The paper focuses on mobile applications created for tablets that could be assigned signifcant literary values. It studies a variety of literary applications and proposes categorization. The main focus is on those applications that use the touch gesture in an innovative and semantically meaningful way.
The paper focuses on mobile applications created for tablets that could be assigned signifcant literary values. It studies a variety of literary applications and proposes categorization. The main focus is on those applications that use the touch gesture in an innovative and semantically meaningful way.
The paper focuses on mobile applications created for tablets that could be assigned signifcant literary values. It studies a variety of literary applications and proposes categorization. The main focus is on those applications that use the touch gesture in an innovative and semantically meaningful way.
Zuzana Husrov Abstract: The paper focuses on the mobile applications created for tablets that could be assigned signifcant literary values. It studies a variety of literary applications and proposes their categorization: interactive stories applications oriented at children (remediated or digital born), applications supporting creative writing, applications remediating print literary works, applications on multiple digital platforms, interactive narrative applications, interactive poetic ap- plications. For each of the categories, several examples are intro- duced and analyzed. The main focus is on those applications that use the touch gesture in an innovative and semantically meaning- ful way and thus support users interactivity, creativity and playful potential. 1 Introduction You will remember we did these things in our youth, many and beautiful things. [] Sappho, Time of Youth. A young woman (maybe the great lyric poetess Sappho of Lesbos, may- be someone else) is on the Pompeiian fresco (Figure 1), dating from 1 st century AD, depicted with a stylus and four wax tablets. Wax tablet is, simply said, a piece of wood with a wax-flled recess; using a metal- tipped implement, one writes on the tablet by scratching the surface of the wax, which is darkened for greater contrast. In efect, it is a renewa- ble scratch pad. 1 Wax tablets (in Latin tabulae) were from the ancient times until the Middle Ages used mostly as a writing tool for notes, drafts, correspondence, teaching, for recording speeches and various other types of information, like business accounts, for calculating. Besi- des all other purposes, they were used also for writing literature. Con- temporary era has seen the rise of tablets, but not of those made of wax 1 Priest-Dorman and Priest-Dorman 1999. 82 Z. Husrov any more, but rather of the technological gadgets mobile computers with touch screen, usually controlled by fnger gestures. What links are responsible for naming these diferent things with the same term? Be- sides having a similar rectangular shape, also manually manipulating with the tablet area (either by scratching with stylus anywhere on wax tablets or by pressing a fnger on an active spot on mobile tablets) has an efect on the display. These new tablets, running on mobile opera- ting systems (mainly iOS or Android 2 ) ofer their users also the writing and reading functions, as their wax predecessors did. Moreover, these new digital media devices are enriched with the multimedia dimen- sion, Internet connectivity that ofers possibilities for generating con- tent as well as multiple opportunities for both work and leisure. This 2 other mobile platforms are Blackberry OS, Windows Phone. Figure 1. Depiction of a girl with a stylus and wax tablets on a Pompeiian fresco (often called Sappho) 83 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch paper will look at various approaches towards the implementation of literary expression into the mobile tablets. A Polish theoretician of electronic literature, Mariusz Pisarski, de- fnes the literature on mobile devices in his entry in Sownik Gatunkw Literatury Cyfrowej as: a literary work designed for systems, interfaces and reading habits typical for smartphones, mobile devices, which, by their technolog- ical advancement and type of use situate themselves between sys- tems, interfaces and reading habits typical for PCs and laptops and those known from traditional mobile phones. The distinguishing traits for this genre are the particular material placement of the text, specifc composition, adapted to the limitations of the device (divid- ing the text into chunks, discontinuous reading, a small screen) and an above-platform manner of distribution. 3 The mobile platform ofers new characteristics for the literary expres- sion multimedia dimension, interactivity, kinetic textuality and inter- active design, new forms of manipulation with the text (responsiveness to touch, movement of the whole device, even voice responsiveness). However one has to be aware that very long texts are difcult to read on mobile devices, and therefore the author should consider the char- acteristics of the mobile devices prior to writing the text to be able to structure the story/poem based on the platform features, taking into account its strengths and weaknesses. Besides the poets/designers/pro- grammers in one person (who should be aware of all the before-men- tioned technical characteristics), common are also collaborations bet- ween writers and interactive designers or programmers, or in some cases even the whole production team, where the use of the technical parameters can be the task of the designers. Due to the emergence of tablets, new market has grown the market of applications. Mobile products for Apple devices can be download- ed from App Store, products running on the Android platform, can be found on Google Play. According to Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism report from 26 th October 2011 4 , 17 per cent of 3 Pisarski 2013. 4 Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism report The Tablet Revolution and the Future of News 2011. 84 Z. Husrov tablet users read books on their tablets daily 5 . The report does not state what types of books the users read, whether regular e-books or some interactive applications. However, the percentage shows that people do read literature on their mobile devices, which can be fruitful for authors of electronic literature those authors that go beyond mere transpos- ing of print content into the media realm (characteristic for e-books), but rather focus on the innovative possibilities that oral and writen textuality and even intermedial projects can bring into the digital, mo- bile environment. Scot Retberg (2011) even writes in connection with iPad literature about a transitional moment for the feld of electronic literature: The interactive book, the literary artifact that is also a computa- tional artifact, is no longer a concept completely divergent from the path of mainstream publishing. E-Books are a fast growing sector of the publishing market. And from the launch the iPad, a number of writers, artists, publishers, and media makers have conceived of the tablet computer as an opportunity for reading experiences that dont simply mimic the operation of the print book. 6 This paper will introduce and study only mobile applications, neither eBooks (on e-pub or other formats), interactive pdfs, nor audiobooks. It will also deal only with those applications that can be atributed as lit- erary: both narrative and poetic. Only those applications will be looked into, that can be downloaded from two biggest application markets: App Store and Google Play. Diferent categories of poetic applications will be introduced and analyzed, according to their innovative ap- proach to textual material, textual expression and poetics, according to their intermediality, aesthetics and use of touch gesture. The key focus will be on those applications that approach the user as having a creative potential and allow her in her activity to do these things [] many and beautiful things. 7
