Grand Text Auto

I’ll read from my book #! at the University of New Hampshire tomorrow: Memorial Union Building. 12:30pm.

You don’t have permission to access /memslam/IN A GREEN, MOSSY TERRAIN,IN AN OVERPOPULATED AREA,BY THE SEA,BY AN ABANDONED LAKE,IN A DESERTED FACTORY,IN DENSE WOODS,IN JAPAN,AMONG SMALL HILLS,IN SOUTHERN FRANCE,AMONG HIGH MOUNTAINS,ON AN ISLAND,IN A COLD, WINDY CLIMATE,IN A PLACE WITH BOTH HEAVY RAIN AND BRIGHT SUN,IN A DESERTED AIRPORT,IN A HOT CLIMATE,INSIDE A MOUNTAIN,ON THE SEA,IN MICHIGAN,IN HEAVY JUNGLE UNDERGROWTH,IN AN OVERPOPULATED AREA,BY A RIVER,AMONG OTHER HOUSES,IN A DESERTED CHURCH,IN A METROPOLIS,UNDERWATER on this server.

I was delighted to be at the first NYU ITP Code Poetry Slam a few hours ago, on the evening of November 14, 2014. The work presented was quite various and also very compelling. Although I had an idea of what was to come (as a judge who had seen many of the entires) the performances and readings exceeded my high expectations.

A reading I did from historical computational poetry kicked off the event. I read from a new set of reimplementations, in JavaScript and Python, that I developed for the occasion. The set of four pages/Python programs is called Memory Slam. It contains:

Alan Cox has just released Fuzix, a Unix-like OS for the Z80. The kernel runs in 40kb. Designed for portability, it’s been compiled on the 6502 and 6509, but further work will be needed to fully support those processors.

Alan Cox has just released Fuzix, a Unix-like OS for the Z80. The kernel runs in 40kb. Designed for portability, it’s been compiled on the 6502 and 6509, but further work will be needed to fully support those processors.

Er, sorry. I exaggerated a bit. It’s actually just
NaNoGenMo 2014. But that’s still really cool.

“Spend the month of November writing code that generates a novel of 50k+ words.” As is traditional, the event occurs on GitHub.

I awoke one night in Quito, Ecuador, this year and came up with a way to save a chip or two from the Apple II, and a trivial way to have the 2 grays of the Apple II be different (light gray and dark gray) but it’s 38 years too late. It did give me a good smile, since I know how hard it is to improve on that design.

That’s Woz, in 2014.

I mentioned a few of these earlier, but there are more. I’ll try to keep an updated list of reviews here for any curious Polish-reading visitors:

Review of Zegar światowy in Portal (nie całkiem) Kulturalny.

Review of Zegar światowy in SZORTAL.

Review of Zegar światowy by Katarzyna Krzan.

Review of Zegar światowy in Pad Portal.

Review of Zegar światowy in Pad Portal.

There was also review of Zegar światowy in the major Polish weekly magazine Przegląd (the review is not online).

The book was also discussed in an interview I did on Radio Kraków.

The site Unglue.it, which offers books that can be made free after a certain number of purchases, also promotes born-free e-books such as the Creative Commons PDF of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. They have featured our book today, in fact. The founder pointed out to us that there are now 11 different “editions” of 10 PRINT in WorldCat, thanks not to the hardback, paperback, and e-book editions but to variant titles and author entries.

Students published the first digital Des Imagistes in 2008, chose to self-host it without sending me a copy. It’s gone.

Wired: It’s up on the Internet Archive. Tired: Without scraping that I can’t get the CC BY-NC-SA site.

Beautiful class project. The preservation strategy was not so great. I should have required the files be sent to me, too. Live, learn.

Finally, the first review of my book #! is in. It’s from Zach Whalen. this is it, and to make it easier for you to copy, paste, and run it, here is the review that he banged out:

perl -e '{print$,=$"x($.+=.05),map{$_ x($.*.1)}qw(# !);redo}'

By the way, please come to my reading tomorrow at MIT (E15 atrium) at 6:30pm if you’re in the area. It will be fun!

Nick Montfort presents #! in the atrium of MIT’s building E15, just steps from the Kendall T stop. It’s October 22, Wednesday, at 6:30pm, and thanks to the List Visual Arts Center. The book is Montfort’s new one from Counterpath Press, consisting of programs and poems. Please, come join me!

Michael Mateas looks even more smug than normal – and he should – in the photo accompanying this UC Santa Cruz press release. He’s the chair of the new Computational Media department at that UC school, the first of its sort.

My collaborator & friend Michael, along with my collaborator & friend Noah Wardrip-Fruin, have made good on the suggestions of the report “Envisioning the Future of Computational Media,” the outcome of an NEH-, NEA-, NSF-, and Microsoft-sponsored workshop of which I was a part, along with about 40 others.

