Tumbarumba

TAXONOMY

Cagean | Conceptual | Electronic Literature | Fiction | Firefox | Intertextual | Intervention | Net Art | Playable

REQUIREMENTS

Install Firefox Plugin.

MEDIA & ACHIEVEMENTS

Tumbarumba – a surreal fiction anthology in the form of a browser plugin | Boing Boing

Tumbarumba | Jacket Copy | Los Angeles Times

Thumbarumba, turning the ordinary web into a textual treasure hunt | Neural.it

The Escapist | News – Tumbarumba – The Conceptual Art Firefox Extension

An Anthology Built for Your Web Browser | mediabistro.com – GalleyCat

Tumbarumba Proposal | Ethan Ham

A Conversation with Ethan Ham and Benjamin Rosenbaum | The Present Group Journal

ADDITIONAL NOTES

Tumbarumba quietly sits in the background, occasionally inserts a fragment of a story into a webpage that is being viewed. The result is an absurd sentence that is reminiscent of the surrealist exquisite corpse game. If the inserted fragment (we call the fragments “tumbarumbas”) is spotted and clicked upon, the entire story will emerge and eventually take over the page.

It’s easy to turn off Tumbarumba’s effect at anytime.

Our intention is for the reader to not only have the pleasure of finding and reading the stories, but also the momentary disorientation of stumbling upon a nonsensical sentence as well as a heightened awareness of textual absurdities (of which only a fraction will be the result of Tumbarumba).

The project is the second collaboration between Ethan Ham and Benjamin Rosenbaum. Their first collaboration was Anthroptic.

Stories: