All posts by Tyler Clark

student blogs

Last Post

Hey Everyone!

We made it to the end!

I am happy to report that my project is about 70% done. I am very excited about it.

The whole project takes place inside Google Sheets. It starts with a sheet with two links. One takes you to a website that allows you to generate scrolling text from the opening of Star Wars. The text is a suicide note from the protagonist. After that, you go back to the sheet to continue.

Next is the iceberg. There are x’s inside the boxes in the iceberg. When you click on one, it takes you to another page in the sheet. The things above the iceberg are things that are out in the open and the things below the iceberg are hidden by the protagonist.

There are different elements that I have used. There is prose about the protagonists life before their suicide. There are song lyrics that have been made into blackout poems with links to Youtube videos of the song. There are clips from anime. If you don’t know the source material, the clips seem out of place. For example, one clip is from an anime where the protagonist kills themselves and wakes up in a new world where everyone has wings, yet people who commit suicide have black wings.

I’m going to include one hidden thing. I am going to make a box behind the moon that links to a sheet. It will take all of the songs that are included in the piece and put them in order. There will be a note from the protagonist telling the reader that when they die, this is the playlist for their funeral.

The piece is meant to be confusing, maybe a little disorienting, and not fully understood in a narrative sense. There is no one reason why the protagonist commits suicide and I want the reader to see that. I guess the reader is going through the life of someone who committed suicide and trying to put all the pieces together.

student blogs

Almost Done!

Hey Everyone!

We are winding down to the end! I am happy that things are finally winding down, but I will miss class as well!

My final project is going really well. Last class was really inspiring for helping me hone in on my project. I have finished the visual part of the project and have been working on my outline. I have a basic idea of what my narrative is and the events that I will include in the project. My project will be based in poetry and it won’t be a straight forward narrative like my thesis. Instead, my project will be a series of events that are connected, yet the moments don’t spell out a concrete story.

The moments in my project will be memories of a deceased person and I think it serves the themes of the project better if the story is more abstract like All of Your Time Tossed Selves. I have decided to include an intro page that serves as a frame work for the story. I will let the reader know that the protagonist has killed themselves and that it is up to them to unravel the memories of what was. I think this will be a gentle entry for the reader into the work instead of no intro and letting the reader figure things out on their own.

I am finishing up my outline. Once the outline is done, I just need to create the poems for the piece. Some poems will be written by me and others will be blackout poems of songs. They will be “emo” songs from the mid 2000’s. These are the songs that many millennials, including me, have grown up on. The genre is called emo because these songs are highly emotional. Many emo bands sing about depression, anxiety, and heartbreak. The song that served as a large inspiration for this piece is called “Die Romantic” by the band Aiden. Link here: https://youtu.be/YbygUxEjnos?si=A8oqqqkXBTso4Mom

The song is very dark as it is about suicide and how there is romance in dying. The video shows the singer of the band following around different people who are thinking about self harming or committing suicide. Rather than tell then to keep going, his character is the finally whisper that causes the people in the video to commit the act. It almost subverts your expectations because a happy ending is more acceptable to society. But I think that’s the whole point of the video. It’s that there are people who think and feel dark things and the words they hear can be the final thing that push them over the edge. Rather than thinking in a negative light, it shows that we have the power to help people, but we also have the power to harm. And maybe if we look at someone who committed suicide, like the protagonist of my piece, we will see moments that seemed simple on the surface, but held deep seated trauma. And maybe we’ll start to see things in a different life and embody the phrase “Everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about.”

student blogs

Final Project

Hey Everyone.

Here’s a picture of my final project.

I made this in Google Sheet. I was inspired by All of Your Time Tossed Selves and how the author took Google Forms and made a poetic narrative out of it.

The reader will navigate the piece by clicking on the boxes within the ice berg. Each box will link to another sheet on the same workbook and will contain some sort of poem. You will be able to go back to the iceberg once you are done reading the poem.

