WRT: Writer Response Theory

What are the digital art forms that use plain text? One of the most common examples is ASCII art - using arrangements of characters to create images. Another is artful computer code, including quines (which generate their own source code as output) and artfully obfuscated code which stretches the limits of how source […]

A year ago, we discussed the idea of QR Code and unreadable digital text - and this spring, we began work on a QR-based net.art project that uses the unreadability to retell a classic cryptographic mystery. Here is another aesthetic experiment in unreadable encoding - a poem often accused of illegibility, rendered in columns of […]

When a digital artwork, game, or story exists in many forms across many hardware and software systems, what is the ‘real’ work, and do we experience it differently?
Right now I’m thinking about that ur-interactive fiction, Adventure (a.k.a. ADVENT, Colossal Cave Adventure, etc.) - which through its complex history has been both massively cross-platform and massively […]

cent milles milliards de po?mesuploaded by mjutabor
In Raymond Queneau’s combinatoric sonnet, “Cent milles milliards de po?mes,” 10 sonnets of 14 lines each are cut in strips. By selecting strips the reader can create 10^14 recombinations, which, as the title says, is 100,000,000,000,000 possible poems. But one can arrive at 10^14 poems by many […]

Flowchart art uses a multilinear diagram that convey stories or experiences. Examples such as EGBG’s ???Telemarketing Counterscript??? were discussed earlier on WRT in relation to interactive fiction mapping practices. Some other examples of flowchart art include works by Scott McCloud, Chris Ware, and Craig Robinson.
Scott McCloud’s ???Carl??? sequence from Understanding Comics is a multilinear story […]