Grand Text Auto

Here’s the Boston.com article on our exhibit “Programs at an Exhibition,” which opens Thursday (March 6). Hope to see you at the opening, which is 6pm-9pm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Those who have recently started developing electronic literature are welcomed to apply to have work in the Gallery of E-Literature First Encounters. Feb 15 is the deadline; the gallery will be at the “Hold the Light” conference, ELO 2014, in Milwaukee.

Consider it not in French, but Italian.

There are obsession-inducing transmissions, audio transmissions.

The ending is ugly … overall and in one language, at least.

But the story is a poet’s story – it begins with O and ends with O.

“Description,” my 2014 New Year’s poem, was sent out as a text file at the end of 2013; it’s now online in a solvable and checkable form, in a new Web edition.

Now by a commodious vicius of recirculation – go the fuck to sleep.

In Nashville, Husky Jackal Theater has presented Terminator the Second, which enacts the story of Terminator 2 with a text composed entirely of lines from Shakepeare’s plays. Video is available.

Also, I have been watching a certain TV show set during the Korean War with a certain fan fiction author, and I believe the guys making passes at guys, wearing dresses, mugging with guys, etc. have suggested a new possible genre of writing that would have to be called S*L*A*S*H.

The Trope Tank has a good deal going on in the next month, as classes at MIT begin. If you’re in LA, the Boston Area, or New York at the right times, please join us…

• January 16 in Los Angeles at USC, my talk “Computational Poetic Models,” SCA Complex, SCI Room 108, 11am
• January 17 in Los Angeles at UCLA, my talk “Ten Cases of Computational Poetics,” M/ELT, YRL Hub, 12pm
• January 21 in Cambridge at MIT, Dr. Piotr Marecki’s talk “Polish Literature in the Digital Age,” 6pm, The Trope Tank

I am moved by the holiday spirit of MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) to announce a Commodore 64 BASIC programming workshop using original hardware.

[Update: The workshop is now fully subscribed, but I will try to arrange for spectators who would like to join us around 4:30pm to see the results of our work.]

From p01 comes a 64 byte JavaScript program to produce a random-seeming maze, as long as the person at the computer is willing to wiggle the mouse a bit. It’s on pouet.net, with comments, too.

My novel World Clock, generated by 165 lines of Python code that I wrote in a few hours on November 27, 2013, is now available in print.

World Clock tells of 1440 incidents that take place around the world at each minute of a day. The novel was inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s “One Human Minute” and Harry Mathews’s “The Chronogram for 1998.” It celebrates the industrial concept of time and certain types of vigorous banality which are shared by all people throughout the world.

The new project European Poetry Forum by Zuzana Husarova Martin Solotruk is now online.

The project aims to connect a diverse group of poets with overlapping interests, as this statement about it explains. There are answers to queries from 38 poets up now.

Just posted: TROPE-13-03 – No Code: Null Programs by Nick Montfort, in the Trope Report series (technical reports from my lab the Trope Tank at MIT).

To continue the productive discussion of uninscribed artworks in Craig Dworkin’s No Medium, this report discusses, in detail, those computer programs that have no code, and are thus empty or null. Several specific examples that have been offered in different contexts (the demoscene, obfuscated coding, a programming challenge, etc.) are analyzed. The concept of a null program is discussed with reference to null strings and files. This limit case of computing shows that both technical and cultural means of analysis are important to a complete understanding of programs – even in the unusual case that they lack code.