Stuart
Moulthrop


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In Development

This page lists projects not yet published or under continuing development.

Title image from <em>Emaji Naratgee Marakka</em>

Title image from Emaji Naratgee Marakka.

Emaji Naratgee Marakka. 2018: pending publication at Wonderbox

HTML/Javascript. Project available |HERE|.

This work in two parts -- a troll-tweet simulator interrupting an American fable -- began as an exercise in sympathetic magic. If you can simulate the production of evil, does it give you power over it? Sadly, not. Which is where thoughts turn to wishes. If wishes were cheesburgers. Godpseed, Mrs. K.

The project has been accepted for publication by Lyle Skains' Wonderbox and is awaiting the launch of that venue.


Title image from <em>Wise Marx</em>

Title image from R/Wise Marx.

Nineteen Floor TV. In development, 2011-present

This effort began when I taught Michael Joyce's Was: annales nomadiques, subtitled "A Novel of Internet," in a graduate seminar in 2011. See my ebr essay "Lift This End" for more context. Along with my students, I became very interested in social mediation, remix, and an approach to digital text very different from node-link hypertext on the one hand, and games on the other. After compiling a series of Flarf-like "poems of internet of novel," I had the idea of a larger effort, initially a multi-part series of interfaces to the database of Joyce's deconstructed novel. These were to be collectively called "R" (as in, that was, we are), until I realized that capital letter already means something to digital humanists.

The strongest part of "R" was something called Wise Marx (ars magna omnia vincit), in which a textbase of extracts from Was provides Google searches, which are then mined to create a second textbase. A JavaScript program mixes the two together at runtime to produce a novella-length hybrid text. I even added illustrations. I used XML to structure the textbases, and unfortunately didn't keep up with craft knowledge on that technology, so my XML rendering code currently generates fatal errors. There is probably a fairly simple fix for this in the offing.

It remains to be seen whether this kind of textual appropriation would be acceptable to Fiction Collective 2, who published Was. If necessary I can install a governor to stay within the 10% fair use quotation rule.

When I developed and showed this project during my residency at Banff in 2012, my advisors J.R. Carpenter and Joe Amato both suggested the project would be stronger on the Interruptive Fiction model, with some kind of continuous text looped through the mixery. After the XML fix, this is where the work will begin.


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