September 30, 2007
Conference, Installation, Books, Dead Media
Those who won’t be able to join us in Los Angeles on October 3 and 4 for the Grand Text Auto exhibit opening, symposium, and performance, but who are able to make it to Brown University in Providence, should certainly attend the October 4-7 Reading Digital Literature, a US-German conference that Roberto Simanowski has organized. There’s an exhibition and screening, a full two days of events plus an opening before that and a day of wrapping up on Sunday, and a great slate of people who will be offering close readings of particular works and other discussions of e-lit. I wish I could make it, but I’ll look forward to hearing about how it went … and to telling the folks there about how great the Grand Text Auto gig was out at UCI’s Beall Center for Art + Technology.
And there’s more in the museum and text world…
Faith Denham sends word of Block H, an interactive installation that uses murals from Northern Ireland, a “sound reactive television,” and the virtual architectural space of a paramillitary prison portrayed in a CounterStrike mod. The installation looks impressive, based on the copious documentation at the site; a YouTube video is part of this, giving a quick look at some game images, video images, and the installation space. The project site seems to be anonymized, with the artist’s name not mentioned in the contact information or documentation, even in the 34-page dissertation documenting the project.
Beard of Bees has kept on diligently publishing human- and computer-authored books as free PDFs. The press now has 43 of these e-tomes available. The latest human-computer collaboration is King of Eatable Birds by Anne H. Murdeus and Gnoetry.
The Museum of Lost Interactions from the University of Dundee’s Interactive Media Design students showcases nine forms of “dead media” so obscure that no mention appears of them anywhere else on the Web. They are quite amusing, but perhaps suffer in some cases from being too plausible, a problem that some less obscure dead media does not seem to have.