You can click on the boxes in any order. They will tell a story, but not a linear one. It’s basically about a person who commits suicide and their life experiences are the ice berg. The things above the water are what suicidal people show to society and the things underneath the water are what they don’t show people. Note how just like real icebergs, there is more under the water than above.

This is meaningful to me because my best friend commited sucide about 5 years ago and it has deeply affected me ever since.

I am excited to use a boring and professional medium like Google Sheets to make something fun. Spreadsheets are seen as corporate and uninspiring, so just like All Your Time Tossed Selves, I get to rewrite the narrative on how you can use something like Google Sheets to tell a story in a non traditional way.

student blogs

Blackout Poetry and 200 Castles

Hey Everyone.

Blackout Poetry Tool

This piece is really cool. I really like how there are different methods of selection.

My favorite method of navigation is synthesis where you select and the bot selects. What a fascinating way to work together with AI! This is a really unique way to be creative.

This tool seems like a great way to find inspiration by taking something that already exists and blacking out parts to create something new. I like how there are an infinite number of combinations of poems that the reader can make simply by selecting different words and phrases each time.

Using AI to help with the blackout poems feel like a great way to use AI to be creative while letting the reader work together with the AI rather than having the AI do all the work.

I love the simple interface of this piece and how the possibilities for new poems from the existing texts seems endless.

200 Castles

The concept of this piece is very interesting. It seems like the piece only fully works if you experience it in person. It seems like it’s a digital version of a museum tour guide / historian. On top of getting a story about each photograph, the video also showed how the pictures pop out on and change on the Ipad.

I have experienced augmented reality before with video games and it really is awesome. I think more places in society should have augmented reality components. Maybe this is a little dystopian, but how cool would it be to point your phone at different pieces in a museum and have them come to life and tell you a story?

I think this piece would have been really cool to experience in person and the effects would probably pretty mind blowing.

This piece does make think about the conversation around preserving electronic literature. Especially with a piece like this that was meant to be experienced in person to understand it’s full potential. What is the best way to capture and preserve a piece like this? And maybe a better question is, is it possible to preserve all forms of electronic literature or will some pieces be unable to be fully experienced in their original form as time goes on?

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My Presentation and Hana Feels

Hey Everyone,

Here is a link to my paper and slide deck for All of Your Time Tossed Selves: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iN8oAbIvAuFJcEk6Z5GG4Z9Rp3RjDxd7Ygep0IrR6C4/edit?usp=sharing & https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1v5Its4UyiT885PBzTwHiLZQ08whdKCCUUvUhmoKEw1k/edit?usp=sharing

Let’s talk about Hana Feels!

What an interesting concept for this piece. Being a volunteer for a mental health hotline puts the reader in a position where a person’s life is in there hands. Right from the start, the stakes are high and I am carefully considering my choices because I want to make the “right choice”.

At the beginning, it says there are three different endings which really reinforces the weight of each choice.

As I am reading/playing this piece, I start to think it would be great for someone who doesn’t take mental health seriously or is not empathetic to play this/read this. The piece really makes you feel for Hana and it makes me want to help and understand her. I think this would be great for old school types who don’t take mental health and therapy seriously. It could be a good way to help change their views.

Another thought is that this could be a great training resource for people who volunteer for these types of hotlines. When I get to some of the choices, I really sit and think about what the best response is to say in each situation. It’s not easy to know which choice will lead to Hana opening up or shutting down and I’m guessing that is intentional.

It’s really cool that you get to play as Hana’s boss. It makes me feel uncomfortable that so many of the responses that you can pick for her are cold and mean, knowing what Hana is going through.

I really like how we switch to a new character after Hana’s boss. I guess this is how the piece will play out, with new characters being introduced. But I feel like it will come full circle and we will be Will at the mental health hotline again.

Wow! I mad it to the end! That was really intense and once Hana revealed her secret, I felt like I had to finish the piece.

To say every choice felt heavy would be such an understatement. Hana’s story is so relatable that I wanted to help her get the best ending possible. I think I got a good ending because Hana told Jen her secret and they stayed friends, Will was very helpful, and Hana called her mom and planned to meet soon.