5 According to this report, the percentage shows the percent of tablet users who do these activities on tablet daily: Email 54%, Get News 53%, Use Social Networks 39%, Play Games 30%, Read Books 17%, Watch Video 13%. 6 Retberg 2011. 7 Sappho in Barnstone 2009, p. 26. 85 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch The aim of this paper is to look into various ways how the literary content was remediated from the original print page into the multime- dia mobile format, as well as study the characteristics of the digital born 8 literature (Hayles 2007) running on the interactive mobile plat- forms. The initial research was partially based on the research collec- tion iPhone and iPad E-Lit in ELMCIP Knowledge Base 9 , collected by Lori Emerson and Scot Retberg. The main questions are: What new functionalities do the interactive stories or poems provide for the reader? How do these functionalities enrich the poetic or narrative content? Do the aesthetic, poetic content and readers gestures when performing the work mutually infuence each other? What is the purpose and potential use of these apps? In the study dealing with the literary works on mobile platforms from the perspective of electronic literature, the following innovative meth- odological cornerstones and approaches could be applied: diferent modes of digital text performance (the topic of the ELMCIP Seminar on Digital Textuality with/in Performance 10 ), platform studies (Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort 11 ), critical code studies (Mark C. Marino 12 ), software studies (Lev Manovich 13 ), digital poetics and aesthetics, interface poet- ics and aesthetics, and many others. However, the aim of this paper is not to deeply analyze particular chosen works from any of those tempt- ing approaches, neither from the perspectives of narrative and poetic structures, but rather to highlight a diversity of mobile literary apps through a media-specifc analysis. N. Katherine Hayles defnes the media-specifc analysis as: a mode of critical atention which recog- nizes that all texts are instantiated and that the nature of the medium in which they are instantiated maters. 14 In this case, the referred me- dium is the mobile application. Also Hayless concept of technotext 8 Hayles 2007. By digital born literature, Hayles means: a frst-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer. 9 Emerson/Retberg 2012. 10 ELMCIP Seminar on Digital Textuality with/in Performance 2012. 11 Bogost and Montfort, online. 12 Marino 2006. 13 Manovich, online. 14 Hayles 2004, p. 67. 86 Z. Husrov will be referenced in the paper. Hayles states that the physical form of the literary artefact always afects what the words and other semiotic components mean. 15 She considers physical and semiotic layers of the work as cooperative elements. By the term technotext, she refers to those literary works, where the material and semantic layers appear in a substantial dialogue: When a literary work interrogates the inscrip- tion technology that produces it, it mobilizes refexive loops between its imaginative world and the material apparatus embodying that crea- tion as a physical presence. 16
Through a proposal of diferent categories of literary applications as well as through the use of media-specifc analysis that should stress the characteristics of literary mobile platforms and defne the specifcs of each category, the paper aims to show that the literary applications create a fast-growing and quite an engaging feld (as well as a cultural business market). Moreover, the paper wants to point out that in this feld arose many works with high quality content, atractive interactive design and sophisticated semantics that are worthy of notice by literary communities. For each of those categories, a number of examples are provided. A rapidly growing number of applications made the selec- tion process quite demanding. The choice is based on subjective prefer- ences and limited by the number of pages of this paper. The following main categories of the mobile interactive literary appli- cations are proposed: interactive stories applications oriented at children (remediated or digital born) applications supporting creative writing applications remediating print literary works applications on multiple digital platforms interactive narrative applications interactive poetic applications 15 Hayles 2003, p. 25. 16 Ibid. 87 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch 2 Interactive stories applications oriented at children (remediated or digital born) Stories are designed to promote a reading experience that is both fun and educational for children. PlayTales 17 Interactive literary applications for children and young readers are the result of rise of quite a big and atractive application market for chil- dren and young readers. There are whole libraries of these interactive tales for iPads and iPhones, like Interactive Touch Books by Interactive Touch, Story Time for Kids by Teknowledge Software, Grimms Fairy Tales 3D Classic Literature plus other tales by StoryToys Entertainment Limited and many others. The Android based collections of interac- tive stories applications include among many others Doll Play Books by Swan Media, Russian fairy tales called Fairy tales and storybooks by Whisper Arts, StoryBooks by Joe Raj. There are also collections running on both platforms like iStoryBooks by iMarvel, Read Unlimitedly! Kidsn Books by SMART EDUCATION, LTD, PlayTales by Genera Mobile and many others. These applications are mostly of a multimedia character, several of them aimed already at children from 2 years up. These stories very often incorporate spoken and/or writen text, colourful animations or images and music, some of them can render pages in 3D, some ofer multi-language editions. For example PlayTales ofer eight languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Chinese (Man- darin), and Japanese. Children are supposed to navigate through the story by clicking on the assigned butons or by virtually thumbing through the con- tent. Childrens litle fngers can touch various (predominantly visual) pop-up media elements. Children are supposed to interact, in order to trigger the story to appear. But in comparison to other kinds of digital fction, like hypertext literature or computer games, the aim is not to fnd ones own way through the story. These stories are tradi- tionally mono-sequential, there is only one prepared way how to en- gage with them. The form of these interactive tales for children is often 17 PlayTales, Apps. See: htp://www.playtales.com/en/apps 88 Z. Husrov reminiscent of the pop-up books format, transposed into digital me- dium (when concentrating on the aspects of interactivity by touching and thumbing). From another perspective, they could be considered as transpositions of the animated fairy-tales (when focusing on the com- bination of multimedia elements and oral narration). Figure 2. Screenshot from Goblin Forest app by Emilio Villalba and PlayTales 89 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch Figure 3. Screenshot from Pinocchio app by PlayTales The young reader can meet with two basic types, according to the con- text and content of the story: the well-known fairy-tales and stories repurposed for the touch mobile devices or the newly created fairy- tales and stories. There are still text-based stories, however, much more atractive for younger readers are those that do not privilege writen text over visuals. Many of the stories are orally narrated and the styl- ized and sophisticated visuals also bear the semantic function. There- fore, these multimedia remediations 18 of traditional fairy-tales work with shorter textual fragments and the semantics of the story is embed- ded in the media elements and their combinations. 18 the term remediation defnes, according to the theory by J.D. Bolter and R. Grusin expressed in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, a process of refashioning earlier media into new media and vice versa. In Bolter and Grusin 2000. 90 Z. Husrov One of the most famous apps is Alice for the iPad (a remediation of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland) with both the abridged and full versions of the classic story. The app is available besides English, also in German, French and Korean. The company that created this app Atomic Antelope also issued its successor entitled Alice in New York in 2011. This app was praised as one of the frst with really atractive interactive e-book design. Apart from tapping the visuals, the reader can also make some elements of the classic-style illustrations alive by moving the iPad. When the child tilts the iPad, the clock swings, botle and jar fall, Alice shrinks and grows. When the reader shakes the iPad, mushrooms, pills and cards fall, Mad Haters head bobbles. The design reminds us of the illustrated books design, rather than the design of pop-up books or animations illustrations accompany the text in the centre of the page-like looking screen. With most apps, children can choose whether they want to hear the recorded oral narration or they want to read it themselves. The London based app and retailer company Me Books allows the readers to tap on particular artwork and hear characters speak, plus it allows the readers to customise their apps by recording their own voice when reading the stories. By proposing to children to use their creativity, the apps can contribute to the informal education, where children learn to work with their voice without even realizing it. In the paper Electronic books: childrens reading and comprehension, where Shirley Grimsaw et al describe their research on childrens reading and comprehension of a story in print version and in electron- ic version, they write that the main benefts to childrens reading of electronic storybooks, compared to printed ones, were the provision of narration, accompanied by animated pictures and sound efects that related directly to the storyline. 