Project created in 2002-5 in the Brown U. CAVE-Writing Worshop; features dynamic, interactive text in a CAVE environment:

“Screen was created in the ‘Cave,’ a room-sized virtual reality display. It begins as a reading and listening experience. Memory texts appear on the Cave’s walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play – as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text. At the same time, the language of the text, together with the uncanny experience of touching words, creates an experience that doesn’t settle easily into the usual ways of thinking about gameplay or VR. Words peel faster and faster, struck words don’t always return to where they came from, and words with nowhere to go can break apart. Eventually, when too many are off the wall, the rest peel loose, swirl around the reader, and collapse…. In addition to creating a new form of bodily interaction with text through its play, Screen moves the player through three reading experiences – beginning with the familiar, stable, page-like text on the walls, followed by the word-by-word reading of peeling and hitting (where attention is focused), and with more peripheral awareness of the arrangements of flocking words and the new (often neologistic) text being assembled on the walls.” (from )

Starter Links: Description with images on Noah Wardrip Fruin’s Hyperfiction.org site | Iowa Review Web Interview with Noah Wardrip Fruin (with videos of Screen) | Brown U. CAVE-Writing Worshop