newer yarns

A love story: searching for gold in Key West…

Where you rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge anything (or anyone) you want!

Messages from a brave new world…

The Lord’s Prayer, remix.

For better or worse, this President breaks the mold.

A western con with your choice of ending.

The Fast Forward™ app animates any book so it can be read in under five seconds.

Three-time winner of the MBPW (Most Boring Person in the World award), John Smith is about to take a radical step into the next phase of his life.

“A Change of Heart” asks the question, Is there life after college? For Danny Clay, there is no easy answer as his job, dreams, love life, and health devolve into surreal chaos. Refusing to be molded, “Clay” navigates through one strange event after another on his predestined path to what he has always rejected: change.

“Protect the Poet” envisions a future in which the United States has been invaded by the “Enemy.” The government has collapsed, the President has escaped to Mexico, and Congress is in hiding. There is no internet, and communication can only be achieved through speech, print, and semaphore.

It is in this futuristic landscape that the Poet wanders with his loyal entourage of printers, typesetters, support staff, and body guards. He is the most revered man in the nation, and he is also the most hunted. The Enemy wants to capture him, but if they do, they will have won the war.

“Two Roads Diverged” is a story of family loss and its aftermath. Using Robert Frost’s famous poem “The Road Not Taken” as its metaphorical model, this interactive narrative offers brief glimpses into the paths three children take after the accidental death of their parents. The narrative also offers a view–through archetypal imagery and remote voices–of the darker side of the family’s tragic past.

FLY is an artist, poet, singer, and media figure. He is also a housefly. This is his life.

“This Is” provides a digital commentary on fiction and the nature and history of narrative. There are multiple elements at play in this work: text, audio, animation, and still image. How the viewer experiences this piece is dependent on their mouse or touch interactions with its central, animated “characters.”

This work is open-source and created with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript.

“The Seven Wonders” looks at the wonders of the western world, and a solitary exploration of a kitchen, as a man deals with his absent girlfriend. This work reduces a story to its basic narrative form through the use of archetypal images, video, animation, and text.

“My Life in Three Parts” addresses the question of how personal identity is influenced by the language of the web. Our online interactions are often circumscribed by tracking software and various social networks. As a result, our identities–how we view ourselves and how others view us–are shaped and expressed, in part, by personal browsing practices and the vocabulary associated with those practices.

So what do our autobiographies look like in this new world? To answer this question, “My Life in Three Parts” ignores the conventions of traditional autobiography in favor of oblique readings of iconic visual symbols, terminology, and concepts found online within the private and social web-spaces of shopping, art, and mathematics.

This work uses text, images, audio, and videos to create a synthesized narrative of the self. Nothing about personal identity is clear in this work: the life behind the story is only implied.

“In the Hall of Human Origins” reduces a story to its basic narrative form through the use of archetypal images and text.

Viewers can look for the text in “Silence,” but they will not find it. This story uses the P22 “Cage Silence” font, which is inspired by John Cage’s famous work 4’33”. This font does not appear on screen or print. There is no vector or bit map information other than the period character. All of the information is searchable, but it is not visible unless you look at the source code.

< Cody in Love > seeks the true nature of code as it is manifested in text. The work is a personification and an elegy to love. It is an examination of the digital heart, and how to find it within a coded and text-based world.

In “How They Brought the News from Paradise,” a first-person speaker narrates his story (in heroic verse) as he swims from one end of a resort pool complex to another in search of what he thinks is more alcohol, but is in fact a journey to find his marriage and himself. The poem plays with the epic and tragic within a setting stifled with consumerism and class separation.

“In A World Without Electricity” is the story of a life in celebration, and a life taken. Using text, images, animations, and sound, the piece describes the murder, or possible suicide, of a young woman, and the struggle of her friends and family to reconcile themselves to their loss. There are no easy answers in the world of this narrative, and questions still remain. This work is based on a true story.

“Last Words” is a narrative of eight individuals, their brief archetypal histories, and their last words spoken at the moment of death. Using text, images, audio, and video, this online work captures the ambiance of the afterlife and how people live on through the data they generate while living.

“The ABCs of UFOs” is the purported website of a UFO investigation team.