Grand Text Auto

I like clicking through this: “Psychographics: Consumer Survey” by Dane Watkins. And I learned something about myself by doing so. I think. Yes.

Or at least inspires a song and video…

The musical group Bedford Level Experiment writes of their song “Confounded to Corruption” and of the video for it:

We’ve been reading the book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and became very inspired by the section on procedurally generated art. All the footage in this video was generated by Commodore 64 programs written by us, including a 6502 assembly version of 10 PRINT. The lyrics were also generated algorithmically; Sonnet 64 and some commentary on it from Wikipedia were fed into an old Amiga program called NIALL, and the output was edited together into something resembling lyrics. The corruption the sonnet underwent became the theme of the song and video.

For Immediate Release

Tiltfactor is proud to announce the addition of 4,000 new images from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library to the Metadata Games platform. Metadata Games is a digital gaming platform for gathering useful descriptive data on photo, audio, and moving image artifacts. Through Metadata Games, players contribute valuable information to collections and further enable archivists, librarians, data scientists, and others, to gather and analyze information for archives in powerful and innovative ways. Clark Library joins a growing list of Metadata Games content partners, which currently includes the Boston Public Library, Open Park Networks, and Dartmouth College, among others.

Nick Montfort & Páll Thayer

Programs at an Exhibition

At the Boston Cyberarts Gallery
141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line
Phone number: 617-522-6710

The exhibit runs March 6 through March 16.

Opening: 6pm-9pm, Thursday March 6.

Or free software work?

In ways that you have already explicitly allowed me to use it, in a legal document that you posted along with this work?

YES.

It’s not quite Thy Dungeonman, but you can now play POET The Game, which pokes at the life of an MFA student poet in a browser-based roll-your-own-parser experience that is meant to recall the text adventures of yore.

My colleague Myke pointed out this New York Times column about the Commodore 64, which waxes nostalgic and also points out how the computer opened up possibilities for new programmers to explore and learn. Myke also pointed out, quite aptly, that the photo, which is supposed to be of a Commodore 64, is actually of a 1541 disk drive. Alas, the Grey Lady, in reference to the rainbow-logoed computer, nods…

I’ll post more on this soon, but for now, let me invite you to the opening of my & Páll Thayer’s show at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery: 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line, 617-522-6710.

The opening is 6pm-9pm on Thursday March 6.

… is today’s comic.

And it’s true, Randall probably did not know about World Clock (book, code). Maybe he didn’t even know about my inspirations, Harry Mathews’s “The Chronogram for 1998″ or Stanislaw Lem’s One Human Minute.

In that case it’s an unwitting answer.

In any case, it’s a nice one.

(int)7 — INTELLIGENT NARRATIVE TECHNOLOGIES SEVEN
Call for Participation
http://int7.westphal.drexel.edu/

KEY DATES:

• (int)7 Submission deadline: March 3, 2014
• Workshop: June 17-18, 2014, Milwaukee, WI

(int)7 & ELO registration information is now available:
http://conference.eliterature.org/conference-registration

The Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT) workshop series aims to advance research in artificial intelligence for the computational understanding, expression, and creation of narrative. Previous installments of this workshop have brought together a multidisciplinary group of researchers such as computer scientists, psychologists, narrative theorists, media theorists, artists, and members of the interactive entertainment industry. From this broad expertise, the INT series focuses on computational systems to represent, reason about, adapt, author, and perform interactive and non-interactive narrative experiences.

Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7 will be co-located with the ELO 2014 conference and will take place June 17-18, 2014 in Milwaukee, WI.

The Intelligent Narrative Technologies (INT) workshop series aims to advance research in artificial intelligence for the computational understanding, expression, and creation of narrative. Previous installments of this workshop have brought together a multidisciplinary group of researchers such as computer scientists, psychologists, narrative theorists, media theorists, artists, and members of the interactive entertainment industry. From this broad expertise, the INT series focuses on computational systems to represent, reason about, adapt, author, and perform interactive and non-interactive narrative experiences.

Those looking to develop games for impact might benefit from reading this handy guide from the White House Office of Science, Technology and Policy Academic Consortium on Games for Impact.

Check it out — the short pdf guide contains quick info on vetted sources,  cost estimations, and other resources.
Enjoy!

Purple Blurb, MIT’s digital writing series organized by Prof. Nick Montfort of the Trope Tank, powers on, thanks to the four excellent writers/artists who will be presenting in Spring 2014. All events this semester will be held Mondays at 5:30pm in MIT’s room 14E-310.

March 10, 5:30pm in 14E-310:

Páll Thayer
Microcodes

Short Perl programs that are also artworks, presented for viewers to read, download, and execute. Thayer will trace some key steps showing how he went from his background in painting and drawing to presenting code as his artwork.

Thanks to RA Erik Stayton, we now have a formidable catalog of hardware and software in The Trope Tank, my lab at MIT.

There are pages on each of the systems (or in one case a group of switched systems) that are regularly hooked up and ready to use:

• Apple IIc System
• Atari 400 System
• Atari VCS System
• Commodore 64 System
• Macintosh SE System
• PowerMac G4 System
• Video Game Systems

Also, information is recorded about each display and about all the other working computers that are kept in the lab.

Update: Blankets of snow and torrents of sleet have tried to match the intensity of the poster design below. As a result, today’s talk (2/13) is cancelled! NYU is closing at 3pm today. Hopefully there will be another chance before too long…

I don’t always announce my upcoming talks on my blog…

But when I do, they’re promoted by very nice posters.

MIT Press has just launched the BITS series of excerpts from the press’s book publications. They are offered as DRM-free e-books, and come with a 40% discount on the purchase of the entire print or e-book from which the excerpt comes. I’m glad to see a collaborator and a colleague topping the list, and I’m also pleased that one of the first selections featured is from my and Ian Bogost’s Racing the Beam.