For my final project, I created a non-fiction hypertext story modeled largely after Shelley Jackson’s hypertext semi-fiction work “My Body.” My work is called “Wasabi’s Body” and tells the story about how my family ended up with a cat instead of a Christmas tree one year, and just how awesome a decision that was. Unfortunately, I’m not able to host my work and keep the media that I’d incorporated, so I’ve emailed it instead.

I had a lot of fun working on this story, and incorporating various images of my cat. He really is pretty cool. I was inspired to make my own hypertext version of “My Body” after reading Jackson’s work because it was so interesting. I’d never made a hypertext story before and it was challenging but enjoyable. Learning how to incorporate media took some trial and error, but I’ve found I learn pretty well that way (despite the extra time it takes).

My project is definitely entry-level because I didn’t use any advanced “if/then” type programming, but I wanted to keep it somewhat true to Jackson’s recipe with multiple links on one page linking back and forth to different body parts and sections of the same story. My work isn’t metafictional, like Scott Rettberg describes Jackson’s works, but it is reflexive in the ways that the images and gifs used play with the text and play off of the text. I also explored branching stories (van and cat person) that are tenuously related to the main story of how we came to adopt our cat. This felt very postmodern in its fragmentation, while still maintaining an overall theme.

The Twine platform is a new twist on a genre that’s been around a while. It embodies the E-Lit definition of “born digital” as Rettberg describes hypertext fiction: “fundamentally a text technology” (62). It also allows authors new to the genre, like myself, to explore hypertext literature in a non-threatening way that inspires creativity, and I’m glad I had a chance to try my hand at a genre that’s helped to shape such an interesting field.

I wanted this piece to tell a story but at the same time be a bit of a puzzle for the reader to solve. In coming up with the idea for this story it needed the right platform to feature it. In that regard, Twine felt like the perfect fit for what I wanted to achieve. The way that it gives the option of making a multilinear story is what drew me in. Also the capability to have things like audio, images, and be able to delay the text for dramatic effect when needed.
Twine was always the platform I wanted to work with for this story. I had worked with it once before but wanted the opportunity to work with it some more. I feel like it is a very user-friendly and one is able to do so much to further enhance the story.
I was inspired by some of the digital literature pieces such as Howling Dogs by Porpentine and First Draft of the Revolution by Liza Daly. Both of these works are stories that are click based and certain choices can determine the outcome of the story. The story by Daly specifically deals with a whole host of characters that through clicking through we learn their backstory as the story moves along. This is all done through the clever back and forth of people communicating through letters.
I think in creating a digital literature piece one needs to decide what is going to be the it factor that grabs the audience to experience this piece. In taking on this story I was at first going to take a very different approach. What actually helped me write it was finding the media for it. As I gathered audio and pictures the story started to piece itself together and manipulate into something else. Media is a big influencer in the majority of digital literature so it felt fitting that the media I chose would help me grasp what I feel like is a more layered story than my original piece.
The story is about an ordinary girl who is drawn to the unusual that is happening on this day. Although it questions if the unusual the right choice, or should she stick to her everyday routine. Will she be better off for it? This all done as strange objects and people come into her life. I wanted it to have some Alice in Wonderland vibes. The user decides the outcome as there are a few endings. And like I said before there is some bounce back if certain decisions are made, so choose wisely. Or don’t, it’s entirely up to the reader on the path that is taken.
I wanted my story to have some crazy elements but still be well grounded and easy to follow. I didn’t want the reader to get too lost searching for the deeper meaning but slowly guide them to the message.
Lastly, I hope those who click through my piece will enjoy it so much so that they might explore other digital literature pieces.

Here’s a link for my project:

http://dtc-wsuv.org/ddolphin18/digital%20lit/

For my final project, I wasn’t entirely sure which genre of E-lit that I wanted to pursue as we have explored so many interesting types. Upon exploring various works over the semester, one work in particular that I was inspired by was heyharryheymatilda by Rachel Hulin. Hulin’s work is a perfect example of how we interact with the social networks we participate in. One of the things that really brought this to my attention was the use of the Instagram platform itself. In his book, Electronic Literature, Rettberg states that “Networks are both technological and social structures. For electronic literature, networks are both platform and material.”(152). I knew that I wanted to create a work that mimicked the type of intimate narrative that Hulin’s work achieves. I chose to create a piece of network fiction, specifically digital vernacular fiction.

I knew that I wanted to create a work that took a socially common practice, such as text messaging, as a way to highlight how we interact with one another through various social networks and how these interactions can be considered narratives.

For my piece, I chose to tell the story of two childhood friends through their text message conversations. Along with text shared back and forth between the two characters, I also include images in the same way that individuals share imagery with one another in social network spaces. By utilizing such a well known and commonly used platform to tell my story, the reader is able to easily connect with the narrative and the characters. To me, this is one of the best things about network fiction.

My creative process for writing this story was somewhat challenging. I am not a creative writer by nature, so it was important for me to make my narrative interesting. I didn’t want it to be seen as just a mundane conversation between two people. I wanted there to be relatable themes with interesting twists along the way.

After writing down all the separate texts between my two characters, I then went and found images from creative commons sources that would go along with certain moments in the story. After searching for what seemed like hours trying to find the perfect app or online software to create my text conversations, I finally settled on an app called “Fake Chat Story”. One of the reasons why I chose this app in particular was because I was able to personalize various settings such as the names of my characters as well as select avatars for each. This app also allows you to send images which was a feature that was important to tell my story. After recording each day’s conversation of the narrative, I then compiled all the video footage and imported them into Adobe AfterEffects. I was then able to merge all the separate videos into one cohesive piece. Overall, I enjoyed the entire process. I found it to be a fun and challenging journey exploring network fiction along with all the other types of electronic literature.

http://dtc-wsuv.org/jwjackson18/twine/

My Twine work, “Vivid”, is a multilinear look at the concepts of intrusive thoughts and maladaptive daydreaming. Taking heavy inspiration from Robert Coover’s work “The Babysitter”, I wanted to make a work that dips in and out of reality as a serene way to explore the topic of mental illness. I felt that this would be effective because of the often random and unpredictable tendencies of mental illness.

Maladaptive daydreams are extremely intense daydreams that can often be confused with reality by the sufferer. Combined with intrusive thoughts, involuntary thoughts that are upsetting or distressing, these maladaptive daydreams can be extremely intense and disturbing for the victim. With my work, I attempted to recreate this sensation in a written form in order to raise awareness of what living with mental illness can be like.

“Vivid” is an interactive fiction that also has some combinatory aspects at its core. The multilinear structure of this work makes it participatory, immersive, and experiential, allowing for the interactor to influence how the story progresses. However, the interactor does not have complete control, as my work also uses randomly generated story progression. These two mechanics combined allow for multiple playthroughs that each detail how mental illness is both the same and different on a daily basis.

My goal with this work was to raise awareness about mental illness by writing about a topic that everyone experiences. Everyone has had thoughts about harm to themselves or a loved one, but it can be much more intense when combined with mental illness. I wanted to create a piece that could combine both the experiences of those who suffer from mental illness and those who do not. In doing this, I aimed to make a work that everybody could understand and that created an immersive representation of mental illness that those who do not suffer from it could better understand.

Achieving a work that could explore mental illness while still being relatable and understandable to those who do not suffer from mental illness was both easy and difficult. As someone who does not suffer from this kind of mental illness, I was able to make sure that the work was easy to understand, but actually writing about the mental illness was challenging. My girlfriend, who suffers from mental illness, was a tremendous help in describing how it manifests and what kinds of maladaptive daydreams she has experienced. She was also able to make sure that the way I approached mental illness was accurate and respectful, which was extremely important to me.

The biggest challenge with this project was definitely finding a stopping point, Often the problem that writers can find with Twine and multilinear fiction is making too large of a web that eventually becomes daunting and impossible to finish. I attempted to avoid this problem, but I would love to expand this work at a later date if it seems necessary or potentially beneficial. Getting lost in a multilinear, interactive work can be an amazing experience, such as in Porpentine’s works. I wanted to create a similar experience while adding a powerful, important message to the heart of the work.

http://dtc-wsuv.org/jschoenlein18/elit-final/

When the time came for me to start thinking about my final project, there were a couple of specific works and concept presented over the course of the class that led me to create the project that I did. Being exposed to a multitude of works that are categorized as multimedia fiction such as Cityfish by JR Carpenter and FilmText by Mark Amerika were especially inspiring to me. For me, the combination of a plethora of different media elements such as text, sound, video, imagery, and more in able to form and drive a narrative are indicative of what is possible with electronic literature that cannot be obtained with literature presented in a physical format.

Additionally, the work Pry by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, as well as the video components in Cityfish were influential to me. The use of digital cinema in order to drive the narrative of a story is both aesthetically enjoyable and is familiar and digestible for most viewers. Cinematographic works are an enjoyable source of entertainment for a vast amount of people across the world. Incorporating cinematic elements into works of electronic literature add visually stimulating elements to the work and often are used in harmony with other forms of media. For instance, in Pry, the reader must interact with the screen by prying or shutting the main character’s eyes. Not only do the video elements enhance the narrative of the story, but the interactive elements also allow the reader to navigate through and take control of how the story is presented to them. This is yet another aspect of electronic literature that cannot be obtained with a print medium.

As I began my project, I knew immediately that a web-based format would suite the requirements of the project well. Not only am I comfortable working with web technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, I knew that without a doubt that the medium that is the web can be used to incorporate all of the media elements that I wanted to use. This included text, video, imagery and sound.

