Secret Numbers of Dead Objects
Jason Nelson
There is often an unexpected immediacy to gun violence. The movement of a finger can explode forth metal ending a trajectory of interactions. What remains from victims of gun violence are memories and legacies, tragic pain and the remnants of unique experiences. Those experiences are retained, like strange ghosts, in the objects we use, the objects we live with and around and through. Each of us are unrepeated numbers in the devices we create.
These are the Secret Numbers of the Dead. An interactive fiction/poem recalling our distinctive and uncommon encounters with the world and the objects around us. After our end, a sudden sponsor of bullets, triggers, our secret numbers of experience and interaction are revealed in blenders, in brushes, in the things we’ve built. Aim and fire to arrive at these numbered and brief, defining moments of beauty and rarity.
The work uses a sniper game engine, where the reader has to aim and fire, to end the objects, to reveal our secret numbers, those combinations of interactions exclusive to only one, only you, only them, only me, only these.
About the Artist
Coming from Australia, but born in Oklahoma, Jason Nelson is a creator of curious and wondrous digital poems and fictions of odd lives, builder of confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. He professes Net Art and Electronic Literature at Australia's Griffith University in subtropical metropolis of Brisbane. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around the globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list (Paris Biennale Media Poetry Prize), organizational boards he frequents (Australia Council Literature Board and the Electronic Literature Organization), and Fellowships he’s adventured into Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Bergen, Moore Fellowship at the National University of Ireland, and numerous other accolades (Webby Award, Digital Writing Prize), but in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetry portal http://www.secrettechnology.com attracts each year.