iPoem

From Itch Away:

'Aya Karpinska has finally had her iPhone / iTouch app - the children’s story “Shadows Never Sleep” accepted in the Apple apps directory. This, to my knowledge, is the first piece of interactive fiction which makes use of the iPhone’s multitouch technology in a non-trivial way - i.e. it relies on the technology to produce readings and experiences in terms of the device’s capabilities, rather than being a case solely of remediation from what would then be a more practical paper-page.'

It will be interesting as technology and print intersect more and more to see where this leads to. Imagine, for instance, a computer screen in the shape of a sphere too big to wrap your arms around. Now imagine a poem that covers the sphere, but every time you move the sphere the poem moves relative to it, so no one person can ever read the entire poem from one position because they are always seeing the same part of the poem. So now it becomes a spatial interaction where the body moves around the sphere. Now imagine that the the sphere is hollow, and when you climb inside the sphere you see what the person on the corresponding adjacent point of the sphere is seeing. Suddenly reading is a social activity, and the voice is a conducting mechanism for completeness. Imagine having to perform for each other to appreciate the work fully.

Comments

[John Sparrow]

That's an interesting idea.

I think we're already seeing interesting use of the 'z-index' abilities of new media as ways of changing reading. Aya's iPhone app is one way, and there are numerous screenic approaches to work where the layers and perspectival attributes of the work are essential to its performance and its interpretation.

Performance, as you point out, is an issue I think. As texts combine kinetic, interactive and transformative processes in spatially temporal ways (check out Hayles' E Lit book, chapter 3 for a fascinating if dense overview of this concept) they become performances for reading. It's interesting to consider how transformations over time can be performed when combined with multiple choice and/or generative elements and how these form one instantiation of a work. As a body/mind responds to the workings of the media, which in turn respond to the input in feedback loops, multi-sensory experiences in conjunction with the traditional notion of 'reading' become the act of reading and performing. I'm excited by works which produce this sort of experience.

I never got a chance to see any Cave work (the 3-D environment at Brown) in the flesh when I visited Providence early this year, but I've seen documented performances. For me, the jury is still out on this work, which strikes me as having exceptionally interesting potential, but also perhaps runs the risk of forsaking the textual output in favour of the three-dimensional experience, rather than striking a balance.

There's also an installation outside the Royal Festival Hall at the moment, in which participants interact with tall vertical speakers which produce sounds in relation to the movements of the participants. This kinds of pursues something of what you outline above, though again, I feel like it kind of suffers from the tendency to produce indiscernible output of very little actual interest, as opposed to the interest level in the concept itself. Tied in with this is the unwillingness I noticed in participants to actually bother looking around them and interact in relation to others (something the installation encourages). Instead, people might perform in small groups or individually. I assume the programme which runs the installation must take into account such circumstances, and possibly therefore is designed to produce outputs with a degree of abstraction / ambience to cater for the vastly differing amounts of participants and participation between participants -- so it leads to a rather samey experience, I found. Maybe I need to revisit at another time.

J