Grand Text Auto

At Récursion (the Montréal demoparty), we (Nick Montfort, Michael C. Martin, and Patsy Baudoin) released Nanowatt, a single-loading VIC-20 demo.

You can download it and run it using a VIC-20 emulator (or, of course, an actual VIC-20). I run it in VICE on my Ubuntu system by typing “xvic nw” from the directory that contains the “nw” file. If it’s more convenient, you can also download a d64 disk image with Nanowatt on it and load “nw” from there.

It produces 8 KB of English text quoted exactly from Samuel Beckett’s second novel, Watt.

This is my contribution to NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month), written in about four hours on November 27. (Messing with the typesetting took a bit more time.)

Source code in Python. Requires pytz.

World Clock, the generated novel presented as a 246-page PDF.

(The demoparty this Saturday in Montréal.)

And my VIC-20 and C64.

Let’s roll.

Mr. William S. Burroughs:

Although if you live in the United States, this is my favorite version of that video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEWj1nlrQS0

What can transform a field? Janet Kolodner argues, in her talk for the Media Systems gathering, that individual projects are not enough. But programs do potentially offer a route to transformation — by being larger, integrative efforts.

I’m lucky to have a print copy of Amaranth Borsuk’s Tonal Saw, a long poem created by erasure from the pamphlet National Sunday Law.

But that print chapbook, which was printed in a small edition of only 100 copies, is now sold out.

So, I was pleased to find (for everyone else’s benefit) that Tonal Saw is available as a PDF from the press that published that print chapbook, The Song Cave. Here is is!

You can find other quality PDFs on The Song Cave’s site.

Just back from several travels, I’ve found that there’s a video record online of me, Patsy Baudoin, and John Bell presenting 10 PRINT at the University of Maine way back in April of this year. In our presentation, we answer questions and discuss the origin of the 10 PRINT project and the nature of our collaboration. And I do some livecoding. Pretty often, actually.

Please note that 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 is available as a beautiful MIT Press book, designed by our co-author Casey Reas, ans also as a free PDF.

Any software development process involves a fair amount of extraneous creation. Code is revised, documents created and destroyed, prototypes and demos constructed, all in the pursuit of a final, stable digital object. Digital games add even more to this crush of documentation with an unending multitude of art assets, proprietary file types, and a lack of internal documentation.  Since most development today relies on cloud storage and backup, code repositories and all forms of digital spatio-temporal communication, just finding out where everything is stored necessitates significant technical effort and time.

While critics may now say a film’s action scenes “seem like a video game,” it doesn’t just seem like film and games are borrowing from each other. It is not only happening stylistically, but also at a deep technical level. At the Media Systems gathering, Chad Greene from Microsoft Studios discussed how the common basis of computation is leading to transformations in film and games, enabling borrowing between the two, as well as both borrowing from academic research.

A remarkable hypertextual video essay, Parallelograms, has been posted by Jeffrey Scudder. It is composed of an intriguing collections of clips, and includes some fascinating video quotation of (e.g.) Marshall McLuhan, Douglas Rushkoff, Ted Nelson, Alan Kay, and Chris Crawford. Not to mention my colleague Hal Albelson in a wizard hat. Also, I couldn’t help but notice that it shows the 10 PRINT program executing and features a shot of the book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.

If these matters at all interest you, do read/watch this video meditation on digital media, society, materiality, matter, the body, and (as I read/watch it) how the computer, whatever its limits, may have still-untapped potential for empowerment and change.

Read all about it! And sign up. It’s the brainchild (or brainbot) of Darius Kazemi.