19 Even though this team did not study the electronic books on mobile devices, but on the computer, it could be deduced that the benefts of the multimedia features make the interac- tive stories apps successful for the young readers. And the multimedia build-up is exactly what the atractive and successful stories apps for children have. The positives of these apps lie in bringing the stories 19 Grishaw et. al. 2007, p. 598. 91 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch into the atractive media environment and thus in childrens motiva- tion towards reading and engaging with literature and stories. One of the possible ways how to use several of these stories, could be, due to their multilingual versions, also in foreign language teaching. 3 Applications supporting creative writing There exist applications, whose aim is to support users creativity by the means of creative writing. Many apps are used for recording ideas in form of quick notes (either by typing or even handwriting), but the focus of this paper is on those that are listed among poetry and creative writing apps. These apps can on one hand be oriented at younger users, like an app A Story Before Bed. This app lets the user record a childrens book online with audio and video. 20 Thanks to this app, children can also play back and listen or watch their recordings on their digital de- vices. On the other hand, there exist the apps for adults that try to en- hance their creativity by enabling them to write and share their poetry or prose and get some comments or feedback from other users of these apps. Among them are apps like Poets Corner by Wild Notion Labs. These apps follow the tradition of web-based literary servers, where the feedback depends on the quality of the piece but the percentage of responsiveness is infuenced by the number of pieces on the server. An interesting app that presents creating poetry with formal restric- tions, is Refrigerator Poetry by WBPhoto, a remediation of poetry mag- nets magnets with text that one should organize into a poem and place them, most commonly, on a refrigerator (hence the term). But besides choosing from the pre-made words (as is the case with tradi- tional poetry magnets), in this app one can also add her own words or phrases by typing, or through voice (via Androids voice recognition). Applications for creating fridge poetry exist also for Apple devices, like the app Poetry Magnets by King Software Design. 20 A Story Before Bed, online. 92 Z. Husrov Figure 4. Refrigerator Poetry by WBPhoto 93 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch Apart from the main aim of apps for creative writing, which is ofer- ing the novice and amateur writers a virtual space for presentation and quick and instant feedback, they also tend to create a community that could help writers write more and beter, or even to have more fun. There are also many apps that should help with the creative writing process, like apps for constructing a beter meter, for rhyming, diction- aries and so on. 4 Applications remediating print literary works Application markets list a great number of applications that remediate the print literary works. These are mostly applications bringing some canonical poems or short stories. The function of these apps is very often to bring literature to the contemporary reader, reading while us- ing all kinds of transportation and in all types of situations. One can fnd among these an app called Poetry from the Poetry Foundation (that also allows the readers to create their own poems), The Poetry App by Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation lists over a hundred poems by six- teen well-known poets. Here the poems are accompanied by video and audio narrations from actors. There are also apps Poetry Series: Robert Frost, Poetry Series: Walt Whitman. Furthermore, the works of Shake- speare can be downloaded as well. Literary applications concentrate besides poetry also on short stories, like the app A story a day, where the reader fnds the stories by the Anglophone authors Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Sherwood Ander- son, Nathaniel Hawthorne, W. W. Jacobs and O. Henry. Among many others, there are apps for reading fctions by Charles Dickens, E.A. Poe, Anton Chekhov, Ambrose Bierce. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Arabian Nights also exist in mobile literary forms. Application IPoe pre- sents diferent stories of Edgar Allan Poe plus Poes biography, where the reader can choose the language of the stories to be English, Spanish, or French. A very interesting example is Dave Morris adaptation of Mary Shel- leys Frankenstein. Morris interactive novel Frankenstein was designed and developed for iOS by inkle and published by Profle Books in 2012. This version of Frankenstein is writen in small fragments accompanied by drawn-like illustrations. After each fragment, the reader has a sim- 94 Z. Husrov ple choice, she should make decisions that dont interfere with the reading fow, but over time will shape and mould the way the story is told. 21 The reader is presented with two or three small titles (some- times sentences or questions) that when clicked on, contain some extra information about the particular narrative fragment. Beside the entertainment function, these poetry and prose apps can also have an educational purpose to educate the reader in poetry or prose and bring the older works (thanks to the multimedia elements and interactive design) closer to the contemporary reader. As is writen in the info about The Poetry App, these apps are for the poetry nov- ice - explore the power of poetry through the narrations of world-class actors 22 . It seems that the purpose of remediation of print based, older literary works into mobile platforms is to keep the reader literate in the literary feld, to provide an easy and cheap access to (even whole collections of) literary works and also to send a message that even the older literature can be still considered cool and up-to-date, if you use the new medium and aim at the suitable target-group. Some diferent examples of how print literature can be remediated, provide the following literary apps: Composition No. 1, Humument and Obvia Gaude. Composition No.1, originally a piece of shufe literature by a French author Marc Saporta from 1962, was in 2011 reedited by Visual Editions, who released it, based on the original, in a format of loose leaves plus on the iPad. To bring the reader an experience of shufing through loose pages on the mobile device, Visual Editions decided to present the reader with pages that constantly run on the screen, one after the other, in extremely fast tempo. In order to stop this instant fow and be able to actually read the text, one has to hold a fnger on the screen. Tom Phillips, an author of artists book Humument (which is an alteration of a Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, in which Phillips treated every page either by painting, collage and/ or cut-up techniques), decided to create an iPad version of Humument, for which he created 52 new pages and added them to the previous- 21 Frankenstein, online. 22 The Poetry App, online. 95 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch ly print-published 367 pages. This app has also an interactive oracle function, which casts two pages to be read in tandem. 23
