Skip Navigation

Archive-It

Facebook iconTwitter iconWordpress icon

Electronic Literature: Individual Works

Collected by: Electronic Literature Organization

Archived since: Aug, 2007

Description:

This collection consists of sites that include works of electronic literature: works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. This collection includes individual works of electronic literature and collections of works by a single author, as opposed to collections of works by multiple authors.

Subject:   Arts & Humanities individual works electronic literature individual authors

Page 1 of 1 (1 Total Results)

Title: overboard

URL: http://homepage.mac.com/shadoof/net/in/overboardEng.html

Description: overboard is an algorithmically animated work that combines borrowed text with graphic elements and sounds. The text is an adaptation of William Bradford’s account from Of Plymouth Plantation1620-1647 of an incident during the Mayflower crossing. It is a story of a man who falls overboard during a storm but catches hold of a rope and re-surfaces. The author’s adapted text is put through a process of algorithmically steered, time-based changes in which letters appear, disappear, and re-appear. These textual changes show how minute letter substitutions destabilize meaning, while simultaneously evoking other temporary and fluctuating meanings. The sounds are generated in a similar way as the words and help to create an ambient atmosphere. In overboard, the text visually reenacts the story while undermining the words’ lexical relationship until the original letters are restored and the story surfaces again. The ever-changing, ambient text functions as a visual rendering of its own linguistic message: its illegibility is readable as a symbol for the sinking man. The author explains his interest in algorithmically generated processes of textual changes as an intention “to interrogate certain relationships between the granular or atomic structures of alphabetically transcribed language and the critically or interpretatively discoverable rhetorical and aesthetic effects of literature.” (http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2004/2-Cayley.htm) (Parts of this text were modified from "Reading Digital Arts. In-Depth-Analysis and Historic Contextualization" by Roberto Simanowski.) Entry drafted by: Maria Engberg

Loading Wayback Capture Info...

Loading video data...

Subject:   kinetic text appropriated texts quicktime audio ambient time-based constraint-based translation algorithm

Page 1 of 1 (1 Total Results)