Cage

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Chris Palko, known by his stage name Cage is a rapper from New York City. Born overseas the youth began his life  on a military base. His father was a drug addict, and his mother divorced him, only later to marry an abusive man named Frank. Palko had a troubled youth and was eventually kicked out of high and by that time was abusing many hard drugs. After several minor run-ins with the law, he was sent to a psychiatric institution where he ended up staying for 18 months. While there he made several attempts to kill himself, and was part of a test group for the drug “fluoxetine.”

When he was released at 18, he pursued a career as a rapper, then going under the name “Alex” reminiscent of the character from A Clockwork Orange who endured a similar plight. During this time drugs were still a large part of Palko’s life and much of his early work is reflective of that. Palko has led an interesting and fairly depressing life, and it is my belief that his flash-based website tells a digital story of these roots.

The first image has ominous looking clouds in the distance which darken when the mouse scrolls over them, as shown on the left, and this foreshadows some unpleasantness in the future. The argyle looking lines that intersect the “C” in Cage, denote a rap-group by the name of Weathermen, of which Cage is a founding member.

 

 

 

 

This is the second screen you’re taken to. Here the clouds flash and the light in the window flickers. The red cloud seems to look like the upper part of a face. The house is old and decrepit. I’m not sure if this place is simply metaphorical or has historical significance for Palko. Either way the creepy effect is achieved. Clicking on the house takes you inside.

 

 

Now you can see the inside of presumably the above house and as you explore it Cage’s music starts to play. The symbol on the wall links you to the aforementioned rap group’s Myspace. The newspaper takes you to press articles, while the garbage takes you to Cage’s merchandise store. I’m sure this is no coincidence. The picture takes you to a newsfeed. Out of frame on the right is a refrigerator, and on the left is a stairwell.

 

 

 

I won’t go through any more of the house so if you’re interested you can experience it firsthand. His music, with the effects of the flash animation create an atmosphere very representative of the experience one gains when listening to Cage. A lot of his lyrics are graphic and explicit, so if that kind of stuff offends you — heads up. There are more details in his biography, and pages from a journal he kept while institutionalized can also be found. Have fun exploring and if you can stomach it, you should listen to Cage, he’s pretty neat.

**Screenshots taken from his website. I own the rights to these images**

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Body of Work

February 23, 2012 By 1 Comment

Author Shelly Jackson tells her personal stories through a hyper text format, but uses something much more primitive to to reveal her stories, her body.  The HTML hypertext format gives a fresh look on the memoir genre and is a very effective medium for her anecdotes by allowing the user to view the picture as a whole as well as select on body parts to examine. It is a very thorough anatomy of her body as well as her life, she tells some of her most pivotal childhood moments and the pictures leave nothing to the imagination as well.

I thought that this was very strange but interesting piece of work. Her tone through out her reflections comes across as very sincere and even talks about her imperfections with out a hint of shame which I thought was very cool.

“My stomach is white and completely flat, and consequently unfit for bellydancing, which nonetheless I work at, off and on. Bellydancing has taught me to roll and flutter it, though awkwardly and unreliably. When I was little, I could suck my stomach in and make a cave or stick it out in a resilient dome that sounded like a drum when I tapped it.”

You really get a sense of somebody is by their body. Where they have been, what they have been up to, even maybe what they’ve been eating. All of her scars, tattoos, and imperfections prompt the her to delve deep in her child hood and pull out memories both big and small that really give you a sense of what her life was like and put you in her shoes.

I’m glad I chose this selection for my writing assignment because I was thinking about also doing a hyper text story. Mine will definitely be not as revealing as this one, but I’m glad I got to see you some different formats and styling I could use. I am think about using HTML5 so I will have to play around with all the different options because I am only familiar with html.

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

My Mind Is Blown.

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I decided to play “88 Constellations for Wittgenstein; (to be played with the Left Hand)” by David Clark.  This was by far the most interesting work on electronic literature I have encountered yet.  Everything about this was intriguing to me.

When starting this piece of literature, you are instructed to use your left hand.  At first, this meant nothing to me.  Once you click ENTER, an introduction is given to you.  This introduction tells you over and over again to “join the dots”.  Hearing this didn’t make sense until the introduction ended and I was forced to click on a constellation, where the dots were connected.  After the introduction was over, a screen of various constellations are shown, allowing you to pick one.  The first one I chose was called “Limits of Language”.  When clicking on this constellation, I was overwhelmed and impressed by the amount of information thrown at me.  To top this off, the music was unique as well.  This section of the game shows you, through moving objects and words, a conversation between two people.  What struck me about this conversation is that it was all about language limiting the world.  Questions such as “Did existence exist before we existed?”, and “Is the ending of language the beginning of existence?” were asked.  To go along with these deep and intellectual questions, the narrator talks about the limits of language, and compared that to a cup of coffee.  He explained that the limits of language are the limits to the world, just as the size of the coffee cup limits how much can be put inside of it.