In regards to the narrative componenet of my work, I’ve incorporated a selection of clips that a friend of mine and I acquired during a car ride. This was originally a test of the camera of my new phone and a gimbal that I had bought for it, yet these clips came out to be surprisingly well. I’ve edited all the clips in Adobe Premiere to alter the color of the visuals. In addition to the video elements of the work, the textual elements represent a more dark and saddening theme. When the time came to write out the story of the work, I’d decided to write about the awkward and heartbreaking experience of being in a car with a significant other in the midst of an argument/break-up. While the story is fictional, it is regarding a topic that is relatable to most everyone: the final and often hurtful final interactions we have with someone we once cared for. I hope that the relatable nature of the story both resonates and intrigues the readers of the story.

In order to navigate through the story, the reader enters the site and is instructed to play the background audio presented in the beginning. The reader is then tasked with scrolling across the page while playing each video in addition to reading the passage presented with it, repeating this until the reader reaches the end.

The construction of “Drive”, as well as my participation in the course has been both challenging and transformative, as I’ve learned a great deal about an area of literature that was previously completely foreign to me and have since been able to create my own piece of electronic literature within the sixteen weeks of taking the course.

I have to admit that I was never into poetry until I decided to take a creative writing course that involved writing poetry. Nevertheless, I became intrigued after learning poetry is about word play and using words to create sound effects by using alliteration, and assonance. During this semester I learned about kinetic and interactive poetry and how digital poetry can be use on digital platforms such as Twine. I teamed up with Joel because his knowledge of Twine is far superior than my own.

Joel and I came together and started brain storming ideas about the themes we wanted to explore. We settled on writing about human emotions, and how these emotions can cause one to feel isolated, as well as turn violent. We wanted the poems to loop, by creating an infinity cycle of birth and death, like Ouroboros. We chose certain words within poems to shake to signify violence. We knew with Twine we could create effects with words we would not able to on the printed page.

The process of coming up with poems to fit the themes we wanted was a bit of a problem. I had asked to see the poems that Joel was working on to see if I could come up with the poems we needed to help complete the infinity cycle. I noticed the word, “virtuous” and then I wrote a poem, Vindicator (in five minutes) about a violent man who was boastful and fearless in battle. I used alliteration to help create the hard “v” sound in the poem. When the poem is read aloud, reader/users can really hear the hard “v” sound effects.

I added an abstract poem about love to help complete the circle. I wanted the show the effects of love and how it could be abused and be used to destroy. The hard thing was writing a poem that could show and not tell. I also did not want the poem to beat the users over the head with what I wanted the poem to convey. I purposely did not include the word love in the poem to allow the users to wonder what force could build and destroy, as well as be abused.

Twine allowed Joel and I freedom to experiment with words and manipulate them like objects, so the users are not only reading the poems, they are also watching and interacting with the poem instead of reading stationary words. The black backdrop on Twine worked perfectly for my poem, Black Flower. It helped accentuate the poem’s theme of isolation and despair.

Tom Swiss’s Shy Boy was an inspiration to me. After reading it, I knew I could also use a digital platform to express myself through poetry. I did not want to copy Swiss’s style of kinetic poetry but wanted to do something different with interactive poetry. When I teamed up with Joel for the Twine project, I knew we could use the platform to create digital poetry. I hope the user enjoy the work that Joel and I created, because I enjoyed creating it.

http://philome.la/joelmcummings1/e-literature-dtc-338-110/play

**For some reason I posted this at 10pm on April 30th but it says I posted it on May 1st?**
For my final project in the class, I decided to do a collaborative piece with Elaina using Twine. Throughout this project, we thought it would be interesting if we pass a Twine file back and forth and each add something to the story. The only thing we both knew were the direction we wanted the story to go, the treasures the player could get, and where the story would ultimately end up. Since we did it this way, there are things about the project that I still haven’t discovered, and things Elaina hasn’t yet discovered either. This was an interesting way of working because it’s really strange to now know exactly what’s in your project. At the same time, it was also really exciting because one of us would play through it and message the other and be like “this was such a great idea how did you do it?”. It created a sense of excitement when you open the file for the first time after the other person worked on it.

We decided to base our Twine game off of the pieces Colossal Cave Adventure and ZORK. I did my ELD entry on CCA and Elaina did hers on ZORK, and since they were so closely related we decided it would be a good idea to implement them into our final project and work together. Not only did we heavily base our story and format off of them, but there are also multiple easter eggs such as some of the treasures you can find in our version, you can also find in CCA or ZORK. However there are also a few key differences with our version as well, such as the navigation system. In the originals you would type the commands in, but in our version since it’s on twine the navigation is through hyperlinks. Due to limitations with the Twine format we used as well (Harlowe 2.0) we weren’t able to find a way to implement an inventory system or point system the way we wanted to. It was fun to work in Twine not only because of how much we can do on it, but also because unlike these original games, we were able to see a map of our final project and users are also able to look at the cave map to see if there’s anything they missed or just for some guidance. Originally we had planned that to beat the game you had to collect all the treasures, but near the end we decided to change it to each treasure giving a unique ending if you decide to give it to granny. We decided on this because we thought it would create more of a multilinear story. It didn’t seem fair to make the ending the same no matter what choices the player made, because then what was the point of them making all of those decisions?

The biggest struggle for me with this project was definitely the cave. I mapped out most of the cave and it got really confusing making sure everything connected correctly and was going where it was supposed to. I think the final version ended up having almost 40 different rooms just in the cave. This was also my first time completing a Twine of this size, so it was also really interesting to plan out all the different paths the character could take, what would determine each kind of ending they could get, and what big decisions should we have the player make that will affect their entire gameplay. My favorite part was being able to create all of the sassy and pithy things that the narrator of the story says, and being able to play through the final completed version of the game was also really cool. Colossal Cave Adventure is arguably one of the most important pieces of electronic literature, so it was really cool to be able to create a newer version of that with our own twist, with today’s standards of technology.

https://dtc-wsuv.org/esundwall18/red/

I wrote this piece to explore the possibilities of interactive fiction on Twine. I was trying to replicate the experience of navigating a place that you can’t physically view, like in works such as Colossal Cave Adventure or With Those We Love Alive. I feel as if this is the main draw of text based adventure, as the mystery of not being able to visually see a space encourages the user to explore the space in order to increase their understanding and gain context for the story.
Unlike Colossal Cave Adventure, I wanted to give the user reasoning for exploring the cave. In Colossal Cave Adventure, is a series of events that take place within the cave but the user ventures into the cave because the cave itself is the objective of the game. I felt that giving the user a reason to explore as well as endings that involved not venturing into the cave at all deepened the fictional world of the work.
A main component of the game is the passages that the player finds on sections of the floor of the temple. At the end of the journey, the passages combine to form a short 3 line poem. Each tunnels passages took on a certain theme, the leftmost being courage themed, the middle being knowledge themed, the right tunnel focusing on the desire for power. Writing a poem that made sense if the player chose different paths was a definite challenge, that was ultimately solved by limiting the players access to certain rooms. Creating separate adventures to go with specific poems soon became the ultimate goal.
Though the piece is very simple, it utilizes some of the unseen functions of Twine. At many points throughout the work, the dialogue of a room is changed by either the history of you being in another room or a variable noting an experience in another section of the cave. These variables gave me total control of how a user experiences the narrative because it allowed me to control the perception of the user within the story. The variables not only serve as a room history but also as a player inventory. When a player encounters a passage or an item within the work, the variable of that object within the code gets set to one and those items and passage last then follow them through the story.
I think I will come back to this piece and greatly expand it, making the temple a more perilous journey for the user and adding potential side stories within the major story. I was originally trying to make some ambient music to accompany the work, much like Porpentine does in their works. I think that music and sound paired with a some different styling in CSS would enhance the user’s level of immersion into the narrative. Another function I would love to add, would be a player journal that would allow the user to track their progress through the temple and what they currently have in their inventory. This could be made with a large amount of simple boolean functions but I think it would be a nice touch, especially if it was styled to look like the journal of a seasoned explorer.

Below is the link to my work:

Passages

Final Presentation

http://dtc-wsuv.org/ssims18/final/

https://twinery.org/2/#!/stories/3f0a145a-c957-457a-a58f-dbada952a788/play

Artist Statement

I’m not that experienced with hypertext but working on this helped me get a lot better at it than I was previously.  I read a lot of tutorials in order for me to create the time system that I would need. I wanted to explore the idea of interactive fiction and hypertext fiction. I wanted to create a story with one ending but I wanted the player to get to that ending in their own way. This work was mostly inspired by Device 6 by Simon Flesser. I really like in Device 6 how you didn’t know what was going on and how you had to try to figure out what was going on by exploring. I incorporated that idea by having the player explore the area and to find clues on how to escape just like in Device 6. Device 6 used clips of audio as hints, I used notes that were scattered around the house. I also took a few ideas from With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine. I liked how she had a time system that caused the game to advance as days would go by. I wanted to incorporate a similar idea with time advancement. I decided to make a time system that would allow time to slowly advance based on the players actions. The more time would advance the harder it would be for the player. For example, every room in the house (except certain rooms you would need special items for) is accessible. But as time would advance, some of those rooms would be no longer accessible and would cause the player’s character to die. I made it so the main rooms the player would need to complete the game are accessible as long as the player has items that they need. Another idea I like in Device 6 I wanted to use was it’s puzzles. Device 6 is filled with difficult puzzles that challenged the reader to solve them. I’ve never made a puzzle, riddle, or any type of problem like that before so I wanted my puzzle to be more exploration based. In order to succeed, the player would has to have a key that is locked in a four digit safe. Each digit is hidden in the house among one of my eight notes. If the player finds the four notes that have the code then the player can access the safe. All eight of the notes tell the history of the cursed house. Some of those notes however have certain requirements to access. Some can only be accessed before a certain time and some can be only accessed after a certain time and with certain objects. To be able to plan an area this big I made a personal map for myself to have a layout. I did this from the video we watched in class about Colossal Cave Adventure. The guy in the video printed out a map to help him navigate through the game so I wanted to do the same just for my own benefit to help me stay organized. The notes that I wrote were slightly inspired by The Babysitter. I wanted them to be spread out for the player to find somewhat out of order. I wanted the player to try to find them all and to try to make sense of what happened just like I did when I read The Babysitter.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1u2S0-37oTue2YuckdXIUi37yuV4CrR6rNmrILHsaNhE/edit#slide=id.g56ce02a3a7_0_0

https://dtc-wsuv.org/esundwall18/red/

myboyfriendpresentation

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Muq8LlKROZ8ZBpG9PI-9MEEA1fcyKEbLcFR4RmQOjzE/edit#slide=id.p

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NB7m5WNTfLVOYk-MLABhvjG5XQJUMCL81ZE0FQtC0G0/edit?usp=sharing

Final Presentation

The first piece of work that I wanted to explore was Jörg Piringer’s sound poems. I never was big into poetry but the word sound poem had me interested and I was curious and wanted to see what it was. What I thought it would be and what it turned out to be were two completely different things. I thought it was gonna be a bunch of random voices reciting poetry but what it turned was a bunch of random voices saying sounds. This made me question what the definition of poetry. What is a poem? Though it reminded me of when Scott Rettberg discussed how Readers can change sounds created in different ways. That is just what I did as a reader for Jörg Piringer’s poems. I created and changed multiple sounds just by clicking.

