ba-tale

By Zuzana Husárová and Ľubomír Panák

BA-Tale is an interactive, intermedial electronic literature piece, whose narrative is a fake myth about the formation of Slovakia's capital Bratislava. The way the reader engages with the piece brings about the concept of myth as an oral narrative and re-contextualizes it. The story is read in fragments, semantic units from the scattered moving text. The aspect of catching a fragment in time reminds one of listening to the oral story, although the necessity to remember the subsequent words in order to proceed adds a new aspect to this tradition. The sound is randomly computer-chosen from our database that defines for each unit a number of sounds. The semantically most important word of the unit was used as a keyword to find several corresponding sounds in freesounds.org.

From deep within a black screen a grey cluster emerges. As the cluster approaches and disperses we discover this grey mass to be a collection of individual words. As the user moves the cursor over a word other words are drawn to it, constructing a poetic fragment. Through interaction the user discovers that for each word on the screen there is a text fragment to be constructed. Since the sequence of interaction is determined by the user, each encounter with the work constructs a different story from the fragments. Over time, the individual words fill the screen and then, slowly, recede back into the darkness until all that is left is a small grey unreadable cluster.