Grand Text Auto

An initial summary of the goings-on at the fifth Phrontisterion conference on Interactive Storytelling is now online, written by its organizer. Chris reports that the attendees will soon write up their impressions as well, to be compiled into a new group blog.

A highlight of the conference was the discussion of several new books, notably Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling, in which Chris offers many pages of wisdom gained from years of experience working towards building a grand vision of what interactive stories could be. Chris considers this the most important book he’s ever written; my initial quick-read of the manuscript can testify to this. More on this excellent new resource in a future post.

If you’ve been looking for a reason to visit the eternal city this fall, here’s your opportunity. October 21-22 at the University of Roma Tre, the Department of Linguistics is running a two-day colloquium on writing and new media. The three areas of focus will be:

• Orality, Writing, Memory
• Writing and the Professions
• Writing and New Media

Critic and novelist Tom LeClair recently published a novel Passing On. While the novel itself is a print novel, in part about a company that takes the dying on trips when they have no one to assist them, LeClair also recently published a Web site, Terminal Tours, which is purportedly the site for the fictional company featured in the novel. I include the link here because I think it’s an interesting example of one modest way that authors can use the Web to extend a fictional universe beyond the bound artifact. Some of the stories and testimonials are also quite funny.

Designer Rick Valicenti and friends are up to some fun letter-play at Playground ’04. Twelve typographers have accepted Valicenti’s “invitation to create an alphabet of 26 characters illuminated not to start a sentence, but to begin a thought.” The project in some ways reminds me of Paul Chan’s conceptual fonts in Alternumerics. My favorite of the Play fonts released so far is Anthony Angelos’s Watch. Each of the letters includes a caricature meant to represent a feeling or phobia.