Grand Text Auto

Drew Davidson passes along word of the recent fourth Media in Transition conference at MIT. From the list of abstracts and papers, it looks like the conference was indeed an interesting gathering, including quite a bit of work on nonlinearity in movies (e.g. “Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database by Jim Bizzocchi), narrative in computer games (e.g. “Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle” by Robert Buerkle), emergence in nonfiction film (e.g. “The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence” by Rod Coover) and topics in hypertext literature (e.g. “Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia” by Burcu S. Bakioglu). The abstracts suggest some interesting interdisciplinary fusions, and many of the abstracts are also linked to full papers.

Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, has some incredibly important questions about reading in the digital age, and he’s started a formidable project to begin to answer them. His Transliteracies project begins with a conference at UCSB in June:

“UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference

Launching the Transliteracies Project

June 17-18, 2005 / Univ. of California, Santa Barbara / McCune Room (6020 HSSB)

Electronic games are a new topic of study in the field of information ethics, and an area that my collaborators and I have been working in to ultimately make more socially conscious games.

The International Review of Information Ethics journal has a call out for a special issue on the subject!

Deadline for abstracts: June 30, 2005.

First off, a happy 2nd anniversary to Grand Text Auto – here’s to many more years of writing and conversation by the “drivers” and by the readers and commenters, who also bring direction and make the blog what it is.

I also want to re-welcome Mary Flanagan, who has been with us for a while as a guest and now joins us as a regular “driver.” We’re not planning to expand the driver pool much more, or perhaps any more, but we all continue to admire Mary’s work as a new media critic and creator, appreciated her contributions as a guest driver, and wanted her to remain part of this project. We hope that having her name on the masthead will let her keep contributing to the conversation here and allow her to more easily give us the scoop on her current and future projects.

Check out the multimedia fruits of the Things That Don’t Exist Remix Contest, and if you haven’t seen the Creative Commons video that inspired this festival of digital creativity, check it out [Quicktime]. If you miss the point – maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist?

Remember that unusual alternate orthography, presented in artworks of various media, that I mentioned last year? Will, it turns out that there may be a simple explanation for it. A recently released hypertext report reveals that glyphs made of lines inscribed in circles have something to do with aliens.

Better late than never, I hope — here’s a writeup of my experience of last March’s Game Developers Conference. Perhaps the nine weeks that have passed since GDC has given me some additional long-term perspective on it all.

Personally I had less fun at this year’s conference compared to last year, because I was more stressed out this time. I was to moderate a high-profile panel on interactive story, give a programming talk and live demo with Michael on natural language in games (which we were still preparing for until minutes before the talk), and try to network with game developers that we may try to work with in the future — all self-imposed tasks of course. But all that was enough of a load to put me into a sleep-disturbed funk for the entire GDC week and beyond.

(But now I’m feeling better, especially because our interactive drama project is now so close to completion — it has taken forever to finish up all the niggling details, but we’re really, really close.)

Okay. Informed by this year’s GDC, in this post I’d like to summarize my impressions of the overall state of commercial interactive entertainment development, as well as my take on the state of interactive story development.

Pioneer in computer music (incl early computational sound generation + composition, musique concrete, etc) James Tenney will be presenting work in nyc on Sunday, May 8, 2005 at 8:00 PM

james tenney’s “postal pieces” (1965-71): a rare performance of Tenney’s Postal Pieces (1965-71). Postal Pieces is supposed to be “a remarkable series of eleven works printed on postcards.”

After spending several hours in the Apple Store Soho a week ago and being bombarded with the classic dancing silhouettes from various ipod ad campaigns from all directions, I must disclose my discomfort with depictions of the body, race, the individual, and general ‘hipness’ these campaigns infuse into the sale of albeit charming products.

I was a visitor to Apple Soho the day after the New York Times reported that 50 iPods have been stolen on NYC subways this year due to owners being easily identifiable (the distinctive white earbuds). Luckily, iPod theft represents a smaller number than cell phone theft on the subway… This is also after realising that with over 10 million iPods sold in Feb 2005 every single person in this city, and then some, could wear the thin white sash as a badge of honour. There are great figures online for the success of the iPod, such as “1.79 iPods sold every minute in 2003” and 300 million downloads from the music store marking an extreme shift in technology and cultural distribution/consumption. In fact we now have fans making ads for Apple.

I’ve been unable to reach Google.com for the last few minutes. I also can’t reach Google.ca, Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.de, Google.at, etc. And no one on ifMUD can reach any of ’em, either.

Well, while we wait for Google News to come back up and tell us what’s happened: Teoma, Altavista, Yahoo.

(Update: Google became available again within two minutes of my posting this, but then went on the blink again. Seems that 15 minutes later all but Groups and News are working, at least from my standpoint.)

In The Rake, a magazine for and about the Twin Cities, there’s a recently Slashdotted article about Post-Its (part 1, part 2) by Greg Beato, who used to write for the late, great Suck.com. The article chronicles Art Fry’s invention of the Post-It, initially as a sort of sticky bookmark rather than a radically reduced cover letter, and describes some early suggestions for naming the product: “Jot and Jerk” and “Mount and Show.” The article is mainly a wacky corporate chronology of innovation and success against all odds, but it’s interesting to think about how Post-Its played into our ecology of writing.

There’s a nice writeup of music-game-maker Harmonix, developer of FreQuency, Amplitude, and Eyetoy: AntiGrav, today in the Boston Phoenix. With the recent Karaoke Revolution 3, the company may be working towards one day pleasing even demanding machine-learning researchers/karaoke software developers such as Lawrence Saul. And with a realistic virtual bear costume included, who knows what other niche markets Harmonix may be embracing?

Steve Ince of the blog Writing and Design just launched his Juniper Games site, with some information about his in-the-works Juniper Crescent – The Sapphire Claw. The game has also been previewed at Adventure Gamers. (“For the less technical, one word will suffice: sweeeet!”) Good luck to Steve in polishing off this production.

Putting First Person online was a very positive experience. I make this declaration now that there’s a new section of the project live at electronic book review (which includes a piece by GTxA’s Nick). With this, all the book’s essays are online — along with most of its responses, and much material the book doesn’t hold.

Making all this material available in collaboration with a web-based electronic journal broadened the conversation around the project, made it possible for the conversation to continue in new ways (as it does today with a response by Matt Kirschenbaum), made the material accessible to an audience that doesn’t buy hardcover university press volumes, and apparently didn’t hurt sales of that volume in the least (it went for a second printing less than a year after it first hit the shelves).

The essays in this section (New Readings) attempt to develop, via a combination of close reading and broader theorizing, modes of engagement appropriate to particular forms of digital writing.