Grand Text Auto

In December, while visiting family in Nevada, I went to the Nevada Art Museum in Reno. My favorite piece was East of Fallon, Highway 50, Nevada by Joseph DeLappe, a new media artist at University of Nevada, Reno.

The submission deadline for TIDSE 2004 (mentioned here previously) has been extended to February 15.

There’s a new article at MSNBC.com on the future of emotion in games, a topic we like to talk about here on GTxA. A variety of game developers and researchers are quoted, including Andrew and me. It describes our work on Facade as an example of the advances in AI required to support emotion-rich game experiences.

The exhibition Machinista 2004 is currently accepting entries until February 28th 2004.

Machinista is a yearly unmediated open-submission online exhibition. Creative and technological practices including visual and software art, science and design projects, moving image, experimental music and performance are featured in various scales and stages of development ranging from documentation of prototypes and exploratory installations to fully operational systems.

Submissions for the following three themes are welcomed in all media.

Peter Norvig, of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach fame (the most commonly used intro to AI textbook), has created a Powerpoint presentation for Lincoln’s Gettysburgh Address. This work is in the tradition of Powerpoint art, generally critiquing the Powerpoint communication style, pursued by artists such as Michael Lewy and David Byrne.

A month ago I finally had a chance to go to Musée Mécanique in San Francisco. While wandering through this mechanical arcade, I found myself comparing these turn-of-the-century machines with contemporary game genres, looking for commonalities in design approaches and player/viewer experiences. A number of distinct machine types were immediately apparent.

Fortune Telling Machines
The classic in this genre is the gypsy or old crone who waves her hands over a crystal ball before dispensing a fortune, though many other forms, such as the Love Meter and Career Meter are on exhibit. Fortune telling programs have certainly been popular in computing; I remember many horoscope programs being sold for the TRS-80, Apple II, and Atari 800 (the first few computers I used). And there are more contemporary efforts, such as classic Mac program Synchronicity, by Paul O’Brien, the “father of interactive divination”. Interestingly, a number of the responses to project 1 in my class last fall involved horoscope or fortune telling programs. All such systems, whether implemented in gears or code, harness brute randomness to create a (more or less) engaging experience. Even when the systems involve some amount of interaction, such as grasping the levers at a specific time on the Love Meter, or sensing the exact timing of keystrokes in Synchronicity, these interactions are mediated by highly random processes, inducing almost no agency. So how do such systems elicit any sort of engagement at all? They work by giving ambiguous responses that can be interpreted by individuals in the contexts of their own lives; by having the responses relate to important life themes, such as love or career, these systems effectively push most of the sense-making onto the human participant instead of into the system. The participant does all the work of reading meaning into a random process.

Cosign 2004: Computational Semiotics, will be held at the University of Split, Croatia, September 14-16, 2004.

The creation and interpretation of meaning in interactive digital media requires the manipulation of signs and/or pre-existing structures of meaning. The focus of COSIGN is the way in which meaning can be created by, encoded in, understood by, or produced through, the computer. As such, it is of interest to computer scientists, digital artists and designers, HCI and AI practitioners, and a broad range of other critics, theorists and researchers.

The full call for participation is available here. The submission date for papers and artworks is April 29; the submission date for posters and demonstrations is May 24th. The programme and proceedings of the COSIGN 2001, COSIGN 2002 and COSIGN 2003 conferences are all available online.

For San Francisco Bay Area GTxA readers, there are two public presentations of the National Academies of Science report, Beyond Productivity: Information Technology, Innovation, and Creativity on Jan. 22 and 23. This report, authored by an all-star committee of artists and scientists, explores the ways in which information technology and art mutually inform each other, describing promising areas of interdisciplinary art/CS work, and proposing models to foster such interdisciplinary work.

This report was previously mentioned in a GTxA discussion of the artist/programmer debate.

The book Close Reading New Media: Analyzing Electronic Literature, edited by Jan Van Looy and Jan Baetens, offers close readings of work by Mark Amerika, Darren Aronofsky, M.D. Coverley, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Rick Pryll, Geoff Ryman and Stephanie Strickland. The editors contrast their aims with hypertext theory of the 80s and 90s that saw hypertextuality as a literal realization of poststructuralist thought. Instead of abstract theorizing, their book seeks to identify interesting points and problematics through detailed, concrete engagement with specific works.

Chris Crawford recently announced Phrontisterion 5, his fifth annual conference on interactive storytelling, to be held June 26 and 27, 2004, at his home in southern Oregon. Chris says:

This is a most unconventional conference, concentrating on discussion rather than presentation. There will be no lectures or panel discussions; all the attendees (only 30 will be invited) sit in a circle under the towering fir trees and compare thoughts in a structured format.

