Grand Text Auto

There’s a new (ink and paper) issue of Open Letter all about the work of Kenneth Goldsmith; it just launched at the Kelly Writers House. Kenny’s brand of “uncreative writing” (“typing, not writing”) imports ideas and the determination to follow through on them from the world of visual arts. His recent books include The Weather, which transcribes a year’s worth of radio weather reports; Day, a book of about 900 pages that is a re-typing and scanning of a single day’s New York Times, and Soliloquy, which reproduces in print a week’s worth of Kenny’s recorded utterances. See his EPC author home page for links to online versions of all of these, except the one that’s fit to print.

The Organic City is an Oakland-based site for collaborative storytelling, rooted in a common environment. It’s a project of Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern at Cal State East Bay, and it just launched, less than a month ago.

In concept and basic workings, the site is similar to Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, which takes New York and its cityscape, and which Scott discussed in his recent DAC presentation. Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood is an innovative project that has amassed many writers, but that site is about six years old and, in some ways, seems unpleasantly old-school in its interface and its workings. The Organic City project features a story map that looks and works well; there are even plans for mobile access. (Registration is required to add stories, no doubt because the potential for story-spam has been wisely foreseen.) The mobile media page links to several other related projects, too.

Molleindustria [English] [Italian] offers brilliant “political videogames against the dictatorship of entertainment.” Over on Water Cooler Games, Ian just wrote up their latest, an anti-McDonald’s game in the vein of the anti-Kinko’s Disaffected! This is a pretty complex one that involves much more than paper-shuffling, as the extensive introductory tutorial (in the style of a managerial PowerPoint presentation) should signal. I can’t comment yet on the long-term playability of McDonald’s Videogame, but the site is definitely worth a visit, and I do recommend at least starting up and playing with all the games. The ones that involve fornication might wait until after work, though.

I was tipped off on ifMUD to the discontinuation of Western Union’s telegram service. Stunning, I know. And the telegram took such good care of itself. You can check it out on the site if you don’t beleive it, but it’s a fact: the major United States Victorian Internet provider is down.

It looks like Canada remains online, though.

Also note the Dead Media project working note on the death of the singing telegram, or at least of the Western Union executive who created that means of communication, about a decade ago.

The Electronic Literature Collection will bundle together all sorts of readable digital work: animated, interactive, hyper, cyber, and on and on. Works are sought for the first volume, but only until the deadline next Tuesday, January 31. See the call for works for details!

The San Diego paper has an aritcle, “Accidental traveler in a brave new world,” about Mary Ann Buckles, the first to undertake a serious, involved study of interactive fiction or any sort of computer game: “Interactive Fiction: the Computer Storygame ‘Adventure.'” As a New York Times story and Gonzalo Frasca’s Ludology.org noted a while back, Buckles seems to have been broken from academia by interactions with her committee and the PhD process, but to have kneaded herself into a career she’s enjoying – as a massage therapist.

Brian Kim Stefans’s blog Free Space Comix has returned to the Web as Free Space Comix III, now WordPressified and served up one letter at a time. (It arrives in one’s browser window so quickly, however, that it looks like you’re getting it a page at a time.) For a thorough grounding, you can check out the first incarnation of the blog, the 2002-2004 Free Space Comix, and the 2004-2006 Free Space Comix II. From these sites, and from behind the arras (Brian’s site), a bevy of intriguing texts, poems, and online artworks will be revealed – and nowadays, syllabi, too, since Brian’s teaching and completing his MFA in creative writing at Brown.

Attention Philadelphians and those nearby! The MACHINE reading series at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kelly Writers House, co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization, will soon feature:

On February 15: Loss Pequeño Glazier (University of Buffalo, author of Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, numerous digital works, and Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm) joins Penn’s own Jim Carpenter (creator of the Electronic Text Composition system) to take the Writers House to the limits of computing and poetry. The program will be hosted by poet and critic Charles Bernstein (With Strings, My Way: Speeches and Poems, Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, Dark City). This “Constructing Poets” program is co-sponsored by the Penn Creative Writing Program.

A simple and elegant computer interface being used to simulate an inscrutable computer interface, in White Chamber.

This post is dedicated to the escapers, and those who want to be escapers. Perhaps you remember Toshimitsu Takagi’s Crimson Room (Grand Text Auto post & discussion). By now the game has established itself well enough to be briefly glossed in Wikipedia, everyone’s favorite the free encyclopedia. And the master of one-room Flash has since released Viridian Room. Now – well, I’m a few weeks late with this revelation, but anyway – he’s also completed White Chamber.

