Dikult 203
Skoddeland, Strange Rain and the concept of mood in e-lit.
http://kurs.uib.no/dikult203/rO0I/Skoddeland/
192232
Autumn 2014
1628 words
Skoddeland, Strange Rain and the concept of mood in e-lit.
Venturing through the world of electronic literature, a genre in which the limits to the borders
of its definition is constantly stretched, can turn out to be quite emotional. The beauty in the
combination of different types of media used in works of electronic literature often paint a
quite broad spectre of impressions, and depending on the tone in the piece it can draw you in,
and evoke powerful emotions. This is also one of the elements, which separates digital art
from the bunch of other digital items. According to Roberto Simanowski the goal of specific
modes of expression realized through digital technology only, is one of the ways we can
divide what is digital art and not. If we look towards any broader definitions than that, almost
everything created with digital equipment can be defined as digital art, resulting in loss of
heuristic power (Simanowski 134).
Strange Rain is one of these pieces of art that is clearly created for specific reasons. Bordering
on the lines between game, e-lit and digital art. It’s an app created for the Iphone and Ipad
tablet in 2010 by Eric Loyer. As already mentioned, it can be described as many things,
ranging from a game, to ambient music and perhaps even an e-book. Why is this? What is it
that makes it a combination of these genres?
This piece can be approached in different ways, and it is not likely to be associated with
literary works when players first interact with them, but in reality, many games have narrative
elements. Narrative is one stronghold for gaming relations with art and literature, and textual
elements of gaming like dialogues and ludic characteristics have resulted in a subcategory of
the broader artistic field of electronic literature in academic context dedicated to gaming
(Ciccoricco 123).
It really depends on how you choose to approach it. By combining interactive elements as
images, text and sound Strange Rain is creating its own little universe, in which we dwell into
and explore in different ways depending on our own needs. And when we do so, we get
emotionally engaged and starts to self reflect. Strange rain has a really moody feel going on
for itself. Whether you choose to use it just for relaxation/meditation, or play it for the story,
it’s hard to escape the fact that it takes place in a grey and eerie world. This effects your
emotions.
Skoddeland
1 The particulary distinct mood of Strange Rain is what inspired this project, which has been
given the name Skoddeland (skodde meaning mist or fog in english). Wanting to explore the
gloomy and eerie feeling that nature sometimes give you, and how you can use it to drift away
and/or perhaps make out some sort of counterbalance to the (very often) naive positivity our
society serves us everyday, is one of the main goals of this artwork.
In a society where you get bombarded with impressions from morning to night, nature can
provide for a relaxing time-out. The ambient atmosphere of nature also has a very peculiar
feel wrapped around it. It is like a combination of eerie and tense, but majestic and proud. In
this way, nature is also a prime example of evoking strong emotions within humans, both
negative and positive. Humans are generally in need to have a healthy portion of both positive
and negative emotions and use them, as a tool to overcome the many obstacles life has to
offer, and nature can help us get in touch with these feelings.
This is where I feel that Strange Rain hits a nerve in emulating the strong forces that different
settings of nature can offer. This subdued atmosphere can set our mindset so that we get a
new angle of approach to our feelings. This is also where Skoddeland tries to fit in, as a
project of trying to grasp this particular fixed emotion in nature, but via the tools of modern
digital technology.
This project emerges from a very simplistic soundscape I started to play around with on my
guitar a couple of weeks ago. By writing a text or a poem that bore some of the same feeling
as the soundscape and trying to combine it, I came up with a couple of concepts surrounding
the artwork and then I started to put the pieces together. The end result is an audiovisual
experience that puts emphasis on remix and interactivity.
Strange Rain And Skoddeland: Interactivity
Strange Rain turns your screen into a skylight on a rainy day, shifting perspective depending
on how you tilt your device. Raindrops starts falling and gives an illusion of hitting your
screen. Now, the app has different settings for how it will behave depending on which mode
you choose, but the basic concept of interactivity in strange rain, is when you touch the
raindrops on the screen and music or words appear.
