By Lucile Haute – An augmented book (2013-2015)
Conduit d’Aération is part of a research & creation project led by Lucile Haute and Alexandra Saemmer and supported by the Laboratory of Excellence Arts-H2H. This project benefitted from the help of Agence Nationale de la Recherche as part of the program Investissements d’Avenir (ANR-10-LABX-80-01).
Conduit d’aération is a tablet-based hyperfiction written and designed by a group of artist-researchers with the support of the Laboratory of Excellence Arts-H2H. It has been displayed as a performance installation in two festivals as well. The creation and design process required a strong conceptualization of the hyperlink’s action potential in a narrative text. The design and creation process of the different versions of this project is based on a theory of the “action potential” (term borrowed from Iser, 1976) of the hyperlink in a narrative text. In the “digital book” as in the performance installations, it was then a matter of anticipating the audience’s motivation to circulate between the different texts.
From the first experiments with the hyperlink in the narrative text in the early 90s (for example, Afternoon a story, 1993), hypertext has been associated with fragmentation, non-linearity and the questioning of “classical” narrative patterns. In Conduit d’aération, on the contrary, we wanted to explore the potential of a hyperlink supporting a logic-temporal coherence between different episodes of a narrative while proposing alternative paths of a journey. We are therefore including the digital book Conduit d’aération in the contemporary movement of “renarrativization” (Blanckeman, 2000): some “places of indetermination” are nevertheless foreseen in the logico-temporal framework of the narrative.
We are just as interested in the possible anticipation of reading practices by hyperlinking as we are in their updating in a precise reception situation. What happens to the text, the hyperlinks and the perception of time and space in the narrative when a hyperfiction, initially designed for a private reading device, turns into a participatory installation, offered to the public for limited exploration?
Crédits
• Visual design, script, additional media (video and sound editing): Lucile Haute
• Author, screenplay, hypertext production: Alexandra Saemmer
• Visual design, documentary research, hypertext production, screenplay: Aurélie Herbet
• Author, screenplay: Julien Pænasse
• Graphic and interactive design, ergonomics, iPad development: Tomek Jarolim
• Adaptation epub2: Emeline Brulé
• Writing coordination: Odile Farge
With the voices of Elise Courcol-Rozès (Lia), Regina Demina (Marie), Jean-Paul Schintu (the reviewer), GS (Mohamed) and Leïla Vigné (Sonia)
• Recording sound: Christian Phaure, studio of École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs
• Post-processing sound: Christine Webster
• Video documents: Grégory Dassié (performance captures), Lucile Haute, Aurélie Herbet