I shall lend credence to Jeremy Douglass’s characterization of Grand Text Auto as being a source of “breaking news and events” in interactive fiction – a characterization seen in his recent Writer Response Theory post on interactive fiction news resources.

The first breaking news item is Jeremy’s even more recent discussion of how interactive fiction tends to be characterized in news stories, which includes a proposed generation system for news stories about IF. For a very different take on interactive fiction and the news, check out the transcript from Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure, provided by Defective Yeti.

Here people might not properly capitalize a proper noun. They might transpose letters in ‘thier’. They might use jargon that isn’t in oxford. And all of that is OK with me.

Whether or not you’re a textual scholar, you may have wondered what the editorial values are on the three-leet site Slashdot, and what principles and practices apply to posting “stories” there. If so, you’ll be interested in a lengthy, recent post that tells the whole story and also offers a Goldilocks theory of story length and a sort of rhetoric of hyper-linking. There is some very fascinating conversation afterwards, too: “The process of reading is pipelined. Humans can scan through text very quickly because while the eye is scanning one word you’re parsing the sentence from a few words before and thinking about the meaning of what came before that. When you hit a grammatical or spelling error you cause a pipeline stall.”

.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.

                Computational Aesthetics:
  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Approaches to BEAUTY and HAPPINESS

         AAAI 2006, Boston, July 16 or 17, 2006

         http://www.computationalaesthetics.org

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                  *         *         * 

Our aesthetic agency for beauty and emotion is one of the most 
celebrated bastions of humanity.  If machines could understand and 
affect our perceptions of beauty and happiness, they could touch 
people's lives in fantastic new ways. Drawing variously from work in 
diverse fields such as psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy,
recent applications of artificial intelligence have begun their foray
into the computation of, inter alia, art, music, poetry, and affect. 
Both the theory and praxis of aesthetics by computational means are 
seeing rapid advances, and the time is ripe for thematic integration.
Hence, this workshop will bring together AI theorists and 
practitioners across various realms in study and celebration of its 
central thematic, COMPUTATIONAL AESTHETICS.

Ian Bogost and Persuasive Games have just released Disaffected! for Windows and Mac. The game, mentioned earlier on here, is a parodical critique of working life at FedEx Kinko’s and a Slamdance finalist. The whole Persuasive Games site has gotten an upgade, too, with a new page that showcase their games. Also, see Ian’s post on Water Cooler Games about the release of Disaffected!

Will FedEx deliver a threatening legal letter to Persuasive Games? How will the high-concept Disaffected! fare against the AI juggernaut of Façade at Slamdance? What did Vaugn do with Thor’s package? What will happen when late-generation situationists take the game into FedEx Kinko’s and play, or invite employees to play with them? Stay tuned!

The Electronic Literature Collection 1 seeks submissions of readable digital media – literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Hypertext, interactive fiction, e-mail novels, cybertext poems, games with literary dimensions, visual and animated literary pieces, performance texts, and on and on.

The deadline looms just two weeks from this posting – January 31! We welcome submissions of work from years past, though. For this first Collection, N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland are the editorial collective. The Collection will be available on CD and online, and Creative Commons licensed so that students, teachers, and individuals can share and enjoy. See the call for works for details.

Turbulence-commissioned artist and Rhizome director of technology Francis Hwang seeks writers for collaborative, improvisational fiction online. Should be comfortable with ongoing light commitment, technology. Stipend offered! See blog post for contact information and further details.

M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online, specifically, has returned with issues #1 and #2 available again and part of the 2006 issue up. The magazine, with print and online dimensions, deals provocatively with art and includes writing from poets and critics as well as artists. Of particular interest to us here on Grand Text Auto: the second issue, from 2003, on collaborations. (Interestingly, the Summer 1961 issue #2 of Locus Solus, edited by by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler, was about collaborations, also.) Issue #2 of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online includes, for instance, an article by Michael Mazur about his collaborations with Robert Pinsky and Robert Townsend. And lots of other collaboratively-written articles about the topic, too.

I recently acquired a Game Boy Micro, which I like a great deal. It’s pocket-sized, clear and ergonomic enough, rechargeable, and runs Game Boy Advance cartridges (from the stellar Wario Ware, Inc. to, via the magic of flash RAM, the homebrew games and demos that Brett Camper has discussed).

Modern-day gaming systems cause me to hesitate as I reach for my wallet, though, not only because of my retro tastes, but also because they’re so severely locked down. This is the case both from the “consumer” standpoint (as seen in region coding, which I believe Nintendo developed prior to the DVD) and of course from the developer’s standpoint.