The second poem I explored was Cruising by Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar. This poem also uses sound but also uses images as well. The images can travel either fast or slow depending on how you control it and a woman’s voice is reading the text. I found that helpful to be immersive in the poem as I made the images travel fast so it felt like I was in a car looking out a window. It made a lot more sense to me as well than the sound poems did. It told a story that was easy for me to follow as the sound poems didn’t really seem to have any direction whatsoever.

Two games that I explored were Blackbar and Device 6. Blackbar told a very unique and interesting story and had difficult puzzles. It was somewhat easy at first to solve but then became increasingly more difficult as some of the words I had to type were backwards or even had to be spelt wrong. The goal in the game was clear, I had to uncensor what the department of communication didn’t want me to know. It made the story very interesting because the more I played, the more I found out that mostly everything that was censored involved words of negativity. I play lots of word games so I was eager to solve what certain words would be. It got easier for me as I continued to play since I saw how Kenty’s writing style was.

Device 6 was very intriguing and mysterious which caused me to love it. I enjoyed it a lot more than Blackbar as I would explore the environment to try to find out what was happening. It took me forever in chapter one since I was a bit unsure with what I had to do but I eventually figured it out. After I passed chapter one I kinda figured out what this story was gonna be like and I had to pay very close attention to the environment that Anna was in. I needed a pen and paper to write down every clue I would find whether it was in text, pictured, or audio. I passed chapters 2 and 3 quickly using this method but couldn’t quite pass chapter 4. This game was great with exploring though as multiple times I would choose the direction to go. I actually got scared playing the game in chapter 2 when I came across a creepy doll and it started screaming at me.

In the second half of Pry, there are many details that come to light that are kept under wraps in the first half of the story. In chapter 5, there is more information regarding James’ eyesight, when Luke gives him another job after initially firing him because of the issues revolving around his eyesight. We also gain more insight into Luke’s character, as he is trying his best to give James as many opportunities as possible despite his challenges. This chapter follows the same format as the previous chapters in regards to how the reader navigates through the story.

In chapter 6, the story’s format changes slightly. The reader is faced with reading through a long selection of text, as one would read a body of text traditionally. However, by prying the screen between two lines of text, different visuals appear that show James’ relationships with different people, most notably with Jessie. In this chapter, we begin to pick up on the close relationship James and Jessie had at one point.

The Epilogue shows visuals of both George H.W. Bush, as well as George W. Bush on the television, describing what appears to be both the Gulf War and the Iraq War, respectively. The reader can infer that James is watching the television at both moments in time, and there is a video of James going off in the truck that was seen in the Prologue; indicative of the fact that there is a perspective from James from both before and after he goes to war.

The extra details and nuance in the app Pry make the app worth multiple traversals. It was not until I read my classmates entries on the first half of the app that I realized how many details it was possible to miss just by nature of how the work is traversed, or pieces of significance that I had missed. The aspect of the app that gives the work its name, pry, was lost on me during my first traversal. The pinching and opening motion to progress the story mimics open one’s eyes and pinching or pulling back into ones mind to access the subconscious. I had been thinking of this piece in visual terms and had missed some of the kinetic aspects that make the work so subversive. The braille chapter is an obvious example of this that I had not missed. Chapter 3 was the most immersive chapter for me, as dragging my fingers across the screen forced me to remain engaged, almost like the conscious thoughts of the app with text. Other subtler details that increase immersion are fun to find and easy to miss as well. Chapter 5, in which it is confirmed that the protagonist is losing his sight, includes a part where the protagonist uses eyedrops. It’s funny to think about how this might have been filmed, but to a traverser this element increases the immersion and is a very concrete real life example of going blind. The more time I spend with this work, more and more immersive and kinetic details reveal themselves.

Instead of just jumping in and finishing from where I left off, I chose to start from the beginning and read all the way through. I also took my time on each section and let each video play through its entirety. This really helped me fill in some missing pieces and helped me understand more of the story.

One of the things that I wasn’t completely sure about when I first experienced this work was whether or not Luke as James’ brother or his friend, but it was confirmed after going through and re-reading this story. In one of the sections, James mentions that Luke was Squad Leader and that he saw him as an older brother. There is also mention of how the demolition company that Luke hired James’ to work for is his dad’s company.

Some of the themes of this work were made even more obvious the more I explored it. Unrequited love, jealousy, coping with a medical condition, PTSD, friendship, guilt, anxiety, OCD, loss, the struggle of re-acclimating to life post-war to name a few.

This story about a man who joins the military and becomes friends with a woman named Jessie.It is apparent in the story that James begins to have feelings for Jessie (and borderline becomes obsessed with her), however, she and James’ buddy Luke enter into a secret relationship while they are all serving together. James becomes jealous of Jessie and Luke’s relationship and exposes it, which causes Jessie to be re-assigned. James brought an album from home with him and he puts pictures of Jessie alongside his mother’s photos, thinking that she would be flattered. However, when he shows her the album, she is not amused. James and Jessie end up having an argument about him revealing her secret relationship and as a result, Jessie does not show up for a scheduled poker game the three friends had scheduled that night. Their camp was bombarded that night, and Jessie died during the attack. James blames himself for Jessie not being at the poker game, and ultimately blames himself for her death. 6 years after serving, James and Luke return home and Luke hires James to work for him as a demolition consultant. James’ eyesight begins to worsen and it affects his performance on the job. This creates conflict and tension between the friends.

While reading this story, there is a moment where you can clearly understand how James is processing Jessie’s death. He reminds himself that she was her own person, who made her own choices.

One of the things that really stood out to me was at the very end where you see George W. Bush on the television talking about war, and when you pinch James’ eyes shut, it shows a flashback of George Bush Sr. also talking about war. I found it to be an interesting way to connect how life was for James pre and post-war.

I thoroughly enjoyed exploring this work. The use of various media elements kept me engaged the entire time and I really enjoyed going back and re-exploring sections to make various connections.

PRY tells the story of a Gulf War veteran who took a job as a demolition consultant, which he got from Luke who was his squad leader. In the first chapter, James is lying in bed staring up at the ceiling, thinking about the job and the stain up on the ceiling. It becomes apparent that James has vision problems as exhibited by what I assume is intended to be eye floaters. When you peer into his mind, you see flashes of Luke and Jessie, and then when you open his eyes you see a hallucination of Jessie stab him. What follows is an explosion of different parts of the same moment.

The use of different effects, the text, the visuals, really come together. The quick succession of shots in the first chapter tells so much information, especially when you go through the story for a second time; showing how much affection he had for her and how all of it was blown away in an instant. He feels as though it was his fault for what happened as he reported to his superior officer what was going on between Luke and Jessie. In Chapter 4 there was a point where he made reference to Jesus and Judas.

The story shows how war can have lasting effects on an individual. There are moments like in Chapter 2 where as the Hartman Plant was being demolished, if you go into his mind you see images of people being killed from the perspective of an AC-130 Gunship; and how sound of those explosions can trigger those memories.

Chapter 4 also shows the blurring of reality and fiction. Luke is sitting at the table in the hotel room shuffling cards. Chapter 7 explores this more so, with conversations that are clearly happening outside of the war zone being portrayed as if they were happening in that setting. Chapter 7 really shows how James seems to have lost ability to percieve what is real and what isn’t real, at the start it was less extreme but by Chapter 7 what is happening in the present versus what happened in the past becomes muddied

From the prior research that we have done on Tender Claws’ piece Pry, it is an extremely intense representation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This concept becomes much more clear by the end of the first chapter, continuing into the second chapter, with surreal imagery of death and war. The protagonist visiting his friend at a construction site, for example, triggers memories of explosions while serving in the military.

Within Pry, the interactor flips through three stages of the protagonist: eyes closed, eyes open, and subconscious. The lines between the three often become blurred, but primarily the eyes closed represents thoughts via text, the eyes open represents reality via video, and the subconscious represents war flashbacks via avant-garde sequences. By constantly flipping through these three stages, Pry gives a feeling of chaos and fear that aims to artistically represent the effects of PTSD on its victims.

The navigation of the piece is extremely simple, only requiring the interactor to advance by “prying” the protagonist’s eyes open and closed by pinching the screen. This allows the protagonist to freely flip between the three stages while moving through the piece, while putting the interactor in a place of physical connection with the events taking place in the protagonist’s mind. By pinching the screen shut, the interactor is taken into the protagonist’s mind, similar to film reel, that is constantly racing with text and war footage.

Pry is a powerful piece of electronic literature that attempts to shine light on mental illness through the advantages of technology and interaction. To say that the piece succeeds in doing so is an understatement.

