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Description: Once the reader enters the Case Collection he learns that "a flood threatened to destroy everything." Two diaries, an illustrated children's book, a journalist's sound recording and other artifacts from a naturalist's secret collection could be saved. The reader is welcome to explore the narrative space of the project that provides a database of the 'saved' narrative objects such as films, photographs, letters, maps and diaries that accompany over 600 writings visually. These digital narrative objects can be browsed, they are from a fictional 1910 natural history expedition and relate to the life and trial of Sir Francis Case. The diaries, for instance, serve as minute details of an expedition to "a lodge on a hill" and the reader learns: "I have a conversation with the missionary, Amelie. She tells me that we are the Company's guest and best stay on good terms with their officials. I have developed a different view of matters during the course of my travels, but I dare not to tell her." With its graphical representations as well as the textual and literary browsing structure the Digital Case Collection bears a 'playable media' character using game elements to achieve interaction. It allows the reader to have exploratory trips one can return to and follow up on. Gaming conventions are used against the grain to mediate on the nature of digital artifacts and their relationship to time and space. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: metatextual, playable media, graphics, historical
Creator: Tal Halpern
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: Urs Schreiber’s Java-based German Internet opus Das Epos der Maschine ("Machine Epic") epitomizes the control of the "machine" over its user both practically and (meta-) theoretically. As the title suggests, the text regards itself as a poem of epic dimensions, i.e. poetic narrative that acts as a symbol of an entire national or, as in the case of the Internet, virtual paradigm. In other words, Schreiber positions his work in the tradition of the great ethnic and religious epics (e.g. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Nibelungenlied and Milton’s Paradise Lost). By the same token, it follows in the tradition of concrete poetry, which critically and playfully reflects on language itself as well as its inextricable determination by the medium in which it appears. The Epos is a joint venture. Text and programming were done by Urs Schreiber, the graphics by Kai Jelinek and Cesare Wosko, the photographs by Claudia König, and the sound by Die with Dignity. (...) Read the entire elit work article by Astrid Ensslin at: http://directory.eliterature.org/node/314
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Subject: poetry, fiction, cybertext, sound, epic, machine control, multimodal, narrative
Creator: Urs Schreiber
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: "We wanted love" recites a voice that narrates a teenager's favorite pastime in Wisconsin, racing up and down the Main Street drag looking to make connections, wanting love. "Cruising" is a flash based poem with cinematic elements marked by a flow of images accompained by the poem text. The filmic flow suggests sights glimpsed from a train's window. A hidden code integrated into the piece lets the user control the speed, the direction, and the scale with the cursor, turning the reader into just another cruiser. The viewer moves between reading text and experiencing the flow of images but cannot exactly have both at the same time. Entry drafted by: Patricia Tomaszek
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Subject: flash, women authors, collaboration, audio, visual poetry or narrative, poetry, place, cinematic
Creator: Ingrid Ankerson (words and design); Megan Sapnar (design)
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: Jhave Johnston’s “human-mind-machine” is comprised of three chief components. The most obvious of these are the animated, three-dimensional images of the words in the poems’ title: “human,” “mind,” and “machine” (rendered using Autodesk’s Mudbox software). These three terms, which serve as the piece’s thematic backdrop, hover in the center of the screen, moving, morphing, and mutating to the palpitating, ambient loops that serve as the second, but perhaps most innovative, component of Johnston’s piece. Below the three-dimensional images, lines of text appear, in a variety of fonts, and change in synchronization with the cardial thrumming of Johnston’s soundtrack. In terms of its content, “human-mind-machine” explores consciousness and its competing characterizations as organic and mechanical, patterned and random, individual and collective. Especially powerful is its depiction of life in an apartment building, where the smell of cooking onions by an unseen neighbor imposes upon the speaker’s senses, pointing to a visceral intimacy outside of language. The speaker explains, “We know each other well. breathing and farting in the same tight pool. Sharing the vectors of savage necessity.” The poet captures the subjective character of daily life while rendering this primal experience with a twinge of determinism. The irony, of course, rests in the underlying programming feat of Johnston’s Sound Seeker application, which he describes as an “online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator.” The result is a delightfully chaotic instance of individual expression grafted to a patterned, structured format. Entry drafted by: Davin Heckman
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Subject: Flash, animation, visual poetry, 3D, sound seeker
Creator: William David (Jhave) Johnston
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
Description: Rob Swigart's "About Time" is a web-based digital fiction that juxtaposes two temporally remote narrative strands. One involves an aboriginal named Mouth with a penchant for exploration and discovery; the other tells of Crockford ("Cro") de Granville, a voracious business mogul who heads the Institute for Cognitive Emergence. Mouth's present is 40,000 years before de Granville's, which is described as the "present day" but appears much more like a mildly dystopic near-future, where a pretentious and egotistical de Granville "skinny-casts" his clients to secure their popular and financial support. Mouth likewise spends his time trying to convince his dull cousin, Tuber, of a world much larger and more complex than their current way of life would allow them to grasp. Thus both Mouth and de Granville conspicuously crave knowledge, but for vastly different ends. Using Flash animation software, "About Time" incorporates both sound and images, but relies on the primacy of the text for its dramatic and aesthetic effect. Composer and performer Allen Strange is credited with the "sound design," which includes introductory music for the text as a whole, musical effects for many of the episodes, and voice-over audio for some of the interactive media elements. The subtitle of the work, "A Digital Interactive Hypertext Fiction, Two Braided Parallel Paths, A Double Helix," is a fairly accurate comment on the structural composition of the text. The navigation is organized in two ways. Each page contains a sidebar menu of links to individual narrative scenes or episodes. In addition, the body text of each episode is populated with a number of links. These links will either open other textual episodes (color-coded by blue text) or, in the de Granville strand, open small windows containing media elements that are typically images with voice-over audio (color-coded red). The result is a reading environment that accommodates a linear, hierarchical reading - from the top of each menu to the bottom - as well as the ability to traverse the lateral linkages. A further navigational element joins the two "parallel" narrative paths, effectively braiding the text into its "double helix" composition: a dynamic image sits at the foot of each sidebar menu. For "Mouth's Journey" it is a futuristic-looking glass sphere in rotation; for "The de Granville Files," it is a rather austere skin of water that ripples in perfect red spheres with the perpetual disturbance of a single droplet, against what could also be a background of screen static. This is the portal between the Mouth's world and that of Cro de Granville, and for the reader a way to not simply imagine two disparate realms but, in effect, experience them in striking and eerie proximity. This is a work about two "times" that are, on the surface, far removed, but nevertheless continually bumping up against one another. The result is a telling commentary on human nature and its "progress" through the ages refracted through the juxtaposition of the two anchoring characters, along with a commentary on a topic toward which all narratives tend - the nature of time itself. Entry drafted by: David Ciccoricco
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Subject: Flash, Animation/Kinetic, fiction, hypermedia, animation, network forms, narrative
Creator: Rob Swigart
Collector: Patricia Tomaszek
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