Grand Text Auto

Even after much prompting, Scott won’t announce it, but his new personal site has been online for a while now at retts.net. His site is a good place to track Scott’s new media teaching, see what his classes are up to, and learn about other things that Scott deems too embarrassing to publish on Grand Text Auto.

The Hypertext ’05 full paper deadline has passed, but you can still submit short papers and demo proposals (due June 9) and poster proposals (due June 19). The conference will be September 6-9 in Salzburg.

Jason Scott has just shipped his epic BBS (Bulletin Board System) documentary, a set of three DVDs which has video from more than 200 interviews with BBS pioneers, “new school” latecomers to the scene, sysops, users, and others involved in the huge, headless social computing project of the BBS during the 1970s and 1980s.

On Tuesday, I saw on Slashdot that the documentary was shipping. And I got my copy today. Hanna and I just watched the first episode. Without having seeing the whole production, it’s still clear to me that anyone interested in the material and social history of computing should watch this documentary, and it would be useful to show parts of it to classes that deal with the topic.

Lisa Nakamura is giving the talk Subjects & Objects of Interactivity: Racial Formation and Media Convergence at UC Riverside’s Global Interface Mellon Workshop, this Wednesday (May 25) at 5pm. She’ll discuss the interface-like logic of Jennifer Lopez’s 2000 video “If You Had My Love.”

Black, Maurice J. 2002 “The Art of Code.” PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. [Department of English.]

As the abstract says:

Arguing that software’s increasing abstraction from hardware has defined computer programming practices for the last half-century, this dissertation shows how that abstraction has shaped the aesthetics, politics, and professional culture of programming. Specifically, the dissertation examines how some programmers have adopted a literary approach to coding, describing carefully crafted code as “beautiful,” “elegant,” “expressive,” and “poetic”; writing and reading programs as literary texts; and even producing hybrid artifacts that are at once poems and programs. This project has two central goals: first, to show how identifiably linguistic sensibilities have influenced programming theory and culture; second, to show how programming theory, as a body of knowledge that thinks deeply about the semantics and organization of textual structures, can contribute to the project of literary study.

When I write cute little bios describing what I do as a writer, I usually mention that I collaborate, because, after all, I do. So I was a bit interested to see that the Spring 2005 Authors’s Guild Bulletin has a writeup of a symposium the Guild held. The piece is entitled “Strange Bedfellows: The Rewards and Pitfalls of Collaboration.”

I heard about GTxA commenter Raph Koster’s “The Laws of Online World Design” recently on ifMUD. It’s a provocative and thoughtful list of principles, some of which were evident back in the days of Habitat. While the page itself is not new – an Internet Archive search shows the page has been around at that location since 2000 – and there are no arguments offered for why these laws obtain, the page is still well worth reading, and has several thoughts that apply to one-player games as well.

Having used the Internet Archive to check the date this page was first posted, I also fetched the May 11, 2000 version of the page (the earliest one) and then ran diff on this old page and the current HTML. Which leads me to wonder…

Fredrik Ramsberg just started a Game of the Week page to foster good ol’ USENET discussion on rec.games.int.fiction (also accessible via Google Groups). Discussion of Jacqueline Lott’s The Fire Tower is already underway…

New on Turbulence is “Why Rock?” The piece offers sound works by net artists with “real or supposed rock affinities.” Talan Memmott (real rock affinity) is one. And then – I never thought of Richard Stallman as a rocker (mp3), or, actually, as a net artist, but hey.

The project includes texts by Frédéric Madre and tutor to the Talking Heads Alan Sondheim, whose sound work Zing (wav) and whose oddly compelling video Ennui (mp4) is linked. Sondheim’s text ends with “fuck this didn’t go anywhere it’s not sounded out // (too _male_”. Alan, you’ve got a decent list of rockers who you know but let me tell you Charles Bernstein actually read on stage with Sonic Youth. You are cool and all and your video is pretty seriously frenetic but man.

Horse Less Review #2: Put Out Lights has just been put out. In it you will find fiction, poetry, and perhaps other things by Tyler Carter, Thomas Cook, Phil Cordelli, Maria Filippone, Sandy Florian, Michael Geier, Garth Graeper, Matthew Henriksen, Sean Hoade, Mark Kanak, Kirk Keen, Conan Kelly, Andrew Lux, Andrew Lynes, Clay Matthews, Carolina Maugeri, Jim Maughn, Jerry McGuire, Corey Mesler, Nick Montfort, Bryce Newhart, Scott Pierce, Marc Pietrzykowski, Nate Pritts, Maggie Queeney, Marthe Reed, Kate Schapira, Brandon Shimoda, Brian Kim Stefans, Hugh Steinberg, and Bronwen Tate.

Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, has some incredibly important questions about reading in the digital age, and he’s started a formidable project to begin to answer them. His Transliteracies project begins with a conference at UCSB in June:

“UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference

Launching the Transliteracies Project

June 17-18, 2005 / Univ. of California, Santa Barbara / McCune Room (6020 HSSB)

First off, a happy 2nd anniversary to Grand Text Auto – here’s to many more years of writing and conversation by the “drivers” and by the readers and commenters, who also bring direction and make the blog what it is.

I also want to re-welcome Mary Flanagan, who has been with us for a while as a guest and now joins us as a regular “driver.” We’re not planning to expand the driver pool much more, or perhaps any more, but we all continue to admire Mary’s work as a new media critic and creator, appreciated her contributions as a guest driver, and wanted her to remain part of this project. We hope that having her name on the masthead will let her keep contributing to the conversation here and allow her to more easily give us the scoop on her current and future projects.