After clicking on only one constellation, I wasn’t convinced as to what this piece of literature was trying to get across, so I clicked on another constellation called “Fly Bottle.”  This constellation’s purpose was to explain that the purpose of philosophy was to show the fly the way out of the bottle.  The narrator explained this way of thinking by describing, (through words being spoken, words on the screen, and pictures), a monkey who is given a box with a banana inside of it, with a hole just big enough for the monkeys hand to fit inside.  When the monkey reaches for the banana, it then cannot take it’s hand out of the box while still holding the banana.  In this situation, the monkey will not realize that if it were to let go of the banana, it’s hand would be able to fit out of the box.  Just like the monkey not being able to grasp this concept, we as humans are not able to ungrasp things either.  For example, humans are not able to ungrasp the meaning of words.

After exploring these two constellations, I realized that this work of literature must have been explaining different ways to think about parts of life.  Directly after clicking on Fly Bottle, I realized that there was a button, “I”, on the bottom of the screen.  After clicking on it, an ‘information screen’ came up and showed me that I could type words on the keyboard and it would effect how the constellations were played out.  It also should me that I could click on different stars in the specific constellations I had picked, and more stories would come from that.  To me, this added a while new level to the literature because the choices seemed to be endless!  After finding out this exciting news, I tried these out.  I found out that by using buttons on the keyboard while a constellation was playing, the visual images would respond to my typing by increasing the amount of movement they were doing during the narration.

Once I was done exploring the game, I found http://olponline.wordpress.com/2009/11/23/net-art-by-david-clark-88-constellations-for-wittgenstein-to-be-played-with-the-left-hand/ , where the author David Clark explained what he meant from the game.  He wrote this game from the point of view of an Australian philosopher named Wittgenstein.  In this game, there are 88 interactive flash animations, which ends up correlating to the 88 constellations in the sky.  Hearing his point of view was very interesting, “music and the night sky both seemed to me to stir up the limits of our understanding of existence.”  Reading this quote from him proved to me that the point of this literature was to make the reader philosophize about the different abstract aspects of life.  My thoughts on why he wanted us to use our left hand when interacting, is because using the left hand is something that without instruction, is not usually done by the common person.  By not using the right hand, a slightly different view might be taken.  He also allowed me to understand that when he repeatedly said that we needed to ‘connect the dots’ in the beginning, he wanted the reader to connect the dots by using the facts of life that he gave us.  There is so much to learn from this piece of literature, and I encourage everyone who gets the chance, to try it out!

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , ,

iPhone 4$: Siri, Can You Balance My Checkbook?

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Recently I got an new phone to replace my old blackberry. Being the tech-geek that I am, it was easy for me to decide which phone I would buy next and, of course, I chose the iPhone 4s. As many of you know the iPhone is the number one cell phone in the world right now and the newest iPhone, 4s, comes complete with many new features including the iCloud and, most notably Siri, a personal assistant. I know that Jonah Butler has also written about the iPhone 4s and Siri earlier on in the semester but I would like to focus specifically on the functionality of Siri rather than the idea behind her.

Siri is so interesting because she is what many gadget reviews are calling “the first personal assistant that can actually understand what you mean rather than just hear what you say.” I must admit that this new functionality is groundbreaking.I personally have used Siri several times and it is easy to feel like she actually does understand what you are saying. Much like Jonah, I began to think back to Eliza and how many users actually felt like Eliza could understand and sympathize with them.

While it is clear that Siri is only a program, it can be very tricky to say that she does not have any sort of attachment to what is being said to her. I know that she understands the relationship that I share among different people in my contacts list. For instance, I told her that Paul and Lisa were my parents and she understands, now, that when I ask her to tell my parents I love them, she knows to send a text message to Paul and Lisa with my message. On the other hand, one can also tell that she is not capable of actual human-like thought. For example, when I tell her to tell my parents that I love them, her message says exactly what I said sending a message like “I love them.” and not “I love you.”In the grand scheme of things it is a minor problem and it is easy to see why Siri is causing such a big deal.

