E-litist

[e-litist]

J.R. Carpenter Essay

Exploring the Works of J.R. Carpenter

            J.R. Carpenter is a self-described “Canadian artist, writer and maker of maps, zines, books, poems, fiction, non-fiction and non-linear hypermedia narratives” (Carpenter, J.R. Carpenter || Bio). She started her foray into electronic literature in 1995 with an HTML project titled Fishes and Flying Things. Since this first work, Carpenter expanded her portfolio of electronic works to include not only HTML works, but more dynamic elements like scripts and videos. Throughout these works however, one can find a unifying theme. Carpenter uses geographic, cartographic, and location-aware elements to contrast and emphasize the personal, emotional themes in her hypermedia narratives.

Starting with one of her early works, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls, we can see Carpenter exploring the forking paths of a non-linear narrative. It is an HTML and image-driven piece of electronic literature focusing on interpreting the female body as a landscape. In it, the female body is explored, metaphorically, using the language of geography and cartography. The interface is littered with maps and figures lifted from geology texts, civil engineering manuals, and other books  (Carpenter, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls | ELMCIP).

The reader is presented with a main menu of sorts where links to all the bits and pieces of this work are presented at once, then allowing the user to pick one and explore from there. This non-linearity allows a form of exploration influenced by the Choose Your Own Adventure books (Carpenter, Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls | ELMCIP). At the same time, the subject matter lends itself extremely well to this exploration: a personal narrative of a female exploring her body mingles well with the idea of landscapes and cartography, a more literal, real-world exploration. The metaphors used by Carpenter juxtapose intensely personal descriptions of a woman’s body with geographical descriptions bordering on sterile in tone. An example of this can be seen in the work’s “groin.html” page:

The sea led her tongue across me and wore me down in my holder and followed me home to the Valley, where the shoreline is long, and notably irregular; where the tide rushes into the Bay of Fundy like fire in the wake of an earthquake, like blood into the groin of a girl. (Carpenter, J.R. Carpenter || Mythologies and Landforms of Little Girls)

            Initially, this passage’s imagery strikes vivid imagery of tongues and such, but then the tone is swapped for something a lot more sterile – irregular shorelines. Subsequently, the reader is knocked back into intense metaphors of earthquakes and fires, finally letting us realize that Carpenter was discussing menstruation. The passage is then followed by a detailed image of a map with a red flourish symbolizing the blood. The textual metaphors, along with the imagery, show the blending of personal topics with dry, geographic themes.

Another of Carpenter’s notable works is Entre Ville, a significantly more recent work (2006). This electronic work is crafted in HTML along with JavaScript and features embedded video clips. The textual part of the piece consists of a narrative poem divided into eight sections, each telling a short event occurring in Carpenter’s back alley. These are told from the point of view of Carpenter herself. The reader is exposed to various aspects of the alleyway, apparently from her balcony, from the alleyway itself, and some from inside her apartment. She tells us of the curtain of underwear separating her balcony from that of her Greek neighbors and of the urgent sex being had upstairs (Carpenter, J.R. Carpenter || Entre Ville).

These snippets of stories and snapshots of people’s lives are complemented by a side panel of clickable doors and windows, each opening a new window when clicked. These reveal a collection of videos shot by Carpenter in her alleyway. Each video clip shows a different aspect of her alleyway, and gives the reader further insight into the poem’s sections. The tone of the clips is very dry and emotionless, mostly comprising of close-ups of mundane objects such as fences, mattresses, and curtains. This contrasts well with the poem, which is a very lively narrative.

For example, in the third section of the poem, Carpenter discusses how “each apartment's gallery / trains a curious / opera glass eye / upon its neighbouring loge”   (Carpenter, J.R. Carpenter || Entre Ville). This is followed by simple imagery of a gurgling sound by a pool, and then a more human look at a Frenchman playing his trumpet. So from this section, the portion that is placed in a video is the gurgling of the pool. Between the people staring into each other’s apartments, the Frenchman, and the gurgling pool, by far the least engaging is the one that makes it into the video clip.

This work is extremely personal in the sense that it really does give us a first-hand account of what it’s like to live in the author’s neighborhood. Not only does she textually describe the typical events of her back alleyway, but she gives us actual moving imagery to further the immersion. It is very important to note, however, the wide gap in tone between the two sets. The poem tells us the stories of people and how they interact, meanwhile the videos are mostly just quick views of inanimate objects and set-pieces described in the poem. This contrast between the two allows Carpenter to convey the idea of living in her Montreal neighborhood by providing the reader with both personal facets and a dry, muted look at mundane imagery.

