Transfiction

Transfiction is a narrative framework conceived by Alok b. Nandi, circa 2000, for mixed realities installations in public spaces as well as for installations in museums. AR/VR/MR – www.transfiction.net

Transfiction (a.o. with the EU IST art.live consortium, the publisher Casterman and the TELE lab at UCL Louvain-la-Neuve) for real-time interactive installations such as :

  • Hyperadventures
  • Panoptiques à la Saline royale d’Arc et Senans
  • utHOPEia in Salzburg
  • urbicande-la-neuve on Internet

Alok Nandi, Mixed Reality Story-telling: Story-setting and Story-sharing, Digital Art & Culture, 2003, Melbourne, Australia
http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Nandi.pdf

Alok Nandi, Xavier Marichal, Transfiction, chapter 2, pp. 13-33, in M. Eskelinen and R. Koskimaa (eds), CyberText – Yearbook 2000, Publications of the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture 68, 2001, ISBN 951-39-0905-0

The collection includes several essays that examine, broadly speaking, literary texts infused with computer technologies. These include Raine Koskimaa’s admirably thorough reading of Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden; Janez Strehovec’s study that grapples with aspects of literature made possible only when delivered on the Internet; “Introduction to Cybertext Narratology,” an ambitious piece by Markku Eskelinen that blends Aarseth’s cybertextual categories, recent narrative theories, postmodern constructions, and specific practices drawn from work of the OuLiPo; and “Transfiction,” a remarkable article by Alok Nandi and Xavier Marichal that explores the “mixed reality” that occurs when the virtual and the real overlap—transfiction is achieved when a computer’s graphic interface joins a web camera whose real-time images become part of the virtual landscape. The influence of Aarseth’s notion of “nontrivial effort” required to read and build pathways through ergodic literature (a notion that shifts attention from the literary object to the person reading it) is greatly enhanced by the attention in many of these essays to the sort of cooperation, interest, and patience that keeps the user engaged.

Excerpt from Electronic Book Review