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Yardley PA 1997 and Avenue S

  • Yardley, PA, 1997
    • I really like how in order to make the text move, you can press the keys in a certain order or just press the spacebar.
      • Pressing the keys in a certain order makes this feel like a game which is really cool. 
      • Great choice by the author to make this decision as it really leans into the game aspect of interactive fiction.
    • The background colors, font, and fireflies invoke a short of coziness. It gives vibe of Summer evenings catching fireflies.
      • Since the piece has the year 1997 in it’s title, I am assuming it takes place then.
      • I definitely get nostalgia vibes from just staring at the piece.
    • The music sounds like it could be a vinyl record because I can hear record scratches.
      • It is very calming and really adds a wonderful dimension to this piece.
    • The way that the words fade away like fireflies in the dark is really working for the piece.
      • I like how the instructions tell you to press the button to make the next line of text appears as soon as the last line disappears.
        • This plays into the firefly motif since they glow and then go dark as another firefly lights up.
    • What a hauntingly beautiful ending. The way all the text overwhelmed the screen and the music rises to a crescendo and then it all flickers away into the darkness as we are reminded how ephemeral everything in life is.
  • Avenue S
    • What an interesting piece! At first I thought it would be more text based and straight forward, but there is a lot of imagery here that needs to be interpreted.
    • I think I understand one aspect of how on some pages there is a ton of clutter which is the idea of living in a city that the author misses.
    • It’s interesting how some things on the pages, like certain images, take time to make their full picture. This can be a metaphor for having to wait for things in the city – like buses, trains, lines, or slow walkers.
    • I think the author is showing what city life can look like to outsiders – overwhelming and crowded. But to people who live in the city, it is the hustle and bustle that makes the city feel alive.
    • It’s interesting to note how simple all of the people are drawn. Maybe this is the author’s way of saying that in the end, all people are the same, no matter how you appear on the outside. 
    • I really like the aspect that the reader has to make meaning out of this. The author gives hints in that each page has a different title if you look in the name of the tab. It seems the story being told isn’t a solid narrative, rather it is a series of the author’s observations about city living that tell a story of change caused by Covid.
      • What happens to the crowded city that you love, when it’s people are forced to stay away from each other? If you came to the city for the connection, what do you have in the Covid era? Just isolation. For those who feel alone, Covid in the city is an awful reminder that no matter where you go, the world is forcing you and others to keep your distance (physically and emotionally).
student blogs

Facade and Welcome Home

Hey Everyone.

Facade

This is an example of a piece of text that needs to be interactive fiction. Being a 3-d game makes the reader a character in the narrative who experiences the events 1st hand. Reading this in a non interactive way would remove the sense of tension. Having the reader input responses instills nervous emotions since the reader has the chance to make the situation worse. And after making choices you have to stay in the couple’s house and wait till they tell you to leave which add such much weight to the already tense story.

Welcome Home

I love the framing of this interactive narrative as lost media. The beginning of the narrative explains how Welcome Home was a children’s TV show that aired on an unknown channel. This is a believable narrative and maybe this piece is actually truthful? This aspect helps provide motivation for me to navigate. The What’s Welcome Home? page is a small amount of information with hyperlinks that provide more information about the show. I didn’t hesitate to click the hyperlink to learn more. The news section was extremely interesting to me. Normally, I wouldn’t pay too much mind to a news section a site like this because it’s normally just updates about the site or the authors. It’s so interesting to read about the authors attempts to uncover Welcome Home and it all sounds so believable. The neighborhood was my favorite part because it was so colorful and lively. It was awesome to learn about all of the characters and hear the soundbites.

student blogs

Interactive Poetry is Dope!

Hey Everyone!

Let’s talk about “High Muck a Muck” the interactive poem.

