Tales of Automation is a collection of nine “short” tales that explore the effects of digital automation on embodied experience. Each tale is a never-ending cycle of asynchronous loops that presents a moment of distracted attention. A single character attempts and always fails to track, narrate or just make sense of experience in its enhanced complexity, materiality and abstraction. Notifications, algorithmic behavior modification, social messaging, life-logging, and quantified feedback intrude on consciousness at the cusp of self-awareness. Narratives compete. Vision is composited, filtered and collaged. The multiplicity and variability of nested loops means that the short fictions are without beginnings or ends, or rather they begin in medias res and end when the nature of the characters’ situation becomes evident.
