Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
Minicontos Coloridos is a collaborative project conceived by Brazilian journalist, writer and teacher Marcelo Spalding in 2013. The short tales are structurally and conceptually associated with colors in a playful way. To access the stories, the reader should mix the primary RGB colors through a pull down menu available on the website in HTML which hosts the tales interface. The website offers three blending options for each of the three primary colors, totaling 27 short tales.
“Galatea” is a piece of interactive fiction with a single non-playing character (NPC) in a single room. The narrative is loosely inspired by the Pygmalion story, for this reason Galatea, dressed in green, stands on a pedestal as part of an exhibit.
“Galatea” is a conversational program, descended from early pieces like ELIZA, that imitates the language of a Rogerian psychotherapist. Notably, the whole concept of “Galatea” makes reference to ELIZA, which was named after the character of Eliza Doolittle in the play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw. Instead of imitating the language of therapists as ELIZA does, “Galatea” tells a narrative. However, “Galatea” is a multilinear narrative: it does not just tell one story, but many alternative stories that can develop into infinite permutations. “Galatea” was created using the Z-machine, a 1979 virtual machine originally used for the development of adventure games.
In “Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw,” Donna Leishman uses a series of animated images to tell the story of Christian Shaw, an almost eleven year old girl who lives in Balgarran. This is an exploratory piece that allows the user to experience Christian’s world.
Although there is some text, the piece is mostly non-verbal. The images change when the user chooses to hover over them and they show strange things happening. The world inhabited by Christian is filled both with terrible creatures that observe her from behind the barren trees or marvellous flora that changes in unexpected ways. Her experiences affect her perception.
This is a work of poetic narrative built upon the structure of interactive fiction. The protagonist of this piece is a defective (“bad”) machine whose malfunction has given it self awareness and independence from the clockwork functioning of a warehouse full of robots. The reader (player, interactor) is placed in this machine’s position and must learn how to survive in a world that will quickly take it apart and reabsorb it into its operational structure. The most poetic part of this work is that the lessons are in interpreting its language and interacting with the parser, both of which lead to a fresh experience of language as action and power. Using the imperative form reminds us of how powerful words can be to command a person or machine into action, much like computers follow programmed commands… provided they can parse the instructions and that they’re not defective. The shift in perspective offered by this “bad machine” is another way in which experience is made fresh, much as the Martian Poets did with their poetry.