“Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society. The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a man endowded with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and his society.” Italo Calvino
"Does fiction follow function?"
"How does context affect text?"
"extrafiction" is a conceptual framework encapsulating works, research, design and development by Alok b. Nandi, in the areas of analogical and digital texts, at the interzone of art & sciences, design & technology.
"extrafiction" is a term coined by Alok Nandi, after his works in "transfiction" (a mixed realities platform) and "hyperfiction" (a.o. the awarded web mise-en-scène urbicande.be directed from 1995 to 2003, based on the concept of a narrative labyrinth, adapted from the series Obscure Cities, by Schuiten-Peeters, published by Casterman).
Louis Sullivan, mentor to famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright, once noted that, in architecture, form should follow function; a building should be designed to suit its purpose. The phrase "form follows function" was coined in 1918 by American architect Louis Sullivan, who wrote that if "a building is properly designed, one should be able with a little attention, to read through that building to the reason for that building." Designers (products, industrial, newspapers, cars , websites, ...) have since adopted this as a valuable mantra. Frank Lloyd Wright extended the idea to argue that form and function are one, and his architecture is famous for successfully implementing that.
Hence, in a networked environment where architecture meets storytelling with or without technologies, what narratives and imaginary spaces are architectured ? are articulated ?
How function is "extra"polated, remediated into fiction ?
What are the emerging patterns in praxis ?
Extrafiction is aiming to look at this ..., to explore...
Key words: artificial life, pseudo-autonomous behaviours, intelligent agents, storytelling, narrative patterns, language and emergence, memory and affect, linguistics
Design
Architempo
A research & design label
by Alok b. Nandi
Un label recherche & design
piloté par Alok b. Nandi
http://www.architempo.net
Concept
Alok b. Nandi
Contextual and textual explorations
Uzoopia, "maad"
and some other works in progress,
but let's keep in mind these:
I mistrust all systemisers and I avoid them.
The will to a system is a lack of integrity.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols"
...
I believe in a cinema which gives more possibilities and more time to its viewer – a half-fabricated cinema, an unfinished cinema that is completed by the creative spirit of the viewer, [so that] all of a sudden we have a hundred films.
- Abbas Kiarostami
...
Savez-vous ce qui me préoccupe quand un film est terminé ? J'aime que le film donne au spectateur l'impression qu'il n'est pas fini. Parce que je crois qu'une oeuvre d'art où le spectateur et le critique n'apportent pas leur part n'est pas une oeuvre d'art. J'aime que ceux qui regardent le film construisent parallèlement leur propre histoire.
- Jean Renoir
...