2026
The Grand Hotel Bald Cockatoo
An immersive, nest-like installation combining five-channel video, two-channel audio, recombinant dream narratives, and a mechanical fortune-telling interface.
2026
The Grand Hotel Galactic Center
A narrative virtual-reality interactive fiction for Meta Quest 3, exploring a cosmic hotel of spectacle, wonder, and despair. VR development by Colin Robinson.
2026
Trump Jesus
In April 2026, Donald Trump distributed a meme portraying himself as Jesus Christ (though he claimed he was doctor). In May 2026, I responded with this work of counter-slop, where I ask the serious question: what if Trump really were the savior?
2026
Birds of Norway
A 3D-modeled birdwatching simulator for listening to common birds of Norway while navigating a landscape, hovering over passing birds to identify species, and learning from data drawn from museum collections, live weather, Xeno-canto, Wikipedia, and related sources.
2026
I Will Write a Poem
An experimental interface for using Claude to produce, edit, and analyze poetry, with tools for turning poems into broadsheets, kinetic and interactive digital poems, image prompts, video prompts, and song prompts. The project breaks from the usual chatbot paradigm by giving writers more granular and recursive control over AI-assisted poetic composition.
2025
Riverrun (fascistchicfascistquick)
An AI-produced film based on the style of the preamble to Finnegans Wake, using generative cinema to comment on contemporary American politics.
2024–2025
The Grand Hotel Sand Fountain
An ambulatory augmented-reality narrative unfolding along three interwoven paths through fleeting passions, chance meetings, unstable rooms, memory, and loss.
2024
Fin du Monde
A darkly comic generative AI digital narrative that meditates on the popular fascination with disaster, mortality, teleology, and AI through an apocalyptic cataclysm that manifests as a global meteor shower impacting cities across the planet simultaneously.
2023
Authors Reviewing Authors Reviewing Authors Reviewing Authors Reviewing Authors....
An early AI writing experiment in ChatGPT 3.5, Authors Reviewing Authors Reviewing Authors Reviewing Authors Reviewing Authors.... is a comical test of the LLM's knowledge of literary references and styles, featuring dozens of book reviews allegedly authored by authors from literary history.
2023
Genre Fiction Experiments with GPT
Experiments in producing genre narratives with the earliest public releases of GPT and ChatGPT, using iterative prompting to test how human authors could draw on narrative conventions embedded in the model and reshape stories as they unfolded.
2022–2023
Coding with AI — Electronic Literature and Digital Art
A set of experiments using GPT-3.5 to code short kinetic poems, primarily in p5.js, and small digital artworks. Produced across roughly three months from November 2022 to January 2023, the series explores how AI-assisted coding could open electronic literature to new approaches and to artists trained more in writing and aesthetics than in programming.
2018
Penelope
A combinatory sonnet generator film based on the Odyssey, linking longing, migration, and extinction through constantly recombined poetry, image, and sound.
2017
Circe
A short film shot on the Isle of Inishbofin and in the Galway area, adapted from a feature-length combinatory script and shaped by myth, return, and transformation.
Screening history
- Inishbofin Festival, Inishbofin, Ireland.
- ELO 2017 Conference, Porto.
- Berkeley Center for New Media.
- John D. Rockefeller Library, Brown University.
2016
Thor in Minnesota
A contribution to Mark Marino and Rob Wittig's netprov project Monstrous Weather, written when the idea of Donald Trump becoming president still seemed comically outlandish. A thread about weather and campfire tales somehow brings Thor and Trump into the same mythic Minnesota storm.
2014
The 100 Babies Story Machine
This is a project borne of a recurring set of tales I used to tell my kids when they were little. The 100 Babies Story Machine is a narrative toy I made back then and updated in 2026 with more gizmos. One of the stories I wrote with my daughter Jesse is also included here.
2014–2016
Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project
An immersive narrative work on torture, memory, and moral injury, developed from interviews with American soldiers who participated in or witnessed abusive violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Exhibition history
- Electronic Visualization Lab (CAVE2 performances), University of Illinois, Chicago.
- IEEE 2014 Visualization Conference, Paris.
- Paris 8 University; Human Rights/Human Wrongs International Film Festival, Oslo.
- IEEE 2015 VR Conference, Arles; ACM SIGGRAPH 2015, Los Angeles.
