Cirrus@Austlit

'Inspired by the possibilities of fiction, digital poetry and experimental digital art, All the Delicate Duplicates tells a complex psychological story through a combination of digital literature and experimental game formats. Developed by digital artists/writers rather than traditional game developers, All the Delicate Duplicates attempts to expand storytelling within games by including 3D elements spanning multiple time periods and incorporating animated and transitional texts, thus leaving the story wide open to multiple revisits and interpretations. The poetic, digitally born language called ‘Mezangelle’ forms a central part of All the Delicate Duplicates. Mezangelle involves constructing poetic phrases to extend and enhance meaning beyond the expected. As Mezangelle remixes the basic structure of English and code to create language where meanings are nested, players need to read, re-read, then re-read again in order to piece together a narrative. This article traces how All the Delicate Duplicates was initially conceived, the commission parameters of the project, the use of Mezangelle as a project story component, and overall reception.' (Publication abstract)

A single-player, first-person psychological exploration game. The game's website notes:

All The Delicate Duplicates is a work of fiction that narratively toys with the concept of time, offering a series of windows into the lives of its characters.

Through a PC game and a web-based short story, All The Delicate Duplicates constructs a glimpsing storyworld where perceptions are stretched beyond the 'real' as you think you know it - exploring places where time no longer feels stable or linear. (http://allthedelicateduplicat.es/)

The core of the game involves John, a single father who inherits a collection of arcane objects from his mysterious relative named Mo. Over time, John and his daughter Charlotte begin to realise that these objects have unusual properties: the more they are exposed to them, the more their reality and memories appear to change.

'Attn: Solitude isn’t a straight poetry book, nor is it a strict collation of cyborgian-emulated [chap+lady]book texts. The codework contents in this book do fragmentally fold [+ spit out of/from] poetic conventions. These microtexts do presentation-lap gently [yes: gently, albeit clinically, in some instances] at the cusp of code and poiesis.

'Attn: Solitude employs mezangelle – a type of quasi-cobbled conventionset born from 90s digital fomentation – to form packets of code-laced and culturally inflected output. You may choose to snippetswim in[to] these units of mezangelled output, these comprehension chips dragged kicking from one medium and screaming into another. You may not.

'If not, then … ? If-then-else.' (Publication summary)

A digital 're-mix' of a melodramatic Gothic novel, The Guardian, published in Australian in 1838.

'Mez does for code poetry as jodi and Vuk Cosic have done for ASCII Art: Turning a great, but naively executed concept into something brilliant, paving the ground for a whole generation of digital artists." (Florian Cramer).' (Publication summary)

This creative multimedia work consists of several parts: _cquench_, _haggard_, _monitored_, _userperv_, _reAD_ and _siqlick_.

The introduction to the work states: "...the texts presented here act as residual traces from net.wurk practices that thrive in the online environment in which they ][initially][ gestated.... u have the option of viewing these net.wurks as singular _texts_ or selected _n.hanced_ packages. the _n.hanced_ wurks contain various n.teractive elements that require u [the user] to x.plore [and]; x.tract meaning via mouseovers, clickable regions, audio fragments [and]; x.tended "click-N-hold" areas."