Here’s an interview of mine, in Polish and posted on the site interia.pl. World Clock is among the topics.

Yes, Post Position will be switching over to all-Polish programming soon. But in the meantime we’ll have a few more posts in English.

I announced the Polish translation of World Clock recently; here is, as far as I know, the first review of it – which is also the first review of World Clock in any language.

„TRAVELOGUE” WIERSZA WOLNEGO NICKA MONTFORTA

Nick Montfort, Zegar światowy, tłum. Z jęz. ang. przełożył Piotr Marecki, Kraków, Korporacja Ha!art, 2014.

Ciekawie przedstawiono w książce autentyczne przemówienie, w którym narrator mówi głosami innych osób. Autor nie tylko opowiada zdarzenie, ale pisząc, że tak było zwraca też uwagę na to, jak do tego doszło: „Ashgabat. Jest prawie 05:04. W pewnym przytulnym schronieniu sporej postury mężczyzna, o imieniu Jakub, czyta kanarkową umowę. Siada prosto”. Kategorii narratora szybko zmienia „punkt widzenia”.

World Clock (book, code) has now been published in Polish. The translation is by Piotr Marecki, who translated the underlying novel-generating program and generated a new novel in Polish. ha!art is the publisher, and the book appears in the Liberatura series, which also includes some very distinguished titles: The Polish translations of Finnegans Wake and of Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, for instance.

My most unconventional lab is documented in a new zine by Sherri Wasserman, one available for download and screen-viewing now; it will be available in DIY print-and-bind-your-own format soon.

The publication is Restore [Return] Shift, and it’s the second in a series of zines documenting spaces that preserve and offer access to creative computing.

A rare color photo can be seen on the Instragram announcement.

Here are some photos from the opening of the show More Human at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery on September 12.

The site for the show also features a PDF of the catalog [2.5 MB].

My piece in the show is From the Tables of My Memorie. I read a bit from the piece last night, when I spoke at Boston Cyberarts with several other artists about our work and the theme of the show.

I’ll be speaking at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery again on November 19, this time about ports and translations in computational art – the topic of my Renderings project. That event is at 7:30pm. The gallery is in the Green St T Station on the Orange Line.

I read from #! and two other books at the Harvard Book Store last Thursday.

This Wednesday (September 24), I’ll be one of ten artists speaking about work in the COLLISIONcollective show “More Human.” The Art Technology New England event is in the gallery where the show is up.

That’s the Boston Cyberarts gallery, 141 Green St, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts 02130 – connected to the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line.

The event starts at 7:30pm and will probably go to about 10pm.

ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program) at NYU is having a Code Poetry Slam on November 14. And they are seeking entries now! Send them along no later than November 7.

Call for Participation

THE END(S) OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

The 2015 Electronic Literature Organization conference and festival will take place August 5-7th 2015. The conference will be hosted by the Bergen Electronic Literature research group at the University of Bergen, Norway with sessions at venues including the University of Bergen, Det Akademiske Kvarteret, the Bergen Public Library, the University of Bergen Arts library, and local arts venues. Bergen is Norway’s second-largest city, known as the gateway to the fjords, a festival city and cultural center with a lively and innovative arts scene.

DEADLINES

Hey, lookit here. Not only is 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, MIT Press, 2013) available for free online as a Creative Commons PDF, and available in the original harback edition that MIT Press published, it’s also now in paperback.

The paperback looks beautiful, by the way, thanks to the design work and attention of our co-author Casey Reas.

Here’s the MIT Press page with both the hardcover and the paperback.

I’m delighted that Flash: Building the Interactive Web by Anastasia Salter and John Murray has just been published by the MIT Press.

This is an excellent study of an influential software platform – our first such study in the Platform Studies series – and it both traces the history of the platform, its development and the contexts in which it arose, as it also covers many famous and representative Flash productions.

Mark Sample writes of it, “Combining historical research, software studies, and a deep appreciate for digital creativity, Salter and Murray dramatically explore Flash—whose very ubiquity has heretofore made it transparent to media scholars—as the defining technology for a generation of artists, storytellers, game designers, and Web 2.0 companies.”

I will be reading from and discussing three recent books this Thursday at 7pm the Harvard Book Store here in sunny Cambridge, Massachusetts. These are:

#!
Counterpath Press, Denver
a book of programs & poems (pronounced “shebang”)

World Clock
Bad Quarto, Cambridge
a computer-generated novel

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
MIT Press, Cambridge
a collaboration with nine others that I organized, now out in paperback

These all express how programming can be used for poetic purposes, and how
new aesthetic possibilities can arise with the help of computing. Also,
some portions of these (which I’ll read from) are quite pleasing to read
aloud and to hear.