Salon.COM has now partnered up with Francis Ford Coppolla's ZOETROPE magazine and is publishing one story per quarter for two weeks. This is a good read, catch it while you can! excerpt:
Bart and the team he now worked with - whom he carefully avoided naming - had a very early alpha version for a piece of software that implemented the concept of "story actants," active story parts whose data structures determined not only how they would react to manipulation by other agents - including a story's reader - but also how these parts themselves moved through the story space, signaling to each other and operating actively upon the unfolding sum of resources that composed the story. The environment in which his story actants ran, a system called DIALOGOS, sounded to me like a whole ecosystem of digital objects updating and informing each other as if they were simultaneously all characters, readers, and authors of their own tales. Here was a true Bakhtinian carnival landscape whose sole interest lay in keeping itself in perpetual motion. The code for the alpha version of DIALOGOS was still rough, unstable, and far from the finished product that Bart and his team envisioned. But Bart asked if I'd like to help road test it. I wasn't doing anything but working on a novel. I said I'd be happy to. More fun Sci-fi short stories... Literary Devices |