I have had the pleasure of viewing this work last semester in another class and I think it is absolutely brilliant. This work is about a guy named James, a former soldier of the Gulf War, who works as a demolition consultant. James is going blind and also likely suffers from PTSD. Understanding these key details about James affects how the story is told and understood. The author’s use of all the different multimedia elements are what I think make this work so intriguing. The way that text montage segments were used to illustrate his subconscious are a perfect way to describe how erratic memories can be triggered. The use of video gives the user a first-hand look of what James sees in both present time as well as events that are parts of his memory or subconscious. There is also a lot of kinetic interaction used in Pry. This helps to tap into the user’s sensory modalities, which helps tell the story and influence the way that the user experiences the work. These kinetic interactions also give the user the feeling of a first-person point of view. The use of sound in Pry helps the story to unfold as well. It aides the user’s feelings of being immersed in the story. Spread and hold, pinch and hold, touch and drag are some of the actions that are required by the user in order to experience this work. The spread and hold action simulates the opening of the eyes. It is almost as if you, the user,  are “prying” the eyes open. The pinch and hold actions initiate memories or flashbacks. I would compare this action similar to when people squint or squeeze their eyes closed when they are trying to remember something or trying to not see something.

One of my favorite parts of chapter two was when the building was being demolished. This moment connects James’ present vision, current thoughts, and memories of his subconscious. It was at this moment for some reason that it really clicked with me how I am meant to understand each of the three spaces (eyes open, closed, and pinched to reveal his subconscious).

At one particular moment, what is seen when his eyes are opened, when they are closed, and when we are peeking into his subconscious all display same type of event, but in different settings.

This is from the scene when his eyes are open and he is viewing the building is being demolished and an explosion occurs.

This is from the scene when his eyes are closed and he is having flashbacks of his time playing video games during his down time while he served in the war. Explosions are occurring in the game.

This is from the scene from his subconscious. Video montage of explosions are occurring in this scene.

The first half of Pry was really enjoyable, and I’m really excited to go through the second half now. In the prologue, I didn’t really understand what was going on and even after going through the first four chapters, I’m still not sure I understand it. However, Pry was so immersive for me I found myself sucked into the story and it really feels like you’re actually there. The way you “open” the characters eyes to see the world around him and “pinch” the screen to go further back into his mind is such a unique way if viewing the story that adds so much to the storytelling. There were also multiple points that just had me mesmerized staring at the screen. I dont remember exactly when it was, but at one point there was just a load of words flashing into the screen changing rapidly. I caught myself just staring at it completely entranced by this and it was insane. I think I can honestly say I’ve never been as invested in a digital story before.

One of the coolest parts, which I’ve already seen a couple people comment on as well was the Braille chapter. The idea that as you scroll your finger across the Braille on the screen it actually reads it to you was absolutely genius. I love the effect that has, not only does it contribute to the story and the characters vision loss, but it helps you relate and further pulls you into the story making you feel like you are the character in the story.

I’m still not completely sure of the whole story, from what I can tell it’s about someone who used to serve and he’s dealing with life after. Some of the things he’s struggling from are his PTSD, and like mentioned before, vision loss. Overall, I think this app does everything right. It’s really just an amazing work of art and I can tell the people who made this put a lot of work and thought into it. I also really want to know who the girl in the beginning was that (I think?) killed him.

Pry is a story about a war veteran struggling with PTSD, on the iOS App store that rethinks the way an eBook is created. The story was created mainly for use on a tablet but also works on the iPhone.  Pry is fantastic as it uses haptics, expanded cinema, and interaction design from which methods and functions are intensely intertwined. Pry gives us a relationship of touchscreen clickables and text that uncovers reading as a unity of haptic and thinking processes. Pry provides the reader with the feelings of the main character’s thoughts through literally pinching the screen as if you are opening your eyes from a dream and haptics that give you a sense of being in the story.

The goal of the piece I think is to give the reader through, and touchscreen gestures a new way to feel the story’s content instead of just reading and imagining. Touching and tilting the screen gives us the feeling that we are the main character. Readers can decide how long to focus on the character’s thoughts. The period of focus changes the parameters of the next available scenes. The thing that makes this story great is that we get to feel the inner world of the main character through floating text, animations, and video flashbacks as well as experiencing the and the outer world of video that details the main character’s day-to-day experiences. This story is incredible for all readers young and old that would like a new way of immersion in storytelling.

I think of all of the divergent streams that Rettberg discussed in this chapter, the one that interests me the most are interactive installations. I think what interests me most about them is that the narrative unfolds in an interactive physical space. As the viewer, you are able to physically experience the story in a very real and tangible way.

I recently went on vacation to Las Vegas and decided to visit the Real Bodies Exhibit at Bally’s. If you ever get the chance, I would highly recommend it.  Some may not really consider this an interactive narrative installation, but I would kindly disagree. Each “room” or area of the exhibit sets a scene that tells parts of the multi-level story about the human body. As you travel through the exhibit, you are able to explore various objects, specimens, and art pieces that coincide with narrative text written on the walls. As interesting and cool as it was to see all the various organ and body specimens, I think that the writing was my favorite part. It was very poetic and beautifully written. I think I ended up taking more photos of the written text than I did the actual specimens. Below is one of the photos I took of some text. I realize that the text is difficult to read from the image, so I included the text in the image caption. 

As far as literary possibilities in the virtual and augmented worlds, I think there is a lot of potential. Along with new VR/AR literary works, I think that a lot of pre-existing works could also be recreated in the virtual space. In fact, the work that I wrote about for my ELD entry, Queerskins, which is an online multimedia novel, has a version that was created as an interactive installation that included a virtual reality experience. Viewers were able to interact with real life objects in real life spaces as they were described in the novel. I think that the interactive installations give the viewer a truly immersive and interactive experience. Click here to read more about these installations.

Final Project Description – Jake Martin

For this class’ final project, I will be doing a team project with Elaina. We’ve decided we wanted to further research hypertext fiction and collaborative Electronic Literature by creating a work of hypertext fiction within Twine. The style of the game is going to take inspiration from past interactive games such as Colossal Cave Adventure, and ZORK. Like these games, our version of the game is also planned to have an inventory system. We’re not sure yet how or if we can incorporate a scoring system into this in Twine. We also plan to include some sort of tribute or easter egg in our version of this game to the originals. However, since we are using twine we will not be using the text parser aspect of these other games, instead it will be a piece of hypertext fiction, where the player clicks through the stories by making certain choices that will be laid out for them. This piece of work is going to be based off of Little Red Riding Hood, and will contain many aspects of that story. The story will start out with the player (Little Red) being tasked with delivering a basket of goodies to her grandma. Before leaving the house, the player will be given the option to explore inside and outside the house to collect key items before leaving. After leaving the house, the player will tumble into a cave, where they must work their way through the puzzles to reach grandma’s house. Once you reach grandma’s, she asks you to venture back into the cave to collect her lost treasures. Reaching grandma safely will all the tasked treasures results in winning the game, with various different ending based on what items you took from the house in the beginning of the story. We do also plan to incorporate the wolf into the story as some kind of antagonist, possibly finding him down in the cave will cause him to attack you. For this project we’d like to explore the idea of passing back and forth the twine project and each of us adding our own ideas into it, so while we have a storyline and gameplay laid out, the journey to get there will end up being a surprise to both of us. We also like the idea of using Twine because the unique way the player can go into the actual Twine project, and look at the multiple paths lain out like a map.

This chapter of Rettburg is especially unique in the sense that he discusses some of the more modern and advanced methods and technologies used to create and enhance electronic literature. The section of the chapter that interests me the most pertains to locative narratives and how the incorporation of data regarding our locations assists in the creation of narratives.

As stated by Rettburg:

“The majority of locative narrative projects share a common interest in the relationship of physical space and geographic location to the narrative and poetic dimensions of literature” (185).

The addition of the element of location can enhance the narrative of a work by giving the reader a sense of visualization to base their understanding of the work on. For instance, if a given work of electronic literature takes place throughout Portland, Oregon, the addition of a visual representation of where the story takes place on Google Maps adds to the overall narrative of the work. The incorporation of something such as Google Street View would also add a visual element to a work and would thus add another narrative layer to the work.

The fact that Google Maps is an open API that anyone has access to and may use for their project grants authors of electronic literature the ability to incorporate elements of location into their work. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood for instance is a set of stories that are tagged with a location on Google Maps, and each story is located on different points on a Google Maps view of New York City. Being able to see on a map where each story happens to be pinned adds to the narrative and gives the reader an idea as to why each particular story is written as it is.

Virtual Reality has recently risen in popularity in recent years. A type of technology that in theory “transports” you into the world of whatever game you’re playing, movie you’re watching, or story you’re reading is a very interesting concept that has been around for many years. We’ve only recently started to get the technology to actually be able to create this in a way that is effective and works how it should. Virtual Reality was also the basis of the movie “Ready Player One”, which is set in a future world where basically everyone lives in a VR world, because the real world is corrupt and slowly deteriorating. The idea of being able to actually enter and interact with your favorite worlds is a fantasy that most of us have wanted since we were little kids. Didn’t you ever want to be in the world of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Percy Jackson, Eragon, etc? With VR this will eventually be possible. Video game companies are already capitalizing on the world of VR. Such as the PlayStation VR with motion controllers and a headset that will transport you into the world of a video game. This isn’t the first time a VR set was created by a company. The first time I actually learned about VR was when I was doing a timeline of the history of Nintendo consoles for a school project. One of the ones I found was called the Nintendo Virtual Boy, which was a system that had the idea of using VR to play games. However, the console was a massive flop mainly because of the technical limitations there were at the time. Mostly the fact that the only colors you were able to see were red and black.
The idea of VR is so cool and has been around for quite a while, so it’s going to be awesome to see what we can do as technology only progresses. Augmented Reality however, is far more common. While Virtual Reality transports us to other worlds, Augmented Reality effectively puts other things into our world with the use of camera or other device. AR was really big on Nintendo’s DS Systems, most notably I believe the DSi was the first to start using AR through the use of its camera. The 3DS expanded on this by giving us 3 dimensional augmented reality. As a kid, this was really cool to play with and something I used all the time. Of course, the limitations were still there so most of the games were just little minigames and weren’t too amazing, but it was still something very new and fun to explore. The use of AR was then made extremely popular through the use of the app Pokemon Go, which came out in 2016. The use of AR in the app is optional, but many fans of the game were loving the idea of seeing Pokemon in their every day life. There were so many posts on social media of funny places people had found Pokemon and everyone was having a ton of fun with the idea.

