User:Tancre/2/project proposal 3

Draft 2

What do you want to make?

My final outcome would be an online digital fiction exploring the evolution of my thoughts, my experiences, and my experiments, during this academic year. The story will be developed as a science-fiction narrative focused on the exploration of the outer space (space opera), metaphor of the inner space (nexialism / connectivism), with the task to find the nature of reality, metaphor of consciousness.

Following the ideas of my previous project 'A text within a map, a map within a text', where the 3D navigable space represents the mind with its clusters of thoughts (related to texts, videos, music ...), and producing, on a top-level, the narrative itself (or vice-versa); I will develop a series of small experiments related to the main topic of my thesis: consciousness and software. In particular:

• how our consciousness can be explored, and pushed to its limits, from a subjective and objective point of view developing a consciousness of the self (self-consciousness) and its relation to the world.
• how software, instead of being idealized as human-like beings, helps to develop this self-consciousness by giving the possibility to explore and build worlds projecting our ideas and observing them critically.

These experiments will become phenomena of this universe. Mysterious/alien places, events and things populating the outer space and challenging the characters to find an explanation to their mystery, but also questioning and understanding their own existence.

How do you plan to make it?

Structure

To develop the structure of the project, I'm relating concepts of media theory (cyberspace, hypermedia, mew media, metamedia, rich media) with fiction theory (game book, digital fiction, hypermedia fiction, electronic fiction).

The homepage will contain the introduction and will be the interface to access the 'narrative' from a starting point.

The narrative will have different levels of reading:

• inside the window (explicit text)
• inside parallel windows (pop-ups...)
• inside the code (HTML, CSS, JS)
• external media
• hidden or encrypted messages

The narrative will be non-linear, with different isolated or chained events, forming a network of pages where the user will choose his own path. This will help to identify oneself in the task of exploring a world while giving a sense of control and free will.

To move from one page to another there will be essentially links:

• internal links, in other parts of the same page
• links, to other pages of the narrative or parallel windows
• external links, to force you to escape from the narrative

The narrative will be:

• non-linear > the events are not connected to each other, the user creates its own path passing through different 'worlds'.
• interactive > the user will have different possible interactions (depending on the 'world'), in a game-like environment,

I will build a website where the user caeach page will develop a part of a non-linear narrative. In this way the

connecting a like a sort of game, with an underlying narrative of the exploration of outer space, representing my self-research for consciousness (consciousness of myself and the meaning of consciousness). The user will be able to choose the path to follow and each page where he will finish will be an experiment I did or relevant things I collected. The narrative will not be totally linear so the temporality of the events can be created by the user by choosing its own path. There will be different levels of depth to let always something to find and a sense of unexpected. The narrative will not have an end, the research doesn't stop, and possibly it will continue. In the future, I could expand it.

Narrative

To develop the narrative of the project, I'm using expedients of science fiction, in particular of the subgenre of space opera, cyberpunk, connectivismo/nexialism. In particular, the nexialist approach underlines my interest in connecting the narrative with my knowledge of other disciplines.

This form of fiction can be traced back to the Odyssey. In this adventure, the characters will encounter different alien forms of 'consciousness' with the task of enlarge human perspective Be clearer about the narrative frame, how can we access the different elements Eliza, Clippy, your hackpacts &c. Want to make an open system. Narrates consciousness in its alien form, how does the Captain talk to the alien consciousness?

“An adventure in which we encounter different forms of consciousness”. (radical alterity, clouds of steam, pulsating light =communication with / observation of - an interaction)

Want to make something which engages interest, sometimes hard to play, needs commitment and generates interest to take another path… (Talk to Aymetic and Marloes about narrative and games.)]

It will contain different contents, from music to video to texts and so on...
It is important to me to highlight that is my world and to explore it you need to be really interested in it.
Who enters with a superficial approach will be rejected outside of the site, so who is really interested can come back and chose a new path.

Experiments

The experiments embedded in the experience could be other websites (part of the narrative), videos, images, music and so on.. There will from 30 to 50 small projects plus collateral content that will be grouped by their thematics but that could be explored as separate parts of the narrative. Furthermore, the projects could be, unfinished or just ideas, reflecting my struggle to understand what I'm doing and why and the necessity to change the way if not enough strong.

The experiments will touch different parts of this discourse following my personal evolution and my personal understanding of them. Right now I have:

• hackpact 1 > experiment to visualize all the parts of a software together
• hackpact 2 > explorations of software as agents (early AI)+ how to visualize software
  • 2.1 > clippy
  • 2.2 > ELIZA
  • 2.3 > Git Stalker
• hackpact 3 > liminal space between the code and its visualization + others
  • 3.1 Unspatial spaces
  • 3.2 DOM Annihilator
  • 3.3 Infinite spaces
  • 3.4 Auto Scrolling
  • 3.5 Tag's Highlighter

The science-fiction narrative can be as:

• narrator (overall situation)
• captains' log of a spaceship (with a date)
• eventually, there could be a technical explanation of the projects by the engineer of the spaceship
• other characters
• free thoughts

Example of the captain's log: Captain's Log, stardate 2263.2.
I shouldn't have gone so far from the X system. The controls are malfunctioning, my research for meaning is pushing me at the edges of the known universe. This part of the space is cold and inhospitable, the stars are less shiny than ever. I have to decide if to continue in this direction or explore another galaxy, but now I can't go back anymore to my home planet. Not without an answer.