Storyland is a browser-based narrative work of electronic literature. The project is included in the first Electronic Literature Directory.[1] It was created by Nanette Wylde in 2000 and is considered a form of Combinatory Narrative or Generative Poetry which is created with the use of the computer's random function.[2][3]

Description

"The computer-generated combinatorial story is one of the oldest forms of digital writing. Storyland, with its simple circus frame, plays with this tradition by performing recombination of the sort seen in cut-up and in Oulipian work. The system repeatedly plots amusingly repetitive stories, inviting the reader to consider, to read its scheme for composition." -- From Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1[4][1]

E-lit scholar Scott Rettberg writes, "Nanette Wylde’s Storyland uses a far simpler mode of random text generation, though the short stories the program generates are often quite accessible and amusing. To operate the work, the reader presses a “new story” button. Using a simple “mad-lib” style technique of selecting stock characters, situations and phrases from a database and delivering them into a structured six-paragraph template, Storyland delivers its readers a new combinatorial story every time the button is pushed.”[5][6]

Versions

Storyland v1 was created in Javascript in 2000. It premiered at the 2002 SIGGRAPH conference art exhibition in San Antonio, Texas. The code is documented in Computer Graphics, Vol. 36 No.3, Summer 2002.[7]

Storyland v2 was created in Adobe Flash in 2004. This version included animation and sound. Version 2 was included in the first Electronic Literature Organization Directory in 2006.[8] When Flash software was entirely deprecated in 2021 Wylde archived the project and re-published the Javascript version.[9]

Reception

Samira Nadkarni writes about Storyland, "Wylde’s choice of music is not unintentional. On one hand, it immediately indicates its use of re-purposed material, as Fučík’s original composition is intended to depict a military march drawing from the composer’s interest in the Roman Empire. In contrast, Laurendeau’s pared down small band version is commonly associated with the entrance of circus clowns, a far cry from the grandeur originally intended by Fučík. On the other, its use meta-textually gestures to the manner in which performers within a circus, while inhabiting certain fixed roles, use new guises to play a multiplicity of parts for their audience. The work’s use of its own template within which to use material that is sampled and appropriated, combined and recombined, displays not just the cultural production that occurs within performances such as those within a circus, but on a larger scale to our own performances of digital and popular culture. Storyland‘s display of the poignant as well as the absurd mirrors contemporary creation of narratives, the manner in which information is purposed and re-purposed to new ends."

Nadkarni continues, "Additionally, much like circus clowns, the piece gains a great deal of its impetus from its pretense of immediacy. The stories create the impression that they are only just formed, working with the reader to veil the fact that the work’s random text generation is intentional and written into the piece. However, eventually the stories begin to betray themselves, revealing these repetitive elements. Wylde’s digital work asks the reader to confront and question our use of language, the narratives we structure, and the manner in which these are purposed within the performances of our everyday lives."[10]

Jonathan Baillehache compares Storyland to Surrealist writing, "Nanette Wylde’s generative poem Storyland, for instance, published in the Electronic Literature Collection, generates random short poems by coupling sets of words according to a series of randomly obtained numbers against the soundtrack of an amusement park (Wylde 2006)." He continues, "When compared to earlier uses of chance operation in literature, a piece like this one resembles some of the automatic writings produced by André Breton and Philippe Soupault in their collective work The Magnetic Fields. . . The difference between Nanette Wylde’s Storyland and Breton and Soupault’s Magnetic Fields is that the former is produced according to a computational algorithm involving randomizers and user interaction, and the latter by two free-wheeling human subjects. But the resemblance between the two is uncanny, and part of Storyland’s interest is to question, through its resemblance with surrealist writing, the assumed difference between the human mind and cybernetics. Generative poetry has indeed a tendency to present itself as a simulation of such or such print literature or writer. One could argue that a piece like Storyland is the only one of the two that could claim to be randomly generated because it relies on computational randomizers, the computing equivalent of dice. . ."[3]

Storyland is taught in university level literature classes.[11][12]

References

  1. 1 2 "Storyland". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  2. ↑ "Storyland - Rhizome Artbase". artbase.rhizome.org. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  3. 1 2 Baillehache, Jonathan (2013). "Chance Operations and Randomizers in Avant-garde and Electronic Poetry: Tying Media to Language". Textual Cultures. 8 (1): 38–56. doi:10.14434/TCv8i1.5049. ISSN 1933-7418.
  4. ↑ "Storyland". The NEXT. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  5. ↑ Rettberg, Scott (2008). "Dada Redux: Elements of Dadaist Practice in Contemporary Electronic Literature". Fiberculture Journal. Digital Art & Culture Conference Perth (11).
  6. ↑ "Electronic Literature, Chapter 2: Combinatory Poetics | ELMCIP". elmcip.net. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  7. ↑ Eber, Dena (Summer 2002). "SIGGRAPH 2002 Art Gallery: Process and Product". Computer Graphics. 36 (3).
  8. ↑ "Electronic Literature Collection Volume One". collection.eliterature.org. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  9. ↑ "Storyland ©2000 Nanette Wylde". preneo.org. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  10. ↑ Nadkarni, Samira (2014-02-18). ""Storyland" by Nanette Wylde". I ❤️ E-Poetry. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  11. ↑ "English 589". writing.upenn.edu. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  12. ↑ "Storyland | ELMCIP". elmcip.net. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
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