Grand Text Auto

When we consider art, specifically visual art, the term can conjure a variety of images. For most people, art can be represented by classical art: drawings and paintings, such as the Mona Lisa. But with the development of technology, visual art begins to encompass new mediums and styles. An art student might begin by learning drawing and composition, then proceed to develop skills in charcoal or watercolor. Computing transforms this paradigm altogether. Digital artists today can paint through tablet interfaces, or illustrate with vectors.

Dear Mr. Montfort,

I do not want to cause offense, merely offer a suggestion: would you
consider removing the parts of your blog that clearly do not deal with
interactive fiction from “Planet IF” (http://www.planet-if.com)?

While I am not saying that your posts are not intersting or that the term
“interactive fiction” should only apply to text adventure games in the
narrow sense (and while I appreciate the articles on Game Design and other
forms of interactive fiction that appear on Planet IF), the sheer volume of
your blog posts, along with “Grand Text Auto”, sometimes tends to drown out
anything else.

In today’s society, we rely heavily on technology to keep us connected, organized, and entertained.  Yet, how does technology work in the field of the arts? Some find it utterly disturbing and detrimental to the essence of artistry, while others see it as an exciting new tool that unlocks another world of possibilities.  So this leaves us with the question, is technology in the art world our friend? Or is it our foe?

In today’s society, we rely heavily on technology to keep us connected, organized, and entertained.  Yet, how does technology work in the field of the arts? Some find it utterly disturbing and detrimental to the essence of artistry, while others see it as an exciting new tool that unlocks another world of possibilities.  So this leaves us with the question, is technology in the art world our friend? Or is it our foe?

Next Tuesday, January 31st, new media curator and digital art scholar Christiane Paul will be speaking in Loew Theater at 4:30pm. She will be presenting a talk titled “Feedback: Histories of New Media Art,” sponsored by the Digital Humanities Initiative and the Department of Studio Art.

Christiane Paul is the Director of the Media Studies Graduate Programs and Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School as well as the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has written extensively on new media art and technology with publications like Digital Art and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond. At the Whitney Museum, she has curated shows like ”Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools” (May 2011), “Profiling” (2007), and “Data Dynamics” (2001), and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

How can art be used to raise awareness of problems in society?  There are many methods artists can pursue to address social issues, but for Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, the answer lies in animation and digital collages.

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung

Radical Books of 2011, 10/10

Big Questions, Anders Nilsen, Drawn & Quarterly, 9781770460478

I have always thought no connections existed between art and subjects like biology, mathematics and chemistry. I thought these subjects to be independent of one another. It was not until I read about the early experimentation of American artist Charles Csuri or the artwork of Joseph Scheer that I realized I had been creating art in classes like biology and chemistry. Charles Csuri used wave functions to digitally modify the reproduction of landscape, while Scheer used a scanner to scan the bodies of moths. When I first saw the artwork of Scheer it made me think of Lepidopterists, scientists that studies butterflies and moths, or even a collector.

Radical Books of 2011, 9/10

Pale Fire: A Poem in four Cantos by John Shade, Vladimir Nabokov, Ginkgo Press, 9781584234319

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

Radical Books of 2011, 8/10

You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!, Bruce Andrews, Veer Books

There is no way this book will get past your spam filter:

facework cootie itsier-off
we are the dream sequences in your conventional cultural life -

Indeed we are. Here’s verbal salad (French dressing? Russian dressing?) shot through at times with lines of split and reassembled words:

zy^rit
sect^in
sing^franchi
cres^offi

What is interactive art? I’ve always thought art was something one admires from the perspective of a passive observer. But recently, I’ve learned that there is a category of art called new media art which challenges this traditional framework. “New media art” is a term used to describe  nontraditional forms of art that have evolved with technology. One of the most interesting types of new media art that I have read about is “interactive art,” which allows the audience to physically interact with art pieces to create some sort of effect. Interactive art usually involves the use of digital technologies that were not present until the past few decades.

This Thursday, January 26th, humanities scholar and Duke professor Cathy Davidson will be giving a talk here at Dartmouth, at Filene Auditorium in Moore Hall at 5pm. She’ll be discussing her latest book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.  