Carpenter provides us with a certain duality of tone that is quite rare. She walks a fine line between personal narratives and purposefully sterile and mundane references to geography and descriptions of physical spaces. This style allows her to create poignant contrasts between different aspects of her story: accentuating the personal by placing it next to the ordinary. From the cartographic adventures and metaphors of the female body, to the somber alleyway seemingly contradicting itself by brimming with activity, Carpenter’s imagery creates a unique dynamic.

            Works Cited

 BIBLIOGRAPHY Carpenter, J.R. J.R. Carpenter || Entre Ville. 2006. 9 May 2012.

—. J.R. Carpenter || Bio. n.d. 8 May 2012.

—. J.R. CARPENTER || Introduction to Electronic Literature. n.d. 8 May 2012.

—. J.R. Carpenter || Mythologies and Landforms of Little Girls. 1996. 8 May 2012.

—. Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls | ELMCIP. n.d. 9 May 2012.

[e-litist]

Not yet complete at time of posting, should be done by tomorrow :)

[e-litist]

Some works for presentation on J.R. Carpenter

Fishes and Flying Things

Mythologies of Landforms and Little Girls 

[e-litist]

RIVIERA

"RIVIERA" follows the expected Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries signature we've studied in "THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES": A lot of on-screen text set to jazz music.

However, "RIVIERA" differs in that it offers four concurrent texts (I'm unsure if they should be called poems or narratives or something else, so I'm going with texts). All of the texts share a theme: the Hae-Oondae (also spelled Haeundae) beach in South Korea, and each line exposes a different facet of said beach. Additionally, each text is synchronized to a different instrument of the jazz soundtrack.

Saxophone: This text focuses on describing events aboard a ship docked at the beach. The saxophone is prominent during the first half of the song, but then quiets.

Drums: The drums are featured nearly nonstop throughout the work. As such, I suspect this is the longest of the texts. It tells of the beach, and the water, and events involving honeymooners, whores, and sailors. The beat of the drums is sometimes erratic which makes it hard to read. However, it speeds up in sections, which one might think is harder to read, but because of the constant speed, is actually more pleasant.

Trumpet: Describes couples on the shore, and their romantic endeavors. This instrument/text stays static throughout most of the work, but gets a lot of action in the latter half.

Bass: Like the drums, the bass is nearly constantly flowing. This text discusses the flora and fauna of the beach. It tells about the seaweed, the marine animals, and even the concrete that makes up the boardwalk.

It's worth noting that the Chinese version, which I could not read, features a completely different soundtrack. Instead of the English version's upbeat, instrumental jazz, it features a slow, soulful jazz track with full vocals.

[e-litist]

Responses to: Digital Language Movies

"The Struggle Continues"

My first exposure to Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries was circa 2004, when "SAMSUNG MEANS T0 C0ME" was featured on AlbinoBlackSheep. I thought it was novel, and funny. Now in the context of this class I can appreciate the group's work better. 

Black text on a white background, flashing words and phrases, all in capital letters, set to upbeat jazz music. Tools the work employs to engage you as intensely as it can without resorting to images. Instead the gigantic, screen-filling text assaulted me at high speeds, and in capital letters no less, the Internet equivalent of yelling. Exclamation points are abused to no end. The jazz kept my feet tapping throughout, my face a foot from the 24" monitor.

The subject matter, a struggle that apparently continues, is quite love as lust anthem. It inspires love for all. Not just any love though, the lustiest, dirtiest variety of love. Although it starts off relatively tame, it eventually unravels into it's true form of gratuitous adjectives and metaphors describing some intense sexual acts and love. It was a borderline arousing experience.

"Star Wars, One Letter at a Time" 

 This work flashes the script of Star Wars: A New Hope on-screen at a very slow, yet very fast rate. It is very slow because it is done one letter at a time. Because it is shown only one letter at a time (no scrolling text), and done at the speed of what appears to be a court stenographer. The text is accompanied with typewriter sounds: clicking, clacking, bells, and spinning gears.

I found it nearly impossible to enjoy, the parts I was able to follow consistently were those I recognized from the movie, and used that context to understand it. While the concept is novel, it wore out fast for me. It feels like a gimmick, as it's not like the author created a text that would match the strength of the interface, nor are there pauses, or timings to take note of. It's an endless string of nonstop letters from someone else's script.

Project for Tachitoscope

A surrealist look at advertising and subliminal messages. This work really draws you in with it's eerie, pulsating music and the quick, yet readable pace of it's intricate text. It loops endlessly, allowing you to choose when you've had enough. It really is fascinating and I found myself lost in it for a few minutes.

