My talk/paper “Narrativity in Virtual Reality: From Meaning-Making to World-Building” has been accepted and will be featured at the Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Vancouver in June. Work on the trailer for QueerskinsVR should be done by April, so I will be able to show it then as part of the talk. 

Using my own experience in translating a work of electronic literature into virtual reality as a point of departure, I will look at how storytelling in VR differs from and is similar to storytelling in other formats. Drawing examples from cinema, video art, video games, electronic literature and early VR experiments, I will examine trends in narrativity which predate the emergence of VR as a significant storytelling medium. These include: the move away from what Hiroki Azuma calls “grand” and “small” narratives to “database” narrative and the accompanying changes in perceptions and evocations of time and space, the move away from characters to processes that create affective asymmetries that I will relate to Thomas LaMarre’s analysis of Japanese anime, the move from meaning-making to aesthetics including the tendency to emphasize musicality (rhythm, repetition, and tone) over verbal semantics that relates to Flusser’s theory of gesture and Kojéve’s meditations on the end of history, the move from “authenticity” to kitsch and performativity that I will discuss via the writings of Walter Benjamin, Brecht, and Celeste Olalquiga, and lastly, the increasing role of “things” as a form of narrative that I will examine in light of Ian Bogost’s writings on video games and object-oriented ontology. 

I will end with a discussion of desire, intentionality, presence, and subjectivity in storytelling using the example of my new work in progress Queerskins VR,  which combines 360 degree video and computer modeled environments to tell the story of a devoutly Catholic mother’s relationship to the estranged son she has lost to AIDS.

My proposal for a talk at “Forms of the Apocalypse” a symposium at Université Paris 8 in March has been accepted.

I am delighted to be collaborating with visionary VR creator Oscar Raby and producer Katy Morrison on a virtual reality version of Queerskins through their VRTOV production studio. We will have a trailer available in March and expect to complete production by mid-late 2016. Updates soon.

It’s been a year since I gave the keynote speech at the Electronic Literature Organization conference, but an essay based on that has finally been published in Electronic Book Review.  I’m planning to expand it to a book-length electronic form with multiple media.

In the Brazilian poetry and criticism journal Sibila

http://sibila.com.br/critica/a-autopsia-de-um-poema-de-kenneth-goldsmith/11761

#tech #elit #queer Really pleased to be included in the next Electronic Literature Collection. If you haven’t had a chance to check  out Queerskins, try it in Chrome or Safari. Thanks as always to my collaborator Cyril Tsiboulski, interactive designer and co-founder of Cloudred Studio. Queerskins explores the nature of love and forgiveness through the story of a young gay physician from a rural Missouri Catholic family who dies of AIDS at the beginning of the epidemic. It consists of 40,000 words of diaristic text, two hours of audio monologues from five different characters, and over a hundred photos and videos curated from Flickr Commons and YouTube and beautiful little Fiip videos of L.A. by filmmaker Jarrah Gurrie.

#MobileMayakovsky is a mobile lounge/library/workshop/performance space designed by architect Peter Franck. It is a public art project that brings the linguistic playfulness, exaggerated style and oblique political commentary inherent to
the manifesto into the digital age. Inspired by the life and poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky,  the project provides participants the opportunity to learn about, reflect upon, and be inspired by early Russian avant-garde artists, both their revolutionary artistic achievements and the often violent repression of their artistic freedom.  With the help of local artists, graphic designers, and poets, passersby will create their own manifestos, which will be printed on site,Tweeted, and performed. In the process, we hope that Russians will reclaim the avant-garde as a celebrated part of their history and creatively respond to current political, social and cultural conditions which stymie free artistic expression. Mayakovsky is a problematic figure in Russia who has been used/resurrected for many purposes. We are, in a sense, resurrecting him again, as a problematic symbol of rebellious creativity that was stifled for political purposes (Mayakovsky himself writing that he “stepped on the voice of his own song”.) The library offers visitors, especially younger people, the opportunity consider the Russian avant-garde  in all its complexities, and, then,  inspired and/or disturbed by this knowledge, to create their own manifestos that will be printed, tweeted and exhibited on site.

Atomic Vacation combines a contemporary database-influenced narrative with

the emotional potency of oral history to generate spaces for actively

contemplating national identity, global citizenship, technology and

embodiment. While players explore Google landscapes of the American West,

visiting places of natural beauty like the Grand Canyon, as well as sites

of nuclear missile storage and testing, Shizuku, a robot girl from the

possible future, narrates the Pinnochio-esque story of her former life on

Earth. Along the journey, the player encounters archival objects (image,

video, sound and text)  from Cold War history (e.g. remarkably callous

State Department films about HIroshima, Paul Robeson’s  testimony

about being considered “less than an American” before the House

Un-American Activities Committee, etc.) and the present-day (e.g. DARPA

research on “narrative neurobiology,” a rescued egg-farm

chicken’s first walk on grass, the Japanese news report about a

prototype robot girl). Players can access other players’

contributions of data (text, sound, and image) offered in response to

in-game challenges, and contribute their own.  Part multimedia fiction,

part historical archive, part community art project (players earn points

for tweets and for adding media to the game) AV allows players to interact

with their present-day selves from the vantage point of a post-apocalyptic

future. The object of the game is to prevent that future from becoming a

reality and to engage players in small, but personally meaningful acts of

archiving, contemplation, and aspiration. The final project will be an

Android app with narrative extensions housed and distributed through

Twitter.