Most of these, I started typing in Bing, then completed the sentence with my own idea.

She was powerful, not because she was told.
She was a creature of light, not human.
Humans were fish, and she was the sea.
The sea was angry that day.
The day that music died.

Music was her refuge.
The music of the sea.
The sea of trees
Trees were cut down and made into lumber

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OkOmojgbGS1a96oOfy5yj1atG8l01AmtiuaDa_ms5AQ/edit#

Created by:

Jazz Jackson

Mariah Gwin

Kathleen Zoller

Holly Slocum

Out of the works we were asked to explore this week, the one that engaged me the most emotionally was heyharryheymatilda by Rachel Hulin. I had never seen a work done this way, so it was very interesting to me. Most of the time while I surf Instagram, I don’t really look at people’s posts as a way of telling a narrative, but as I was exploring heyharryheymatilda it made me realize that posts can in fact be considered a story. I did find it a little hard to follow at first, but then I remembered that the most recent posts are displayed first in the feed, so I scrolled down to the beginning and started there.

I think this piece is a perfect example of how we interact with the networks we live in. One of the things that really brought this to my attention was the use of the Instagram platform itself. After a post is published, users/viewers are able to interact with the posts by “liking” images as well as making comments on the posts (if the owner has allowed them) to further engage with the story.

“-digital literary art can serve as a critical mirror to help us better understand the networked society that we co-create, that we are subject to, and that we together inhabit.” (Rettberg, 182)

While looking more into this work, I discovered that there is a paperback version of the novel as well. It would be interesting to read the print version and compare the experience of the two. I would make a guess that personally,  I would feel more engaged and immersed in the Instagram version of the novel than I would with the print version. I think that the use of imagery and video really enhances the experience and makes the narrative come to life.

I chose I Love Alaska this week because I didn’t find anything else really appealing. This is a story told of an AOL user #711391o.

“On August 4, 2006, AOL accidentally published a text file on its website containing three months’ worth of search keywords submitted by over 650,000 users.”

This piece would not have been an existing idea, circulated piece, or as a film without the Internet. As the fractional search history of an AOL user, is narrated over images of Alaskan glacial paintings, each entry unlocks a hole upon an overwhelming portrait of oddness. The user seems to have a faint grasp of search methods, and blunt need for guidance, user #711391’s search bar becomes a priest, therapist, prophet. A user log of three months gives us the following perceptions into their life:

“Don’t cut your hair before a big event,” “People are not the same in person as they are on the Internet,” and? “I thought I could handle an affair but I couldn’t.” 

As we watch I Love Alaska, we come to learn that each search history establishes a secondary archive of the self. The continuous process of the inner life is now accessed through keywords. We cannot assume to know what the life of this user is truly like, but the unlimited isolation of being trapped in our own skin has seldom been fabricated in fewer words than,

“Why can’t I sleep since I had a hysterectomy?”

I had trouble finding something that truly hit home this week, but this story makes you think about how secure our information truly is on the internet.

Multimedia Fiction is one of my favorite genres of Electronic Literature so I was looking forward to exploring these works this week. I feel like the use of multimedia elements can add so much to the overall experience of a piece. One of the works that I chose to really delve into was Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon. What I liked most about this piece was the amount of user interactivity. In the first scene, the user has to mouse over the text on the screen which would reveal the next set of text. I really enjoyed the connections between the text and the user interactivity. For example, once the sentence saying “Everything escapes me” appeared, the visible mouse pointer actually disappears. I also thought it was really meaningful when the words on the screen read “I feel I’ve lost control” and the colored orbs that once followed the movement of the user, all of a sudden disperse and the user no longer has control over where they move to.

I felt like all of the scenes in this work illustrated the message of the character in a meaningful way. One of the other points of the story that I found a strong connection between text and user activity was the part of the story where the narrator is talking about how he is discovering a woman that he’s just met by asking her questions. As the user moves the cursor over the screen, a figure of a woman begins to appear underneath the various text.

Another work that I took a deeper look into was How to Rob a Bank by Alan Bigelow. I had been exposed to this work in a previous class, but only to Part 1, so it was interesting to experience other sections of the story. Truthfully, I am glad that I had some understanding of the backstory, because it helped the narrative make more sense.

I thought that the way the work is revealed through the main characters’ use of their iPhones and all the different searches, texts, apps,  and other functions that appear on their screens is an interesting way for the user to experience some immersion while reading the story. I found it even more immersive while viewing this story from my iPhone. As the user, using the swiping motion to progress the story made me feel like I was actually viewing the different apps and such. The use of multimedia elements in this story definitely make it have a more immersive quality than some of the other multimedia fiction we have looked at.  

After I watched and played around with A is for apple last week, I knew 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein was my first choice for this week. Another piece done in Flash, demonstrates constellations in which you click on each and it opens displays with animated pictures and narration that creatively relates certain things from Wittgenstein’s life and philosophy. For example, the piece plays on numerous meanings of “88”, from its ban on German soccer jerseys to a deeper idea that “88” implies “Heil Hitler” because the letter H is the 8th letter. The piece is not an effective story being that it is very nonlinear rather it is an assembly of clicks that make connections in multiple ways, yet works very well to keep your attention.

The next piece I chose was Mark Amerika’s “Film Text”. As I watched the introduction and After no changes on the screen, thinking this was a video only, I started to interact with the text. I really enjoyed the audio and visuals used in the piece that connected the use of technology and living in inner-city communities with many people. again, I felt the piece was a critique of modern society with its large urban centers, technology, and media. I found It interesting that Amerika intended for this piece to have a more particular narrative with specific characters, places, and events. The only continuity in this piece was the shadow man with a hat who appeared throughout the piece. Very nice pieces this week, I feel sometimes I have little to no understanding of why or what these artworks are all about and then some just click with me.

The first piece I looked in-depth at was “How to Rob a Bank” by Alan Bigelow. This piece has actually been my favorite piece of interactive fiction so far. The story takes place on the phone, and throughout the 5 parts switches between Ted and Elizabeth’s phones. Ted is searching “how to rob a bank” and throughout the story also uses google for many other things, such as “how to take a hostage” and “how to steal a car”. Throughout the 5 parts we also see them both playing different games, using the app store, going onto Buzzfeed, and many other things people use smartphones for. Eventually he meets up with Elizabeth, and escapes the police. In part 3 they then begin to rob banks together, and donating some of the money to charities after an article suggests they might be a modern day “Robin Hood” duo. Elizabeth’s sister then tells the police of their identities and gives away their information, and Elizabeth and Ted go into hiding and have a baby girl, who they name Alexandria. Most of part 4 is told through Elizabeth writing posts to her baby girl, which we as the audience get to read. The 5th part is then mostly told by Elizabeth’s sister, who told the police about their identities and is now writing blog posts about them. It is revealed that the couple started taking the baby with them to rob banks, and that they had stolen enough money to live off of for the rest of their lives, so it’s unlikely they will ever be seen again. The sound plays a huge part in this story, such as the background noises of cars driving by, and even at one point, Elizabeth singing to her daughter. The most interesting part of this piece of work to me is that their relationship is based completely off of bank robbing. It’s the reason they get together, and as shown in parts 4 & 5 it is eventually what rekindles their relationship. When they aren’t bank robbing, Ted starts to distance himself from Elizabeth and their relationship. Only by bank robbing again and bringing their young daughter with them, are they able to save their relationship. This work was really immersive to me and I love how well the story was told through the use of the smartphone. Not only were we able to read the character’s story but we also got to see more mundane parts of their lives, such as the apps they play. I think my favorite part was the fact that the time and battery % on the phone was always changing. It was a really nice attention to detail.
(I also liked how they watched Bonnie & Clyde together, that’s a great reference.)

The second piece I looked at was “CityFish” By JR Carpenter. Although not as interesting to me as the first one, I still thoroughly enjoyed this piece. The first thing that caught my eye was the side scrolling layout of the story, which I think was a perfect decision to tell the story in. As you scroll through the story, time passes, almost like a timeline. I was almost at the end of the piece when I discovered that by clicking on the images, a video would pop up. So naturally I had to go back through and watch some of the videos. The videos help move the story along in a way that the text couldn’t do alone, which is part of the reason why I was so surprised I made it almost to the end without noticing. The collage like format is perfect for the story, as it reminds me of someone who travels a lot. Lynne, the narrator of the story is forced to travel to New York to visit her aunt and uncle because her mom “needs a break”. The imagery of the collage background is a perfect reminder that the main point of the story is Lynne’s travelling experiences. Like “How to Rob a Bank” I think this story is more immersive, you’re being brought into Lynne’s story, complete with pictures, sound, video, and the complete storyline.

I found myself enjoying a lot of these works, but two that stood out to me were SOFTIEs by David Jhave Johnson and Shy Boy by Tom Swiss.

Johnson’s use of movement in this piece is what made it so intriguing to me. I was immediately drawn in as I viewed the first poem on the page. He describes Stand Under as a “social-synaptic structure emulated in language” which I think perfectly describes it. As I clicked on each image and viewed the animations, I felt a deeper understanding and connection to the text.

