Hosted by 
Thanks to past GTxA hosts: the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
http://grandtextauto.org
is the shortest way to get to this blog.
Currency, a series of four one-minute videos, designed for looping, has been exhibited in a Philadelphia gallery and screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. The four pieces are now available on YouTube. They are collaborations between Roderick Coover and Nick Montfort. We iteratively developed the video and text of each of the pieces under various textual, shooting, and collaboration constraints.
There were many more great presentations today at Media in Transition 5. The conference actually includes more than 250 presentations over three days. Fortunately, this abundance is matched with good documentation – all the abstracts and many full papers are online, with more coming. Here is a brief mention of a few of today’s sessions:
“Disruptive Practices.” James Cypher showed several of his video mash-ups, which he shows on public access TV; these included one that conflated music from The Pixes (“Where is My Mind?”) and Dylan (“Blowing in the Wind”). Jay Critchley spoke about his prolific and hilarious art projects, one of which was founding and running the Old Glory Condom Company. Benjamin Mako Hill and Elizabeth Stark told us about the copyright perspectives of an often neglected group – pirates, who are concerned with the rights of media users and consumers.
Here are a few brief snippets from Media in Transition 5 today. My fellow panelist Jill Walker blogged about the introduction, so, on to the first session…
In “Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures,” Thomas Pettitt, Lewis Hyde, and S. Craig Watkins took us from the appropriative practices of Shakespeare, through the (potential) piracy and refusal to patent of Benjamin Franklin, and the plundering and reworking of musical history done by DJ Kool Herc and others.
The Electronic Literature Collection, volume one is the topic of Katie Haegele’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. She writes
But wouldn’t it be nice to get our arms around this thing, to get a sense of the full breadth and scope of what’s called digital literature?
The 60 works in the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) (http://collection.eliterature.org) – edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland – show the wide range of forms that exist within the genre.
and describes the keyword index and four of the pieces included in volume one of the Collection in detail.
The Boston Cyberarts Festival has just kicked off, and will run until May 6. Suggestions of what to see each day are posted at Big RED & Shiny, and you can check the full Event Selector. This festival is put on every two years and is the major series of new media events in the Boston area, “encompassing visual arts, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.” Many artists and organizations participate; Turbulence, for instance, has commisioned two works for the festival (“Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments” and “Pulse Pool”) and is sponsoring two events (OurFloatingPoints: The Art of Living a Second Life and an Upgrade! Boston event). MIT’s participation includes the first Cambridge Science Festival, a one-day festival with the MIT Museum as its main sponsor; usual artistic suspects CAVS and the List Visual Arts Center are venues for Cyberarts events, too. If you’re in the area for some of the festival and catch an interesting event, or a show that others should know about, drop us a comment.
Two visitng positions related to Grand Text Auto-y things, here in Philadelphia:
The University of the Arts Multimedia Department seeks candidates to fill a visiting designer position as an assistant or associate professor. The successful candidate should have a strong background in any of the following areas: interface design, interaction design, usability engineering, human-computer interaction or digital installation. Rank and salary will depend upon qualifications and experience.
The University of the Arts Multimedia Department seeks candidates to fill a visiting position as an assistant or associate professor. Rank and salary will depend upon qualifications and experience. A focus in any of the following is of particular interest to the department: information theory, human computer interaction, game theory and contemporary art and design history.
An international festival for new technology art is taking place in Cambridge, England from April 25-29. It seems that this includes an LED workshop – good thing it’s not taking place in Cambride, MA. There’s a blog for the festival, too.
Based on an original design by Toshihiro Nishikado, this is a ferocious simulation of the ancient Battle of Thermopylae in which three Spartans fight to the death against Xerxes and his massive Persian army. Facing insurmountable odds, their valor and sacrifice inspire all of Greece to unite against their Persian enemy, drawing a line in the sand for democracy. The original graphics come to life when iconic, geometric images are combined with processing power. Find one in your local theater today, or try the online version now…
Looks like there is some unusual RPG territory left to be discussed in Third Person, or, if you believe person is four-sided, maybe Fourth Person. Quick, roll saving cube against HYBRID!
Archival & Social Studies, a digital, free, and peer-reviewed journal on archival science, has launched. The journal covers digital issues and draws from other disciplines to solve current problems in archival science. Volume 1 number 0 of A&SS is now out. (Perhaps the bibliographically inclined can explain why the volumes seem to be numbered by an analyst and the issues by a set theorist? A search for “vol 1 no 0” shows this has been done elsewhere.) The Intersections section includes “Archives in the Digital Age: New Uses for an Old Science,” “Searching for meaning in the Library of Babel: field semantics and problems of digital archiving,” and my article “Toward a Theory of Interactive Fiction.” Those interested in submitting should see the manuscript submission guidelines.
Emily Short is interviewed in the main featured article in the current Gamastutra. Jim Munroe (an IF author himself; he wrote Punk Points) talks with her, and their discussion deals a good bit with one of my favorite of Emily’s games, Savoir-Faire.
If you’re in the mood for futuristic, jet-powered automotive descruction, Jetspeed is a slick side-scrolling vehicular combat game you might like. It was done in Flash by Damien Clarke for Albino Blacksheep. The music and graphics work well with the gameplay and are quite polished – closer to the Alien Hominid end of the spectrum than the Animutations end.
