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These two pieces, created as part of Warren Sack’s Winter 2010 “Software Studies” course, explore the minimum amount of code required to make something both meaningfully interactive and recognizably a narrative. The first, Experiment One, generates random short sentences of three types (someone acts suspicious, someone has a motive, and someone dies horribly) and challenges the player to collect them as they scroll by to produce a miniature murder mystery at the bottom of the screen. In the second, Experiment Two, cellular automata rulesets are coupled with linear progressions of words to produce patterns of propagation, expansion, and extinction for each pair that lend mechanical relevance to the thematic content of the words.

The pieces were exhibited as part of the Winter 2010 DANM Open Studios exhibition, “Lunatic Binary.”