Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch

Zuzana Husárová

Abstract: The paper focuses on the mobile applications created for

tablets that could be assigned signiicant 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 1st
century AD, depicted with a stylus and four wax tablets. Wax tablet is,
simply said, “a piece of wood with a wax-illed 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.

81
Z. Husárová

Figure 1. Depiction of a girl with a stylus and wax

tablets on a Pompeiian fresco (often called Sappho)

any more, but rather of the technological gadgets – mobile computers

with touch screen, usually controlled by inger 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 inger 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 Android2) 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.

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 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-
ines the literature on mobile devices in his entry in Słownik Gatunków
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,
speciic 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 diicult 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 Center’s Project for
Excellence in Journalism report from 26th October 20114, 17 per cent of

3
Pisarski 2013.
4
Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism report The Tablet
Revolution and the Future of News 2011.

83
Z. Husárová

tablet users read books on their tablets daily5. 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 ield 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
don’t 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.

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 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 Base9, 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 reader´s gestures when performing the work mutually inluence
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 Performance10), platform studies (Ian Bogost
and Nick Montfort11), critical code studies (Mark C. Marino12), software
studies (Lev Manovich13), 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-speciic analysis”. N. Katherine Hayles deines the
“media-speciic 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 Hayles´s concept of “technotext”

8
Hayles 2007. By “digital born“ literature, Hayles means: “a irst-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.

85
Z. Husárová

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 relexive 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-speciic analysis” that should stress
the characteristics of literary mobile platforms and deine the speciics
of each category, the paper aims to show that the literary applications
create a fast-growing and quite an engaging ield (as well as a cultural
business market). Moreover, the paper wants to point out that in this
ield 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.

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 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.
PlayTales17

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, Grimm’s 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! Kids’n
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 ingers 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 iction, like hypertext literature or computer games, the aim is
not to ind one´s 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

87
Z. Husárová

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

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 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 remediations18 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” deines, 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.

89
Z. Husárová

One of the most famous apps is Alice for the iPad (a remediation of
Lewis Carroll´s 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 irst 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 Hater’s 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: children’s 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 beneits to children’s 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 beneits 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.

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 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 user´s 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 children’s
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 Poet’s 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 inluenced 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 Android’s 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.

91
Z. Husárová

Figure 4. Refrigerator Poetry by WBPhoto

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 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
ind 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 inds 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 ictions 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 Poe’s 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-
ley’s Frankenstein. Morris’ interactive novel Frankenstein was designed
and developed for iOS by inkle and published by Proile 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-

93
Z. Husárová

ple choice, she should make “decisions that don’t interfere with the
reading low, 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 ield, 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 shule 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 shuling
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
low and be able to actually read the text, one has to hold a inger on
the screen. Tom Phillips, an author of artist´s 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.

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 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 narrative24.
App Obvia Gaude by Ľubomír Panák, in collaboration with Zuzana
Husárová, 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 Shule literature, see Husárová/Montfort 2012.

95
Z. Husárová

poet Matej Gažúr 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 lying 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 irst, 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 Mann25 (also in web format), where the reader activates Mann´s
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.

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 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch

Quite an interesting example of the use of more platforms for sto-

ry-telling, is the project Immobilité by Mark Amerika. Immobilité is the
name of the ilm (that was displayed also in the gallery environment)
plus mobile versions. According to the information about the applica-
tion: “Immobilité is a remix of stills, subtitles, and original audio from
the ilm Immobilité, generally considered the irst-ever feature length
art-house ilm shot entirely on mobile phone.“26 This piece was ilmed
in Cornwall and belongs to Mark America´s 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 ilm,
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 Müller´s For All Seasons, initially programmed for Windows
PC, now running also on iOS, uses reader´s movement to correspond
with the meaning of the displayed text. This work presents author´s
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 lowers made of text, in
Summer, animated text-ish swim on the screen, in Autumn, text-leaves

26
Immobilité, online.
27
Immobilité, Remixes. online.
28
Ibid.

97
Z. Husárová

make a whirl and in Winter, it snows text-lakes. The touch gesture on

the mobile devices works very similarly as the mouse movement on the
PC – animations change to some degree based on reader´s input. Dan-
delions turn according to dragged trajectory, text-ish and text-whirl
disperse, text-lakes 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 inal 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
Doesn’t 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 irst one leter, then
other leters and words that gradually form a chain – a line of poetry.
Touching the screen of Buzz Aldrin Doesn’t 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

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 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 one´s 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 ive listed poems in the menu
(Version 2:: Anthology), writen by ive 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).

