Squirrel Tao » Hypermedia Storytelling

Two Different Digital Storytelling Sites Win SXSW Web Awards

Jennifer Elrod — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 02:17:49 +0000

I was pleased to note that two digital storytelling sites have won SXSW web awards. We Tell Stories, from Penguin, features six stories by six authors experimenting with six different ways of telling stories online. The second, Lost Zombies, is a community generated zombie documentary. Personally, I’m especially fascinated by the community logistics of Lost Zombies. The site appears to me at first glance to be very well organized and very user friendly. It looks like fun to me, and I can see the popular appeal of it right away. How encouraging it should be to all who tell stories on the web, to see that these two sites exist and that they have garnered some notice from the wider web community.

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New on Dreaming Methods: “The Flat”

Jennifer Elrod — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:39:18 +0000

Dreaming Methods features a new work of hypermedia storytelling. Called “The Flat“, it is described as “an atmospheric journey into an abandoned council flat where traces of a narrative formed by its previous inhabitants still lingers”. Done entirely in Flash, it requires a Flash 8 or higher Flash Player. It begins with a dark screen and a vignette of a staricase with a lit doorway at the top. Some words flash on the screen briefly and then fade out. One sentence says, “you were right about me hiding the truth”. The screen goes entirely dark, and there is a rhythmic and pulsing sound for a while. This sound is suddenly punctured by loud knocking. Then the pulsing sounds return. This all begins to seem lame to me, until after being interrupted and coming back to this piece and starting over, I figure out I can click on the lit doorway at the top of the stairs. I click.

I realize that unfolding the story will require clicking. There are more words, and I have to read them quickly to catch them before they fade. “you were always going to do well.” I realize that I am in the role of a snoopy person who knew the person who used to live in the flat, and I have the feeling that the person’s resentful consciousness still lingers in some way, ghost-like, in the flat. The inside of the flat is very dark. It has an unmade bed and a purse in it. There is also a coat. I click on anything clickable, bringing on more mysterious words and winding up going in circles inside the flat. I wonder whether the story will be good enough to justify further effort on my part.

I end up being too slow or something, because the knocking sound comes back. The first time it had happened, my husband had said there was somebody at the door. The second time around, he is annoyed. “Would you stop that? God,” he says from his adjacent computer lair. I feel punished by this interactive tale for my lack of quickness and cleverness in navigating the story. I wonder if it’s me or the story. I want it to be good. I want to enjoy it. It’s the future, right? I can’t give up on it yet. I turn the sound off. The sound does not seem key in any way to experiencing the story, anyway. It seems mostly atmospheric, and it has become repititious by now.

I continue clicking. Pieces of the story come in fragments. Whoever is addressing “me” as “you” continues to almost taunt me, and I derive from some of the fragments that I am twelve years old. The red bedspread turns out to have some light red text on it. It’s hard to read. I think I used to eat baked beans in this place after I came home from school. Somehow, I don’t click fast enough or in the right place. The screen goes dark again. I’ll have to start all over again if I want to get more out of it. I like the idea a lot in concept, and I like the atmospheric feel a lot. I wonder if I’m just lazy, since I’m beginning to feel like giving up on the story. So far, my curiosity has not been piqued enough by any of the fragments, and I haven’t felt like my efforts to find out more has yielded enough of a reward to make me feel like continuing. I wish that there were somebody else with whom I could compare notes, so I would know if I’m missing something and, if so, what I’m missing.

I try one more time, and this time, I notice that there is something about noticing the density of the pigments. This has to mean the redness of the bedspread. I click on it again and try again to read the faint red text on it. I pan around and try to read more of it. I begin to realize that my expectations of story were holding the piece up to standards to which it had not been aspiring. It needs to be experienced more as a poem, both a visual and a verbal poem, than as a story. The very experience I have with it, trying to find out more, seems like it might be part of the theme of the piece. I am nosy but find little other than traces that somebody once lived here and is now gone but yet taunts my snoopiness. There are words on the bedspread about vanishing and thinness and husks. The words keep fading and spinning. It all seems transient.