If your tastes are more abstract, check out Kenta Cho’s L.A.2, which repurposes the Game of Life as a shooter – you shoot “gliders” into the self-generating and attacking grid around you.
The first issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly has arrived! Congratulations to editor-in-chief Julia Flanders and the people of DHQ.
Selections: In “Interpretative Quests in Theory and Pedagogy,” Jeff Howard explains and develops some of his work in teaching postmodern novels via quests, as described before here on GTxA. In “Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms,” Mark Wolff describes how the Oulipian view of “potential” does not immediately lend itself to the analysis, rather than the production, of texts. And there’s a review, by Johanna Drucker, of Willard McCarty’s Humanities Computing.
Paolo Tajè’s article over at Game Career Guide proposes six layers for gameplay: Token, including elements like the player’s “man,” opponents, and power-ups; Prop, their properties; Dyn, the verbs of game dynamics; Goal, in-game motivations; Meta, elements outide the game itself such as its division into levels; and Psycho, the desired emotional responses of the player. The article applies this “Gameplay Deconstruction: Elements and Layers” (or GD:EL) model to Pac-Man and Tetris. Thanks to ifMUD for the tip about this one.
What does “chu” mean? The answer is not available on the Wikipedia disambiguation page. My fellow Dreamcast owners may particularly be wondering about this. If you’ve played Space Channel 5, you will probably recall that all the cute alien opponetnts say “chu” to indicate you need to press the A button. I’ve heard that our own Mary Flanagan asked Space Channel 5 (and Rez) creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi what “chu” means, and he explained…
You know, chu!
The Rhizome Commissions Program is now accepting proposals – they are due April 2. “In 2007, Rhizome will commission eleven new art works with fees ranging from $1000-3000.” Ten of these are for Internet projects in general, one for a project focused on the Rhizome community specifically. Projects that result will be shown at the New Museum at an event.
Project Hippasus is an MMO planned by Frozen North for the PC and Xbox 360 – a Mathematically Magical Optimization? The virtual world will offer “accidental learning” because, according to the plan they’ve put together in four weeks, you’ll have to solve math problems as you roam about. Apparently you’ll need to decompose your opponents into their frequency components in order to defeat them. Or maybe hurl weapons along their principal eigenvectors. Or something. I don’t know … math is hard. Let’s go shopping on Second Life!
A three-year project by Jim Andrews, Geof Huth, Lionel Kearns, Marko Niemi, and Dan Waber has come to fruition. The result is that an important set of early digital poems is available once more; the editors, also, have saved the original bits and made the running work available in several emulated, ported, and recorded ways, setting a powerful example for future preservation and porting of digital art, games, and poetry.
Take a look at the New York Times article on video game preservation, discussing curator Henry Lowood’s list of canonical video games. He picked the ten games with Matteo Bittanti, Christopher Grant, Steve Meretzky, and Warren Spector. These “most important video games of all time” are:
If you’re reading Grand Text Auto via Bloglines, you presumably aren’t reading this – the service hasn’t updated our feed since February 25, as a commenter pointed out. We don’t know of any other aggregators that are having problems, and the feeds we’re providing seem to be valid.
Other feeds that Bloglines hasn’t properly digested recently seem to include those of Girls Read Comics (And They’re Pissed) (fixed a few days ago) and IF author Adam Cadre (still doesn’t register updates to the main bloggy part, the calendar). A recent thread at the Bloglines forums suggests that this update problem may be widespread among WordPress-based blogs. Although the title of that post mentions that “newly added feeds aren’t updated,” the problems that bloggers report there are not limited to new feeds.
There’s a fork in the Web up ahead. If you’re part of the angry mob that can’t put up with XHTML, you’ll be pleased, or at least less angry, to know that W3C is relauching activity on HTML. Yes, the HTML Working Group is back. Google finds 95 results for a search on “I hate XHTML” and 14,100 for “I hate HTML,” but I suppose you can’t please all of the document engineers all of the time.
An abecedarian, typographic zoo awaits you online: Bembo’s Zoo. Monkey with that alphabet a bit (that is, click on something) and you’ll discover the animal nature of letters. A classic site, and a book tie-in, from 2000.
The applause-filled, frivolity-filled XYZZY Awards have just concluded. Congratulations to all the interactive fiction authors whose work was nominated. Various characters from IF games (and some of the usual characters from ifMUD) gave the awards, as is traditional. Amid the humor, there was also some time to remember XYZZY award winner Star C. Foster.
The Best Game award this year went to The Elysium Enigma by Eric Eve; that game also won the Best Individual NPC award. Emily Short’s Floatpoint took the awards for Best Story and Best NPC. Andrew Plotkin’s Delightful Wallpaper took the Best Individual PC, Best Puzzles, and Best Writing awards. By the way, since these were done in TADS 3 (The Elysium Enigma) and Inform 7 (the two others), that’s a lot of wins for brand-new IF development systems.
And Andrew Plotkin’s reviews of Myst live on, too. See Zarf’s lastest review of Myst Online: Uru Live, the recently re-animated MMO – or perhaps non-MMO. Zarf also provides the definitive Uru FAQ.
Powered by WordPress
