jill/txt

The Child, by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet raises all sorts of interesting questions about representation, narration and the relationship between words and images - every image in the piece actually consists of letters or words.

You could definitely call The Child electronic literature, and it certainly has literary aspects. It’s a narrative, but the narrative is very simplistic and that’s really not where the interest lies - it’s the fascination of the word-images and the visual kinetics and the music that are satisfying in this video. Interestingly it was made “for the french dj Alex Gopher”, and yes, it does evoke that trance-like feeling of being in an emotion or inside of music.

Ars Virtua, an online-only artists’s collective with a gallery space in Second Life, recently advertised an artist in residency for World of Warcraft. They just announced that they’ve selected two artists: Tom Betts and Alison Mealey. There’ll be a “meet-and-greet” where we can all go say hi to the artists within a few weeks, apparently. And yes, there’ll likely be more residencies in WoW for artists in future. Oh, and Ars Virtua also has an artists’ guild on WoW - on a US server. Such a pity servers aren’t truly international.

It’ll be interesting to see what projects Tom Betts and Alison Mealey come up with!

Bergens Tidende has a good article about Linn’s machinima evening last Thursday, and Linn herself has blogged very useful rundowns of the program (part 1 and 2) and even two pieces that there wasn’t time for. The evening (and these blog posts) serve as excellent introductions to machinima, giving examples of typical genres and tendencies, neatly and entertainingly organised. A great resource for someone interested in learning about the genre or maybe in discussing machinima in class.

Bembo’s Zoo is an animated alphabet book (or, uh, website) where each letter spells the name of an animal - until the letters drift off and become the animal! Oh, and it’s all done in the font Bembo. I adore it and can’t wait to look at it with a child! The screenshot I grabbed is of the octopus. As you can see. (via The Happiness Project)

[heavily edited after posting]
One of the pieces of unstable art in Stavanger this weekend is Finnish artist’s Laura Beloff’s The Fruit Fly Farm, which is a second stage of a project she started with The Head. The Head is a piece of wearable art - sort of like a see-through sphere with a shoulder strap - that has a mobile phone inside that takes a photo and records a bit of sound when someone texts it (the phone number is +47 93351116) and sends the photo and sound back as an MMS, as well asuploading the photo to Flickr.

The Fruit Fly Farm adds in life, in the form of a fruit fly colony that lives inside the sphere, along with enough rotting fruit to last them a week. The camera in this sphere takes photos from the point of view of the flies, I think, and can be SMSed at +47 93351116. You can see the most recent photos on her website. When you wear the farm, you have what the artist calls “-a wearable fly farm, a personal “pet”, with public access-”

When I was tiny, or perhaps before I was born, in that mythical past of which you hear your parents lived before you remember, my mum bred fruit flies, or drosophila as she taught us to call them, for genetic research. So my family had a special relationship to drosophila, and my sister and I knew all about how fast they breed, and how convenient they are for experiments about chromosones, mutations and inheritance. We never kept them as pets, though, at least, not deliberately.

Per Platou introduced me to Laura Beloff, and so I’ve had a glimpse of the Farm. She had to sew it a “dress” to protect it from the cold. A fruit fly farm as a personal, self-documenting pet. It’s a hilarious. I’m looking forward to getting a closer look at it.

Nokia’s LifeBlog creates a chronologically organised blog from all the SMSes, emails, videos and photos that have passed through your phone - Waymarkr takes it a step further by continuously taking photos. Install the free, beta software on one of many Nokia phones, hang the phone round your neck, and check your auto-blog later to see what your life is really like. Or just read more about it at We Make Money Not Art.

Alter Ego is a fascinating project that was just presented at DAC2005 - you sit down at a mirror, and see a computer model of a face. A hidden webcam captures your face and maps it onto the model so that after a few seconds while the computer considers your face, an avatar that looks like your mirror image - but not quite. The avatar in the mirror will then mimic your expressions, showing a mirror image that is you yet not you. Mostly, the avatar will mimic you exactly - but sometimes it will react differently. I would love to play with this!

The source code of the early 3d first-person shooter Quake has been released. There’s already at least one art project (QQQ) that subverts the game aesthetics, Jeremy Douglass writes (Fortunately for people like me who want a quick shot, there are movie files available from QQQ, so you don’t have to actually play it), and he wonders further what a textual version of Quake might be like:

TextQuake would be an environment for 3d reading rather than combat, using the large virtual architectures to create narrative “gardens of forking paths” which go beyond the Pac-Man grid of CYOA narratives and into a kind of writing that would function like a 3d version of the Minotaur maze from Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel “House of Leaves.”

I don’t know that TextQuake would necessarily make a very good platform for electronic literature, but it would certainly make an interesting conceptual exercise to think about what kind of a work TextQuake might be. Would you tell a story? Stories? Poems? I think I’d go for something akin to Kafka’s Trial.