Siri has many other companies on the search to create other personal assistant like her, such as Iris, which is specific to the Droid phones. Though Iris is capable of performing many different tasks she is nothing close to the functionality that Siri possesses and I personally feel like it will be some time before other companies can create a program that is equal if not better than Siri. It is true that Siri is certainly helping Apple stay on top of the competition and she continues to help. In her first few months, she helped rake in a 98% increase in iPhone sales, equalling about 11.3 million dollars. After collecting a bit more research about Apple’s product sales, I can confidently say that Siri is a huge asset to not only to the Apple company but to iPhone 4s owners as well.

I have included the video below for more information about the iPhone 4s and Siri.

YouTube Preview Image

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , ,

“Ah”

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Similiar to the form of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industry’s Dakota, “Ah” by K Michel and Dirk Vis is a work of animated digital literature about singing in the shower. The work tells a story about a person singing and thinking while in the shower, pondering thoughts of Einstein.  Throughout the piece, words are constantly shifting, overlapping, and forming waves on screen. The words move at different speeds, and the order of them is often difficult to determine.

The piece seems to place some emphasis on the phrase “time passes but doesn’t exist.” These e-lit creators seem to have emphasized this idea through the use of variant movement and order. It is often difficult to determine which words, or even letters, are coming first, last, or if they are simultaneous. Often, it is impossible to read what is scrolling across the screen because of the overlaps. The reader takes in a few words here or there, which makes it hard to determine the plot and follow along. The lack of determination of what is happening now and what has happened before attempts to show a disregard for time, as well as a perceived lack of existence. There are a few instances of emphasis of lines of multiple words that stand out without overlap (“There’s lots you don’t know” for example), before being consumed into the rest of the work.

The waves of words like “ah” and “oh” follow an interesting pattern of breathing, as well as being representative of the singing. Despite the fact that this piece is about singing and breathing, the black words and letters on the white screen all move without any kind of sound (a big difference in comparison to pieces such as Dak0ta).

“Ah” is an interesting piece of digital literature to look at. It has no real user interaction (the words flow along without any help by clicks or mouse movements) other than the fact that the reader must play a sort of game to see what words can be caught and what order they can be placed in to create understanding. It’s a very intriguing piece and makes the reader think.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

Faith

February 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Faith is a term whose meaning and value rely within the interpretation of the one(s) using the word. According to some, it is merely seen as a system of belief, perhaps even at times a system which is misleading and often hedged by the dogma of religion, the symptoms of which are “faithful” followers. However, others would use the term as the defining point of stability upon which their lives rest. That is, faith allows them to carry out their human functions which, in these cases, often means serving a higher being. Faith, as it is today, concordantly indicates both weakness and strength.

I read the interactive poem entitled “Faith,” expecting it to present a cynical view on the word and its connotations, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it wasn’t so generic. The poem initially presents the word faith alone, elegantly strewn. As it stands, the word “logic” trickles over its edges, indicating two clear norms which the author Robert Kendall wanted to suggest. Faith is always at war with logic but the way the words are presented in the beginning of this poem could indicate the virility which faith has over logic as a tool (of control) used by people. The other norm in question is concerned with the fact that faith is something which people use to lie to themselves, or to deny their realities, ultimately choosing to be delusional in respect to things they cannot change.

 The poem goes on to question the implementation of faith and perhaps the reason for its introduction into the average person’s psyche. It petitions the reader to ask themselves what is left when logic runs out. This happens to everyone. When we cannot reconcile what we consider to be logical either with the events of our own lives or those of the world at large, we must ask ourselves what illogical force is at work. Some would label this force as faith.

What is left is the leap to be taken, that which is required by the mind to discern between right and wrong, good and evil. It is the determining factor which will bring a person to make a decision, or an assertion, either when logic coincides with the leap of faith or when it is in direct contradiction. The end of the poem sees all the other words falling to the bottom of the screen, and Faith, in all its glory, rests atop the heap of logic which was actually used to describe that very faith itself.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: ,

‘Cause Two Can Keep a Secret if One of Them is Dead- “Public Secrets”

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Everyone has secrets, and regardless of whether or not you’ll willing to admit it, there are some that you would kill to keep hidden from the world. But what about the ones you want to tell someone? Ones that you have to keep secretive because you are forced to by the government?

For my checkpoint, I chose to look at Public Secrets by Sharon Daniel, which is listed in the Elit Directory 2. To be honest, I merely chose it based on its title since I found it pretty provocative… Guess I’m not really a complex person. Haha.

Anyways, Public Secrets is a collection of narratives from women in the Central California Women’s Facility, which is essentially a huge prison for women. These statements from the incarcerated women reveal secrets about drugs, crime, the prison, and the flaws of the judicial system.