  • My first thought is that the navigation is overwhelming. There are so many things to click on and literal places to explore. Could this be a way of showing how overwhelming being an immigrant is? If I think about my experiences in America, I have lived in America my whole life so most American customs are familiar to me and I understand what types of people live in different states. If I were an immigrant, I would not know this. Everything would seem so new and different and I would not know where to go. So it seems that by giving the reader so many navigation choices, the poem is using navigation as a way to make the reader feel certain emotions that may have been felt by the Chinese immigrants in Canada.
  • This interactive poem has a beautiful style. The font of the poems looks like handwriting and the visuals of geography and places is in a hand drawn watercolor style. This accents the poems as it allows the reader to have a visualization to go along with the beautiful poetic language. I think this is important as we can see a crossover audience of people who like art as well as people who like poems. This could also be a thematic choice as if the author is saying how can the experiences of a group of people be confined to just words or just pictures? It’s only when the two are combined, along with audio that the full experience of a group of people can be truly understood.
  • When navigating between places, the screen fades in and then fades out. Everything disappears for a minute only to reappear again. Maybe this is a design by the creator so that it conserves resources on the backend. Even if so, it still fits the theme of this interactive poem. Everytime someone moves through spaces that take them further away from their homeland, how much of them disappears and how much reappears?
  • I love how navigation is left to the reader. It’s like being in a museum. It’s so interesting that you can tell most of what is clickable, but I had to hover over everything to be sure. I feel like this is how museums of the future will be with VR. You’ll wear a headset and look at the artwork and parts will be highlighted that tell you more about the piece.
  • This is the kind of piece where I would love a behind the scenes. This seems like it would take so much work and planning and imagination. I don’t know anything about coding, but I could imagine that for this piece specifically, the coding would be very extensive as there are many elements that need to work together to keep this piece functioning and able to run on most if not all browsers and machines.
student blogs

Navigating Electronic Lit

Hey Everyone!

So just a few observations on Twelve Blue by Joyce based on the Navigating Electronic Literature article by Pressman:

  1. This piece has hyperlinks which are the mode of navigation. New windows that open up are called “lexias” as per Pressman’s article “Navigating Electronic Literature”
  2. The reader is “writing” the story as they go along.
  3. Is there a correct order to read this text? For example, did the author have a specific narrative order in mind? Is there a wrong way to read a text such as this?
  4. Does the author know all the possible paths that we can take through a carefully calculated behind the scenes method and therefore can control the narrative order in a subtle way? Such as the links we click offer different bits of the story, but we eventually get the same overall picture each time?

Next are my notes I jotted down regarding Twelve Blue as I was reading it:

I wonder if there is a difference in navigating with a mouse like I did or with your finger like you could on mobile? What would the mobile formatting look like compared to on a computer screen? This is one way electronic literature is different from print based materials is that we can use different devices to view them which may impact how we navigate and interact with the work. Think about playing a game on your phone vs playing it on your computer or video game console.

Not an easter egg per se but if you hover over the hyperlinks on the right hand side, the text that has the address of the link has a number at the end. The first link ends with a 2 and all the other links follow in numerical order. So is the “click here to begin” page #1 and all the other pages go in order from top to bottom? The hyper link text is purposely obscured by the writer, but the links reveal hidden info.

Also the 1st hyperlink at the top has an address that ends in “sl1” and once you click it the address of the links on the next page end is “sl…” with some being “sl5” “sl6” and some even being “sl7_4”. This is definitely something as the author used these address to help themselves stay organized and probably didn’t want the reader to see them? Or did them?

I’m gonna navigate the story by trying to go from “click here to begin page” and then follow the link address on the left to go in numerical order. Are the hyperlinks in the text and not on the right side red herrings? Maybe put there to be little sides quests so you don’t analyze the hyperlinks on the left so much?

Nevermind, can’t navigate the way I wanted. When I open up a new window and go to the “Begin” page now I am hovering over the hyperlinks and the address is some variation of “sl_…” like “sl_2” “sl_3” “sl_4” etc. So maybe randomness is at play? Or just the illusion of randomness.

OMG when I started on the begin page “follow me” in the story was hyperlinked. I closed the page and started again and now it’s not hyperlinked. Glitch or intention?

