Grand Text Auto

This was my statement for the “Taroko Gorge Remixed” panel yesterday (June 21) at the 2012 ELO conference. The panel was organized by Mark Sample and also featured Scott Rettberg, J. R. Carpenter (who joined us by video chat), Talan Memmott, Eric Snograss, Flourish Klink, and Andrew Plotkin. In attendance and part of the discussion were Leonardo Flores and Sonny Rae Tempest, who did work based on the Taroko Gorge code after the panel was proposed.

It is curious that I was invited to be part of this panel today, for I am the only speaker in this session who has not created and released a remix of Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge.”

Ottar Ormstad made the case for non-translation at the recent Paris 8 conference on the translation electronic literature. He eloquently explained that many explorations of language (including concrete poems) do not lend themselves to either ordinary translation or a simply explanatory note. This was a reasonable point that is appropriate to many works of concrete and sound poetry.

To illustrate this point, he displayed this concrete poem by Uruguayan poet Clemente Padin.

Very compelling! This is an amazing poem that is quite language-specific. And yet, I was compelled to translate it to English, and have done so below:

I just saw an overhead projector demo, at a demo party, that simulated the Amiga boing ball demo using only transpaencies. And then another that, using pinwheels, simulated fire.

I regret that the overhead projector did not, in either case, produce the music.

Building expert-level artificial intelligence for real-time strategy games remains an open research challenge. StarCraft in particular provides an excellent environment for AI research, because the game has many real-world properties and is played at an extremely competitive level. It is also an environment in which human decision making can be observed, emulated, and evaluated. During gameplay, professional players demonstrate a broad range of reasoning capabilities including estimation, anticipation, and adaptation.

I presented the last ppg256 poem (ppg256-7) in Paris today at &Now.

Here are the current versions of all of the ppg256 poems/programs:

http://nickm.com/poems/ppg256.html

I delivered this as the opening keynote at DiGRA Nordic 2012, today, June 7.

1. The World of the Scene

Welcome to the world of the scene, to the summer of 2012, to that Earth where the demoscene is pervasive. Computers are mainly part of our culture because of their brilliant ability to produce spectacles, computationally generated spectacles that are accompanied by music, all of which is produced from tiny pieces of code, mostly in assembly language, always in real time. The coin of the realm is the demoscene production, which includes graphics and chiptunes but is principally represented by demos and their smaller cousins, intros. The coin of the realm – although these are not exchanged commercially, but freely shared with all lovers of computation and art, worldwide.

Reposted from promweek.soe.ucsc.edu…

We are very happy to announce that Prom Week has been selected to be a part of IndieCade’s E3 Showcase. If you happen to find yourself at E3 this year at the beautiful Los Angeles Convention Center on June 5th-7th, stop on by and say “hi”! Chat with us about Prom Week, Comme il Faut (the AI system which powers the game), interactive storytelling, or just high school in general! We’ll be located at the Concourse Foyer, which is in the convention center’s Level 1 West Hall Entrance.

(PDF version here)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
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Tiltfactor Laboratory is pleased to announce that ZOMBIEPOX™ has been selected for the IndieCade showcase at the 2012 annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show at the Los Angeles Convention Center from June 5th to June 7th. E3 is presented by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and is the world’s premier trade show for video game and related industries, with last year’s attendance peaking at 46,800.
http://www.e3expo.com/