This interpretation, that the whole thing is about transience and about the foolishness of snoopiness – as if we could nail down any solid meaning about anybody in this world where everything is temporary – begins to seem like it might be satisfyingly arty. But still I wonder if I’m missing something, because of the initial words, “you were right about me hiding the truth”. I don’t have enough patience by now to go back and click around one more time. I begin to wish that somebody else would try it out and I could compare notes with them. I do like the idea and its technical execution, but I dislike the feeling I have, wondering whether I got something out of this piece that was worth my time, wondering if my interpretation is silly because I’m missing a story that is really there. I am well aware of my tendency to overinterpret almost anything, especially if I have the expectation that it is something arty, so I don’t know how far I can trust my interpretation, when it comes to something like this. This is almost funny in a way.

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Bunk Magazine, a Hypermedia Humor E-Zine, Launches

Jennifer Elrod — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 11:14:13 +0000

Mark Marino has just launched a hypermedia humor e-zine called Bunk Magazine. It looks like it has potential and is worth exploring. I haven’t yet thoroughly checked out the first issue, but I’ve found a few things that made me giggle and smirk, as well as a few things that didn’t. (You’ll have that.) One of the things that did get a giggle from me was the “Y2K Bug Issue”, found under Features. This link brought up a mock circa-1900 newspaper dated January 1, 1900. In this newspaper, you can read about such things as what our future shall bring. Number four on the list is this:

The entire world will be covered by a vast network of wires which will be referred to as the “World Wide Web.” This web will have been woven by gigantical prehistorical arachnids, who will become our leaders after emerging from caverns beneath the earth, where they will have been hiding for 3 millions years.

I think I just like humor that involves wild flights of imagination.

Another thing I like is the Celebrity Playlists, imaginary lists of the favorite songs of various famous people. Thomas Jefferson’s playlist is my favorite, especially “Brown Sugar”:

Thomas Jefferson (Orr)
Preamble Pre-party Mix:

Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours- Stevie Wonder
Brown Sugar– Rolling Stones
Born on the Fourth of July Theme- John Williams
Gasolina– Daddy Yankee
American Woman- The Guess Who
The Star-Spangled Banner- written by Francis Scott Key, as performed by Christina Aguilera
American Pie- Don McLean
Big Poppa- The Notorious B.I.G.
American Woman- Lenny Kravitz
It’s All About the Benjamins- Puff Daddy
Baby Got Back- Sir Mix-a-Lot

Bunk is still a little bit raw at this stage, but it will be a site to watch as it develops further and attracts more talent. It’s refreshing to see a hypermedia zine that has a fun spirit about it for a change. Maybe it will help to show more people that hypermedia entertainment that is created by people who are seriously trying to realize the new media potential of the web does not have to be ponderously, pretentiously, relentlessly self-conscious about its own supposed avant garde status.

Browse all the entries under Humor, Hypermedia Storytelling, Web Comics.

Literatronic Software for Online Writing

Jennifer Elrod — Sun, 28 May 2006 02:52:17 +0000

A new system, called Literatronic, has been created for hypertext authoring. Rather than using links to connect the passages of their stories, authors can assign numbers to tell Literatronic how much affinity one passage has with another. A reader will be presented with choices of what to read next, based upon these affinities. Once a reader has read a passage, it will not be available again as a choice to read next, unless the reader goes back to the map of already read text and marks the text as unread. The system goes further than this, in that it uses artificial intelligence to adapt to a reader’s previous choices and to use information about them to compute the next set of choices. A much more detailed look at Literatronic, and how it has the potential to change the way the way that hypertext literature is written and read, is available on the WRT blog.

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Who Reads Hypermediated Tales? Children.

Jennifer Elrod — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 01:30:21 +0000

“Hypermedia art seems to follow a trajectory from the salon to the playground,” writes Mark Marino in his March 1st post on the WRT blog. He speculates about the reasons why, at the present time, children tend to comprise the audience that can best appreciate experimental works of hypermedia, digital fiction and poetry. Children are natural interacters. Children like to use all their senses. They like to play. They like to be physical. They are curious. Adults, on the other hand, Marino speculates, have become more accustomed to boredom. We have become accustomed to relatively disembodied and desensualized forms of interaction with the written word.

An interesting insight. I wonder if the adults of the future will be more like children, in that they will develop greater enthusiasm and openness toward multi-sensory, whole-being forms of interaction with media. Yet, is the dominant digital environment on the PC and the web conducive to stimulating adults to overcome their laziness, sensory atrophy and loss of curiosity? Andrei Herasimchuk, in “Please make me think! Potential dangers in usability culture“, dared to play with the heretical notion that it is not.

Browse all the entries under Hypermedia Storytelling, New Media Theory.