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Reading
Digital Literature: American-German
Conference Brown
University |
October
4 - 7, 2007 | Roberto_Simanowski
/at/ Brown [.] edu Work Lecture
by Comment
by
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.
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.
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 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! 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.
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.
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
is a "Generator of texts" containing
various programs each making use of
chance elements and
permutation.
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