I think this piece might be less about the narrative of the story and more a meta meditation on how the reader navigates the electronic text. I feel like this could be a psychological experiment. And the content of the narrative is bizarre and strange so it seems like there is more than meets the eye here. What if there isn’t even a central narrative and this text is a bunch of stories put together, but because the reader has to navigate with no map, they are reading different parts of different stories?

I feel a certain discomfort reading this and it’s more pronounced knowing that my navigation is what is moving me through the text. I didn’t write the words in the text, but I can choose what happens next even if it is like stumbling blindly in the dark. About 20 mins in and I just want to get to a few pieces that make sense. I am no longer assuming there is a concrete narrative here which allows me to navigate in the style of “enjoy the journey, not the destination.”

I got back to the “Begin” page. I just realized that I began with that page because it told me to. Is this part of how navigation in an electronic text changes the way we engage with a text? I didn’t have to begin with that page just because it said so. Maybe I lost something important by starting with that page. After many clicks, I made it back to that page and I feel a sense of failure like when you are lost and end up back where you started.

If I didn’t start with that page and didn’t know it was the beginning, would I feel that same sense of failure. So in this case, navigation of the text had a direct effect on my sense of self. Very interesting.

There is so much different information regarding characters, actions, and settings that when I click on a hyperlink and it brings me to a picture, I almost feel a sense of relief. I can look at the picture and get a general understanding of what it is so I feel grounded. It’s kinda like stopping at a bench before going on. I click the hyperlinks in order to navigate to safety (the pictures) when I feel overwhelmed.

It seems the pictures can only be in the intext hyperlinks, but not the left hyperlinks. But the intext hyperlinks can also be more text so I never know if I’ll get a picture or not. This causes a sense of apprehension when clicking the intext links and also a sense of relief when I come to a picture.

Since I am the navigator so when I get to a picture it feels like I accomplished something significant. Putting me in the driver seat makes this text less overwhelming. If I wasn’t able to navigate this text on my own, I don’t think it would be fun or interesting to read.

I think in this case, this text could be seen as showing how navigation is a central feature of electronic literature and the act of navigating the text without fully understanding it is okay because each of us had a different experience navigating the text and how and why we navigated the way we did along with how it made us feel which can be an important topic of discussion and dissection that will remind us to always keep the idea of navigation in mind when interacting with electronic texts.

student blogs

1st Blog!

Hi Everyone!

For those who don’t know me, I am Tyler Clark. I got my undergrad degree from Kean in English Writing and I am in my last semester of my Masters! I enjoy writing and reading poetry. I like playing video games, building gundam model kits, and spending time in nature.

I was thinking about the concept of electronic literature and it’s connection to video games.

In the early days of video games when technology was limited there were video games called text based adventures. These games would show you a screen of text which tells you what is going on. Something like how you were exploring an abandoned house with your friends and have now become trapped in the house alone.

The way you play the game is by typing things into a textbook. For example, the game text might say you are in a room and it is dark. So you might type in, “turn on the light”. The game would then say something like “You turn on the light and can see x,y, and z.” Then you would type something like “pick up object x”. And so on and so forth. So basically the game is entirely text based and your text input moves the story along. While being extremely basic, these text based adventures are some early examples of what I believe electronic literature is.

Another style of electronic literature through video games are visual novels. These visual novels are just what they sound like, text based novels with visuals and sounds on the screen. You don’t really play these games so much as you interact with them. You read the text on the screen and press a button to advance it. There are opportunities in the story to make decisions which alter the story. While the text is displayed on the screen, you will see visuals of the characters and locations within the story as well as sounds related to what is happening.

These types of games were never my cup of tea as there wasn’t much “gameplay”, but visual novels are an interesting way to read a novel while getting the same dopamine rush video games offer. These types of games are such an interesting evolution from the text based adventure games that I mentioned earlier.

As I reflect on the connection between video games and electronic literature, I start to realize how much literacy is required to play certain games as some can be very text heavy, especially with earlier video games before voice acting was a regular feature in games. Video games as electronic literature might seem like a stretch at first, but I feel they share a deep connection that is worth exploring.