[e-litist]

Response to: "Universo Molécula" by Isaías Herrero

Constructed with what appears to be black magic instead of JavaScript, this work is visual pleasure to navigate. Starting off with what seems like a static menu, as soon as you move the mouse, you notice everything shifting, the view is dynamic. You navigate across the giant interface, one screen at a time.

Will update with more details later. Writing this on a campus PC and don't have access to the work, so writing from memory.

[e-litist]

Response to: "Ah" by K. Michel and Dirk Vis

A single, horizontal line scrolling across the screen. This shouldn't be too complex I thought. Suddenly, more words than you can parse scramble across the one line, juxtaposed. The one line becomes a discernible mess. Words scrolling by at different speeds mingle between other words, forming new phrases and sentences. The work's constant stream allows you to catch glimpses of new ideas, depending on when and where you are looking, you will catch new and different ideas, warranting multiple reads (or viewings). I had it all figured out, then there's a fork, like a river that just split into multiple streams. Now parallel lines, the author conveys multiple ideas separately, forcing me to split my vision among two trains of thought.

I like it.

[e-litist]

Concrete Poetry and First Screening

Concrete Poetry in recent times can be traced back to Brazil in the 1960s, but the style can be traced back to 3rd century BC Greek Alexandria. The concrete style of poetry utilizes the shape and organization of words and letters as additional tools in conveying ideas. Creating visual art, as well as literature, within the same work can lead to some very interesting ideas.

I can look at at "Endemic Battle Collage" by George Huth, and see a surreal work that requires much more time to fully enjoy and understand than I could hope to dedicate. The fact that this poetic work incorporates animated text and even sounds, renders it an incredibly complex piece to analyze. Conveying so much information simultaneously, one can appreciate the power of Concrete Poetry with the electronic medium.

Inspecting Anipoemas, I must admit I am not necessarily impressed. Maybe my mind has been tarnished from viewing so much ASCII art on forums. I can appreciate the effort, but I feel like they are too simple. Perhaps like a spectator complaining Pollock's paintings could be done by a 3-year-old, I just don't get it.

bpNichol's First Screening really caught my eye. Partly because the source code is provided and I can see the inner workings and how much code it took to just move a couple of letters across a screen. A collection of computer poems. We start with Island, which features an immobile rock surrounded by never ending waves. Later we can see a stream of dreams rolling by quickly, and maybe also rolling around in bed all night. Letter shows a sentence rolling by, the first word become the last, the second word become the first, and shifting cyclically repeatedly. This gives the sentence new and different meanings. We then see a hoe being dragged across a field in a farm, underneath the sunshine. It leaves behind a trail spelling HOE-RIZON right where the field fades into the distance. Lastly, we are greeted by a tower increasing in height, spelling its own name in its construction.

[e-litist]

David Knoebel's VRML work

Knoebel's poetry in VRML is an interesting application of the language. VRML, designed to bring 3D graphics to the web, is used by Knoebel to render text. Seems like a great twist of irony, but Knoebel's work renders text in very interesting ways, taking advantage of the medium.

 In "A Fine View" Knoebel tells a story of roofers sitting on the edge (of a rooftop) during their break. They share stories of a coworker that fell off once. It wraps up with a similar story, of a cigarette being flicked over the edge and it's trajectory downward, much like the roofer that fell.

The interesting part is how the poem's text is seen from a very far top view initially. As we "fall" towards the text, we can begin to read it, but soon enough it is whizzing past us at an increasing rate. That is until we slam into the ground, and it ends. Knoebel told the story of the fallen worker, the cigarette, or both textuallyandvisually.

[e-litist]

Second Life Works

I planned on reading these works tonight after a long day of studying at Colegio. However, I have no power or water in Terrace, so this placeholder post from my phone is being written. Tomorrow it will be updated with a proper post on the Second Life works. :)

EDIT: Tumblr sucks. I just rewrote this post with full impressions and it lost my edit.

I finally got around to seeing the Trope machinima, and it did seem quite trippy. I would like to focus on a different aspect of Trope than usual. So I am turning my attention to the Orcinus orca, or killer whale to the layman. Trope features a large pond in the island, where an orca is trapped, swimming perpetually in circles. What could be the significance of this whale here? One conclusion I have reached is the pond could represent the construct of Second Life's virtual world, and the whale is the player. The whale believes it is free, as it can see this environment and move around and do whatever it wants. However, this space is actually constricted. It is only as large as the designers allowed it to be, and the whale is beholden to the designers, as to what it can do, and where it can go. Thus the freedom is only a poor simulacra.