An interesting exhibition format: British artist Katie Lips is exhibiting 160 SMS messages that have meant a lot to her in the last 18 months. Thing is, she’s exhibiting them on your ipod - the idea is that you download em and pop them into your notes on the iPod, which lets you browse them while on the bus or wherever. I like the idea. And of course right now I can’t find my ipod (aargh, I had it the other day) so I’m left wondering whether to wait (and most likely forget to install it) or to just read the messages as text on my computer?

I found this while searching for a short narrative project I thought I remembered being called 160 (which of course is the maximum number of characters in a single SMS) after noticing this onesixty project (via Writer Response Theory) that’s not what I remembered. I’ll definitely be returning to the site where Lips’ project is exhibited: S19.Afflatus is devoted to art for mobile devices, and has a lot of different projects you can download for your mobile phone, Pocket PC, ipod, Palm and so on. I’ll be exploring that later.

One of the things I really want to do with this blog is write about networked and digital art and literature. I do far too little of that. I don’t attend the really interesting things that happen in Bergen because I’m tired or can’t find a babysitter or because I’m away, and I don’t take the time to experience art and literature on the web that I want to because, well, I don’t know why. Other things are more pressing. It sucks.

I’m not a specialist in electronic music, but I still wanted to write about the installation in the greenhouse in Muséhagen last week: Farteins hage, Fartein’s Garden, which is part of a larger Fartein Valen project at the Bergen Festival this year. I walk past their every week, and since I discovered a few years ago that the greenhouse is actually open to the public (and always entirely empty of people) I’ve taken to walking through it every now and then. The warmth is magical in the cold Bergen winter, and there are plants there that I remember from my grandfather’s garden in Perth and from the gardens where my sister used to live in Malaysia. Yet I found every possible excuse not to visit the sound installation in the greenhouse. My camera battery was flat and I wanted to wait until I could take a photo, maybe some video. I would hurry to work now, get stuff done and visit the exhibition on the way home. Only by then I had left work too late and only barely had time to get to my daughter’s school before closing time, let alone visit a sound installation. Repeat. It is astounding how easy it is to prioritise stress ahead of space, time, meaning, writing, thinking.

Fartein Valen is one of Norway’s great composers. I knew far too little about him, though his name is so strange it’s completely familiar. I hadn’t realised that he also loved the greenhouse in Muséhagen. He spent a few childhood years in Madagaskar, and so, I assume, missed the warmth as I miss the open spaces of Australia. He’s remembered for having brought contemporary music to Norway, and is particularly noted for his atonal, polyphonic compositions.

The installation in the greenhouse is by Nils Henrik Asheim, one of our contemporary composors who was born a few years after Valen died. You can play the video to get an inkling of the music, but the sound quality is terrible and sadly my battery died before the most interesting part of the soundscape began. In addition to the haunting sounds you can hear in the video, Asheim has mixed recordings of Valen’s voice with the soft voice of a Madagaskan woman. I’ve lost the sheet of paper explaining it, but I think the poster said that the woman’s voice resembled that of his Madagaskan nurse. The voices mixed together sounded like a song, neither male nor female, and speaking no language or all languages. The speakers were placed on the windows of the old greenhouse (small white plastic crosses that spread vibrations through the glass) so it was almost as though the greenhouse itself was speaking.

Before I entered the greenhouse I heard nothing but the sound of the Student Centre being demolished nearby, but after I left I could hear the quiet voices speaking from the empty glass house. I didn’t quite understand it, but I liked its mystery and the idea of memories, the very idea of tropical plants and humidity in a tiny glass building in Bergen.

They’re taking the installation down after tomorrow. I should have written about it before.

Look: NRK and PNEK will be running a series of up to 20 digital narratives, and are looking for ideas. Each project that’s selected for the project will receive NOK 10,000 and access to some production assistance. Read the advertisement and contact Per Platou, who’s the project coordinator. I’m on the reference group for the project, which is going to be a lot of fun! Oh, we’re primarily looking for Norwegian stories - anything that is intended for the web might work. Send Per ten lines or so about your idea and he’ll get back to you.

This appeals to the leave-my-mark part of me: scan your skin and send this project the jpg. A square of your skin will become part of a database of human skin possibilities. This may be ironic or politically incorrect, or maybe just art, I’m not sure. (Is it?)

Which part of your skin would you scan?

(Will I?)

Did you look at Justin Hall’s blog lately? Justin’s been publishing his life online for eleven years, with an honesty (well, an apparent honesty, I don’t know him apart from his website so can’t verify anything, but it’s certainly truthful in the way that literature is truthful) and sustainability that’s awesome.

Right now his usual site has been replaced by a ten minute video, where he cries into the camera asking how to combine his deep need to make media, write, publish, share with his need to have meaningful relationships and love. If the front page of his site is different when you go to look, here’s a direct link to the video.

Blogging, writing his life online, feeds some of the same needs as religion, Justin says:

What if a deeply connective personal activity you do that’s like religion that you practice with yourself, that’s a dialogue with the divine turns out to drive people away from you?

“There’s always someone there.” But it’s not working. “Because I can’t write about people because they don’t want to be there and I have nothing to write about (..) and I publish my life on the fucking internet and it doesn’t make people want to be with me, it makes people not trust me and I don’t know what the fuck to do about it.”

