Grand Text Auto

Just a quick note that ICCC-11, The Second International Conference on Computational Creativty, is going very well here in Mexico City. We’ve had five sessions of brief presentations followed by lengthy discussions among the panelists and members of the audience. The research into computational creativity that is represented here includes work on theory and on creativity in many of the arts. We’re looking forward to this afternoon’s keynote speech by George E. Lewis.

By the way, for those who couldn’t make it here and for those who did, the complete ICCC-11 proceedings are online.

Here’s the abstract from a presentation I gave yesterday, from my pedestrian stance as a non-dancer, at a high-energy workshop on dance technology:

Why Watson Can’t Dance: Attempts at On-Screen Dance in Popular Digital Media

Nick Montfort

Dance Technology and Circulations of the Social v2.0, MIT, April 21-23, 2011

My thanks to Mary Flanagan, Aden Evens, and the others at Dartmouth who put on the digital poetry symposium last Friday (April 15). I was very glad to participate along with Marjorie Luesebrink, Braxton Soderman, and my collaborator Stephanie Strickland. With Stephanie, I showed, discussed and read from our “Sea and Spar Between.” I also presented some of my smaller-scale poetry generations, including words from the ppg256 series, “The Two” and its French translation by Serge Bouchardon, and “Taroko Gorge” and its transformations by Scott Rettberg and J. R. Carpenter.

Tiltfactor is humming, and the lab and the lab director Mary Flanagan are in recent news circles in the art world, commercial gaming, and in public health domains. See our latest press, including Flanagan’s work featured in the latest ARTnews article on videogames and art, April 2011; Melanie Plenda’s article. “POX: Play the game, save the people.” New Hampshire Union Leader, 8 April 2011, B1; Rick Ganley’s NHPR Morning Edition interview with Flanagan on POX;  HealthNewsDigest.com spreading the word on POX; and Stephanie Clifford’s piece on the new Monopoly game from Hasbro in the New York Times.

Dartmouth’s Digital Poetry Symposium, held all afternoon, Marjorie Luesebrink discussed her use of Microsoft Excel as a platform for her poetry. The idea that a story or poem can be revealed through direct manipulation drove her curiosity, and she had come to think of the interface as the defining part of the medium. The predominant trend is to make the relationship between machines and people more simple, yet it is the stage for complexity.

Inventing the Future of Games is a one-day symposium happening today in Silicon Valley. It gathers some of the brightest minds from universities and industry to discuss potential futures of game design and technology. To follow/discuss on Twitter the tag is #IFOG2011, and for updates afterward you can connect with the UC Santa Cruz Center for Games and Playable Media via Facebook or Twitter, or keep an eye on our Vimeo channel.

Metadata Games has several implemented games and our recent March 2011 pilot study on the tagging system using a control and experimental group with 200 of the same images showed some surprisingly accurate results, generating over 4000 new image tags. We’ll be doing a more public test very soon; contact us through contact at tiltfactordotorg if you want to help us test!

And Now, a message from our latest team member:

As the call for papers for ACM Creativity and Cognition explains, we’re only two weeks away from the deadline. Papers, artworks, and proposals for tutorials and workshops are all welcome!

The POX game was in the NH Union Leader this past Friday, complete with interviews of Mary Flanagan and Martin Downs of the Mascoma Valley Health Initiative.
Here are some excerpts:
Flanagan is quick to point out the game takes no stance on whether vaccinations are good or bad, it simply explains how diseases are transmitted and allows the players to fight them. She may be quick to make that point given all the controversy over vaccines and the, turns out erroneous, link between the vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella and autism. A recent British Medical Journal article uncovered fraudulent data was the to blame for this belief and pretty much debunked the idea. “The game let’s you come to your own conclusion,” she said. “People can make their own choices, but you end up seeing how the system works.”

On April 2, “ClubFloyd,” a group of players of interactive fiction, took on my Book and Volume, which was released on the [auto mata] label in 2005. They played the game on ifMUD and conversed online about it. Reading the discussion was a treat for me. Not because every bit of it was positive – I found out about some bugs. For instance, since the current time is only reported in the status line, it can’t be easily determined when playing the game via a bot on a mud, the way this group was playing. But the feedback from these sessions was very useful, and would have been hard to come by otherwise.

Jörg Piringer has a sweet new video of every displayable character in Unicode, one character per frame.

On netpoetic.com, you can find Pringer’s discussion of this piece.

Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2
Launch at the Bergen Public Library
Monday May 2, 2011

The Electronic Literature Research Group at the University of Bergen department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies welcomes you to attend two special events celebrating the launch of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 2.

Video and audio of Oulipolooza, a festive tribute to the Oulipo in which I participated, is now online. The event was held on March 15, 2011 at the Kelly Writers House at Penn and was organized by Michelle Taransky and Sarah Arkebauer. Speakers were:

KATIE PRICE
LOUIS BURY
JEAN-MICHEL RABATÉ
GERALD PRINCE
and NICK MONTFORT

It was quite an honor to be part of this group, which included one of my Ph.D. advisors – Gerry Prince. I may have been the least distinguished Oulipo scholar among these speakers, but I tried to make up for that by being the only one to wear a party hat.

The new Tiltfactor game, POX: Save the People is released! Lab director Mary Flanagan spoke about the game with New Hampshire Public Radio today. Listen now if you missed it!

Last week, we launched our game POX: Save the People. Today, we’re visiting the New England Archivists to discuss results of our Metadatagames Pilot Test! And next Monday, Mary Flanagan will be interviewed (4/4)  during Morning Edition on NHPR.

Meanwhile, our new TiltBling is in stock  — Check out project manager Sukie in his new TiltWear:

This is the only known photograph of the Tiltfactor exclusive "I Heart Huge Pixels" shirt in existence.