My Looking Outwards this week is about narrative and the unique timeline techniques that computationally delivered stories can employ.

The first is Taboo, created in 2008 by Carmen Olmo-Terrasa. The work consists of web pages of ASCII art. The imagery is drawn from religion and sexual fetish.

Each image has several hyperlinks embedded, that take the viewer to a new page, and new image. It reminds me of interactive fiction, in that there is an ending, and a point at which the narrative must start over. This point is denoted by this awesome page:

The project is mostly in Spanish, so I wasn’t able to get the whole sense of the narrative. However, I did enjoy the relationships between the text that I could understand and the imagery. This relationship was even more interesting because the image was made of text.

The next project is Short Story by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead.

This story was arranged into 7 steps. Each step had two distinct options. When you click on the image, the option changed. Then, clicking on the text would transport you to the next step. So, this story could be anywhere from 7 to 14 steps long! It was also looping, so besides the enumeration, there was no clear beginning and end.

The story was fairly interesting.  I found some steps more intriguing than others, especially enjoying the ones that featured dialogue transcript or described the image they were paired with.