Bookishness by Jessica Pressman;

Author:Jessica Pressman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

THE ICE-BOUND CONCORDANCE

Computers not only enable bookish fakery; they also read and write. Spam filters, advertising pop-ups, Twitter bots, and automated writing software attest to this fact. Yet the idea of a computer writing the great American novel or understanding a poem has long been a sensitive spot for humanists and computer scientists alike, a source of consternation for cultural pundits. (For a literary example, consider Richard Powers’s 1995 novel Galatea 2.2, which explores the idea that a computer can pass a master’s exam in English literature.) What would it mean for a computer to pass the Turing Test not by imitating a human in a conversational setting but by writing a work of literature that moves us? This is the question posed by Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe’s The Ice-Bound Concordance, a born-digital and deeply bookish work of interactive fiction that takes as its starting point the fact that AI can read and write.27 Through layered narrative and multimodal gameplay, the work promotes consideration about what role is left for humans in the production of literature and bookish culture when computers author books.

The Ice-Bound Concordance is a work of augmented-reality (AR) literature comprising an app downloaded to a digital device and a very bookish book that readers must hold alongside the device in their hands. This transmedia circuit produces two intertwined stories that explore how AI changes the production and reception of literature. The first narrative is an interactive game set in a mysterious research station located in the Arctic. The Carina Polar Research Station holds secrets of scientific research and of the lives lost within it, but it is slowly slipping into the ice. The reader-player navigates the station’s labyrinthine structure and excavates clues from within it; moving her avatar across the screen’s interface allows her to journey deeper into the station’s lowest levels before the game’s time runs out. The work makes full use of ludic techniques for gameplay, turning reading into a game of search-and-find and taking advantage of multimodal (visual, sonic, gestural, spatial) aspects of digital storytelling.

FIGURE 4.7  Screenshot from the augmented-reality narrative game The Ice-Bound Concordance (2016), by Aaron Reed and Jacob Garbe.

Source: Permission granted by artists.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.