Check out the multimedia fruits of the Things That Don’t Exist Remix Contest, and if you haven’t seen the Creative Commons video that inspired this festival of digital creativity, check it out [Quicktime]. If you miss the point – maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist?

Remember that unusual alternate orthography, presented in artworks of various media, that I mentioned last year? Will, it turns out that there may be a simple explanation for it. A recently released hypertext report reveals that glyphs made of lines inscribed in circles have something to do with aliens.

I’ve been unable to reach Google.com for the last few minutes. I also can’t reach Google.ca, Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.de, Google.at, etc. And no one on ifMUD can reach any of ’em, either.

Well, while we wait for Google News to come back up and tell us what’s happened: Teoma, Altavista, Yahoo.

(Update: Google became available again within two minutes of my posting this, but then went on the blink again. Seems that 15 minutes later all but Groups and News are working, at least from my standpoint.)

In The Rake, a magazine for and about the Twin Cities, there’s a recently Slashdotted article about Post-Its (part 1, part 2) by Greg Beato, who used to write for the late, great Suck.com. The article chronicles Art Fry’s invention of the Post-It, initially as a sort of sticky bookmark rather than a radically reduced cover letter, and describes some early suggestions for naming the product: “Jot and Jerk” and “Mount and Show.” The article is mainly a wacky corporate chronology of innovation and success against all odds, but it’s interesting to think about how Post-Its played into our ecology of writing.

There’s a nice writeup of music-game-maker Harmonix, developer of FreQuency, Amplitude, and Eyetoy: AntiGrav, today in the Boston Phoenix. With the recent Karaoke Revolution 3, the company may be working towards one day pleasing even demanding machine-learning researchers/karaoke software developers such as Lawrence Saul. And with a realistic virtual bear costume included, who knows what other niche markets Harmonix may be embracing?

Steve Ince of the blog Writing and Design just launched his Juniper Games site, with some information about his in-the-works Juniper Crescent – The Sapphire Claw. The game has also been previewed at Adventure Gamers. (“For the less technical, one word will suffice: sweeeet!”) Good luck to Steve in polishing off this production.

I had a great time seeing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on opening night yesterday. It looks to be the first successful film based on an e-book (okay, it’s a fictional e-book, but still) and there were visual and narrative elements of it that resonated with today’s digital culture and economy in a funny, uncanny way.

The movie wasn’t perfect, but there was a lot to like and a lot to laugh at. I so enjoyed myself that I became even more puzzled than I was before about the handfuls of invective that many reviewers of the film have been flinging at it, risking damage to their digital watches in the process. Let me try to gather some of these attacks into categories and figure out where they could have originated…

“Jesus Christ! Where is Tom Bombadil?!?”

From the camp that believes that there must be an injective mapping between the book and the movie, or that the movie is simply a lossless storage medium for the contents of the book, also allowed to have some pictures and stuff as long as Legolas’s footwear is appropriate. Such filmgoers, infected with an aesthetic sort of Protestant Fundamentalism, must find The Shining and Fight Club to be travesties for not disgorging everything in the original texts.

A contemporary poetry conference that includes the words “blogs” and “online” in its call for papers definitely deserves some of Grand Text Auto’s fat pipe. They’ve got a sweet URL, too.

CUNY Conference on Contemporary Poetry
Graduate Center, City University of New York
November 3-6 2005

Abstracts due: September 15, 2005.

After finding that no such resource seems to exist, I’ve started to assemble a bibliography of creative work in HyperCard, a very influential early system used for artistic, literary, and gaming purposes. My list is no doubt very incomplete right now – I was not an early Mac user and don’t have first-hand experience of HyperCard work from back in the day. But I do have more than 50 works listed, so this may be the beginning of a useful resource.

I plan to continue to working on the list and hope that others with more HyperCard experience and knowledge can help out. I’m now dedicating this bibliography to the public domain and inviting others to contribute to it by leaving comments here on Grand Text Auto. A wiki might be more appropriate for such a bibliographic barn-raising, but I have a blog set up and don’t have a wiki that I can use for something like this, so I’m putting the list up on the blog…

A Ukraniam team of cavers has descended 2,080 meters (6,822 feet, or about 1.29 miles) to the deepest point ever explored within a cave. The group of nine plunged into the deepest known cave, Krubera, near the coast of the Black Sea. They were part of the Ukrainian Speleological Association’s Call of the Abyss project, funded by the US National Geographic Society. The May issue of National Geographic features spectacular photographs from the expedition.

A show of original, non-digital art based on 8-bit video games has just opened at Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Los Angeles. The main site requires Flash; the gallery, with 17 images of art from the show, doesn’t. (Via Dennis; The sculpture Pac-Man, pictured, is by Peter Gronquist.)

We must admit that Adam Cadre was there first, with a painting based on Joust. Although we must also admit (as Adam does) that he ripped the idea off from Matthew Bowman.

A new beta version of Processing, a system for sketching out creative works of visual interactive art, was released today. As a sometime user of earlier versions, I’m glad to see the new one out. Processing 85 is a release of the language which is translated into Java but allows you to sidestep importing of libraries and other details, and may be more fun than Fortran 77 and Smalltalk 80 put together. Thanks to Hanna for the tip.

Christian Bök, poet, pataphysician and author of the unfractioned Eunoia, came down to our crazy death country from his native Canada and did a great reading at the Writer’s House today. He read some from his first book of poems, Crystallography and presented some new work, including sound poems from Cyborg Opera, mentioned before on here. His new, pun-riddled “Umlaut Factory” really seemed to break new eggs, I mean ground. I also couldn’t help noticing that it contains the word-palindrome “feel a cop cop a feel.”