Figure 5. Humument by Tom Phillips Both of these works use combinatory functions to add the random ef- fect to the stable number of pages. The random choice of certain com- binations can produce amusement, but usually does not change the overall narrative 24 . App Obvia Gaude by ubomr Pank, in collaboration with Zuzana Husrov, remediates a Slovak Baroque literary text in Latin a wed- ding wish in the form of a patern poem Decagrammaton by a Slovak 23 Humument, online. 24 For more on Shufe literature, see Husrov/Montfort 2012. 96 Z. Husrov poet Matej Gar from 1649. This remediation enables people to use it as their own wedding wishes: to change the original names of the newlyweds (Evula, Paulo) and add there the names of their friends or family. The touch gesture rotates, twists and turns the black and red leters in 3D space (there are 4 distinctive screen areas) and triggers dif- ferent combinations of digitalized Baroque music samples. By shaking the mobile device, the leters start fying and disperse. It seems obvious that the mobile market found its custom-base also with the reading users. The combination of the print and mobile is on the rise, as prove the projects like Brief by Alexandra Chasin published by Jaded Ibis Productions, where the print book and an app were re- leased simultaneously. In cases like this, it is important that the authors and publishers think about how to incorporate the platform possibili- ties into the version. Brief could serve as one of the playful examples: by the shake of the mobile device, the algorithm in the app chooses some of more than 700 pictures, randomly locates them on the page and wraps the text around them. This concept of randomization of pic- tures is not arbitrary, it corresponds with the story-line. 5 Applications on multiple digital platforms There are several apps, where it is not clear what came frst, whether the online version or the mobile device app maybe they were even released simultaneously. Therefore, we will not treat them as typical remediations. However, the remediating character can be very often atributed to the use of touch touch is often incorporated in the very same principle as the mouse-click in digital interactivity to make something happen, to trigger the action. Touch gesture in those cases does not have a semantic potential, but is merely a buton-trigger. One of the examples of these is a provoking audible experience The Use by Chris Mann 25 (also in web format), where the reader activates Manns readings of texts and his video recordings by clicking on any of the presented dots and thus gets a phonic noise-scape. 25 For more on this app, read the blog post The Use by Chris Mann by Leonardo Flores, 2012. 97 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch Quite an interesting example of the use of more platforms for sto- ry-telling, is the project Immobilit by Mark Amerika. Immobilit is the name of the flm (that was displayed also in the gallery environment) plus mobile versions. According to the information about the applica- tion: Immobilit is a remix of stills, subtitles, and original audio from the flm Immobilit, generally considered the frst-ever feature length art-house flm shot entirely on mobile phone. 26 This piece was flmed in Cornwall and belongs to Mark Americas Foreign Film Series. The music was composed by Chad Mossholder, who created also the audio remixes. In the mobile application, the textual screens are followed by the photographic ones, and the touch triggers new screen. It thus cre- ates a dialogue between the black and white textual screens (sentences in white colour on black screen) and the colourful visual, photograph- ic material. Mark America works here with his concept of remixolo- gy, stating that we are all born to remix. What are dreams and active memories if not personally rendered remixes of multi-media source material? 27 Application is thus one of the remixed versions of the flm, the other versions are called Mobile Remixes. So far, these six video and audio remixes were created: Trail(er) Mix and An Image Coming (Spatial Remix) by Mark Amerika and Chad Mossholder, Audiologues (5) and An Image Coming (Spatial Remix II) by Chad Mossholder, Deep Interior (Unconscious Remix) by Rick Silva and Hauntological (A Digital Remix) by DJ RABBI. According to the website, these remixes are extensions of the dreamlike source material that keeps circulating throughout the various iterations of the project. 28 Andreas Mllers For All Seasons, initially programmed for Windows PC, now running also on iOS, uses readers movement to correspond with the meaning of the displayed text. This work presents authors memories connected with four seasons. At the beginning of each season, the reader gets a one-page narrative that vanishes or leans down and its semantic content materializes itself into a graphic form. In Spring, ani- mated dandelions spring from the ground with fowers made of text, in Summer, animated text-fsh swim on the screen, in Autumn, text-leaves 26 Immobilit, online. 27 Immobilit, Remixes. online. 28 Ibid. 98 Z. Husrov make a whirl and in Winter, it snows text-fakes. The touch gesture on the mobile devices works very similarly as the mouse movement on the PC animations change to some degree based on readers input. Dan- delions turn according to dragged trajectory, text-fsh and text-whirl disperse, text-fakes fall quicker on the place assigned by touching a circle. P.o.E.M.M. (The Poemms for Excitable Media Poetry for Excitable [Mobile] Media) Cycle is a project by Jason Edward Lewis and Bruno Nadeau that consists of 8 multi-platform poems projects (the fnal number will be 10), each of which is playable as mobile app and as installation on big screens, some have also big print components. Until now, there are 5 poems that have both the installation version and the mobile version: What They Speak When They Speak to Me (app called Speak), Buzz Aldrin Doesnt Know Any Beter (app called Know), The Great Migration (app called Migration), Smooth Second Bastard (app called Bastard), No Choice About the Terminology (app called No Choice About the Terminology). The other three poems (The Summer the Ratlesnakes Came, The World Was White, The World That Surrounds You Wants Your Death) are now only in the installation versions. The text in all of the poems reacts to touch gesture with two hands, and the principle of interaction as well as the whole poetics and aes- thetics are the same in apps and in versions for installations. Touch- ing of the screen (looking like a lake of white leters in black water) in What They Speak When They Speak to Me activates at frst one leter, then other leters and words that gradually form a chain a line of poetry. Touching the screen of Buzz Aldrin Doesnt Know Any Beter, highlights the touched words from the white textual cloud. The text of this work brings a conversation with Prety Jesus about the contents of the pawn shop display in San Francisco. The Great Migration brings the migration of several visual/textual creatures, looking a bit like sperms but with several tails made of poetry lines, that when touched, release the text on the screen. Smooth Second Bastard uses the concept of blank canvas that when touched, visualize the text in the point of the touch. No Choice About the Terminology presents the text in several moving lines (some to the right, some to the left), covering the screen from top to botom, from left to right. In order to interact with the text, the user must touch 99 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch a leter of one of the lines, which changes its colour and the line gets bigger. The longer one holds the leter, the bigger it gets transparently covering the rest of the screen. Figure 6. Speak by Jason Lewis The idea that connects these 5 poems is questioning ones identity and ontology, questioning where one comes from, his/her roots and migra- tory routes. The poems of the project also interrogate human commu- nication and epistemological thinking. All of these poems were writen by Jason Lewis, who poeticized his own pondering about these themes. He used his individual experience, into which his individual (hi)sto- ry, ontology, understanding and self-concept were inscribed. But these apps ofer more than the poems categorized as Version 1:: Mobile and presented also as installations (Version 0). When interacting with these apps, the reader can choose one of the fve listed poems in the menu (Version 2:: Anthology), writen by fve poets, and a diferent text ap- pears. One can also write her own text or choose a Twiter feed for a customized version of the app (Version 3:: Platform). The user can also share her creation with other owners of the app (Version 4 :: Share) and the work is released under an open source licence (Version 5 :: Open). 