2 Strange Rain also has another trick up it’s sleeve in that it’s nature is build up around some
kind of mystic backdrop, leaving the player with a feeling of never really grasping the
experience completely and fuelling multiple encounters with the game. The more you touch
the screen, the rain and visuals starts behaving strange or absurd. Colors change and the skies
become layered in an unnatural way. There’s even a plane occasionally flying over and
multiple tapping can make it go down, adding a chaotic element.
With Skoddeland the goal was to make something similar especially with a distinct mood,
only in a simpler way. By combining text with sound elements this goal was possible to reach,
making a piece that uses these two elements to both add remix and interactivity. The piece
starts with just an image of a man standing on a hike way surrounded by typical Norwegian
nature. After a couple of seconds, a hauntingly cold melody starts to play, while blue dots
starts to glow in the photo. Text starts to roll upwards from the bottom of the screen. It’s in
Norwegian, and implies that it’s a person’s reply to someone else commenting on it being
“dystert” (meaning sad or mournfully in English). The person then continues to engage in a
one-way conversation, revealing his own thoughts about the subject.
Hovering over the text reveals that every written word is accompanied with a hidden audio
file that starts to play a spoken version of the word you hover over. Doing the same with the
five blue glowing dots reveals a small selection of extra sound effects working as a backdrop
to the scene.
The fact that the app offers these different modes of exploration opens up for both a relatively
wide range of use and interactivity. Dividing the different types of media and how you
interact with them makes it easier to see these elements. The main type of interactivity that is
being used here as a bridge or tool, is the use of the mouse or touchpad on laptops to interact
with the piece.
Lyrical representation: Text sound and remix.
Text and audio has an important symbiosis in Skoddeland and plays a huge role in how you
engage it and what kind of emotions it leaves you with. By hovering over different places or
words in the text, you get to choose what words you want to hear. You also get to hear how
the storyteller puts emphasis on the pronunciation of the different words and their context. In
3 this way the words get to portrait their true emotions both in context with the rest of the text
and outside.
This is also important for many of the definitions of electronic literature. Scott Rettberg writes
in his article “Electronic Literature” that computers or the network context has to be essential
in some way to the performance or carrying out the literary activity in question. Only then can
the E-lit term be applied. (Rettberg 168). This is also close to Simanowski’s definition of
digital mentioned earlier. The mix of text and audio in Skoddeland cannot be executed
without the aid of a computer. It is therefore safe to refer to Skoddeland as a piece of
electronic literature by the definition above.
The possibility to decide which words to play also opens up for an interesting view on the
remix term. If we take a look at the four forms of remix identified by Eduardo Navas,
Skoddeland doesn’t really fit in to any of them (Navas 431). In fact, most of the definitions of
remix seem to base themselves upon the reuse of other artists work. Skoddeland isn’t quite
like that, because it leaves the mixing of the words to its audience, but it still has an element
of it in the way you can decide what words to play and in what order.
Different tools used.
The process of making this involved a couple of tools. The coding is done in basic HTML,
CSS and some Javascript. All of this was made in Adobe Brackets. For the music and speech,
Garageband was used to record and edit the 151 individual audio clips. The effect enabling
you to play sound while hovering over the text was done by giving each audio clip a unique id
number in HTML and recognized and executed by Javascript.
Skoddeland is an attempt on recreating a certain vibe found within nature with digital
technology and to explore the relation between text and sound. Like Strange Rain it joins the
ranks of gradually modes of media evolving from the older ones. Through algorithms we are
given more and more possibilities to explore these digital dimensions, and there’s no doubt
that apps like Strange Rain and artworks like Skoddeland will thrive and expand in the future
to come.
4 WORKS CITED
Angello ,Aaron. “Remix.” Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori
Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014.
401-407. Print.
Ciccoricco, David “Games as Art/Literature” Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.
Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 2014. 401-407. Print.
Simanowski, Roberto. ”Digital and Net Art.” Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.
Marie-Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: John Hopkins
University Press, 2014. 401-407. Print.
Rettberg, Scott. ”Electronic Literature.” Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media. Marie-Laure
Ryan, Lori Emerson and Benjamin J. Robertson. Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 2014. 401-407. Print.
Loyer, Eric. “Strange Rain.” Opertoon. App Store. 27 Nov. 2014.
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