On Leishman's "Red Riding Hood" and Waber's "Strings"

Screenshots of Leishman's Red Riding Hood.

Well, here's something I found appropriate for my blogosphere. Stimulated by my Honors New Media Literature class being taught at VCU by professor Nick Sharp, I formed responses to some new exciting works that are bridging art and literature through an electronic interface.

The first one being Donna Leishman's "Red Riding Hood" (one of my favorite childhood fairy tales), and Dan Waber's "Strings", both of which are accessed through the Electronic Literature Organization @ www.eliterature.org

The prompt to which I responded was:

Does Leishman's putting the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood into interactive code actually do anything to the story that couldn't have been done with a comic book? Does Waber's "Strings" do anything that couldn't have been just aw well accomplished with a set of still images?


I believe that if Leishman's Red Riding Hood was done via comic book, a completely different point would have been communicated to the user. I think that by choosing to do an interactive format the work addresses questions or provokes thoughts in the user that never would have been brought up if it were a comic book format. As Beiguelman put it, "The interface is the message" (29). I think that people may be uncomfortable with this because it is a new medium that has few conventions (meaning you don't really know how to operate it, this can be so scary), whereas books have a long history, and their form and function are known and accepted by everyone, and rarely questioned. We certainly have had revolutions within all other art forms: painting, sculpture, photography, but it seems that the content (ideas/words) within the bound book evolves, but not many challenge the actual 'interface' itself. Leishman's work transcends the narrative story. People might argue that it's interactiveness is a sham because it's pre-programmed and you don't have much decision making power, but to me the work is a lot like a dream. You might want more control, but you don’t. I think the surreal, weird, and disturbing nature of the work corresponds and is amplified by the level of interactiveness. I enjoyed figuring out what was clickable, and the level of interactiveness of the things on the screen. Both works were successful to me in their ability to "[turn] an object into an event" (17).

Strings also goes beyond what simple text on a page would communicate. The media allowed you to interpret these words with your other senses. I would correlate the intensity of the movement of the words with how they might be spoken, or even to internal nonphysical feelings. Flirt made me laugh because I couldn’t figure out what it was trying to ‘say’ to me, which is often the case when we interact with humans. These titles though were also very important in directing how you were supposed to interpret the active words. These titles functioned like simple text, but the strings themselves, did not.

*The text being referenced is Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss, "new media poetics: contexts, technotexts, and theories"

That being said, I strongly encourage all those out there to check out both works.

I truely believe we are turning into cyborgs...I will continue to explore this further in this blog.