SCREEN (2002-2005)
Authors: Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Shawn Greenlee, Ben Sascha Shine, Josh Carroll, Andrew McClain, & Robert Coover.
text by Noah Wardip-Fruin: Screen was created in the Cave, a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins as a reading and listening experience. Memory texts appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play — as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that doesn't settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster, struck words don't always return to where they came from, and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse. Playing better and faster keeps this at bay, but longer play sessions also work the memory text into greater disorder through misplacements and neologisms. While the discussion of the relationship between games and literary forms is longstanding, Screen uses text as play material in a way that this discussion has not previously explored.
Video documentation of this work has been published on the DVDs:
Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art, volume 4 & Chaise One
It has been discussed in the following publications:
George Landow's Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization
N. Katherine Hayles's Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary
The Iowa Review Web
Screen sketch for ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 (PDF)
Screen was featured in the Boston CyberArts Festival in 2003 and 2005.
Screen is maintained by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, who is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UCSC. Since 2005, the work has undergone a new iteration and was featured at SIGGRAPH 2007 at Calit2's StarCave.