Seek out a man called Luke Roberts...

...and ask him about AXOLOTL.

Click to read more ...

Pleasing Work #2

Ryan Ormonde (Website) Janek Schaefer (Website)

Click to read more ...

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.

Click to read more ...

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

'Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.' Link

Click to read more ...

Cover to Cover

Following on from a (much) earlier post about Faber Finds, I tracked down this page: 'A year ago Faber & Faber commissioned me to help with the design of a software system to generate complete & print ready book covers for their new imprint. The challenge proved to be more of a creative than a technical one, as the task given was to build a “design machine” which would be flexible enough to generate a very large (theoretically infinite) number of unique designs, one for each single book ever printed in this range, within the agreed boundaries set by the art direction(s) of Faber design team. The imprint has currently 4 genres, each with its own slightly varied style and rules I needed to take care of.' Fascinating stuff. The cover matters.

Click to read more ...