keywords: cybertext, collaborative writing, imaginary landscapes, bot dialogue, cross-platform characters
Clashscapes is a practice-oriented research project for producing significant textualities in new and old media. Our aim is to design interaction structures and mechanisms which allow great pieces of fiction to come alive in web-dialogue or in digital or printed novels.
Clashcapes is an umbrella project for several subprojects experimenting on cybertext design. In our textual experiments, criticism is directed towards the unsatisfying contents, structures and dynamics of interaction in existing textual information spaces. Questioning the metaphors and principles of interaction in multi-user environments forms the basis of our critical practice. One of our main considerations has been the production of subjectivity of the interactor in information spaces, which we have experienced as limiting.
Our method is textual and digital collaboration. By studying and experimenting with the process of collaboration, our attempt is to invent more justified forms for digital readership, interaction and participation in multi-user environments.
We started with empirical interventions in different multi-user environments (Project Hattiwattis).The nomadic intervention soon grew out to be a concept and a script for an intelligent, emotionally and poetically fulfilling text chat (Villa Mirdia). The basic cybertextual element of the Villa, the chatterbot, then grew into an interventionist chatterbot character residing in the Palace Worlds chatting environment (Laban). At the same time, our fictive characters in their imaginary landscapes got a digital life in various experimental cybertexts (Lunatic Children). These experiments all affect on writing a print novel (Koh-I-Noor) - across different platforms. |