I got word of a very interesting-sounding, Rashomon-inspired, Queneau-inspired, RFID-enabled piece going up at the Beall Center in Irvine, California on January 18. It’s by Brian House (of Yellow Arrow) and Sue Huang, and is called 5 ’til 12:

The Beall Center becomes the site of a nonlinear narrative with Knifeandfork’s immersive installation, 5 ’til 12. The visitor is invited to watch four characters, on four monitors, as they recount the tragic circumstances of the exhibition’s opening night. The experience is unique for each visitor, as each story has most likely never been heard before… and won’t ever be heard again.

I have only brief notes from one session of the Modern Language Association Convention this year – the December 29 one on new media editing, chaired by Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, in which I presented “Toward Scholarly, Critical, and Variorum Editions of Computer Programs.” This was as tedious a paper title as one can imagine (sure to drive both computer enthusiasts and those in textual studies into slumber), but the other two speakers more than made us for this, presenting new interfaces to motion pictures (Stephen Mamber, UCLA) and a compelling take on how to approach video games via bibliography (Steven Jones, Loyola U. Chicago).

A Review of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken
MIT Press
2005
368 pp.
$50.00
http://www.idc.ac.il/tecs

The Elements of Computing Systems has a remarkable assemblage of virtues: it’s a book that covers systems at basically every level, it’s appropriately minimal and lines out just enough to study in each one, it’s clearly written and well-illustrated, there is a nice supply of accompanying cross-platform software available for free online, and the exercises are fun to do. Besides being a nice book about computer systems, it also brings a nice perspective on how we can learn about different abstracted levels in computer science and then put these pieces of understanding together. Really, I’m embarrassed that I like an undergraduate computer science textbook this much.

A French artist has just attacked Duchamp’s Fountain with a hammer, slightly chipping the prize-winning urinal. He “claimed the hammer attack was a work of performance art.” The police have not released the man’s name, but press accounts note that in 1993 he relieved himself into what would later be voted the greatest piece of modern art, when it was on loan to a museum in Nimes. In fact, the person who did that hammered Fountain back then, too. Pierre Pinoncelli, j’accuse.

• Did Pinoncelli purchase his hammer at a store or create it himself? Which would have been better?

Seth Thompson of Wigged Productions recently completed Outside the Box: New Cinematic Experiences, a half-hour documentary featuring interviews with Cory Arcangel, Toni Dove, Lev Manovich, Jud Yalkut, and, curiously, one interactive but less cinematic guy, me. (These are links to the bios on the Wigged site.) The DVD is available on the site and is being shown on various stations worldwide, for instance, here in Philadelphia on DUTV, cable channel 54, on January 10th, February 7, and March 7 (Tuesdays) at 10:30pm; Jan 13, Feb 10, March 10 (Fridays) at 11:30pm; and the weekends afterwards at 6:30pm and 1:30am.

Years ago, early in the morning, I encountered a man in the Oslo train station who gave me a CD containing what might have been the sounds of a lake of robot jellyfish attaining a prolonged ecstasy, or perhaps plotting the overthrow of an oppressive regime [mp3, 971kb].

Happy 2006, all! In the interests of being future-looking, I’ll start off the new year by looking right on ahead to 2007. In the fall of next year the incredible-sounding opera Death and the Powers will go on, with music by Tod Machover (of the MIT Media Lab; The Brain Opera, Resurrection), libretto by Robert Pinsky (Mindwheel, The Figured Wheel, Jersey Rain, The Favorite Poem Project), robotics engineering by Cynthia Breazael (MIT Media Lab), and production design by Alex McDowell (Minority Report, Fight Club, The Crow) – see the page for full credits and a link to a seven-page PDF description. The production will feature incredible-looking sets, autonomous robots, and hyperinstrumental music. The main character is Simon Powers, an aged inventor whose attempt at a seemingly extropian transformation is at the heart of the piece.

Chris Klimas, author of the interactive fictions Blue Chairs and Mercy, sends word of his TiddlyWiki-based site featuring nonlinear stories: Gimcrack’d. Chris is also accepting submissions of nonlinear stories for the site.

The Wikifiction proposal lists several other fiction-writing and fiction-oriented wikis. Where there are lightweight “personal” wikis such as TiddlyWiki and DidiWiki, the wiki has had widespread success as a tool for collaborative writing. So, I find some of the projects that play on this capability most interesting, at least as ideas, although I don’t know that there’s any novel or story-style wiki to match that already classic pre-wiki romp, The Unknown.