When I first opened the page for Public Secrets, I was just expecting a couple of links that directed to transcripts of interviews. However, as soon as the page loaded, there was a voice (I’m presuming it was Daniel’s) narrating the background information about Public Secrets while there is a black-and-white image scrolling across the screen that to me, looks like an outline of a city that you normally see in cartoons (which you can see above). A weird detail Daniel added was that she made the screen look stained while the image is moving, which really caught me off guard. It took me about 2 minutes to realize that my screen was, in fact, not dirty and that I should’ve probably stopped rubbing my laptop screen with a Kleenex (however, even with this realization, I was still disturbed by the stain images…) I’m not sure if I’m just a neat freak, but it really did distract me from the opening sequence.

As soon as the opening sequence is done, it directs you to a screen that displays the same black-and-white outline image (stains still there, of course). There were also four different tabs located on the left side, that directed to four different sets of interviews. I’m guessing it was the four different categories of binary oppositions that Daniel used to organize the interviews. On the different pages, there were a ton of thought-provoking quotes from interviews that are designed to draw the reader in to click it. Once you click the quote, something peculiar happens. I thought that a pop-up would come out and have the transcript of the interview with a picture or something, but rather than that, an audio clip starts playing! David added in the actual recorded interviews into the site, which added to the eery, uncomfortable tone. Thankfully, you could also click to view the transcript, and pause the recording so you can just read the conversation.

One of the most thought-provoking interviews I found was one about a woman talking about how men and women are persecuted differently for committing the same heinous crime. The interview is seen below:

What surprised me the most wasn’t necessarily the fact (although I do find it outrageous that a woman was sentenced more time than the man), but that the woman in the interview didn’t sound angry or upset about this; she just sounded emotionally drained. She sounded like she had accepted the fact and just learned to deal with it, like nothing was going to change about it. One common aspect about all of the interviews was that every single one of the women sounded apathetic. They knew they were stuck in their situation with no way of escaping it; they had lost hope. Listening to the interviews, I pitied them.

Overall, I thought that Public Secret was extremely similar to the PostSecret phenomenon, a on-going project where people mail homemade postcards anonymously with his or her deepest, darkest secrets written on them. We know that telling someone our most private secrets won’t make them any less painful or hurtful, but it does take some of weight off our shoulders. As humans, we crave relief and sympathy from others because let’s face it; we’re fragile creatures. I feel like that’s how people who write to PostSecret feel, and I like to think that Daniel’s project helped take some of weight off of the incarcerated women’s shoulders.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , ,

RE: thetrainjumper’s TV Shows expand on literary world by turning to new media.

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I also agree that media in television is definitely expanding into new media, or sometimes even “old” media in the case of television shows turned into comics. I want to further thetrainjumper’s hypothesis that “the entertainment industry will turn towards interactivity with new media and the shows/movies/games it creates…” As far as I know, there’s nothing along the lines of a professor rating site for viewers to rate Ted Mosby (though that is certainly a fun idea). More interactive and immersive media of other types exists, though. A good example is the Sokoblovsky giraffe farm website. It’s a website for an imaginary Russian farm that breeds “petite lap giraffes” the likes of those seen in the DirectTv commercials. A viewer can sign up to join the list of thousands awaiting their own mini giraffe and can even view Vladimir the bull giraffe’s activity on a web cam. This hoax was so good, many people actually thought this was real. A quick Google search of “petite lap giraffes” brings up dozens of online newspaper articles explaining that the mini giraffes sadly do not exist.

YouTube Preview Image

Another way people are getting more connected to fictional universes is through immersion. A good example of this is the Cerberus Daily News from Bioware’s video game Mass Effect 2. For a time, the Cerberus Daily news was a news feed found in the game that updated daily with a brand new story. Sometimes it was something trivial, like a pop star scandal, and other times it covered an aline race’s civil war on another planet. No matter what the story, it was very much like reading a news article straight from the Mass Effect universe. Fans  could go crazy with new information and canon they would have never experienced otherwise and delve further into the fictional universe. Currently, fans of the updates have posted them online to make them more accessible to other fans.

Both of these examples show ways that new media generated from television or videogames strive to immerse viewers in their world. Perhaps in the future we will see more opportunities to interact and immerse ourselves in the fiction we enjoy.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

TV Shows expand on literary world by turning to new media.

February 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

Has anyone else noticed this?

Regardless, let me put it into perspective!

As the internet has become more accessible for people of all shapes/sizes/backgrounds/ages, the entertainment industry has geared more and more towards using the internet to advertise; obviously to attract more viewers/buyers/etc. Alongside advertising, however, they have begun to utilize the internet in a different way. The entertainment industry has begun to expand upon the worlds they’ve created in their movies/shows, by creating online media for its fictional characters, businesses, etc.