- HASTAC 2015 Conference, Michigan State University; ISEA 2015, Vancouver.
2013–2015
Toxi*City
A feature-length database-driven climate change film that layers toxic infrastructure, Hurricane Sandy, and speculative narrative into a work that reassembles itself in recurring waves.
Exhibition history
- Museum of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, Sensing Change.
- Brown University’s Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab Video Wall.
- ELO 2014, Milwaukee; University of Illinois-Chicago Cyber Commons Video Wall.
- Bergen Public Library; Oslo Poesiefilm Festival.
- Landscapes of the Anthropocene, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Santa Monica Contemporary Art Museum, Barcelona.
2012
Three Rails Live
A generative film that combines micronarratives, film fragments, and “perverbs” through algorithmic variations that link stories of environmental devastation with one of personal dissolution.
Exhibition history
- Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania; Brown University.
- &Now Festival, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; ELO 2012 Media Arts Show.
- places/traces/stories, Rom 8 Gallery, Bergen.
- Bibliothèque Nationale de France; School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
- FILE Festival, São Paulo; Rhinocéros Gallery, Paris.
2011–2013
Katastrofetrilogen / Catastrophe Trilogy
Three short films, including The Last Volcano, Rats and Cats, and Norwegian Tsunami, exploring myth, memory, and catastrophe.
Exhibition history
- Cinematek, Bergen; Ethnographic Terminalia, New Orleans.
- E-Poetry International Digital Language-Media-Arts Festival, SUNY Buffalo.
- Sadho Poetry Film Festival, New Delhi; Instants Vidéo Numériques et poétiques, Marseilles.
- &Now Festival, Paris; Bergen Open Film Festival.
- 101 Festival, St. Petersburg.
2011
After Parthenope
A trigram-based story generator set in Naples, originally made for the Officina di Letteratura Elettronica exhibition at the Palazzo delle Arti Napoli in January 2011 and redeveloped from Processing into JavaScript for the web in 2026.
2011
The Misanthrope of Karlskrona
A somewhat elaborate site-specific joke and performance made for Cabaret Voltage at Karlskrona konsthall in June 2011. A tribute to Talan Memmott, the generator produces a comic diatribe of insults about Karlskrona, Sweden, framed by Lars Hamson, professor of Nordic Relations from the Los Wikiless Timespedia.
2010
Robert Coover Review Generator
A small generator made for Robert Coover's 80th birthday celebration at the ELO 2010 Conference. It splices lines from reviews of Coover's books and interviews into semi-absurd appreciations of the postmodernist maestro, and accompanied a side-roast skit performed with Rob Wittig.
2009
Frequency
A poetry generator built from 2,000 lines written using only the 200 most frequently used words in English, foregrounding constraint, recombination, and serial variation.
2009
Tokyo Garage
A remix of Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge generator, repositioned in an imaginary Tokyo and later recognized as part of a broader culture of generative literary remix.
2006
The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One
A foundational anthology that helped establish a stable, curated, and teachable publishing model for electronic literature across web and library contexts.
2005, 2011
Implementation
A sticker novel about psychological warfare, American imperialism, sex, terror, identity, and the idea of place that invited participant readers to place and photograph parts of the story in public spaces around the world.
2002
Kind of Blue
A multivocal email novel written in reply to Rob Wittig's Blue Company originally distributed in real time, capturing the unsettled atmosphere of the period immediately after 9/11.
2002
The Meddlesome Passenger
A metafictional hypertext about travel, authorship, wherein links trigger timed paratexts around the central story. The author is dead, and he isn't happy about it.
1998–2000
The Unknown
A collaborative web-based hyperfiction about an unruly book tour, widely regarded as a landmark work that brought comic excess and encyclopedic range into electronic literature.
1997
Piercing Through
A play set on a small college in Iowa during the lead-up to and outbreak of the Persian Gulf War (1990–91). It follows a tight-knit group of philosophy students whose lives, relationships, and ideologies get complicated over an existential year. The play was performed as a staged reading by the Cincinnati Playwright's Initiative at the Aranoff Center for the Arts.
1993–1995
Unfinished Paintings
Back when I was a kid, I had ambitions of becoming a regular old fiction writer, and I went to fiction writing school and got an MA at Illinois State University. These are the stories I wrote there. While most read immature and unpolished to me now, I've still got a certain fondness for two or three of them.