. With these motivations in mind, I turn to various palimpsests in the text, features of Lexia that straddle the divide between the literary technique and the glitch.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:24
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Lessons Learned from Designing Children’s Interactive Narratives
Abstract Designing interactive narrative for children requires awareness of the cognitive abilities of young readers. In this paper, we present the lessons learned from two example interactive narrative systems, Baby Duck Takes a Bath and A Little Quiz for the Little Hare. Baby Duck is a multi-sequential narrative where the user can explore how a duckling can become dirty or clean by interacting with its habitat. The agency of the characters (including a mother duck and duck friends) result from manipulating elements within the small story world. The narrative changes according to the user's interactions, allowing for change in perspective, agency and attitude in real-time. The Little Quiz system aims to teach young children the concepts of measurement and comparison through the conversation between two characters. It explores the design space of enhancing interactive narrative using a commonsense knowledge database to understand players' intention and generate relevant narration. Both works target children from 1st to 3rd grade in the early stage of learning story construction.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:41
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Internet Literature in China: A New Literary Revolution?
During the past 10 years, the success of Internet literature has become the most attractive phenomenon in contemporary Chinese literature. Internet literature has not only attracted millions of readers, it has also gained commercial success. How can we understand the combination of computer and Internet as a kind of global technology, and the literature, as the local and the national representation, in China? In order to answer this important question, my paper will begin with a discussion of the rising young and famous Internet literature writers. The Internet not only provides a new world of cyberspace to young people to express their feelings and lives in a new age, it has also created new possibilities for the refashioning of literature in contemporary China. By following the successful stories of Internet literature writers, we will find that Internet literature, as a kind of new folk disourse, creates a new discursive space and constructs a kind of virtual identity. Such an attempt, generally called "the spirit of new folk literature" in the cyberspace, counters the elite discourse of Chinese traditional literature.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:47
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The materialities of close reading: 1942, 2009
Today, we not only see video games and online role-playing games interpreted, in print-based scholarly journals, by way of classical literary and narrative theory (to the dismay of the radical ludologist), but we also see the inverse: classical novels interpreted by way of role-playing games staged in computerized, simulated environments (as in Jerome McGann's IVANHOE Game). The use of classical theory for the study of contemporary video games and video games for the study of classical literature, however, does not necessarily mean that we now inhabit a mixed up muddled up shook up literary-critical world. In fact, these examples might mark opposite sides of a continuum of critical practice, and underscore the logic of analyzing a text in a given medium with the tools of a different – and complementary – medium.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:54
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Narrative choice-making, literary trajectories and interactive environments: on the structure and writing of the Unknown Territories
This artist paper examines in detail and poetic dimensions both the content and construction of the Unknown Territories project. This project incorporates two literary histories constructed along paths dissecting imagined landscapes of the western Canyonlands. The first paths follow an exploration narrative and in the second, imagined 100 years later, users take on a landscape facing development and destruction. The presentation is based on forthcoming papers in the books Switching Codes (Chicago, 2010) and Picture This (Minnesota, 2011).
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 09:56
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Reclaiming the 'Golden Age': The Second Person in Digital Fiction
Since the demise of the 'Golden Age' of literary hypertext (Coover 1999) and the theoretical debates surrounding online and offline electronic literature that followed in its wake, the study of digital fiction in particular has undergone a significant paradigm shift. Recent research has moved from a 'first-wave' of pure theoretical debate to a 'second-wave' of close stylistic and semiotic analysis. While the theoretical intricacies of second-wave digital fiction theory have been well debated (e.g. Ciccoricco 2007, Ensslin 2007, Ensslin and Bell 2007, Bell 2010 forthcoming), the discipline and practice of close-reading digital fiction require a more systematic engagement and understanding than offered by previous scholarship.
Audun Andreassen - 20.03.2013 - 10:12
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Bitwise: The Logic of the Digital
This paper explores the ontology of the digital. Specifically I argue that digital technologies, digital aesthetics, and digital culture express characteristics of the binary code. The binary code, which defines the digital, balances between ideal and real; tied always to some material substrate, the binary code nevertheless operates according to a logic of perfectly specified 0s and 1s. And it tends to bring this idealized perfection into the real, dividing up the world into neat, discrete categories, offering predefined choices with predictable outcomes, and shaping not only the materials of the machine but also the bodies and habits of users according to this binary logic. The binary code is an apotheosis of abstraction, but it is an operative abstraction, which becomes effective even while retaining its pure formality. Brief examples will elaborate this overarching argument, considering the digital’s ontological relationships to temporality, space, material, virtuality, uniqueness, identity, determinism, and language.
(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 09:45
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Mobile Media Narratives: From Site-Specific Stories to Locative Hypertexts
With the move from personal computing to pervasive computing, electronic literature has inhabited physical sphere of ubiquitous computing. This study analyzes examples of narratives that employ mobile technologies (from cell phones to GPS receivers) to interact with site-specific electronic literature. Drawing from examples such as [murmur], PETlab’s Re:Activism project, and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, this paper argues for a spatio-temporal embodiment that is produced in correspondence with the mobile interface. [Murmur] is an oral history project utilizing mobile phones is currently running in 11 cities worldwide. Signs posted throughout the city prompt mobile phone users to call a specific number and record a narrative about that site. Other passersby are able to listen to the recorded narrative when the number is later called. Similarly, Re:Activism is a mobile phone story-game that has players restage scenes of contestation that occurred throughout New York City, led by SMS messages about the site.
Audun Andreassen - 03.04.2013 - 09:50