[e-litist]

Thoughts on Myst

Myst starts you off with no instructions, no set up, or anything. You're just there, with a world (or worlds) to be explored. As you explore the terrain, there's puzzles to be solved, clues to be read, and a whole story to unravel. Personally, I had a hard time getting into it. The open-ended nature of the game and lack of clear, linear path of progression made it a challenge to navigate.

In a way it reminds me of Zork, where you wander a world with little interaction with other characters, and no real direction set for you. 

[e-litist]

Façade as an Exemplary Interactive Narrative

Released in January 2005 as freeware, Façade is an interactive narrative by Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern.  The authors believed that, at the time, an authentic interactive drama had not yet been created, and set about creating one over the course of five years CITATION Pro06 \l 1033  (Procedural Arts). First, let us take a look at the overall idea and architecture of Façade, as described in the authors’ paper for the 2003 Game Developers Conference:

Façade is an attempt to create a real-time 3D animated experience akin to being on stage with two live actors who are motivated to make a dramatic situation happen.  […] we want to design an experience that provides the player with 20 minutes of emotionally intense, unified, dramatic action.  The player's actions should have a significant influence on what events occur, which are left out, and how the drama ends (Mateas and Stern, Façade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama 3).

As a video game (and I’m taking the liberty to call it that), Façade is very odd in that it does not require shooting, or jumping, or any kind of physical conflict. Instead, its conflict is very much a drama. The player is caught in a marital dispute between friends Trip and Grace during what was supposed to be a casual night of drinks. What is interesting about this scenario is how, Mateas and Stern took interactive narratives to degrees of complexity and dynamism before unseen in the areas of both narrative and game design by applying their knowledge in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence.

Façade engrosses players in its story in several interesting ways. The player is presented with a three-dimensional interface in which to interact with the voice-acted characters. These characters react to the player’s interaction with stage objects, and, more importantly, to the player’s natural-language dialogue, which the game recognizes. Furthermore, the game warrants multiple playthroughs, as the narrative’s branches and forks permit very different scenarios to occur, be it via random events or reactions to the player’s actions.

On the branching narrative front, Façade has a startlingly wide breadth for a single-act drama. The principal interaction tool employed by the player is dialogue. In many other interactive narratives, the player has access to a handful of prewritten dialogue options or commands. Façade differentiates in this aspect by using natural language to interact with Trip and Grace. While the system does not perfectly understand the player’s input, it parses it into key terms and combines them to see how that would interact with the characters, as Mateas and Stern explain (Mateas and Stern, Natural Language Understanding in Façade: Surface-text Processing 2). Combine this with the fact that the player can interrupt and speak at any time, and the system becomes extremely agile. As opposed to having predetermined forks in the story, although some are randomly generated, players are now able to lead the narrative on their own terms.

With this tool in hand, the player then guides Trip and Grace through their tumult and is allowed a lot of free agency in this aspect. Whereas in most games and all traditional narratives the goal of the protagonist is dictated by the author, Façade allows players to choose sides, stay neutral, funnel the couple towards separation, or shepherd them to reconciliation. Whether or not players achieve a satisfying ending to the narrative is fully subjective to what their goals were. Here, Façade steps away from games and leans more towards narratives in the sense that one cannot fail at it.

These goals and decisions enacted by the player should not be random, though; the player should be motivated. A strength of the medium that the authors play upon is the ability to give the player an emotional investment in the protagonists. Trip and Grace become fully-realized characters in the short time the player knows them. Untethered from the restrictions of simple text, Mateas and Stern use three-dimensional graphics and facial animations to convey the characters’ emotions and actions. Moreover, Trip and Grace are fully voice-acted, allowing the player to hear the authors’ intended inflection and not just imagine it. The characters’ depth and interactivity has led to some interesting comparisons as observed by Nick Montfort,  “Grace and Trip are not stateless Elizas; they are closer, if anything, to Galateas, but they also maintain an awareness of the way the conversation has progressed so far, and they work together to achieve dramatic goals” (Montfort).

The third protagonist, the player, is also integral to the experience. Rather than having the player be a puppeteer to a premade character, the player starts the game by choosing a name. The authors included a list of common names with the goal of allowing players to choose their own name and play as themselves. This is further compounded by the employed first-person perspective, thus removing any kind of intermediary character in the interaction between the player and the other protagonists. The sum of these simple factors is that the player feels more attached to the story, and is by proxy more thoughtful in the actions he or she takes.

For all this innovation, there certainly are some quirks to being on the bleeding edge. Façade eschews using the turn-based command system of its interactive ancestors, such as the Z-machine games, by employing the aforementioned natural language system that makes its experimental nature evident. The system often misinterprets the player’s input, as I, and many a YouTube video, will attest. This misinterpretation almost always leads to a nonsensical reaction by the protagonists, breaking the narrative’s immersion and leaving the player frustrated.

