Grand Text Auto

This is one I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. What happens when you take a writer, who is editor-in-chief for a gaming magazine, and put a Ted Nelson book in her hands? You get a combination of three perspectives that we’re accustomed to only seeing pairwise: Storytronics.

Katherine Phelps is the author, and while she was pretty early to the party with Storytronics (1998/99) you still don’t see many references to her work. It’s a pity, because things like her Story Shapes for Digital Media offer some of the same example-driven help out of the “Choose your own adventure” box that I also admire in Narrative as Virtual Reality. With Andrew Pam (who is also behind Xanadu Australia) she’s been running the literary website Glass Wings for a decade, as of this March. (You might remember reading about them in this Salon article).

A couple of weeks ago I received the sad news that my friend Steve Kurtz’s wife Hope had passed away in her sleep. This personal tragedy was compounded by the bizarre twist that, when police and medical workers arrived in response to Steve’s call, they saw some of the biological equipment in his home studio that Steve uses for biotech art performances with the Critical Art Ensemble. Hyped up on “War on Terror” fervor, they called in the Feds to investigate a potential bioterrorism case. While this was shocking, and certainly added insane stress to an already emotionally intense situation (Steve was even denied access to his wife’s body for awhile), I assumed that the bioterrorism case would blow over, as investigators discovered the ridiculous mistake they’d made. But, as many GTxA readers may already know, in the last few days the situation has grown ever more Kafkaesque, prompting me to make this public post on what was initially a private tragedy. Steve is now being brought before a Grand Jury on bioterrorism charges. Other artists have been called in to testify, including my friends Paul Vanouse and Beatriz (Shani) da Costa. Below I’ve included the text of a CAE defense fund press release.

Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’…

I’ve added two relatively new blogs to our blogroll: particle stream, “a space for outlandish thoughts about fiction and games”, by Julian Kücklich of Germany, and particleblog by Tadhg Kelly of the UK (also a Ludonaut), who has coined the term insyn, “the idea that the things that you play with on your playstation or xbox can actually have substance and not be just about cheap thrills”.

Recently Tadhg had continued to expand on his conception of interactive reflective art, and Julian is currently reading and critiquing First Person. Both sites are worth your regular attention.

Previously at GTxA we’ve discussed the issue of whether media artists and theorists should program (1 2 3 4), mentioned Mary Flanagan’s and Ken Perlin’s new procedural literacy project, and generally championed the idea that new media artists, game designers and theorists, media and software studies theorists, and generally anyone involved in cultural production on, in or around a computer, should know how to program. Of course people have been talking about the importance of procedural literacy for awhile, with Seymour Papert describing his work with teaching children to program in Logo in the 1980 book Mindstorms, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg describing procedural environments in which everyone, including children, can build their own simulations in the 1977 paper Personal Dynamic Media, and Ted Nelson crying in the wilderness that “you can and must understand computers NOW” (including programming) in his 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines. But a couple of months ago Mark Guzdial turned me onto an even earlier argument for universal procedural literacy, one given by A. J. Perlis in a talk at a symposium held at M.I.T. in 1961 to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and published in the collection Management and the Computer of the Future, Martin Greenberger (Ed.), MIT Press. The symposium consisted of 8 talks, with two discussants responding to each talk, and was attended by such luminaries as C. P. Snow, J. W. Forrester, Herb Simon, J. McCarthy, and A. J. Perlis. Perlis’ talk, The Computer in the University, focused on the role the computer should play in a university education.

CGAIDE 2004, the International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education, will be held at the Microsoft campus in Reading, UK, November 8-10 2004. The conference aims to bring together academics and game developers interested in AI and games, with special session topics on areas such as intelligent agents, learning and adaptation in games, and neural networks in games, as well sessions on game art and education for game design and development. Submissions are due July 30, 2004.

The next few months in NYC offer several events that GTxA readers might find worth the trip. Now that I live within driving distance I’m hoping to make it to some or all of these.

For Ars Electronica’s 25th anniversary, exhibited from May 21 through July 18 will be Digital Avant-Garde, featuring “outstanding media art projects from the past twenty-five years as well as inspiring new developments from the Ars Electronica Futurelab and artist-in-residence program”, plus additional symposia, artist talks, screenings, and workshops.

July June 15 papers are due for the workshop Story Representation: Mechanism and Context, previously posted about here. It will be held October 15 at Columbia University.

July 21-23 is the huge yearly international Autonomous Agents conference. This year it happens to be in NYC, also at Columbia. Looking through the list of hundreds of papers and posters, I’ve culled out ones with a believable agent / interactive story bent: