“Redshift & Portalmetal” by Micha Cárdenas. Your planet is dying. You have an apparent choice: travel to the Ice Planet and start over, or stay and try to help. Every layer of this piece is rich with video, audio, and a textual narrative that triangulates between science fiction, philosophy, and a sort of future-tending Romanticism.
High Muck a Muck: Playing Chinese, an Interactive Poem was created and conceived by the High Muck a Muck Collective. You enter this gorgeously illustrated and written story by clicking on a lottery card–an appropriate visual metaphor for taking your chances on a narrative that determines itself as you progress through it.
“Mutanist Autonomous Zone,” a series of photos with text by Walter Van Der Mäntzche, as translated into English by Nick Montfort and Patsy Baudoin, is funny, charming, and very challenging critique of exactly what you’re doing right now: experiencing human culture via the mediation of the internet.
“Window (for John Cage)” by Katherine Norman is subtitled “an undecided sound essay.” This lovely, pastoral piece is full of pieces of audio and photos that Norman collected over the course of a year as part of an “unplanned ritual” every morning before work. Norman says that her only criteria was to try to not choose what she was shooting or recording. Thus the homage to sound-artist John Cage, the master of composing not by intention but under the constraints of chance. Cage used coin tosses, for example, that he then interpreted via the I Ching, or Book of Changes, in order to write some of his work. Norman’s work is deeply thoughtful and meditative. Norman says that, after she finished “Window,” she felt changed: the same view out her window was one she grew to appreciate more over time. Below is a video screen capture demo (turn up the volume!) of the original website; depending on which browser you are using (Chrome works well), the original site still works.
Window – demo movie from Katherine Norman/novamara on Vimeo.
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Homer on a flash drive — The Electronic Literature Organization at WSU Vancouver