According to Davidson, “distraction is your friend.” Our brains aren’t linear, and disruptions can be welcomed. Within the midst of immense technological change, Davidson emphasizes the synergy of collaboration by difference. Collaborative digital learning and distributed multitasking become essential for 21st century learning. She advocates for re-envisioning our Industrial-age institutions, a crucial update necessary for a new world of constant connectedness, information overload, and global collaboration.

We are still discovering the possibilities that “new media” art can contribute to our art culture. With new media, which is distinguished from other art by its dependence on, or integration with technology, one attribute that has completely consumed me is the interactivity of some new media art.  In my “New Media Theory and Practice” course at Dartmouth College, we observed different works where interactivity was the main component of the piece.  For example, one artist projects video footage into people’s shadows who are walking around in a town square.  Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv ‘s 1999 work  text rain incorporates participation: people stand in front of a screen with falling letters that, once caught on part of one’s shadow, begin to form words.

Most users of the Internet by now know about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), or House Bill 32611, and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP Act or just PIPA), or Senate Bill 9682- after all, when English-language Wikipedia blacks out people are going to notice. Joining Wikipedia in the act of protest were such sites as Reddit, Google, Mincraft, and many others. At this point it would be quite a feat for any wired member of the English-speaking world not to know that, for once, the Internet community at large has rallied around a cause.

Often, artistic pursuits are described as abstractions. They are interpretations of material. Rarely are they thought of as scientific pursuits. However, there are many new media artists who take it upon themselves to bridge the gap between what is seen as science and art. Especially when dealing with digital art, where so many computations are made to display the graphics we see, science can often be not the medium but also the subject of many artworks. Joseph Scheer and Andreas Müller-Pohle each have different takes on what scientific art entails.

To immigrants, Tijuana marks the frontera, or last stop before entering the United States. To American tourists it’s known as “T.J.,” a place to get inexpensive pharmaceutical drugs, dental work and plastic surgery. If you’re a visitor you become acutely aware of the “safe district” and the “not so safe district,” depending on how you see it. But few visitors venture beyond Tijuana’s main drag known as “Avenida Revolución.”

Women workers in maquiladora factory

A New Avenue for Change

It turns out you don’t have to camp outside in a tent in frigid climes to pitch a successful protest. The Electronic Disturbance Theatre has been doing them comfortably since 1997. Using simple technologies such as E-mail, HTML, and Java, the EDT has managed to launch a series of “denial of service attacks” on corrupt regimes from the Mexican Stock Exchange to the World Trade Organization. These attacks focus not on the places themselves, but on their websites.

The Medium Involved

But my credit card company says otherwise…

My new media art students will be posting over the next 8 week a series of introspective blog posts on digital/ new media artists. Our aim is to post one every day or every other day. Enjoy, comment, discuss!

Our rather populous Winter Team (12 of us) has begun a new round of design and development for our STEM Bias project. No genre is left out: board games, card games, iPad/web games, and of course, performative games!

Meet Zara, our design guru; Jasmine, doing a balancing act; and Andrea and Viviana, busy modding!

It is currently a “Tiltfactor Week”: Our own reality show! Teams have a week to research and prototype a concept to playable completeness. It might not be pretty–it is raining ice outside, we’re disregarding any sense of game aesthetics, and if you ask about the hours of hard work students will put into project games–you may hear groans. But– I think our players will be happy with the results!

We are very excited to announce that Prom Week has been nominated as a finalist in Technical Excellence for the 2012 Independent Games Festival!

We’ll be posting more info about Prom Week, how it works, and information about our release date soon.

Whooo hooooo!!!

Wednesday January 18, 2012 4-7pm
304 North Fairbanks

Come greet the new year with the folks behind Dartmouth’s Game Research Lab for an open house! Play video games and board games! Meet our student designers, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan– and play games! This time we will be playing Kinect games, and showing our own new games including POX for iPad and prototypes for our gender stereotyping and STEM field-related games, and we’ll discuss our new after school programs in Lebanon! And, we’ll play XBOX Kinect games and eat Thai food!

Huzzah!

Dene Grigar, vice president of the Electronic Literature Organization and one of the organizers of the excellent e-lit gallery and reading here at the MLA Convention, just gave a great presentation about the importance of platform in the development and reception of electronic literature. I was pleased initially to see that there was not only this presentation with “Platform” in the title, then very interested to hear about her work in a lab with original older computer hardware and her discussion of platform differences and changes through the years.