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Works discussed
S.T.A.L.K.E.R
(2007) (see synopsis by
Fotis
Jannidis) Yes, the same
nuclear plant that exploded in 1986 and, in
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s fiction, again in 1989, creating a
radioactive hotspot brimming with mutants, heavily
armed rival factions, and all sorts of weird,
paranormal activity. Your task: Figure out who you
are and what's going on at the core of the zone.
At its heart,
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a first-person survival game that
blends action with role-playing. This isn't a
linear game, like Half-Life or Call of Duty, where
you basically are restricted to a straight path and
are taken for a tightly controlled and scripted
ride. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s huge environments and
open-ended gameplay make it more like a
role-playing game, as you can go where you want and
do what you want if you're willing to live with the
consequences. However, you don't have to worry
about traditional role-playing attributes such as
strength or intelligence, or accumulating skills
and abilities. Instead, all you have to worry about
is your skill with a rifle and scavenging enough
weapons, ammunition, and med kits from fallen
enemies to keep going. The game's goal is
to create a virtual world with an ecology all its
own and then place you in the middle of it. That's
something that's rarely been attempted,
particularly in a first-person game. However, to
the credit of THQ and Ukrainian developer GSC Game
World, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is an impressive
accomplishment. This first-person survival game is
at times amazing and engrossing and on par with
such classics as Deus Ex and System
Shock.
Slippingglimpse
(200?) (see synopsis by
N.
Katherine Hayles)
Listening
Post
(2000-01) (see synopsis by
Rita
Raley) Listening Post is
an art installation that culls text fragments in
real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet
chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public
forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice
synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a
suspended grid of more than two hundred small
electronic screens. Listening Post cycles through a
series of six movements, each a different
arrangement of visual, aural, and musical elements,
each with its own data processing logic.
Dissociating the communication from its
conventional on-screen presence, Listening Post is
a visual and sonic response to the content,
magnitude, and immediacy of virtual
communication.
Facade
(2005) (see synopsis by
Jörgen
Schäfer) Façade is an
artificial intelligence-based art/research
experiment in electronic narrative – an
attempt to move beyond traditional branching or
hyper-linked narrative to create a fully-realized,
one-act interactive drama. The player, using her
own name and gender, plays the character of a
longtime friend of Grace and Trip, an attractive
and materially successful couple in their early
thirties. During an evening get-together at their
apartment that quickly turns ugly, the player
becomes entangled in the high-conflict dissolution
of Grace and Trip’s marriage. No one is safe
as the accusations fly, sides are taken and
irreversible decisions are forced to be made. By
the end of this intense one-act play the player
will have changed the course of Grace and
Trip’s lives – motivating the player to
re-play the drama to find out how your interaction
could make things turn out differently the next
time. This work is unlike
hypertext narrative or interactive fiction to date
in that the computer characters actively perform
the story without waiting for you to click on a
link or enter a command. Interaction is seamless as
you converse in natural language and move and
gesture freely within the first-person 3D world of
Grace and Trip’s apartment. AI controls Grace
and Trip’s personality and behavior, including
emotive facial expressions, spoken voice and
full-body animation. Furthermore, the AI
intelligently chooses the next story
“beat” based on your moment-by-moment
interaction, what story beats have happened so far,
and the need to satisfy an overall dramatic arc. An
innovative text parser allows the system to avoid
the “I don’t understand” response
all too common in text-adventure interactive
fiction. Somewhere between a
video game and a drama, Façade takes
advantage of voice acting and a 3-D environment, as
well as natural language processing and other
advanced artificial intelligence routines to
provide a robust interactive fiction
experience.
Text
Rain
(1999) (see synopsis by
Francisco
Ricardo) Text Rain is a
playful interactive installation that blurs the
boundary between the familiar and the magical.
Participants in the Text Rain installation use the
familiar instrument of their bodies, to do what
seems magical - to lift and play with falling
letters that do not really exist. In the Text Rain
installation participants stand or move in front of
a large projection screen. On the screen they see a
mirrored video projection of themselves in black
and white, combined with a color animation of
falling text. Like rain or snow, the text appears
to land on participants' heads and arms. The text
responds to the participants' motions and can be
caught, lifted, and then let fall again. The
falling text will land on anything darker than a
certain threshold, and "fall" whenever that
obstacle is removed.
Bust
Down the
Doors!
(2000) and The
Art of Sleep
(2006) Bust Down the
Doors! tells the tale of a midnight raid on a
home by unidentified armed aggressors: "They bust
open the door while you sleep, rush into your home,
enter your bedroom, drag you out of bed, push you
in your underwear out into the street..." The point
of view begins in the second person, then shifts to
first and third person, offering various
perspectives on the narrative. In 2004, Young-Hae
Chang Heavy Industries produced Bust Down the
Doors Again! Gates of Hell-Victoria Version, a
remix in which the original text appears in red,
superimposed over a photograph of their work as it
was displayed on nine Internet refrigerators for an
exhibition in the Rodin Gallery at the Samsung
Museum of Art in Seoul. The artists "thought that
an Internet refrigerator would be an unusual way of
presenting Net Art. Advertisers would have us
believe that the Internet refrigerator puts the
housewife at the cutting-edge of modern, hi-tech
life. We titled our piece THE GATES OF HELL
because, on the contrary, we feel that their
refrigerator helps keep women in the
kitchen." Most New Media art
employs interactivity to engage us as participants
in the work. Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
eschews interaction, but the result is hardly a
passive experience. By accelerating the pace at
which the text appears to a rate just within the
threshold of human cognition, the artists coax us
into a state of rapt concentration. Bust Down
the Doors! is remarkable for its ability to
produce a strong, visceral impact with limited
means. Employing their
usual mix of animated black and white typography,
jazzy music and humour, The Art of Sleep explores
the international contemporary art market from the
artists' perspective.
edinburgh/demon
(2007) (see synopsis by
Karin
Wenz) The
project can best be described as a collage which is
divided into 79 poetic forms from interactive text,
text-image generators to short music videos.
Thereby the artists did not create a simple
multimedia collage but an intermedial whole. The
text entries are in German.
Love
Letter
Generator
(1952) (see synopsis by
Peter
Gendolla) As
early as 1952, Christopher Strachey invented a
program he named Love Letter Generator, which
automatically produced love letters on the basis of
predefined words and patterns. The results reads
like this: LOVE
DEAR MY
AMBITION LUSTS FOR YOUR ARDENT ARDOUR. YOU ARE MY
SEDUCTIVE ENCHANTMENT. MY PASSION THIRSTS FOR YOUR
INFATUATION. MY DARLING ENTHUSIASM CARES FOR YOUR
AFFECTION. YOU ARE MY BEAUTIFUL WISH. YOURS
SEDUCTIVELY
M. U. C
Syntext
(1992-95) Syntext is a
"Generator of texts" containing various programs
each making use of chance elements and
permutation.
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