Phrontisterion offers a unique opportunity to delve deeply into the issues surrounding interactive storytelling with some of the best minds in the world. If you are interested, please contact me by email and I shall provide you with the details.

A workshop at CHI2004, Reflective HCI: Towards Critical Technical Practice, promises to be an interesting venue. The phrase “Critical Technical Practice” (CTP) was coined by Phil Agre in Computation and Human Experience as a description for a technical practice that simultaneously questions its own philosophical and cultural foundations while using this questioning to open up new technical possibilities.

I haven’t been blogging much the last couple of months; this semester has been overwhelming. As the semester winds down and I begin blogging again, I thought it would be interesting to reflect on my experiences teaching Computation as an Expressive Medium.

As I described before, this class is a graduate introduction to programming for students coming from arts and humanities backgrounds. It contains a mixture of students in LCC’s Information Design and Technology program, as well as students in the HCI master’s program (many of the HCI students come from non-programming backgrounds). For the theoretical component of the class, I’m using Nick and Noah’s New Media Reader.

The initial syllabus was far too ambitious, both in terms of programming projects and readings. We ended up doing only the first four projects, not six, and reading about half the readings. Class presentation of the programming material took longer than I had initially planned.

It was challenging coordinating the readings with the projects. I tried to coordinate the readings with the conceptual backgrounds of the assignments. For example, while working on Project 3, the “build your own image manipulation tool” project, we read:

• Man-Computer Symbiosis (Licklider)
• Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication Systems (Sutherland)
• A Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway)
• The GNU Manifesto (Stallman).

I’m back from a week in England where I attended Cosign 2003. I’ll post a trip report in the near future. In the meantime, here are two new conference annoucements.

Ernest Adams, freelance game designer, writer and lecturer (formerly at Electronic Arts) gave a keynote address at Cosign. He is also one of the organizers of ACE2004 (Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology). “The purpose of this conference is to bring together academic and industry researchers, as well as computer entertainment developers and practitioners, to address and advance the research and development issues related to computer entertainment.” ACE2004 is happening June 3-5, 2004, in Singapore.

Next week I’ll be in Middlesbrough UK for Cosign 2003: Computational Semiotics in Games and New Media. I’ll be presenting a structuralist semiotic treatment of architectural affordances, a way of understanding how AI architectures support meaning-making for both the authors and audiences of AI-based new media work. Hope to see some of you there!

The Christian Science Monitor ran an article about game studies today. Besides quotes from some usual defenders of game studies, including Janet Murray, Celia Pearce and James Gee (who was featured in the recent Chronical of Higher Education chat on games), the article includes representatives of the academy who think game studies is bunk:

“It’s just another concession to the customer. Kids have grown up playing Nintendo. They don’t read because they don’t know how to read – they don’t cultivate the imagination…. They need to be put through the intellectual rigors of a traditional format for education. Video games are just an easy way to avoid it.” – Edward Smith, director of American Studies at American University

While commuting in today there was radio news story about Carabella Goes to College, an edugame designed to teach new college students (presumably straying from the safety of the nest for the first time) to protect themselves from the dangers of a prying world:

Players of Carabella Goes to College experience a college-bound girl’s first week of school, when she has to make routine choices that determine whether she will be beset by identity thieves, aggressive marketers and hungry profiling software.

Players earn points by making decisions balancing privacy and convenience.

Full story available at Wired News.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting an online chat on video games in the classroom today at 2:00pm EST. They are asking the questions:

Are video games a valid academic field of research? Will video games one day become a teaching tool in the classroom, alongside textbooks and other traditional media? Or are video games yet another distraction leading students and instructors away from quiet, concentrated study and time-honored teaching methods?

The Chronicle’s latest issue has articles on games studies.

Early in the Summer we had a discussion about the craft of programming in new media art (Artist Programmers: an ongoing discussion, Meaning Machines, Collaborations) in which I took the position that new media artists should program (or understand computational thinking) because it enables a deeper engagement with computers as meaning machines (Meaning Machines). But what would an introduction to programming for art and design students look like if it was fundamentally organized around programming as a medium? Last week I began teaching Computation as an Expressive Medium (original syllabus, current syllabus), a new core course in Georgia Tech’s masters program in Information Design and Technology. This class is an alternative introduction to programming, juxtaposing readings from the New Media Reader with programming projects designed to exercise specific programming competencies while simultaneously exploring conceptual and theoretical issues raised in the readings. Rather than using a special purpose programming language that has been designed specifically for artists, I’m teaching Java. I’m hoping that using a full-featured, general-purpose language will give students a broad understanding of programming as well as give them skills in a widely disseminated language that will be useful in future projects. I’ve included links to both the original syllabus and the current syllabus – I’m sure the syllabus will change as I adjust to the realities of teaching this course. As the semester progresses, I’ll post updates on how the course is going.