“Kinetic poetry by definition deals in time-based poetics: its main distinctive characteristic is that texts change through animation, and that animation itself conducts meaning.”(Rettberg, 119)

I think that SOFTIEs is a prime example of how animation of text conducts its meaning in this type of poetry. While I was experiencing this work, I would read the poem first, then would view the corresponding video. Initially, I found some of the poems to be confusing as a stand alone, however they made more sense to me after viewing the videos. Johnson’s use of movement illustrates the symbolic meaning behind each one of his poems. I thought this work was absolutely beautiful.

The other work that I took a closer look at  was Shy Boy by Tom Swiss. As with SOFTIEs, I also found the movement of the text in this piece offers the user a deeper understanding of the text. The story is about a school boy who can’t bear his current circumstances and longer. The movement of text illustrates the boy’s feelings of hopelessness and desire to vanish. At one point in the story the word ‘vanish’ does just that, it vanishes. The use of animation actually illustrates what the text is trying to communicate. I also found the music that is played in the background played a role in how I experienced the piece. It sets an almost ominous tone that I feel like purposely makes the reader feel a little uneasy. 

I think that both pieces were very effective at using kinetic movement to enhance the experience and help communicate the message.

After looking through all of the works for this week, I chose two that stood out to me. The first piece I picked was “The Dreamlife of Letters” by Brian Kim Stefans. The digital poem was created from words written to him from a coworker during a roundtable conference. He alphabetized her words and produced a series of short digital poems. The poem’s text moves in different ways on your screen.  The text is responsive to other words and letters, but sometimes the text seems to only have the first letter in common, rather than the first few letters, or patterns of letters inside the word. At certain points of the poem, the movements of the letters match a word.

          E.g. , “the word height expands and grows taller at first,       then shrinks away, while the word “drip” appears as the letter D falls down the screen.” 

I felt excited as I made my way through Brian Kim Stefans work but nothing prepared me for A is for Apple. I watched this a couple of times, and I felt like I needed more. I went to David Clark’s page and started looking through more of his work, and I am thrilled to have discovered this man. All of his work is just beautiful, and I can’t wait to explore all of his stuff. For now, I will discuss A is for Apple. This piece is a Flash-based project that uses the hypertext to investigate the science behind an apple. The piece uses a sequence of links, looking for hidden meanings that come from the apple. 

        “The image of the apple leads to references and ideas borrowing from western metaphysics, popular culture, the history of cryptography, ideas of language, and psychoanalysis.”

A is for Apple was created using the model of a collage. Initially, paper collages were made. Those became the basis of a flash website where David and his associates made the page interactive and animated. One of the best Pieces of art I have ever scene.

I chose to explore the World of Awe, an electronic story that takes place in some sort of weird desert where an unnamed traveler is searching for some sort of unknown treasure. There are three chapters in which the first takes place in 2000, the second in 2002, and the third in 2006. You explore this travelers journey by opening up love letters that he wrote to his loved one but were never sent. Even though he knew she would never read these letters he would write them anyways to keep himself from going insane. Some of them were often amusing as one that I read in the first chapter was talking about how he got captured and escaped but ended the letter in “P.S. still looking for the lost treasure”.

Due to the advance of technology each chapter seems more advanced than previous chapters. The first is just sound and text, the second has some short object animations, and the third has some 3D pictures and designs. I however enjoyed the first chapter the most as I found it more immersive with the audio playing in the background as I would read the letters. The third chapter was the most difficult to me as it seemed like the language was arabic or some other form of Middle Eastern language. This story all around seemed very bizarre and strange but I enjoyed exploring it nonetheless.

E-Literature

              In looking at the “Those We Love Alive” (TWLA) I am intrigued by its repetition, as well as its descriptive language. The other piece I looked at was “Deviant” which after playing for a while I remember going through last semester. While Deviant was intriguing, I felt like I was running into the same problem that we have discussed in previous classes. Following the general character but not understanding the story or what is going on, due to lack of context. But after reading the authors inspiration of what inspired them to make deviant it makes a lot more sense. Looking at TWLA it was a lot more linear, so it was easier to follow I really enjoyed it. The tone and mood set by the colors and music are eerie but fascinating. I looked quickly at howling dogs and was surprised that they were both done in twine as well as TWLA seams like a more refined and completed piece but that was only my initial thought. E-literature has such a wide spectrum of what it can do that I will just learn and enjoy whatever I can.   

After reading Rettberg’s chapter on Interactive Fiction and Other Gamelike Forms, and briefly taking a look at all the works, I decided to take a deeper look at Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive and Nick Monfort’s Ad Verbum. I wanted to select two works that were significantly different from one another in their approach. Porpentine’s piece has a poetic vibe. I would say that the framework of the piece is more of an exploration of literary ideas. It involves the reader by having them make selections from author chosen lists, which Porpentine used as a way to guide the reader through the narrative. As the user, the choices that you make dictate the way the narrative unfolds, however the choices  don’t necessarily change the outcome of the story you end up reading because you are limited to the words given to you by the author. However, IF works like Nick Monfort’s Ad Verbum have a different approach.

As Rettberg mentions in his book, “The reader becomes the player” (89), which I definitely got a sense of while I was interacting with Monfort’s work. Ad Verbum involves the player in finding a solution to a problem presented. While I was going through the piece, I felt like a detective gathering clues and making decisions based on what new information was revealed to me.  I would also say that Ad Verbum sparks your imagination while interacting with the piece.
Through descriptive writing of setting, character, and action, both works encourage the user to use their imagination which enhances the experience and aids in the overall understanding of the message that is trying to be communicated by the narrative. I think that both of these pieces touch on Rettberg’s notion that

“The principal challenge to the reader of interactive fiction, and it’s central pleasure, is to find a solution, to achieve satisfaction of a successful session of deductive reasoning.” (90)

I found myself enjoying both pieces for different reasons. I enjoyed the use of multimedia in Porpentine’s piece. While it was much more like reading a story, being able to interact with the work was enjoyable. Ad Verbum was a little bit of a challenge for me to work through, simply because I had to think more about how I was going to respond as I was going through the piece. I still found it fun to work through.

Sources:
With Those We Love Alive, Porpentine (2014)
Ad Verbum, by Nick Monfort (2001)
Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg

I chose to play Howling Dogs, and Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw; both of these kept me engaged by allowing me to click on objects or text. I kept clicking to try to find out what was going to happen next. The experience was like playing a video game and trying to get the high score. I must admit, I quit Howling Dogs, because I could not understand the point of the game. The goals of the game were not clear. While playing Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, I clicked until I could not click anymore. I assume I completed the game.

Howling Dogs, is a different animal altogether (pun intended). The game was engaging at the start. As I advance into the game, I felt like I was descending into madness; and then I clicked on the text “food and drink dispenser” to advance into the room with the ceiling fan if I am remembering correctly. This event leads into pulse which changed color every time I ended back at this point in the game. I quit after ending back at the point of the game after 10 times. I did visualize being in what I assume to be an insane person’s head, while playing Howling Dogs. The player character appeared to travel to alternate timelines (or imagine they did). I did enjoy having to visualize characters and setting while playing this game. This experience was like reading a novel. I just wish I new what the game was about.

 Over the years, hypertext has been non stop evolving. With Afternoon, a story being one of the earliest forms of written hypertext, now in the modern day it has evolved into something as simple as someone tweeting a hashtag. This has all happen just within a decade. Before that it was just links on websites such as wikipedia, but know you can find forms of hypertext within video games. One game industry that I absolutely love takes the idea of hypertext into their storytelling creating multiple games with many choices that the player gets to make that will affect how the story will be told. They produced games coming from the universes of The Walking Dead, Minecraft, and Borderlands. However very recently I discovered that their Minecraft game that the produced has been put up on Netflix. This surprised me when I saw this so I of course wanted to try this to see how they brought a branching narrative game and put it on Netflix. Turns out you would click links that would cause what the main character would do or say and I was amazed. I was hoping that this was some sort of test and was wanting more hypertext stories to come onto Netflix. Shortly after Netflix introduced Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch. I interacted with it multiple times getting multiple new stories from this work. This is where I think the future of hypertext literacy will evolve to. It’s so interesting and new I believe that within a decade we will find a lot more work similar to this on a lot more platforms and mediums.

When I read The Babysitter I felt I followed along the story pretty well. I could tell whose perspective was whose and what was happening in the story despite the random time changes. But then as I got to the end I got completely lost. I read through the ending again and it seemed like there were multiple realities going on all at once, some good and some really terrible. This made me think that if I read this story on twine or some other form of hypertext, it would be a lot easier to follow. The story seemed very cluttered in this regard. There are multiple narrative paths and through hypertext, with just a click of a word or phrase it could take you on a different path.  Though because The Babysitter wasn’t written in hypertext it allowed the story to be mysterious. As I read it I, I would read each new paragraph and try to figure out whose perspective it was whether it was a main character or even something just playing on the TV.

After sifting through these games that I would not consider ever playing if I had not taken this class, I found two that were very well created. I felt all the other games besides Blackbar, and Device 6 was lacking a great structure and were very obnoxious. Device 6 to some may not be a game in the most real sense; it requires a strict amount of attention. A series of short stories combined with interactive riddles.

Device 6 starts with a girl named Anna who seems to have a bit of a problem remembering how or why she is in a castle. Device 6 the game is full of strange devices and cryptic clues. Strange audio sounds and tons of locked doors to open divides this game into six separate chapters. The game has a minimalist art style and fantastic audio. What’s unexpected about this game is it is mostly just text, but the story opens up like a book in that you swipe through words, but the structure is very abnormal. The text shifts to suit the gameplay. For example, the text will stagger like a staircase when you are moving down and will even split, twist and turn.

there are moments you will have to solve interactive devices that are password protected or need a code. There are audio clues throughout the game so you must have audio enabled. This game gives you many different ways to interact through text and audio, but those aren’t just the things that keep the story moving, the text is also the game’s map.