It is a form of art, this media-making so many of us have come to feel is part of life. I don’t want Justin the real person to be in pain, of course not, but a stop and a video like this is a strong narrative move and a cautionary note as well.

I’ve started reading Viviane Serfaty’s The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs, which is a literary rather than an ethnographical or quantitative approach to diaries online. She notes the twofold nature of the screen, which is both a veil and a mirror:

The literal function of a screen is precisely to conceal and as a result of this perception, all kinds of highly controversial discourses are freely displayed on the Net. The screen seemingly offers a protection against the gaze of others, enabling each diary writer to disclose intimate thoughts and deeds, thus attempting to achieve transparency and braking the taboo of opacity regulating social relationships. (13)

Serfaty quotes Jean Starobinski, whom in 1971, writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote what could as well be a description of bloggers and readers: “Making oneself invisible means one no longer is a mere transparency anyone can see thought, but that one has turned into a gaze no taboo can stop.” (Starobinski 1971: 302)

Look at Justin’s gaze, fixing the camera, fixing you, fixing himself. In the final moments, after the sobbing yet self-aware phonecall with a friend, right at the end of the video he’s wiped away the tears and whispers into the camera:

I’m alone because of what I did. And I’m going to be alone because of what I’m doing. Can you take that? How does that sound? [small smile] How does that sound? Hi? Hi, hi, hi…be alone. [smile] Do you like this? This is company. This is relating. This is relating. You’re crazy.

You’re crazy. Is he talking to himself, or to you? To the mirror, or through the veil?

“Without the prohibition of intimate disclosure, there would be no transgression. The prohibition therefore is constitutive of the meaning of self-revelation on the Internet.” (Serfaty 2004: 13-14)

Donna Leishman is now Dr Leishman! Her PhD thesis was practice-based, consisting of a visual narrative, The Possession of Christian Shaw, which is discussed and considered in terms of theory, practice, and feedback from a number of “expert readers”, of which I was honoured to be one. The thesis is now up, as are the responses from us “experts”, giving rather an interesting collection of different more or less formal readings of a new media work. Here’s mine.

At the Digital Play exhibition, a few computers displayed “new narratives” and animations. One of the ones I liked best was Julia 1926, an “interactive” documentary about a woman with Alzheimers by Johannes Weymann, who has a website at Heltersk3lter. I put quotation marks around interactive, because when I returned home and played with the piece some more, it seems to be an entirely linear animation which you simply have to click in order to make the next bit play out.

At several points the interface looks as though you’re going to get a choice - for instance when you get through the first opening sequence, and are presented with what looks like a menu of aspects of Julia’s life - places, people and times. Each title has four items listed below, so beneath “people”, you see children, family, friends and enemies. Clicking on any of these takes you to a stylised and flickering black and white image of a woman sitting on a sofa, with a short text (”times, people, places change”) and an list of her features, like on an ID-card. When you click, the words begin to fall apart, degenerating into noise, dates shifting into the impossible (”Date of birth: 33.03.26″) and through into nonsense. This imagery of deteriorating memory as akin to the corruption of data on a computer works well, of course.

Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library does something similar but carries the metaphor further, including the reader’s actions in its working. Reagan Libraries is also a story of confused memories, and each node of the story is initially full of noise: the words are literally unstable, many of them random. But each time you return to a node, it becomes more stable, finally, after four readings of each node, being fairly comprehensible. The deterioration in Julia 1926, on the other hand, is more a charming visual effect that doesn’t add meaning.

I was disappointed when I realised that there was (as far as I can tell) no interactivity at all. That is, yes, I need to click to see the whole story, but when and where I click makes no difference whatsoever. Because there’s no way to go back without restarting, you don’t notice this for much of the piece, unless you reread it, but there are certain jarring moments. For instance, both Julia and her husbands’ lives are presented through two three paned window where each pane holds an image from a time in their lives - youth, maturity and loss or senescence. I started by clicking the youth pane, and sure enough, a short text describing Julia’s youth was displayed. Then I clicked the old age pane, and was given a text describing her maturity - the illusion of reader choice was broken. Even here the story is told completely linearly and the reader in fact has no choices.

There are many things I like about Julia 1926. The design is beautiful, and the images and the words often interplay very well. The combination of the facts and the bits of individuals’ lives are also effective, and the graphical disappearing of connections and the corruption of data also works well. There were some Germanisms in the language, and a proof-reader for the English would have been useful, although I should also point out that many of the short texts are well-written and evocative. It really irks me that this is billed as interactive, though. So much more could have been done. Probably scale is one reason it’s not truly interactive - the whole thing only takes 5-10 minutes from start to finish, and no doubt even that has taken a lot of time to create in such beautiful design.

Julia 1926 is not only exhibited as one of the few examples of new narrative at the Digital Play exhibition, it has also won several prizes and medals, though these are mostly from design competitions rather than new media sites, and certainly the design is good. It’s a pity, though, that more innovative new narratives weren’t also shown at the Digital Play exhibition.