I have a bit of a brain crush on digital humanities theorist Rita Raley at the moment — we met at UCSB a year ago, but I just recently read “Walk This Way: Mobile Narrative as Composed Experience”, an essay of hers published in the book Beyond the Screen last year. In it, she discusses Hundekopf, a Knifeandfork project conducted in 2005 which is one of our favorites. Raley’s essay is one of the better analyses of locative narrative that I’ve read, and it certainly situates the themes with which Sue and myself were preoccupied far more lucidly than my own attempts at prose. She understands mobile narrative as a mode of writing rather than navigation or annotation and one that engages the city as a “temporal process rather than spatial entity”, very much on my mind recently when researching rhythmanalysis. She closes with this, which is as much of an inspiration for my work as anything:
“When a participant receives a text commanding her to look around, there is a sense in which that command is more open than closed, at least insofar as there is an interpretative gap between instruction and execution. That gap is the site of ambivalence, the uncertainty of meaning, and thus open to improvisation and experimentation.”
Knifeandfork’s The Wrench at the Brick Theater’s Game Play festival
Soft launch of The Wrench, txt your name to XXX.XXX.XXXX
Presentation titled Subversive (Mobile) Storytelling / video installation of Hundekopf at arte.mov in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
TXTML: SUBVERSIVE MOBILE STORYTELLING WITH TEXT-MESSAGING
PHP5, GPL
[code] updated 2010 November
Together with its interpreter and messaging engine, TXTML (TeXT-message Markup Language) comprises a system for creating interactive text-messaging applications.
TXTML encourages natural and open-ended exchanges that emphasize context over commands, allowing the author to dynamically tailor applications to the current location, time, and history of the user. The language is an elegant, domain-specific XML-variant which calls on an extensible library of functional modules. These include methods for natural language processing, user administration, content management, dynamically generated content via Atom/RSS feeds, and location tracking. The language’s nonlinear structure enables complex applications to be simply composed, whether narrative artworks, games, surveys, or interpretive content.
TXTML was not designed to create standard text-message applications such as mailing lists or lookup services. Rather, it is a experimental platform for investigating text-messaging as a narrative medium. It’s inspired by INFORM, AIML, and VXML, but with the particular interactive concerns of text-messaging in mind. TXTML powers artwork by Knifeandfork, including a piece called The Wrench (TXTML sourcecode available). Knifeandfork coined the term Subversive (Mobile) Storytelling to describe their recent work — the use of mobile phones to transform our experience of narrative by intertwining it with daily life. Check out this paper for a more in-depth discussion.
TXTML is free software and available for use and modification under the GPL license. Please contact us with ideas, concerns, technical questions, and inspirations.
For more info see txtml.org
