Category: Uncategorized

One of the new divergent streams that captured my interest are locative projects, specifically Augmented Reality. In my gaming experiences, there has always been a constant reminder that my world is separated from the setting within the game, and I find it incredibly fascinating that AR can make this difference almost invisible. Though it is still in its earlier stages, I believe that it has the potential to become very immersive as the technology improves.  

“Electronic Literature authors have begun to explore how locative technologies can enable us to layer narrative and poetic experiences on the world around us.” (Rettberg 2019) 

As Rettberg says in the above quote, there are many literary possibilities within virtual and augmented worlds, possibilities that are presently being explored. The prospect of telling stories in unique and immersive ways is always exciting, and I look forward to seeing them discovered and implemented. As Rettberg pointed out, we will be reframing environments we are familiar with and reimagining them, reigniting out interest in what we may otherwise find to be commonplace. This sort of storytelling will be more engaging than most other modes because it involves—even relies on—the interactors ability to actively navigate a physical space and possibly experiment with it.  

In the case of Augmented Reality, the narrative would need to build itself around the player, and it will be interesting to see how creators choose to manifest this idea. Perhaps the story unfolds as the player approaches certain landmarks, or maybe s/he must actively pursue the characters as the narrative is being told? Is the story shared solely through audio rather than animations, so that the viewer may focus more on their actual environment? Is the player a key character in the game, or merely an observer? Can they influence the direction the story takes by physically choosing which direction to go? Will the narrative be shown through an iPhone, tablet, glasses, or some other device? Can the player virtually perform actions, such as digging or moving objects? There are many literary possibilities within virtual and augmented worlds to explore, and I am excited to see where these possibilities take us with storytelling.  

Sources: Scott Rettberg Electronic Literature

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

What knows you better than your own phone? You type your words into it for hours an hours. It listens, and it learns.

Here’s a poem constructed from mostly predictive text generation on my Galaxy phone, using mostly text from messages between me and my girlfriend. I provided the first word or so of a sentence and let the suggested text fill in the rest. I formatted the text where they made the most sense, arranged them in a roughly poetic structure, and edited slightly for grammar.

—————————————————————————

The Same Thing

I was working in Spanish,
And you took the moon.
Never went back
To the same time,
I just wanted to let you know
That the same thing
Would have been
A big part of the reason.

Nowhere is the same
As a result of their consensus
With the same thing.
Whatever you want to talk about,
But it provided
A good starting point.
I’m sorry I was going to be in the area,
Or did you want to go?

Where do we go in a while,
To be the one?
What time is flying,
In a bit of a cough?
Not even if
You want to be able
To tell me
When you get back.

However we talk to them,
I just need a ride.
From here…
To fall asleep,
But it provided
A good plan.
The same thing
Would be good.

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.

Everything dies… even webpages.

When you think about it, they’re in a state of constant life support, existing only because we continue to maintain them. The landscape of the digital world is ephemeral, in flux. Yet in the back of our mind we take it for granted that a website will still be there, still give us the same experience it did before, the same experience it will give everyone else.

The normally passive act of viewing a webpage is undermined in this piece. A webpage, normally static aside from the periodic update or patches made, is like an artifact in a museum, locked in a glass case, only able to be touch by the chosen few deemed worthy to handle it. As a viewer of a website, you’re on a guided tour. You never see behind the scenes, you only see what they want you to see, and it stays an unchanging message, the same one-size-fits all message that every other viewer receives.

All that changes in degenerative. The owner of the website has given up control of curating their own set and left it to the whims of its programming (if programming can be said to be possessed of whims at at all, the notion seems rather anthropomorphic). Each view of the page leaves its mark, causing the text to degrade.

As the initial text says, “seeing is not an innocent action,” and “this page will not be the same after you visit it,” the creator calls us to be accountable for our actions, even if the action is only viewing. It is a reminder that our actions always have consequences and that we can never be non-participatory viewers, because the internet changes because of our actions… it’s just normally more subtle about it.

Here, the author refers to the programmed degeneration as a disease, but isn’t it reminiscent of the same entropy that causes everything to unravel? After all, the process of oxidization, the very breath we take, leads to our own degeneration. Web pages may not have to deal with erosion or free radicals, but entropy eventually erodes everything. Just look at GeoCities. Once again, degenerative is just less subtle, because it wants to make you aware, while everything else tries to hide it.

This week, I watched I Love Alaska by Submarine Channel. It is a documentation of search queries by an unknown user (which were unintentionally leaked by AOL), and then put together to create a narrative. The online network is made visible within the presentation through these search queries, whose familiar broken appearance are common in most online platforms. This user’s search history was unique in that the queries were long and specific, revealing to us a clearer picture of what was going on in their life. Indeed, Rettberg noted that 

“[Network Writing] may interrogate the nature and materiality of the network itself” (Rettberg 2019, p.152) 

This was especially true with I Love Alaska: though it was represented as a video, it felt like a commentary about the nature of search history. The choice to tell a narrative was eye-opening, as it caused me to reflect on my own search queries and wonder how I could create a story from them. It made me realize how much can be revealed about someone just through their search history, and how it can sometimes be a serious breach of privacy if recorded and used by someone else (even if only to sell products.)  

In addition to raising points about search queries, this work has literary value as an unusual yet effective way to tell a story. The creator didn’t have to invent anything at all—they simply stitched pieces of reality together and left it up to the readers to interpret it. In this way, the narrative was a mystery, while also being a romance and a drama—all while drawing on a true story. Personally, I found I Love Alaska to be emotionally engaging because it was so dramatic. Most everything that happened to this user (as far as I could tell) seemed like it came right out of a movie, and I was constantly reminding myself that it was based on real events. It reminded me of Bigelow’s work How to Rob a Bank, which was also told through search queries (though the narrative was much clearer since it was an imaginary story.)  

Rettberg, Scott. Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019.