166 Posts Categorized "Kean University 2018"

Digital Alchemy and Networked Narratives course at Kean University in 2018 taught by Alan Levine (see all Kean University Alchemists)

Kean University 2018, The Network

Following the Stars…

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

Feature image: Oddly serendipitous journal entry from this morning~ Sharif Ezzat’s Like Stars in a Clear Night Sky is a Flash hypertext poem, whose simple interface asks readers to navigate the space one star at a time. The work is designed to look like a starry night sky, several of the stars acting as nodes that link to free-verse, narrative poems. The title of each poem is a reference to a line in a poem that is read in Arabic (with English […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Assembling the Story from the Pieces…

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

There are many stories in the Valley Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger is a work of hypertext fiction that explores the nature of love, relationships, family, business, class, and, ultimately, storytelling in a disjointed but compellingly, collage-like way. Uncle Roger consists of three different story files, A Party in Woodside, The Blue Notebook, and Terminals. This small collection of storie revolves around the early days of the Silicon Valley tech industry and people involved in the burgeoning industry. For this review, I explored A Party in Woodside. This story file is […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Cruising Right Along….

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

Meditating on Moving Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar’s Cruising is a compelling work of kinetic poetry that explores themes of love and youth and whose actual design reinforces its exploration of “temporal and spatial themes”. This work is made using Flash and it combines still images with linear, moving text. The speed of the text, and thus the speed of navigating this piece, is determined by the user’s cursor placement and movement. Users are tasked with finding a “balance” that allows […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

*Spoiler* Icarus Doesn’t Die in this One…

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

Shocking In Daniel Merlin Goodbrey’s Icarus Needs, users get to go on a “hypercomic adventure” as they try to wake up “everyone’s favorite mentally unhinged cartoonist, Icarus Creeps”. The premise of this work is that Icarus fell asleep while playing video games and has somehow ended up in a surreal, cartoon-esque dreamscape ruled by a squirrel king??? Icarus needs to find a way out of this nightmare while rescuing his girlfriend, Kit, and defeating a very squirrely squirrel king. Users play as […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Putting the Pieces Together…???

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

“Dada Dada Dada, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies: LIFE.” ~ Tristan Tzara Uncovering the Story The story I want to tell is one I’ve been assembling the pieces of for a while now. Ever since my first interactions with ELit, specifically with works by Jason Nelson, Juliet Davis, and Porpentine, I feel like there has been this story developing. Between then and now, that tale has existed in a kind of in […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Because I Am (Still) Alive

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

“One way or another, the dream will come. Fight.” (*I recommend checking out my first post on this work before delving into this one~) Porpentine’s With Those We Love Alive is a dark, twisted, and fantastical Twine game that invites readers to become participants in the act of experiential inscription by asking readers to draw sigils on themselves as they work through the piece.  These sigils are meant to represent experiences typically invisible or intangible or hidden like “new beginnings” or “pain […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Piecing Myself Together

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

Am I in pieces? “This was the hardest thing to internalize; that something permanent but invisible had happened.” The Raven Boys – Maggie Stiefvater In Juliet Davis’ Pieces of Herself, the embodiment and construction of feminine identity as well as the relationship of the female self to public and private space is explored. This work of Elit operates through a drag-and-drop interface which allows readers to comb through different environments of the work for icons that can be “dragged” and “dropped” on the […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Re-imagining Assemblage in the Taroko Gorge Remix Collection~

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

Some Reassembly Required… Taroko Gorge (2009) is a work of generative poetry created by Nick Monfort and inspired by a body of poetry written about the Taiwanese national park of the same name. Lines of poetry are generated via a JavaScript program, designed to format each line of the work in a specific way. Monfort states, “…this generator forms strophes that begin and end with a “path” line and may have one or more more static “site” lines in between. Between each […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

I Can’t Believe It’s Not Journalism!

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

“It’s like journalism–only better.” (pg. 6, slide 3) My Second Rodeo So….that Hobo Lobo of Hamelin is some story, right? Some great work of far-off, far-fetched fiction, right? Like, could you even imagine living in a world like that???? Wild, right? I’m dying Wild. Help. Alright, alright. Enough thinly veiled references to the blazing “hugest” dumpster fire politics in the greatest country in the world have become. However cathartic it may be….  I’m ready for Ashton Kutcher to pop out and reveal America’s been punked. I remember […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Viva La…Russian Revolution???: Analyzing Neo-Futurism & The Mutability of Reality and Story in Illya Szilak’s Reconstructing Mayakovsky

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

Здравствуйте~ Reality remains fatal, a bullet in the brain ~ In the names of progress and peace, what would you sacrifice? Some of your freedoms? Most of your voice? All of your body? Replace your autonomy with technology, swap democracy for technocracy? These questions seem to be at the narrative heart of Illya Szilak’s Reconstructing Mayakovsky (2008), a work of Eliterature (ELit) heavily inspired by the rise of both terrorist activity and technological advancement in the early 21st century as well […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Diving Back In

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

“‘…there is no story at all; there are only readings’ (124)”. I don’t know why WordPress is throwing my links all over the page like this. I had to cut a bunch of links to make the post remotely legible. I’ve tried many different things to fix the problem and I think it’s just a system error for the time being. Believe me, I’m annoyed about it too >.> Flux & Flow So…. I’m back at it again. Doing the ELit […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Diving Back In~

Profile Picture for helterskelliter helterskelliter on

“‘…there is no story at all; there are only readings’ (124)”. Flux & Flow So…. I’m back at it again. Doing the ELit thing, writing the feelings whatever those are down, being “insightful”… You know, the usual. Anyway, let’s get down to business. I don’t remember what I thought of Jessica Pressman’s “Navigating Electronic Literature” the first time I read it eons and eons ago but this time around, I found it to be thought-provoking, informative, and intellectually engaging. The article articulates […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Time to Say Goodbye

Profile Picture for Marissa Marissa on

me.Well netnarr, it's been a really fun semester. I've been so excited to relive the Digital Alchemy and Networked Narratives experience with a new group of students, and I cannot believe that May has come so quickly. It's been simultaneously a very long and a very short semester-- although I can look back and remember the first week, it also feels as if January were years ago. We've experienced a lot this semester and played with a variety of digital […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

Time to Say Goodbye

Profile Picture for Marissa Marissa on

me.Well netnarr, it's been a really fun semester. I've been so excited to relive the Digital Alchemy and Networked Narratives experience with a new group of students, and I cannot believe that May has come so quickly. It's been simultaneously a very long and a very short semester-- although I can look back and remember the first week, it also feels as if January were years ago. We've experienced a lot this semester and played with a variety of digital […]

more...

Kean University 2018, The Network

What I Learned in Net Nar Is!!

Profile Picture for Eniola Asebiomo Eniola Asebiomo on

In all honesty, I    struggled so much throughout the Network Narrative course. Being a digital alchemist is hard when you come into something  just to find out you know little -to nothing about the digital world you thought you were so familiar with. I    remember my first day of class I    was so overwhelmed when I    came in to find not a physical professor, but a screen. This was the first course in fours years of attending Kean University, that […]

more...