100 Z. Husrov P.o.E.M.M. Cycle uses the gesture of touch as a connecting mecha- nism between the poem and the reader. This mechanism lets the reader grasp the poem, in both physical and cognitive sense. The textual and visual semantics function as mutually cooperating content vehicles, and the semantics of touch gesture (diferent in each poem and always corresponding to the overall meaning) even contributes to users im- mersive poetic experience. The principle of publishing works on multiple platforms seems to be reaching beside the artistic community also the broader marketing interests. One of the examples of marketing strategies is a serial nov- el Apocalypsis by Mario Giordano, published in weekly instalments, always as an app, an e-book and for audio download. This, so called diginovel (the description as it was promoted) with crime theme, consists of electronic text pages, as in e-books, where the user virtually thumbs through them. The project consists also of multimedia con- tent short non-interactive videos that demonstrate the textual content, plus the reader receives pop-up messages. However, the users interac- tivity is very limited she just goes through the content. 6 Interactive narrative applications It is an interactive toy... or rather poem... or artwork... Andrew Plotkin 29 With the rise of the application market, several authors started to think about how to create innovative ways of story-reading experience. Here will be discussed the interactive novels, in which the authors wrote the piece directly and only for the mobile media. Thus can be considered as mobile digital born stories. Several authors saw in the mobile platforms an opportunity how to bring the genre of interactive fction (or IF, traditionally text-based games called also text adventures) into new environment and how to reach new audiences. There are even several apps that bring the works of modern IF authors to mobile devices, e.g.: Z-Machine Preservation Project (ZMPP), JFrot. A well-know interactive fction author, Andrew Plotkin, says that if there is actually an audience [on the App Store] 29 My Secret Hideout, online. 101 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch outside of people who are gamers, then it will be people who are inter- ested in interesting stories. 30 Andrew Plotkins IF games, programmed originally for computers: Shade, The Dreamhold, Hoist Sail for the Helio- pause and Home can be now found in the App Store. Besides these reme- diations, he also created for mobile market an interactive textual art generator set in a treehouse 31 My Secret Hideout. This app, in which the reader grows a hideout tree from the building icons, adds to every change of a tree shape a short narrative that describes my secret hideout. This narrative is based on the combinatory principle with every newly added icon, some sentence changes. Michael Berlyn is along with Plotkin another heir of Infocom 32 , author of many interactive fctions (the most famous are Zork, Infdel, Cuthroat) that now creates interactive stories for iPads and iPhones. His works The Art of Murder, Carnival of Death: Grok the Monkey and Reconstructing Remy: An Interactive Novel (that he names Flexible Tales Creators of re-imagined storytelling 33 and on which he collaborates with Mufy Berlyn) are available from App Store and Windows Store. They all combine multimedia elements with strong emphasis on the story development. Readers interaction with the story is based on tap- ping or clicking on the screen. In The Art of Murder, the reader is sup- posed to adopt the role of a detective: to solve the murder mystery of a young woman Lola by questioning the characters and investigating into the whole case. Carnival of Death: Grok the Monkey also plays upon the theme of murder and investigation in this case with the back- ground of circus seting. Their newest product, Reconstructing Remy, is based on the story of Remys disappearance and the reader should fnd out about what happened through interacting with the elements on the screen. In Berlyns mobile application stories, the readers function is diferent from the function of interactor in IF. In the mobile apps, the reader usually taps on the objects, in IF, she usually types commands and the programme accepts the interactors natural-language input. Nick Montfort defnes the processes in IF as: 30 Andrew Plotkin in Alexander 2013. 31 My Secret Hideout, online. 32 Reimer 2013. 33 For more information, see the website: htp://www.fexibletales.com/index.html 102 Z. Husrov In response to this input, usually a command to the main character in the story, actions and events transpire in a simulated world and text is produced to indicate what has happened. Then, unless the character has progressed to some conclusion of the story, the operator is allowed to provide more input and the cycle continues. 34 However, there are some similarities between the mobile apps and IF by Berlyns. In the Berlyns apps, the reader is often presented with a place (e.g. a room), where several objects are to be touched, through which the reader should gradually learn/inquire the story. The rea- der plays a detective role, trying to solve the mystery. This exploratory principle is sometimes similar to the interactors function when playing IF. However, as stated above, the interaction (typing natural language input in IF vs. tapping/clicking in apps) is diferent. In comparison to Berlyns exploratory use of interactive objects and text, the watermarks in Amanda Havards interactive book The Survi- vors (she calls her edition Immersedition) function to provide addi- tional visual or textual material about the characters, places, etc. This interactive book resembles the traditional e-book format, only with the extended, hypertext-like, use of text to provide additional information. The function of tapping on the text is here of a metatextual nature: the reader can read snippets from authors and characters mind. 35 The diference between these formats is embedded already in their titles/descriptions. Reconstructing Remy is referred to as an interactive novel, while The Survivors as an interactive book. It seems that the term book used in connection with interactive or e-, evokes the incli- nation towards a traditional codex format the readers thumb through the virtual pages, the text is writen in a similar way as in the print for- mat and does not distinguish the genre. When considering the term interactive novel, we could think of an interactive literary genre that tries to keep faithful to some characteristics of the genre of novel: if not the length of the text, then the developed plot structure, number of characters, function of a narrator, perspective, temporal and spatial di- mension. Even though a generally more strict diferentiation of formats 34 Montfort 2001. 35 The Survivors, online. 103 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch could be suitable for a more synoptic and organized users search for kinds of interactive stories forms, it seems that in reality the diference between interactive books and interactive novels (due to a lack of prop- er categorization) is solely based on the authors choice or preference. Another example of the use of interactive platform for story-telling is Jef Gomezs interactive novel Beside Myself. Beside Myself presents the readers with three diferent Jef Gomezes: a single one, a married one and one with a family. All three doppelgangers discover one another and start to communicate. The content of the story is formed by longer text passages accompanied by music, communication through email by characters or author, integration of social media, photos and interactive menus. The creators of this story (Jef Gomez is responsible for text and design, Rolando Garcia did the programming and app development) intertwined the content of the story with the technological possibilities (N. Katherine Hayless idea of a technotext): The contents of Beside Myself can be shufed, chapters can be programmed like a playlist, or the reader can follow one Jef at a time throughout the story (with the ability to read the story again from the point of view of a diferent Jef, seeing the novels events from another perspective as well as being served up an alternate ending). 36 Having based the interactive novel on the doppelganger story (simi- lar story idea can be found also in hypertextual fction Subway Story 37