I just played Dead Reckoning, the interactive fiction (IF) Nick recently translated. Playing this IF reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about for awhile, the relationship between interaction and agency. Before continuing, let me provide a preliminary definition of these terms in the context of new media. By “interaction” I mean the act of physically manipulating an input device (e.g. wiggling a mouse, moving in front of a camera, etc.) and eliciting a response (e.g. an image changes on a screen, motors turn on and off, etc.). Interaction is an abstract concept, saying nothing about the character of the relationship between input and elicited response, just that there is some relationship between them. Agency is a phenomenal category, describing what it feels like as a player/interactor to be empowered to take whatever actions you want and get a sensible response. That is, an experience is productive of a sense of agency if it supports the interactor in forming intentions (based on what’s happening, the interactor can think of something they want to do), taking action with respect to these intentions (there is a way to express the action the interactor wants to take), and interpreting the response in terms of the intention (the system’s response makes sense with respect to the intention). Given these definitions, the question that interests me is whether the sole function of interaction is to produce a sense of agency, or whether interaction can yield other, equally interesting phenomenal experiences.

A week or so ago I had a nice chat with Jay Bolter about the function of New Media theory. Just to be clear, since “New Media” is a very squishy category, what we were talking about is computer-based work. Our discussion raised a number of questions that I would love to hear comments on.

1. What’s theory for?
For me, theory is for making. Theoretical frameworks are contingent constructions that inform the creation of artifacts. Jay sensibly points out that theory can be purely descriptive – a “purely descriptive” theory presumably doesn’t directly inform an artifact, though perhaps it provides a background against which design occurs. This got me thinking more generally about what role new media theory plays in the work of new media artists. When I think about my own work and that of my colleagues at Georgia Tech, my own work is informed much more by science and technology studies than by new media theory, Sha Xin Wei’s work is informed by performance studies, phenomenology and mathematical theory, and Diane Gromala’s work is informed by phenomenology and theories of subjectivity. So here are at least three new media artists who practices aren’t strongly informed by new media theory. When working on specific pieces, I often construct temporary, contingent theoretical structures to inform that particular piece, but the theoretical construction is in some sense part of the craft practice of making the piece. What do other artists and media theorists feel about the relationship between theory and making?

The post Responsive Narratives (and its comments) raises the question of whether there lies anything in between brute force authoring approaches and building a human-level AI. This question is important not just for interactive drama, but for Expressive AI (AI-based art and entertainment) in general. In a brute force authoring approach, the artist lovingly hand-crafts material (e.g. animation, text, images, etc.) for every possible context, for all possible interactions. In the AI-complete approach, the artist somehow describes their intention at a very high level (e.g. the high-level motivations of characters), and the system auto-magically grounds this high-level description with concrete representations for different contexts (e.g. generated animation, generated text, generated images) and for all possible interactions. There are good reasons to seek a middle ground besides the current technical impossibility of AI-complete approaches.

Harold’s post inspired me to post on what I see as the modes or genres of AI-based art. The modes described here are not mutually exclusive; a single piece may simultaneously explore multiple modes or genres. I would love to hear any comments describing a new mode (with an example) or an alternative categorization scheme.

I just spent the last week in Stockholm as an invited opponent on a licentiate thesis in interactive drama. While there I was able to visit with a number of folks in the Swedish Institute for Computer Science, the IT University of Kista, and the mobility studio of the Interactive Institute.

Andrew raises the question of whether artists should program. The answer is yes. Here’s why.

Computers are not fundamentally about producing 2D visual imagery, video, or 3D models (everything taught in the typical into to electronic media classes).

Computers are not fundamentally about responding to the input of a user/player/interactor (computer-based interactive everything).

Computers are not fundamentally about controlling motors, lights, projectors, or other electro-mechanical systems (installation art, robotic sculpture).

Computers are not fundamentally about mediating signals from distant locations (telepresence).

Chaim Gingold, a recent graduate of the IDT masters program at Georgia Tech, has put his excellent written thesis (pdf) and thesis project (mac pc) online at www.slackworks.com/~cog/. His thesis provides a description of a miniature worlds aesthetic derived from the work and thoughts of Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Seymour Papert, introduces the idea of “magic crayons” as lightweight computational languages that integrate conventions of artistic practice, and describes his thesis project, Comic Book Dollhouse.

His treatment of miniature worlds unpacks the design aesthetic of Shigeru Miyamoto. As Chaim states: