Grand Text Auto

Robert Kendall has just launched the site for his new generator-backed, photo-enabled sticker literature project, Logozoa. Photos provide the logozoo – more exhibits are sought from contributors – while texts are downloadable and sticker-printable from the adopt-a-zoa section of the site. This project is aphoristic rather than novelistic or completely open and blank. It’s is based on Rob’s earlier Soothcircuit system, emplying some of the sayings that system can diagram.

Some of this, some of this, and even a touch of this to help you get fully iPoemd up during our noble country’s National Poetry Month. It’s the cruelest month, and sometimes it snows in April; but celebrate it or oppose it, it is indeed here.

• “If Someone Touches You,” by People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly (more by PLU)
• “The Jezebel Spirit,” Brian Eno and David Byrne (last.fm) (info)
• “Mayakovsky,” The Four Horsemen
• “Rocked by Rape,” Evolution Control Committee (more by ECC)
• “PoetryMix” (Christian Bök + Caroline Bergvall), DJ Disaffected (special to GTxA!)

I was delighted to see that someone at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin – to wit, Jeffrey Lamar Howard – wrote a dissertation engaging interactive fiction and contemporary literature, and ways that IF can inform the teaching of postmodern writing. Jeffrey Howard’s dissertation is “Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy.” Update, May 9: It’s now online.

I will just quote a few passages from it and mention one point that it makes. This won’t provide anything like a summary of Howard’s work, of course, but hopefully it will show something about the very novel approach to interactive fiction and postmodern literature that he has taken.

Literary pedagogy can be thought of as a form of game design, in which the teacher transforms a printed text into an interactive fiction by locating and devising “puzzles” in the form of interpretative challenges for the student to solve. By applying the principles of game design while teaching postmodern novels, instructors can draw upon the theories and examples of interactivity already associated with interactive fiction to enhance their own pedagogical imaginations.

I write a lot of things intended for the computer. I decided, for a change, to write a poem that was fit for print and paper. Here are a few notes about the project:

1. Ream is a 500 page poem.
2. The writing of Ream was entirely imagined and executed on one day: April 5, 2006.
3. On each page of Ream a single, one-syllable word appears, centered, in ordinary, 14-point type.
4. Page numbers do not appear on any of the pages and are unnecessary, since the words are in alphabetical order.
5. Pages 1-51 recapitulate Poe’s “The Raven.”

Happy 01:02:03 04/05/06! Although if you’re on a 24-hour clock in this time zone, you may have missed your last chance to celebrate this rare alignment of the digits, 12 hours ago…

Best would be to do nothing. If not that, at least read nothing relevant to what you should be working on. If not that, at least don’t shoot the puppy.

Here are two word and image gems, great verbally-playful motion pictures that the Internet provides to our home theaters…

Word Disassociation. By Lemon Demon, a.k.a. Neil Cicerega, who has also brought us animutations and ultimate showdowns. Also on Google video. Thanks to Brian Kim Stefans for pointing this one out.

ClikClak. In French and English; click through the intro to get a choice of language for the movie itself. Thanks to Adam Cadre for the link.

In my presentation at E-FEST 2006 (official blog) I showed some ways that an early virtual cave, the interactive fiction Adventure, can – when implemented in an IF system that separates simulation from narration and uses text generation – be varied in narrative ways. But I also got yet another chance to check out the virtual, textual Cave at Brown that has been the locus for 3D literary work by Talan Memmott, John Cayley, William Gillespie, Noah, and many others, in Robert Coover’s cave writing workshops.

At E-FEST 2006 I understood the main connection between postmodern writing and hypertext. It took being on a panel that included – along with computer scientist Lutz Hamel – George Landow, Stuart Moulthrop, and our own Scott Rettberg. This purported “Game of Fiction” panel was actually a veritable hypertext brainwashing session! I probably should have figured out this connection when I first read Landow’s classic Hypertext, just out in its third edition, or from Scott’s repeated statements of what I now seem to recall as this very point. But I think it was the comment from Robert Coover after the presenters spoke that finally made the Super Hypertext Club click.

I plan to have a few short notes about this year’s E-FEST at Brown, which was a great event. (Update: Note 2, “First I Saw the Surface;” Note 3, “Virtual, Textual Caves.”) You can see some evidence of this in the photos by Brian Kim Stefans and the photos by Scott. I won’t attempt to summarize all the good points made in the panels and all the provocative and compelling e-lit that was shown during two nights of performances, but I do want to recount and rhapsodize upon a few of the many interesting things said and done at this festival.

Jim Carpenter’s poetry generation project has surfaced here and there, for instance, at a Slought foundation exhibit and event and at the recent MACHINE series reading at Penn, where Jim read with Loss Pequeño Glazier. But the project has remained rather enigmatic, so those without access to Philadelphia (or to this week’s E-FEST 2006 at Brown, where Jim will be presenting) haven’t gotten to even read much about this poetry generation system.

Now, the Electronic Text Composition project, and its focalizing persona, Erica T. Carter, have a site that describes the project, provides some publication credits (poems generated with the system have been printed in literary magazines), shows off some of the source code, and offers interactive access to the system. Enjoy!

At the current GDC, the First Penguin Award (which is not the first award of this sort and doesn’t have anything to do with Linux) goes to Will Crowther and Don Woods, says the press release.

The two “are credited with pioneering the videogame genre of Role Playing Games (RPGs),” which is one line of descent you could trace, I suppose: via Rogue, via tile-based graphical RPGs of the Ultima sort, etc. Adventure had a more fluent interface that was able to speak in something like English back in 1975, but it lacked many important RPG elements, such as a detailed combat system and the ability to control multiple characters or characters with different abilities. But, presumably the RPG genre still exists, while the same can’t be said for other genres and forms that more obviously grow from Adventure – say, interactive fiction, or “adventure” games more generally, or even action-adventures in fantastic environments.

Francis Hwang was seeking writers for a collaboration back in January: Now, the project has launched. It comes pre-primed with writing, but invites you to stop back and read further as the blog rolls fictionally on.

“Ten-sided” is by Francis Hwang, with Johannes Görannson, Jess Kilby, Tao Lin, Brendon Lloyd, Jessica Penrose, Glenis Stott, John Woods, Taren McCallan-Moore, and why the lucky stiff. The project is a Turbulence commission; the email from Turbulence explains:

A Celebration of New Literary Hypermedia

Brown University, March 22 – March 24, More info at the official blog

Aya Karpinska * Braxton Soderman * Brian Kim Stefans * Daniel Howe * Edrex Fontanilla * Gale Nelson * George Landow * Ilya Kreymer * Jim Carpenter * Judd Morrissey * Lutz Hamel * Michael Stewart * Mike Magee * Nick Montfort * Nick Musurca * Noah Wardrip-Fruin * Polly Hall * Robert Coover * Robert Kendall * Scott Rettberg * Stuart Moulthrop * Wendy Chun

Congratulations to Jason Devlin, whose IF-Comp-winning Vespers brought him the Best Game XYZZY award and three others, and congratulations to the other XYZZY winners. See the full list of winners; there’s also a transcript of Sunday’s online ceremony.

The Yahoo! home page in 1996 and 2006. The inverted region on the right shows the space occupied by the Web Directory, once the sole feature of Yahoo!

Paging through a few of the many archived versions of the Yahoo! home page on the Internet Archive shows that the Yahoo Web Directory’s rate of disappearance has been pretty steady over time: Feb 1998 … Jan 2001 … Jan 2003 … Jan 2005.

Part of this encrustation of advertising, services, customization, news, and so on around the core function of a site is a general phenomenon I call “portalitis,” one which has afflicted many a page. Portalitis is not always irreversible. Flipping through the archived home pages of Altavista (www.altavista.digital.com through 1998; switched to altavista.com by the beginning of 1999) shows a different progression, toward a busy mess that is trying to provide one-stop shopping for everyone and then back to the Google-like minimalism of the current Altavista page. Whether this improvement in interface led anyone back to search using Altavista is another matter, of course.

Long have people puzzled over the strange system of Dan Shiovitz’s game Bad Machine (available online at Poems that Go.) But the attempt at careful discussion I made in my review of Bad Machine now seems unnecessary, because a page that explains everything has recently come back online.

It’s spring break, so I decided to take a trip to Maryland and hear a talk…

Wherefore Genre?

Scott Rettberg’s talk at MITH (University of Maryland). I was pleased to hear Neil Fraistat plug Grand Text Auto in introducing Scott…

Scott uses the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1 (eds. Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, Strickland) to discuss the notion of genre in e-lit. There is no established publishing model, economic market. This causes problems with in presenting work in the classroom, assigning work.

There’s a new issue of CIAC’s Electronic Magazine, an online French and English publication of Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal. This Winter 2006 issue is “Hyperlittérature IV: contraintes / Hyperliterature IV: constraints,” and it includes an article by Patrick Ellis on my Ad Verbum (2000) and Neil Hennessy’s Jabber (2001).

Leading IF author Emily Short has released two new games, and Graham Nelson, IF author and creator of the widely-used IF system Inform, has a new IF offering, too. Graham’s piece is entitled The Reliques of Tolti-Aph. Emily’s new games are Damnatio Memoriae (set in the Savoir-Faire universe) and Bronze (a “fractured fairy tale” based on the legend of beauty and the beast). They were all coded in the soon-to-be-released Inform 7, and they come with lavish virtual “feelies” such as PDF manuals, a map, and a walkthrough (for the weak). Among these is Emily’s IF Instruction Manual and similar instructions in the Bronze manual, which will prove very useful for IF newcomers.

On ifMUD I learned about an elegant and geographically-contextualized real-time system for delivering news headlines.

It’s slick. All it needs now is a PointCast logo … if one is still available.

How to write sinister computer overlord dialouge?

low voltage # WRONG

Now get this straight, pal – no one User wrote me. I’m worth a couple million of their man-years! I’m bigger than all those little wimps put together! Humans they can’t even keen their social order in one piece. [Continue …]

high voltage # RIGHT

No one has lived in the past. No one will live in the future. The present is the only form of life. It is a state of existence which is indestructible. [Continue …]

I read a great BBC article on Tactical Iraqi thanks to my U.K. correspondent. You may remember our previous post here relating a bit from Elizabeth Losh’s presentation at DAC about Tactical Iraqi; certainly, if you were at DAC you’ll remember her discussion of it, in which she (as a peace activist) argued against outright dismissal or opposition to the game, explained its workings, situated it with regard to video game genres, and critiqued it in terms of how it dealt with gender, race, and language. The official page on Tactical Iraqi is quite informative about the basics of the system itself.

To those in the area – please come by for this great digital poetry program!

CONSTRUCTING POETS

LOSS PEQUEÑO GLAZIER

JIM CARPENTER

A reading of digital poetry
hosted by Charles Bernstein
part of the MACHINE series

Wednesday Feb 15 … 5:30PM
Arts Cafe, Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk
Philadelphia

Two brilliant examples of anagrammatic work have come my way today:

Anagrams (mostly) of “Van Helsing” and “Man on Fire” on the Flatbush Pavilion marquee in Brooklyn. (Thanks to Brian Kim Stefans)

An anagrammap of the London Underground. (Thanks to markm on ifMUD)