by David M. Yun), where the reader can shufe the story and choo- se diferent perspectives (multi-sequential element), even use email and social networks, was a choice that could not be that smoothly and sophistically done in the print format. The creators were thus able to develop a story that suits a digital format and uses its potential. The question connected with interactive novels in general, is why the aut- hors have not created the stories in the hypertext/hypermedia format? Is it because hypertext fctions have not reached a broader readership beyond the university milieu? Is it because this platform was not atrac- tive enough? Is it because it did not provide enough fexibility, touch 36 Beside Myself, online. 37 Subway Story, online. 104 Z. Husrov Figure 7. Beside Myself by Jef Gomez 105 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch gesture and moveability? Is it because the mobile apps markets are now so wide-spread that authors want to be part of this paradigm? It is too early now to be able to answer these questions. Whatever the general reasons of moving to the mobile platforms are, it seems that the electronic literature on the tablets has its future. And according to the contemporary trends, it seems that the future of interactive novels might be much brighter than the future of hypertext fctions. 7 Interactive poetic applications are you the directlr[tv]uees? just do x,y,z! smarter zzzz...! forever mracn! cerna that make the rgse! you ubik poor bastard! it is about rudopcnetwork not arius! lighten laziikly! iveta would taste to ispernetvdpib! and-or (Ren Bauer, Beat Suter and Mirjam Weder): andorDada The feld of interactive mobile applications whose content is poetic, is formed also by those authors who created in the area of innovative poetics even before the rise of mobile market. Many of the authors in this feld engaged themselves with various modes of digital poetry or digital writing (Jrg Piringer, Andy Campbell, Mez Breeze, Eric Loyer, Jason Lewis and Bruno Nadeau, Beat Suter, Ren Bauer, Mirjam Weder, Johannes Auer, Aya Karpiska). This fact contributed to the quality and status of the interactive poetry apps. Many of the poetic applications combine diferent media and use the touch gesture in a new way. Ho- wever, there are still those that use the touch gesture only to trigger new screen. Here we will discuss the mobile born digital poetic applications, where the reader interacts with the kinetic digital text in various ges- tural forms that go beyond the gestures of touch and tap. We focus only on those that were created only for the mobile market and are neither remediations of print formats, nor remediations of digital works, origi- nally created for PCs or Mac computers. The aim is to look into specifcs of mobile poetics, which can be diferent from the web-based pieces that do not work with touch gesture. Those apps will be introduced and shortly analyzed, whose authors contextually work even with the gestural semantics and make the process of readers touch relevant to the concept of the whole piece. Another studied group of the poetic apps consists of those works that make use of the generative textuality/ 106 Z. Husrov visuality/musicality for poetic purposes and those that also make use of the performative poetics but all of them still stress the gestural poetics and can thus be regarded as technotexts. 7.1 Apps with Generative Poetics The principle of generative poetics has been connected with digital poetry, therefore it is quite understandable that it appears also in the mobile applications. The generative principle can work on diferent levels from having the results of the generative processes be the fnal product (as is the case in the work Spine Sonnets by Jody Zellen, where the app generates a poem from the book titles), to the projects that use the results of real-time processuality as a material for further develop- ment. The Swiss, Zurich-based artgroup and-or consists of Ren Bau- er, Beat Suter and Mirjam Weder. In their three locative mobile apps: andorDada, snif_jazzbox.audible city, wardive, they transform the imme- diate wlan waves environment into the poetic medium. Their apps capture the names of the wlan waves and according to diferent prin- ciples use them to make generative poems. The app andorDada allows the user to initially choose between four modes: clear, copypaste, story, instant poem. At the botom of the screen, the user sees a list of the actual hotspots around her, which the app takes and uses as one of the source texts for the poems. The reader gets a poem of generated sen- tences, while a female voice synthesizer uters the text. Very amusing is the fact that also the readers clicks on any of the modes are orally presented. This dadaistic poetic app writes and speaks to the reader in a multilingual way, where the names of the hotspots enliven and get performed as poetic elements in diferent syntactic positions. Snif_jazzbox, created in collaboration with Johannes Auer, transforms the titles of the hotspots into music. After opening the app, the user sees a playing musical score with the titles of hotspots under the score. The programme recognizes the leters of the hotspot titles and transforms them into playable tones of the musical notation system. One of seven diferent themes can be chosen as the underlying component: waiting, walk, riding a bus, classic, jazz, trance, random. Besides this, the user can choose one of the playing instruments at a time: organ, drums, 107 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch bass, piano, fute, string, singleton, penta. At the botom, a fickering list of the hotspots appears. The app wardive asks the user to play a game: to protect a crystal from the atack of the hotspots that appear in the vicinity of the mobile device. The hotspots materialize in the form of triangles that fall from Figure 8. andorDada by and-or.ch 108 Z. Husrov various corners of the screen and try to reach the crystal in the centre of the screen. All these three apps are on the authors website categorized as adaptive games with locative levels 38 . All three were frst released for Apple customers, but after Apple rejected the used IPA, authors decided to place them on Google Play market for free. All these apps approach the hotspot names as a subconscious expression of the pres- ently existing communication networks. 39 By generating the hotspot titles into poetry/audio/game elements, they approach this information as a source of artistic expression. They poeticize/musicalize/gamify the hotspot titles, for the users not only to realize their presence, but also to think about their potence/potential. The titles do not refer just to the occurence of wlan waves, and thus to the presence of Internet signal, but here, decontextualized, they become signifers of a diferent reality: of the people that stand behind those names, of the places that stand behind those descriptions, of other relations. The Situationist efect can be applied here, as drive in the sense of creating a new and authentic experience from walking the everyday routine, as well as in the sense of placing the actual descriptive information into a new artistic context. 7.2 Apps with Gestural Poetics Notice me, notice me Eric Loyer 40 The concept of coded language that creates a texture around us is present also in the application #Carnivast by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell. Here, however, the text is not generated, but is created by textscaped micro-environments (or immersive 3D Segments) 41 that respond to ones touching any point on the screen, as well as to a zoom gesture. Text is writen in Mez Breezes Mezangelle, which is a code poetry language, a creolized language that combines human language and programming language terminology. When the reader clicks on the symbol [], she gets a hexagonal text room, where the whole nar- 38 For more information, see the website by and-or.ch , 2012. 39 snif_jazzbox.audible city, online. 40 Strange Rain, text from the piece. 41 #Carnivast, information about the downloaded piece. 