While yes, I would agree that the inclusion of online components and/or varying media for a TV world can be considered further ploy to reel you in and keep you watching, the aspect of the world’s expansion is worth noting on a literary level. Let’s look at some examples!

The first one/s that I remember coming into contact as a consumer,were associated with NBC’s Heroes. The first and most notable being the graphic novel.

The Heroes graphic novel, like many of the other examples I will mention later on, added a depth to the Heroes universe that could not be fit in the boundaries of a weekly episode. The graphic novel provided the show’s fans with another chance to experience the universe outside of the TV show. It provided them with back story on characters that was mentioned in passing in the show, if at all, with events prior to what happened in the show, during but from other perspectives, or after, all made evident by the words and art that filled the panels of the pages.

Aside from the graphic novel, Heroes used various other means of media to give more depth/realism to the show, such as with the Primatech Paper website, which was the company that *spoiler* was a front for an organization affiliated with the Government to find/keep the “Heroes” under control. The rest are available at the official NBC site under “Exclusives.”

Both Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother have used new media in similar ways. Each show created a faux rating website. Scrubs for its Doctors, rateyourdoc.org, complete with faux reviews and pages for most of the characters, and in How I Met Your Mother, http://grademyteacher.net/, a faux professor rating site which featured character, Ted Mosby.

Unfortunately rateyourdoc.org is no longer in existence (since Scrubs is no longer being produced), but here is a photo of the banner.

They also each showcase websites created by their characters, such as thetoddtime.com (Scrubs) and http://www.barneysvideoresume.com/, (How I Met Your Mother) where you can download and watch Barney’s video resume.

All of the other websites mentioned on the show can be found on the show’s wiki page.

All of these sites create a sense of the show being more than just a show. By making the websites mentioned in passing accessible to viewers, by allowed us to access content the characters speak about, the 4th wall, in a sense, is broken.

In How I Met Your Mother fashion (Barney’s Blog which can be found via the wiki) HBO’s True Blood offers its fans with Jessica’s, a new, through events in the show, vampire, blog/vlog. 

YouTube Preview Image

Jessica’s blogs, effect/affect audiences in the same manners as does the Heroes sites. Jessica is a vampire. By giving viewers a look into her life via a blog, not only do we again see more character develop/events/etc. that there is no room nor place for in the show itself, but it allows us, in this instance, further background on the idea/conceptualization of the vampire (as Jessica speaks of her experience) created in its universe.

I expect that soon, the entertainment industry will turn towards interactivity with new media and the shows/movies/games it creates, whether through social media, ARGs, or sites that are fully functional, (e.g. a professor rating site where we, the audience, can review Ted Mosby as a professor) and provide consumers with, not only more draw, but more to pull from literarily.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Façade- Beyond Basic IF/TA

February 20, 2012 By 3 Comments

   Façade combines interactive fiction with images. Unlike Galatea, the user can type input but the output comes with visuals and verbal responses from the characters. The whole object of the game is to select a person, visit a married couple, and try to keep them together. For me, I was only able to resolve their issues once out of the ten times that I played it. Grace seems to flirt with the male characters and really likes for you to be on her side. Trip tends to get really jealous and if you kiss Grace or flirt with her too much, he will literally escort you out of the apartment. If you offend Trip too many times he will kick you out. If the user is rude before the character enters the apartment, Trip will slam the door in the users face.

    This game is very much interactive fiction on the next level and each story line is different. Olivia is a character that is responsible for setting them up in college. The couple invites her over to celebrate and thanks her for years of pain and suffering but also love. Olivia tends to flirt with Trip too and doesn’t set well with him. Depending on how the user plays Olivia, if she tends to be more on Grace’s side, the flirting is minimal and Olivia can help them. If Olivia sides too much with Trip, the couple tends to split. Each reason may be different. Grace may feel she cannot be an artist because Trip won’t allow her to follow her dreams. Trip feels guilty because he manipulated Grace into marrying him because he proposed in front of his parents. No matter what, the game never ends the same way twice. The game reacts to anything the user types in and the characters respond directly to the user or to each other in reference to what the user said. The user can walk around the apartment and drink, rearrange the sculptures, answer the phone, check messages, or just sit on the couch. Using the information the characters give, the user can make them feel heard, understood, and stay together, or upset them and either be asked to leave or one of them leaves, which ends the game.

 

    Apparently there is a hidden key behind their wedding photo that allows the user to unlock the back door. The user then walks into a room full of guns and must quickly shoot Trip. I have tried several times to figure out how to get the key but have failed. The   following youtube clip explains how it should be done.

YouTube Preview Image

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: , ,