As for the game Blackbar, I found it was a bit slow and somewhat frustrating. If you are able to get something right, you will advance through the story, if you get the answer wrong you sit in limbo until your next guess. It’s a touching and somewhat difficult game about loss and language, and while it doesn’t seem like a game of the normal stature Blackbar gives us a story of communication between two women and parts of their letters have been blacked out by a dictator like system, like censorship. You must fill in the words that have been blacked out. Some of the words are a common sense solving Other parts of the game will have you solve a word puzzle, or put your memory to the test from an earlier conversation. Some puzzles are a bit mysterious, but there’s enough reasoning behind them that, when you FINALLY figure out the HARD ones, you can breathe again. The narrative is what really makes this game. It’s about the importance of language and the price of censorship.

While I’ve explored all of the works presented to us for this week’s blog discussion, I’m particularly intrigued by Olia Lialina’s work “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War”.

One distinct feature of Lialina’s work in comparison to other hypertext fiction works is that it is far more linear and finite. Each link will only bring about a few more options for one to click on before the link disappears, forcing the reader to move on to the next link of their choice. Additionally, my personal experience in regards to navigating through the work led me to read it in a similar way time after time, due to the fact that the entire work laid out on one screen and my natural inclination was to navigate through the work from left to right.

The defining feature of “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” that sets it apart from other works of hypertext fiction is Lialina’s use of animated and still imagery to enhance the story. As stated in the Net Art Anthology article in regards to the work,

My Boyfriend Came Back from the War highlights the parallels and divergences between cinema and the web as artistic and mass mediums”

Lialina does an excellent job of incorporating imagery into her work by both maintaining certain images on the page throughout the work, as well as by creatively turning certain images into links that lead either to other images or to text that progresses the story further.

“My Boyfriend Came Back From The War” is a very interesting hypertext story. It starts off as one big screen, and as you click on images or the hypertext links, the boxes split up and become smaller and smaller. At the “end” of the story, all the boxes are just black boxes with white outlining with no text or images inside. The story is about a man who comes back from some type of war and him and his girlfriend are having various conversations depending which links you choose. In one area the boy proposes to her, and they decide to get married the next month. In another, it is revealed that while he was away the girlfriend cheated on him with the neighbor, and then begs her boyfriend not to kill him. It’s interesting because there isn’t much storytelling going on, a lot of it is up to reader interpretation. The few lines of dialogue there are in the story rarely have more than a few words. I also like the use of the images as links as well, such as the different clocks and the images of the couple. It’s possible I just went through the story wrong, or wasn’t able to figure out how to explore it to its full extent, but for the most part there didn’t really seem to be that much of an option for the reader. It seemed once you starting working your way through a box, even if there were different options they would all lead to the same place. I guess it could be seen as multilinear based on which box you choose, as each one can be perceived as a different storyline. However the way I looked at it they were just multiple different conversations that went on after he came back.

Like most hypertext, this confused me. However, I did really enjoy the aesthetic used of the boxes slowly getting smaller and smaller as you progressed through the story and were able to make different choices. I think I got the main idea of what the story was, as well as some of the more important outcomes for the storylines. Like I said above, I also enjoyed the relationship between the images and the pieces of text in this. It really feels like it blends together that much better and I love in the beginning that you click on the image of his face, and then once it splits up you have the option to click on his face again. I like the grainy black and white style the pictures have going on, it makes the story have more of a sinister feeling to it, almost like you’re not getting the whole story of what’s happening between the two (which I don’t believe we are, I think there’s much more to the story). It’s different from other pieces we’ve seen in the past because usually you pick one story and pursue it, and if you want to pick a different route you start over. This one you can go through every single route right after each other without having to restart or go again, since they’re all on the same page.

I had first heard of “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” when I started at WSU in 2017. Now that I have gone through a few different DTC classes I have clicked through this story on multiple occasions, and it seems to get more interesting every time I look more into it.  Olia Lialina’s story, uses simple HTML elements to communicate a somewhat haunting like a cinematic narrative. Olia Lialina’s story tells the story of a young lady who is reuniting with her love, after his return from war. The story makes use of browser frames, hypertext, and also includes both animated and still images. This story highlights the artistic similarities and separations between cinema and the web as mediums, and explores the early language of the internet. The author uses the web to question our understandings of the story and organization of memory through a set of on-screen graphics that are clickable.

The story is somewhat Incomplete which opens up a user’s imagination through navigation and reinterpretation of the piece. “My Boyfriend Came Back from the War” demonstrates the possibility to use the internet as a way to remember, together. The work brought cinematic themes such as pulsing imagery, intertitles, and close-ups of actors into an interactive, multilinear structure of hypertext. As you click on each fragment, the browser window splits into smaller and smaller frames. When interacting with this story a user can advance through the story by clicking on the hyperlinks, images, and incomplete phrases. I like this story. For how old this story is, I get a feeling that it was written in more modern times, being that we are still at war in the middle east.

Taroko Gorge had an really interesting piece of work. When I first opened it, I observed it for a really long time trying to make sense of it. I tried to piece the sentences together to see if it made a story or a statement. While I couldn’t quite piece any of the words or sentences together I did notice a pattern in the work. The sentences all would say very similar things. It when I went through this piece of work I noticed how this one sentence would say “encompassing objective dim-“, “encompassing cool-“, “encompassing sinuous straight dim”, and “stamp the straight objective dim-“. This was only one sentence pattern that I noticed as I noticed as the sentences kept coming, it would cause more words to be in different and similar patterns. I remember learning about Dadaist when I took 101 and out of all the digital artist Dadaist and surrealist stood out to me the most. I find Dada real interesting and when I took a look at this work after I read the chapters it reminded me of it. Gorge, like all other Dadaists, have created something that I would have never before thought existed. Its so interesting to me seeing the types of things bots can create. 

I think that there is a promising future for hypertext fiction as a literary form. Culturally, we have begun expressing our “stories” and thoughts in a form of hypertext through social media platforms. An individual tweet or post can stand alone with cryptic meaning, much like fragments of hypertext, however, when they are put together, they can form a complete story that has an intended meaning or message. I think that because we are getting so used to seeing stories revealed this way that our minds are having an easier time deciphering fragmented text in this fashion.

Author Shelley Jackson mentions in an interview that with hypertext, she was able to write her stories like Patchwork Girl without “imposing a linear order” to the narrative.

“Hypertext makes it easy to place things side by side, rather than one after another, so it makes “thing” and “place” metaphors much easier. I guess you could say I want my fiction to be more like a world full of things that you can wander around in, rather than a record or memory of those wanderings.”

I feel like this allows for the narrative to be expressed and experienced in a way that printed stories cannot. Stories that also diverge and meet like some hypertexts do would be much more difficult to achieve in the print world. The use of multimedia elements that are included in hypertext narrative also add an enhanced experiential element to a story that print cannot. Hypertext has the potential affordances of giving the consumer the abilities to make choices that influence the progression of the narrative, to select alternate endings, or to have an entirely new experience of the story each time it is read. While I would say that this isn’t impossible to achieved in print, it is not typically done.

Like any approach to art, hypertext fiction has its advantages and disadvantages. As an unconventional form of writing, it provides ways to tell nonlinear stories in a much easier way than physical writing can. And for writers looking to write unconventionally regardless of their platform, hypertext fiction has provided a way to simply lay things out in a much more organized manner. Author Shelley Jackson, writer of hypertext fiction piece “Patchwork Girl”, stated in a 1998 interview with Mark Amerika that “hypertext permits me to write the way I ordinarily would, in related fragments with no overarching design, but then to allow a structure to arise out of the inclinations of the material itself, instead of imposing a linear order onto it…” Jackson’s typical style of writing blended perfectly with what hypertext fiction had to offer for her, allowing her to create an iconic piece of writing. However, she is nowhere near a household name.

Although hypertext fiction is a fascinating form of art that allows for millions of stories to be made from just hundreds or thousands of sources, it failed to take off in the nineties, and it will never be able to take off no matter what attempts are made in present day or will be made in the future. There’s a few reasons for this, but the main reason is that hypertext fiction is a novelty. It was a fad of the nineties that showed off the newest technology, but the evolution of technology soon skyrocketed and left hypertext fiction in the dust. Furthermore, it was a fad that, although was made easier with technology, wasn’t impossible in writing. Physical examples of nonlinear writing are abundant. Whether the goal of a hypertext piece was attempting to emulate the feeling of looking back at memories in a nonlinear way, similar to Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, or create a branching path of stories and endings, like Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter”, or randomize the events to tell a completely different narrative, like Mark Saporta’s Composition No. 1, it has been done in physical writing.

However, perhaps the failure of hypertext fictions comes not from the folly of machine, but rather the folly of man. As Steven Johnson bluntly points out in his article “Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story” for Wired, “it turned out that nonlinear reading spaces had a problem: they were incredibly difficult to write.” Although hypertext fiction sounds great on paper as a mainstream form of art, the upkeep, dedication, and sheer amount of material required could never be reached to keep it in the limelight.

During the 1990s I was a teenager in high school when I first learned about this mysterious new thing called hypertext fiction, but it appeared to be around for a while and then seemed to vanish overnight unless you were someone writing it or explicitly seeking it out. So, what happened to hypertext fiction? I had myself forgotten about this type of literature until I started the DTC program at WSU. I remember teachers in high school raving about hypertext, how it was hyped up as the next big thing. Hypertext is a medium that could change storytelling in the post-Gutenberg era, a way in which the invention of movable text gave rise to the novel. Hypertexts were available, first on diskette, then on CD-ROM, and eventually on the Web.  And then, poof, nothing happened. I think that it was put out to fast and people weren’t ready for this type of thing although people raved about the technology.
Numerous reasons might exist as to why hypertext fiction has not taken off in literary communities which might include strict design problems, complications with copyright laws, and problems with stocking e-books. For me, I am a bit old fashioned as I like to feel and turn each page of a book when I am engrossed in a novel, the aesthetics are what I enjoy about reading. With hypertext fiction, I have yet to embrace the new digital media in a way that has enough added value for me to enjoy it which is a reason I chose to take this class. I hope at the end of the semester I will have gained a new interest in hypertext fiction.