109 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch rative can be read in Mezangelle and also in English. The whole screen is interactive touching the screen on a particular place triggers a re- sponse corresponding to that place, zooming into a particular textual part, word or leter. The whole work consists of three diferent segments, landscapes or nests: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3. Each of the segments is diferently coloured (yel- low/orange, yellow/light green, red) and creates diferent geometric 3D shapes. By touching the visual-textual sphere, composed, in each segment, of several layers of the same textual material, one gets deep- er and deeper into the metaphorical core of the textual space. The text rotates, expands and shrinks, depending on readers interactivity. Atmospheric music accompanies the textual-visual experience as well. According to instructions, one can touchswipe to swivel around and pinch to zoom in and out 42 . The visualized text of each part tells one fragment of a story. In the frst part, 1.1: # [Parent Primary 1 st Layer Nest = Miss N. Abyme], one gets to know the main character Miss N. Abyme, who, during her party, received as gifts all engineered state o the art geophysical objects. This nest is created by mild yellow/ orange background and yellow and black textual paterns. The second nest 1.2 consists of yellow/light green background and black text forming fying cubes and textual walls. The third nest 1.3 is red with black text and creates a shape of a ball with a darker shadow. The fragmented text tells a story about Parent Miss N. Abyme (in 1.1) and her two children: # [C(LoneC)hild1 2 nd Layer Nesting = Txt]: (in 1.2) and [C(LoneC)hild2 3 rd Layer Nesting = I#Mage]: (in 1.3). Text about each of the characters creates one nest. The authors interestingly play here with polysemantics of the expres- sions parent and child (in the semantic context denotating family relations, but as object superordinate to another subordinate object in the programming languages). Miss N. Abyme is obviously a language play on mise en abyme, a formal technique, where a recursive sequence occurs, or where an image contains a smaller copy of itself, or is a ref- erence to intertextuality of language. The recursivity of the text hap- pens in each of the parts the reader gets deeper and deeper and gets 42 Ibid. 110 Z. Husrov still the same text, only zoomed in. The concept of an element contain- ing a smaller copy of itself is referenced by the duality of parent and children and expressed in this sentence at the end of 1.3: Mise_en_ aby#me_mirrored back in glorious st#Amplifed genecode. The inter- textuality is here approached by the mutual infuence of human lan- guage and code in mezangelle. Considering the title Carnivast, several interpretational possibilities could be applied. If we think about carnival + vast, the story about the parent, clone child1 called text and clone child2 called image, Carnivast could be understood as their vast party, where they take on masks that shade their true identity (the story even opens with Miss N. Abymes party). If we think about carnivore + vast, we could have a story, where the parent plundered the nests of clone children (and maybe ate them) to gain their qualities. And maybe the reader is a carnivore, who consumes the living text and image to satisfy her hunger for experience. The reading and interacting with Aya Karpiskas app Shadows Nev- er Sleep, a zoom narrative, as she subtitles it, is also based on the Figure 9. #Carnivast, 1.3 by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell 111 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch zoom gesture. But in this case, zooming is not the way how to travel through 3D textscapes, but rather the way of navigating through the app. The work consists of three sequences the frst one with authors photo when lying with a shadow above her and visual text saying: We go to bed we close our eyes but shadows never sleep/Up they go, and out they go/Shadows never sleep... 43 The zooming function gets the reader to a grid consisting of 3x3 squares with the blank central square. Each square combines a white female fgure (a personalization of Shad- ow) with a text. After using the zoom gesture again, each of the pre- vious squares turns into nine squares with a blank one in the centre. Since the very central one is blank, the reader gets 64 black squares with variously opaque white visual text. Small visual textual parts are based on the theme of shadows, some of them are writen in interrogative or exclamatory form. The black and white aesthetics of the grid reminds one of a (board) game, but in this app, there is no assigned way how to traverse through the space of the visual-textual feld. The use of children-stylized language, the visual style of both text and the drawn fgures, reminds one, due to its repetitive structure and the formal sim- plicity, of bedtime stories or nursery rhymes and creates the feeling of easily approachable narrative poems or prose poetry. The zoom gesture corresponds with the overall poetics reminding the reader of zooming into the dreams, into the unconscious and unknown, of get- ting deeper inside. Eric Loyers app Strange Rain is playable in three modes: wordless, whispers and story, each of them with soothing, atmospheric music. Since this part of the paper deals with poetry applications, only the story mode will be looked at 44 . The screen presents a hand-held cam- era-like perspective showing an imaginary sky with raindrops falling on the glass. The touch of the fnger on raindrops activates the text the thoughts of a narrator going through a family crisis (his sisters accident), standing in the rain, thinking in his backyard, not wanting to return back inside. The text is either black or white, and as the reader 43 Shadows Never Sleep, online. 44 Wordless mode presents falling rain with atmospheric music and whispers presents the same perspective but when one touches the raindrops, the words fall or drop appear. 112 Z. Husrov touches more and more thoughts, she uncovers other layers that are present in the sky. There is also an airplane fying and the more the user touches the raindrops, the more explanations about what hap- pened and what the narrator ponders about, the user gets. The touch momentum in this app is not aimed just at moving new parts of the sto- ry forward (as one can traditionally see in the apps that use an arrow, a gesture in the mobile devices that replaces the mouse-click), but be- sides revealing new sentences, it works also as touching in the sense of familiarizing familiarizing with narrators cognition, with the nature of this sky and its layers. Also, the touch never reveals the same text at the same place of touch. The touch gesture works generatively, maybe wanting to bring the idea of associative mind processes. Raindrops that fall from the sky carry narrators thoughts but they need a reader to get to know them by her touch. Otherwise, the story is but poten- tial. Each stage of the app brings new words and sentences when the raindrops are touched. At the fnal stages, the reader seems to get into the narrators mind the sky layers fash and the airplane fies in the middle. He talks to a God-like being, pleading: Notice me, notice me. And also two lines of thoughts appear in the app: The strange becomes familiar, and the familiar, strange. It could be deduced that the narrators standing in this Strange Rain can be an atempt to under- stand how to deal with his sisters amnesia after the accident. As the tool of this understanding, he chose his complete soaking in the rain. Therefore, raindrops here represent not only the magical elements of his thoughts, but since they fall from the sky, they can be interpreted also as metaphysical media that should help the narrator in his difcult situation. The search for soothing is thus both physical, emotional and intellectual (I am going to need an explanation). 7.3 Apps with Performative Poetics Two letrist-like applications by an Austrian sound and media artist Jrg Piringer, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and konsonant, explore the qualities of leters, their visual and sonic presentations and accent the artistic potential of leter combinations. Jrg Piringer is also known as a performer, video, sound, software and hardware artist, one of whose main domains is a concrete sound/visual performativeness of leters. 113 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch The performative aspect of leter concretization is the main drive be- hind both, his performances and his applications. In abcdefghijklm- nopqrstuvwxyz (2010), the reader meets with tiny sound-creatures in the shape of leters 45 that travel through the screen and turn it into the soundscape and textscape. The choice of each leter sets of its sonic presentation and the combination of the leters on the screen sparks of a concrete letrist noise concerto. The user can switch between four sound modes: gravity (constantly sounding leters bump into the borders of the screen), crickets (leters speak only in the clusters with other leters), vehicles (sounds and visuals of leters remind one of the characteristics of transport machines), birds (leters visual and sound features remind one of the bird sounds and their fight lines). In all of these modes, the reader can switch the bomb icon to blow the leters out. The leters in all the modes create a distinctive visual trajectory that maps their movement on the screen by leaving behind a shadow of their trajectory. Figure 10. konsonant by Jrg Piringer. konsonant is similar to the previous app in the way how the leters (through implementation of their articulation/sonifcation) become lit- tle but powerful sound machines that produce resonating noise efects. 