Grand Text Auto

FILE, an electronic art and game festival in Brazil has now made their online digital magazine FILE SCRIPT available. Relevant to our recent discussion of Simon Penny’s ISEA talk on behavioral or generative art, FILE SCRIPT has an interesting article on meta-art, first describing telecommunication and telewriting experiments as a kind of meta-art (the artist is constructing, not a work, but a context in which art “happens”), and then moving on to extend the term meta-artist to include “…computational systems or softwares that attain quasi-autonomy in making their design decisions or that may even be designed to evolve in complexity as they learn through experience in their sign-processing endeavors.” The article looks at several image generation (including Aaron) and poetry generation systems.

The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has issued a threatening legal notice to a person who mirrors the Interactive Fiction Archive because a person at this organization is painfully and pitifully laboring under the mistaken belief that a file named “Doom3.zip” (a 114KB file, uploaded almost 5 years ago) is an unauthorized copy of a game created by some company they represent. May these and similar bounty hunters all go the way of Boba Fett.

I’ve always loved non-fantasy comics; I never got into fantasy or superhero ones for some reason. I spent a lot of time reading MAD magazine as a kid, usually in my room while eating cookies pilfered from the kitchen pantry. My dad, who grew up in Coney Island’s housing projects, had collected MAD as a kid and later gave his tattered collection to me, where it promptly became even more tattered, along with any new issues he’d just finished reading. (The phrase “The Spy Who Glubbed Me” still sticks in my head.) But more than the movie parodies and the folding back cover, I was drawn to Dave Berg’s dysfunctional ‘The Lighter Side’, Al Jaffee’s inventive artwork, Don Martin’s onomatopoeic panels, the surreal ‘Spy vs Spy’ (and later the computer game), and of course those little cartoons in the margins by Sergio Aragones. Blecch!

Slamdance, an alternative film festival to Sundance held annually in late January in Park City, Utah, also now includes an Independent Games Competition. There are two $5000 prizes to be awarded, Jury and Audience. Early deadline is Oct 1, final deadline Nov 14.

Thanks to the New Jersey Humanities Council, this fall, a maelstrom of electronic literature activity is descending on the Atlantic City area, with The Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. There will be three panel events in the next three months. On September 24th, two of the best-known authors of hypertext fiction, Talan Memmott and William Gillespie will present their work and discuss electronic fiction. Both are or have been graduate fellows in creative writing at Brown University, and both have been recipients of the trAce/AltX award for new media writing. Each is also known for publishing activities in the electronic media. Memmott is the editor of the Beehive hypermedia journal, and Gillespie the publisher of Spineless Books. The second event will feature two of the best-known critics of new media. On October 15th, Grand Text Auto’s own Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the co-editors of The New Media Reader published by MIT Press, will give presentations on the history of new media. Montfort is the author of Twisty Little Passages, the first book-length study of interactive fiction, and Wardrip-Fruin is the editor of First Person a book about interactive drama. (But of course you knew that). The final event, on November 19th, will feature Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson, the co-editors of the leading new media poetry journal Poems That Go. All these events are free and open to the public. This fall the very full Stockton event calendar will also include visits from novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, poet Sharon Olds, and filmmaker Michael Moore. I’m psyched.