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Z. Husárová

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 user´s 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 user´s 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 Plotkin29
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 iction (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), JFroz. A well-know interactive iction author, Andrew
Plotkin, says that “if there is actually an audience [on the App Store]

29
My Secret Hideout, online.

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 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 Plotkin´s 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 ictions (the most famous are Zork, Inidel,
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. Reader´s 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 Remy´s disappearance and the reader should ind
out about what happened through interacting with the elements on the
screen. In Berlyns´ mobile application stories, the reader´s 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 interactor´s natural-language input.
Nick Montfort deines 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.lexibletales.com/index.html

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Z. Husárová

“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 interactor´s 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 Havard´s 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 “author’s and character’s 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.

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 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 author´s choice or preference.
Another example of the use of interactive platform for story-telling is
Jef Gomez´s 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 Hayles´s idea of a technotext):
“The contents of Beside Myself can be shuled, 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 novel’s 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 iction Subway Story37
by David M. Yun), where the reader can shule 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 ictions 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 lexibility, touch

36
Beside Myself, online.
37
Subway Story, online.

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Z. Husárová

Figure 7. Beside Myself by Jef Gomez

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 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 ictions.

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 (René Bauer, Beat Suter and Mirjam Weder): andorDada
The ield 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 ield engaged themselves with various modes of digital poetry or
digital writing (Jörg Piringer, Andy Campbell, Mez Breeze, Eric Loyer,
Jason Lewis and Bruno Nadeau, Beat Suter, René Bauer, Mirjam Weder,
Johannes Auer, Aya Karpińska). 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 speciics
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 reader´s 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/

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Z. Husárová

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 inal
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 René 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 reader´s 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,

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 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch

Figure 8. andorDada by and-or.ch

bass, piano, lute, string, singleton, penta. At the botom, a lickering

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

107
Z. Husárová

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 irst 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 signiiers 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 dérive – 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 Loyer40
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 one´s touching any point on the screen, as well as to a zoom
gesture. Text is writen in Mez Breeze´s “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.

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 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 reader´s 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 irst part, 1.1: # [Parent – Primary 1st 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 lying 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 – 2nd Layer Nesting = Txt]: (in 1.2)
and [C(LoneC)hild2 – 3rd 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.

109
Z. Husárová

Figure 9. #Carnivast, 1.3 by Mez Breeze and Andy Campbell

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#Ampliied genecode.” The inter-
textuality is here approached by the mutual inluence 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. Abyme´s
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 Karpińska´s app Shadows Nev-
er Sleep, “a zoom narrative”, as she subtitles it, is also based on the

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 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 irst one with author´s
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 igure (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 ield. The use of
children-stylized language, the visual style of both text and the drawn
igures, 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 Loyer´s 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 at44. The screen presents a hand-held cam-
era-like perspective showing an imaginary sky with raindrops falling
on the “glass”. The touch of the inger on raindrops activates the text
– the thoughts of a narrator going through a family crisis (his sister´s
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.

111
Z. Husárová

touches more and more thoughts, she uncovers other layers that are
present in the sky. There is also an airplane lying 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 narrator´s 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 narrator´s 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 inal stages, the reader seems to get
into the narrator´s mind – the sky layers lash and the airplane lies 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 narrator´s standing in this Strange Rain can be an atempt to under-
stand how to deal with his sister´s 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 diicult
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
Jörg Piringer, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz and konsonant, explore the
qualities of leters, their visual and sonic presentations and accent the
artistic potential of leter combinations. Jörg 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.

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 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 light 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 Jörg Piringer.

konsonant is similar to the previous app in the way how the leters
(through implementation of their articulation/soniication) become lit-
tle but powerful sound machines that produce resonating noise efects.

45
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, online.

113
Z. Husárová

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 deine the consonant´s be-
haviour: “sound organisms” (M,N,O) follow user´s drawn line, in
the other game, the user can “control the leter cloud” (the red lash-
ing leters are H, X, Z), the leters from the “R” group, with diferent
accents on R move on a grid according to user´s 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 Piringer´s 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 inluence 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 user´s 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, Piringer´s apps work
with macro-poetics and force the readers to concentrate on the spec-
iicity 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.

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 Literature on Tablets: Poetics of Touch

8 Conclusion
We believe that signiicant, 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 Nadeau46

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 inluence 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 ield 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 speciic 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 inite. Its aim was rather to pinpoint a
variety of literary mobile apps in the time when the paper was writen,
to sum up their speciics and to mention several examples. Regarding
the used methodology, the paper leans on the media-speciic 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 speciic 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.

115
Z. Husárová

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 user´s
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 deined 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 ield 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 author´s 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.

116
 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 deinitely remember
the more “beautiful” ones, the apps that touch both the artistic commu-
nities and the general public.

Key-words: literary application, poetic application, interactive novel,

interactive poetry, tablet, Android, iPad, iPhone, electronic literature,
electronic books, sound poetry, visual poetry, concrete poetry, digital
poetry, digital poetics

Acknowledgements
This paper was writen within a Grant UK by Zuzana Husárová
106/2013 “Transmedia approach to creative practice.”

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