45 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, online. 114 Z. Husrov In konsonant, not the whole alphabet is at stake, but the focus is on the consonants (even though some vowels are present). There is also a choice of one of four modes/games that defne the consonants be- haviour: sound organisms (M,N,O) follow users drawn line, in the other game, the user can control the leter cloud (the red fash- ing leters are H, X, Z), the leters from the R group, with diferent accents on R move on a grid according to users decisions. In the last game, one can build machines from big leters (by touching a screen at any point), control their movement and the litle leters, falling from an opening, then sit on the statues made of bigger leters. When one shakes the device, they disperse on the screen. The poetic and aesthetic current of both Piringers apps is embed- ded in the bodies of the leters and their performative dimension. Piringer makes the leters and their combinations speak (by artic- ulating their sounds) and makes the leters visually present and in motion by the interactive design (incorporating mostly just the ty- pography). The infuence of sound poetry, concrete, visual, kinet- ic and digital poetry is felt in these apps, and Piringer created an exquisite example of how nothing but the concrete representation of the leter-bodies can bring the aesthetic, playful and poetic experi- ence that is always responsive to users choice of leters. Besides this performative poetics, his apps are a wonderful example of gestural poetics the concept of touching the words and thus turning them into active bodies, is the core principle of all the literary mobile applications. But in comparison with other mobile apps, where peo- ple touch the electronic pages or arrows that allow the readers read bigger text amount but not individual leters, Piringers apps work with macro-poetics and force the readers to concentrate on the spec- ifcity of each sign. Maybe, after understanding the features of each particular leter (by playing with it), the readers would be able to treat the words, sentences and pages with diferent criteria. 115 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch 8 Conclusion We believe that signifcant, sustained investigation of the writing and design possibilities of such devices will lead to new forms of electronic literature that will be compelling, provocative and delightful. Jason Edward Lewis and Bruno Nadeau 46 This belief, articulated by Jason Lewis and Bruno Nadeau, has already come true, mostly with those poetically gifted media poets and artists in the creative mobile apps industry that both make a research into in- teractive poetics and design and are familiar with the principles and characteristics of electronic literature. It seems that those authors who are consciously aware of the infuence the experimental poetics (digi- tal poetry, concrete poetry, kinetic poetry, sound poetry, visual poetry) has on their works and who are able to shift the experimentations into new dimensions based on the contemporary technology and media, can bring into the feld of mobile apps new and fresh air, enrich the poetic and aesthetic criteria and treat the work as a whole. Every com- ponent of their work has its specifc position in the semantic complex. This paper proposes a categorization of mobile literary applications, based on the diferences in genre (poetry and narrative), in the source text (remediations or digital born), in the target group (apps for chil- dren), in the purpose (creative writing apps), and in the number of digi- tal platforms (multi-platform apps). This categorization is far from per- fect and even further from being fnite. Its aim was rather to pinpoint a variety of literary mobile apps in the time when the paper was writen, to sum up their specifcs and to mention several examples. Regarding the used methodology, the paper leans on the media-specifc analysis (proposed by N. Katherine Hayles), gestural features in connection with text and other media, on the aspect of intermediality and the as- pect of technotext. It is now too early to talk about genre analysis in connections with mobile apps, but perhaps in the future, even mobile apps will form specifc and generally accepted genres. The market of applications running on iOS and/or Android is on the rise and the situation with the literary apps has not contradicted 46 P.o.E.M.M., online. 116 Z. Husrov this trend. Although the number of literary apps is far smaller than the number of apps bringing quick and easy entertainment and simple games, the tendencies of bringing literature into the mobile market are becoming more and more present (both in the amateur creative poet- ry and in the professional apps). Several artists and publishers have decided to issue their works on multiple platforms whether as print books and mobile apps or as web-based projects and mobile apps. The paper shows that even though many of the applications provide interesting content with atractive visual design and profound poet- ics, not that many really concentrate on the innovative use of users gestures. The ways of interacting with the work should stem from the content of the work and the gestures should co-create the poetics of the piece. Only then one can talk about the technotext as N. Kather- ine Hayles defned it. Regarding the studied examples and categories, the paper shows that the apps on multiple digital platforms (mostly those by Jason Lewis and Bruno Nadeau) and interactive poetic apps (either with gestural poetics, generative poetics or performative poet- ics) are able to make the best use of the interactive gestures and thus use those elements that cannot be implemented into any other poetic form. According to the contemporary situation in the feld of mobile literary apps, it seems that the authors of poetic mobile apps use kinet- ics and playful potential of digital text to a more innovative extent and use them to create technotexts more frequently than the authors do with interactive novels. This is quite understandable, regarding the fact that poems are much shorter than the developed narrative, and therefore the authors task of keeping the reader entertained, could be easier, since the extent of poems allows only small, but an intensive number of interactive ways. However, with bigger formats, when read- ers know that the piece ofers interactivity (and also regarding their experience with playing interactively-intense digital games), they often require more than just scrolling and thumbing through the pages, or simple video inclusion. The situation is diferent with publications, e.g. for Kindle. These publications do not state that they ofer an enhanced reading experience based on interactivity, the focus is on the text itself, they are remediations of classic books. 117 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch Compared to the other senses, touch is the only sense that needs the person to be in physical contact with a thing or another person. Touch as the interhuman gesture creates a physical bond between peo- ple, a momentum of non-linguistic communication. Sensing the books through touch has been one of the reasons that people stated in the 1990s (the others were: I cannot take a computer to bed or to the beach), when talking about the positives of print books against the electronic literature. Now even the electronic literature can be touched and un- like with the print text, the text on mobile devices can react accordingly. The ancient Greek poetess Sappho wrote that you will remember those many and beautiful things we did in our youth. Now, the mo- bile literary apps have not even reached their metaphorical youth it could be said that they are now in their infants phase. However, the mind of the contemporary Zeitgeist will probably remember them, thanks to its recording mechanisms. And it will defnitely remember the more beautiful ones, the apps that touch both the artistic commu- nities and the general public. 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