As Mateas and Stern declare, Façade is an interactive work crossing boundaries and building new bridges by using game design to further research game studies and narrative studies (Mateas and Stern, Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space 1-2). By studying the Chimera known as Interactive Narrative, we can see the permeation of narrative work into game design, giving a player more than just a motor skill-driven sandbox. Likewise, a personal and emotional investment is created in the player by exposing narratives to the free agency of games. Even the vocabulary of the two fields - stages, players, scripts, and so on -seemed to imply their eventual intersection.

Works Cited

 BIBLIOGRAPHY Mateas, Michael and Andrew Stern. "Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space." Digital Games Research Conference. Vancouver: n.p., 2005. 1-2. Print.

—. "Façade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama." Game Developers Conference. n.p., 2003. 3. Print.

—. "Natural Language Understanding in Façade: Surface-text Processing." Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment. Darmstadt: n.p., 2004. 2. Print.

Montfort, Nick. Rev. of Façade. Society for the Promotion of Adventure Games 15 July 2005. HTML Page.

Procedural Arts. Vision and Motivation for Façade. 2006. HTML page. 17 March 2012.

[e-litist]

Dan Waber's Strings are pretty cool guys.

Dan Waber's Strings and Strings Mark II are a blend of text and animation that really try to capture the meaning of a word or phrase. Waber animates the handwriting of a word, and animates it in such a way that it represents what it means or the connotations it implies.

The animations are mesmerizing; they loop infinitely and are very fluid. Using Flash to implement these, Waber made them viewable on the majority of web browsers, making it instantly shareable across the Internet. I wonder if Waber implemented this using bitmap image animations or using native Flash vector graphics. Also, I wonder about his design process. Was it all digital? Or did he draw physical paper mockup first?

[e-litist]

Two sestinas

Trying to make rational sense of these sestinas proved futile, so instead I focused more on the rhythm and sounds created by the words.

I found it helped to read them out loud. While reading them quietly, I felt like I couldn't make sense of them, but reading them aloud showed me a rhythm and cadence embedded in the sestina beyond what the commas and periods implied. I stopped trying to make sense of the sentences' relation to each other, and the alliteration and similar sounds created a hypnotizing rhyhtm.

I can't really explain it, but the first sestina struck me as soothing, and some of the words and verses inspired romantic imagery. Meanwhile the second sestina, although similar in content, felt more aggressive in it's rhyhtm, like a march. 

[e-litist]

Bad Machine

Dan Shiovitz's Bad Machine is a text-based game, in the vein of the previously discussed Zork. The setting is a factory populated by a variety of robots, each busily buzzing along on their tasks. The main character however, is a robot that has gained sentience, and is deemed a BAD MACHINE. As the robot, you explore the factory and interact with other robots. The interesting twist is that the author uses the usually interactivity-impairing, text-based user interface as an immersion tool. The user is presented with cryptic machine messages that fit in with the story and inputs commands in the fashion of a programmer. That said, this same interface is very unintuitive, requiring a lot of dedication from the user to fully explore the game. 

[e-litist]

Response to: Stir Fry Texts

Stir Fry Texts by Jim Andrews et al. is web oriented take on cut ups. These experiment with the creation of new literature by combining existing literature. In this case they are deliberately written to still infer somewhat rational ideas even when combined. However, as the essay "Stir Frys and Cut Ups" says, the work brings up the concept that every "original" idea is actually a combination of existing ideas.

I tend to agree with this point of view, since as a civilization we are able to progress past the rest of the animal kingdom only because we exchange and build upon others' ideas. More colloquially and less dramatically, we can see this in a lot of pop culture. Musicians often cite their influences, and critics often describe a musical act as "a combination of [Band A] and [Band B]."  

[e-litist]

Response to: 100,000,000,000,000 poems

When this poem was brought up in class, I immediately thought how it could easily be generated in software by randomly picking out verses in the sonnet. Then, someone  had already done it, and it turned out to be the reading assignment.

The concept of it is pretty interesting. Individually written verses in a sonnet which can be randomly exchanged to produce a new sonnet. The new sonnet maintains the structure and rhyme, albeit with different meaning (if any).

It certainly follows the concept of Oulipo, which it appears to have started, of surrealism through constraint. In this case, the constraint the author faced was writing an exchangeable set of verses for a sonnet. It was more an exercise in structure than it was about the literary value of the text (or was it? Can't really tell with these surrealist types).