While the content of The Babysitter was pretty dark and was somewhat confusing at first due to its fragmented nature, I found myself enjoying the process of reading it. Personally, fragmented and non-linear pieces of literature are my favorite to experience. What I like most about stories like The Babysitter and other fragmented stories is that they almost force you to be more imaginative because your brain has to really work at sorting out what is happening in the narrative. Another thing that I like about fragmented and hypertext stories is that each time you read the story or segments of the story, you are experiencing it in a new way and gain more of an understanding of the narrative.

As Will suggested, I took my time while reading The Babysitter. I think that the structure of the story almost forces the reader to read it slowly and methodically in order to interpret what is happening. While the events are presented in a chronological way, the narrative is still convoluted in a sense given that there is no clear differentiation between what is fantasy and what is reality.

“The relation between the external world and the interior world of   imagination has been abolished on the page.” (Ruttberg 58)

This makes it hard for the reader to know what is really going on, but I think that this was Coover’s point. He was trying to push the boundaries and reconsider the way that stories can be told. Coover was definitely a pioneer when it comes to hypertext fiction and
other forms of fragmented electronic literature. I am excited by this type of literature and look forward to experiencing more works like this.  

The Babysitter by Robert Coover is definitely an interesting story to say the least. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure I completely understood what was happening the majority of the time throughout this. At some points in the story, it seemed like things weren’t actually happening, like they were all a part of some dream sequence or imagination, yet in other parts it all seemed very real. At the same time, the reader has to infer which perspective the section is in everytime it shifts, since it doesn’t tell you. I read through it one time, just to get a basic understanding of it, and then I read through it again trying to piece it together in a way that makes sense but still, it left me feeling annoyed and at the same time, wanting more. From what I could comprehend, the story has 3 “main” perspectives. 1.) The parents Mr. and Mrs. Tucker, 2.) the Babysitter (I’m not sure what her name is), and the Tucker children, 3.) and the babysitter’s boyfriend Jack, and his friend Mark. Mr. Tucker, Jack and Mark, and Jimmy the oldest Tucker child, are all in some way infatuated with the babysitter. Jimmy is referred to multiple times as wanting to spank her, as well as trying to catch and spy on her naked such as when she’s getting into the bath Mr. Tucker is (I think?) having some sort of fantasies about the babysitter and the things he wishes to do with her. While Mark and Jack both end up at the house with her trying to engage in sexual activities with her, and eventually trying to force themselves on her.

Although this isn’t my type of literature, and I was definitely feeling more frustrated than anything, I do understand why The Babysitter was an important piece that paved the way for current hypertext fiction. There is definitely some type of spiderweb type narrative going on in the story, but the reason it becomes meddled and confusing is there’s not really a way to navigate through it. With Twine, the reader is able to “choose their own path” by selecting different options to continue the story. With no option like this in The Babysitter, the reader is basically forced through every possible outcome of the story. Although this isn’t the best way to go through a text like this, it was still a very good model for later texts to build off of. It introduced the idea that a story could have multiple paths to go down, and it’s based on how can be based off of the reader’s decisions. The premise of the story is good, it just lacks the “Electronic Literature” aspect it needs. In other words, when Robert Coover was creating this story, he was just lacking the technology he needed to truly make it work. If this story was remade with twine or something similar, I’m sure it would be understood much better, with the added bonus that the reader would actually get to “choose” the outcome of the story. Which would actually be great because I’m interested to know how the story (stories?) are actually supposed to go!

Sources:

Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg
The Babysitter by Robert Coover

After going over the weekly readings, we can look at Hypertext, not as a classification but as a common term, the word hypertext is used to describe writing that is made possible by the invention of the computer and is created in the nonlinear or non-sequential space. Also, unlike print, hypertext offers numerous paths between text fragments. With its webs of linked fragments sometimes referred to as lexias, these fragments give us alternate routes that hypertext uses drastically with technology, giving us interactive independence which frees’ the reader from the author control. Hypertext users and creators are thought of as co-learners or co-writers, mapping and remapping the textual, visual, and kinetic components.

The mechanics behind “The Babysitter” follows somewhat of a TV guide listing. It is separated into sections, each of which links to a television program. From the beginning, Robert Coover uses key phrases to link the reader to characters. For example, the repeated phrase of “light brown hair” identifies Mr. Tucker, while “enough’s enough” or “that’s enough” identifies Jack. As the story develops, the character’s points of view begin to blend, and annoying attempts are made to differentiate among them. When we get to the end of the story, chaos has substituted the stories simplicity and reason. The shift in viewpoints is supposed to simulate channels changing and the fragmentation of realism in television. When we look at the beginning of the story, it was somewhat easy to recognize and distinguish the different points of view. By the end, it was somewhat jumbled.

I found it fascinating this week, perusing through the list of various versions of “Taroko Gorge”. Each work had its own theme as they were created by others. The concept of this code was very interesting to examine. Though I could not understand most of the HTML, it was easy to spot where the words of the poems were drawn from. Two of my favorite pieces were “Tasty Gougère” by Helen Burgess, and “Dress for overcast” by Clare Bryden. “Tasty Gougère” brought my mind into the kitchen, baking with my mother and sister and I just became hungry. A phrase like “Butter rolls the herb,” though it makes no practical sense, adds a sense of home to the theme of the poem where butter and bread and various pastries are being made. “Dress for overcast” simply reminded me of the Pacific Northwest. Every line was accurate as to what an average day here might turn out to be. The clouds moving by in the background definitely helped the ambience. These pieces, and others that I browsed, reminded me of a way of writing that is, just write whatever comes into your mind. I thoroughly enjoyed this assignment.

This week we were assigned to examine 2-3 versions of Taroko Gorge originally created by Nick Monfort. This piece of electronic literature has been modified by many authors and is a continuous, ever changing work. The original author, Nick Monfort developed this piece using the programming language Python which is now available in JavaScript. This programming language creates a dynamic, digital space of interactivity. It was interesting to experience several different versions and to see how the authors remixed the work. Upon inspecting the source codes, I discovered that each author used Monfort’s original code, but input their own set of words into a word bank that are programmed to randomize while viewing the page. This creates a new version of the poem each time you open a new browser so you never experience the same version twice. One of the contributing authors, Scott Rettberg, described Monfort’s original poem as a “classic and elegant nature poem” that he chose to remix entirely. Rettberg titled his remix, Tokyo Garage which I think suits it well. He describes his version as modern and urban which is a complete contrast from Monfort’s. One of the other versions that I found quite entertaining was the version written by Talan Memmott titled Toy Garbage. The phrases that were generated were quite amusing. Their use of words like Easy-Bake Oven, Furby, and Cabbage Patch Kid instantly took me back to my ever so glamorous childhood of the early Nineties. As a reader, the combinatory nature of the writing created this exciting experience. It was interesting to read each newly generated phrase as it appeared on the screen and try to sort out or piece together the meaning and author’s intent.

Entry #1

On this weeks entry I have encountered very interesting work named “Taroko Gorge” made by Nick Montfort and, with the help of such software like JavaScript, CSS and HTML, he was able to put together a very intriguing poem that displays keywords. I found this piece of work to be very interesting because other writers where able to pick up the same type of story-telling and make it their own just by changing a few words.

Another variation of this type of poem I read was “Taroko Gary” by Leonardo Flores. It was structured just like Montfort’s Taroko Gorge but the background really spoke to me. I felt like I was being taken on a quest to just observe the rainforest and the mountains. It reminded me of when I was a kid, going camping, and I would just love to go out and explore the landscape with phrases such as

“Rain coasting the creek.”

“Creek Stand.”

The technology behind this is really fascinating because the format of making poems like this one and “Taroko Gorge” is it looks like you put different variations of words in a div and you can see that the words get randomized to try and make very compelling poems and can really make you think about what sort of content that you can produce by knowing this sort of language.

Sources:

https://nickm.com/taroko_gorge/

http://academic.uprm.edu/flores/TarokoGary.html

Nick Monfort’s poem, Taroko Gorge is a reproductive poem about the Taroko Gorge National Park. The words scroll down infinitely, originating from a simple nature poem. On the surface, it is a countrified description of boundless landscapes in a variety of variations and length, yet confined like a river’s gorge by its short sentences.

The poem’s simplicity is reflected in its JavaScript code that is less than one thousand words. Each line of the poem that is generated from a small collection of adjectives. Another thing I noticed when researching this poem is that Nick Montfort allows the modification of his poetry generator by users or readers, provided the users give an original copyright notification.

Scott Rettberg’s Electronic Literature reflects on new forms and types of writing that manipulate the abilities of computers and networks such as works that would not be possible without the modern digital framework. Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg is a vital book for students and researchers studying literary concepts.

Rettberg puts the most significant categories of E-literature in a cultural, technological, and historical context. Some of the categories in this book talk about digital, hypertext, and interactive fiction. Rettberg argues that E-literature needs to be read through the view of the specifics of the technology used to produce the work. This book offers a fundamental introduction to a vast field that both reacts to innovative literature and traditions of art that generate various new forms of stories and poetry that are specific to the modern era.

Hello World!

Hello.

Hello everyone, my name is Jarid and this is my test post!

My name is Ian Farnham and I am a DTC major. My superpower involves Illustrator, premiere, and after effects. My interest is film and cinematography. I have worked on twine before and enjoyed it and would like to learn more about twine and find out how to use more of it.

Hello, is it me you’re looking for?

This is the first Post