Grand Text Auto

The games are out for IF Comp 2003, as of yesterday. Download, enjoy, vote.

I went to Postmasters in New York yesterday with Rachel and saw a very nice exhibit of new media art. The pieces were by Eddo Stern, an artist who was born in Tel Aviv and now lives and works in Los Angeles. He’s the founder of c-level and seems to be rather steeped in hacker and gaming culture.

War, religion, and the American military were themes that ran through the five pieces on exhibit. Formally and in terms of genre and technique, there were two sorts of pieces. The first sort, pictured above (full size image) were large objects that integrated desktop computers, flat panel screens, moving parts, and hexagonal tiling to make computer hardware itself into a video game structure. The second sort was represented by Vietnam Romance, a piece of video art created entirely from recordings of video games (often first-person shooters), with a soundtrack made from MIDI files that people have offered online.

Which is to say, the artworks consisted of case mods and machinima!

On Thursday I went to a great poetry reading at the Kelly Writers House, an event that also served as a welcome. Charles Bernstein was reading; he has recently joined the faculty here at Penn. He is undertaking a project, PENNsound, to create a large, free archive of digital recordings of poets reading poetry. He’s working with Al Filreis and others here at Penn on this venture. Bernstein has written a very nice manifesto for the project, which requires that the per-poem recordings be available in a format that is as useful and non-proprietary as possible, that they be of high enough quality, and that they be indexed and carry bibliographic information with them. The manifesto auspiciously begins “It must be free.”

Scott and I almost got into a bar fight Sunday when discussing the MLA and Chicago Manual of Style bibliographic format for electronic resources.

I find it absolutely silly to require that every electronic resource bear a publication and access date in its bibliographic entry. If I cite an article from an online magazine that was published in May 1998, and I know quite well that the article hasn’t changed since then, there is no reason I should include the date that I looked at it. Doing so adds unnecessary clutter, blurring and obfuscating the publication date of the resource, and simply provides a form of surveillance of scholars and their Web-reading habits. (Do you mostly read on the weekends? Right before your article is due?) Yes, in some cases (malleable blog entries, works like The Unknown) it does make sense to note both when you think something was published and when you accesses it, but that shouldn’t apply to everything on the Web. If someone cites my undergraduate thesis or a dated item on my Web site, they know perfectly well when it was published, as much as they know when the usual book was published by looking at the copyright page.

I’ve been thinking about machine learning more acutely than usual recently, since I’m part of a seminar on the topic this semester. And I’ve been wondering about literary applications of support vector machines and kernel methods and so on. (Sounds fun, doesn’t it?)

Quick note from the Q∓A session of a talk on Mass Observation, a project in mass reportage/mass surveillance that began in 1937 in Britain and which gives its title to an exhibit opening today at the Philadelphia ICA. It was a sociological sort of project, involving artists (painters and photographers) at times and involving a lot of hanging around at pubs. It reminded me a bit of Invisible Seattle in the way it invovled others who submitted questionnaires.

I just finished a draft of an encyclopedia entry about “artificial intelligence.” It’s for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and so, of course, it deals with how AI relates to narrative. Following Jill’s example, I have posted this draft in case anyone has comments on who I might have slighted, how I might have misrepresented AI, etc. I’d be greatful for any comments. It is as long as it can be, though, so I will have to cut things out if anything else is to go in there!

Revised: Thanks for your comments! I have replaced the first draft with the copy that I just submitted. (nm, 7 Sep 2003)

After spending a good deal of time buttering Scott Rettberg up by praising his creative and critical writing, I’m pleased to announce that he has joined our band of automatic hooligans. Having already mentioned some of Scott’s many creative contributions, I’ll just note that Scott also founded the Electronic Literature Organization and is now an assistant professor at Stockton College, where he’s starting up a new media track in the Literature Program.

Scott Rettberg’s dissertation, which was mentioned earlier, deserves some further comment. His dissertation has a first part in which he writes about the network context of The Unknown, discussing some similar efforts by other authors. The rest of it contains mainly Rettberg-authored Unknown texts – a.k.a. shovelware. Although funny, it’s hard to imagine why one would want to read this section instead of the hypertext or the Unknown Anthology book in which contributions from the three other Unknown authors are also included, but perhaps some Italians will consult the section as they work thoroughly on their own dissertations about The Unknown. They and others may be more interested in the preface to part two, which describes the project of The Unknown and even (gasp!) specifically attributes the authorship of some sections.

The 127 double-spaced pages that make up “Part One: Experiments in the Network Novel” are not dense with new advances in literary theory, but they are certainly worth reading. They share the following affinity with the more typological and semiotic Cybertext: Rettberg’s writing also is trying to describe a new, interesting category of texts, and to explain what makes this category interesting. In this case, the chief promoter of the term “electronic literature” discusses a more specific form or genre: the “network novel.” The term was much in his mind as he worked on Kind of Blue, which I wrote about recently, at some length.

The Brown alumni magazine just did a great writeup of Bob Coover and Talan Memmott, describing some of the ways their unusual, different backgrounds ended in their working together now at Brown on CAVE projects and other electronic writing. It’s a great story which, contrasting with the usual unbridled alumni-mag ebullience, describes Talan as shift-eyed and suggests that Bob may have bought his clothes at Costco, giving the profile some nice color. (It’s quite a positive profile overall, of course, as these two deserve.) Thanks to Scott for the link.

Immemory, a CD-ROM by Chris Marker
English edition translated by Brian Holmes, Exact Change, 2002. $19.95
Originally published in French, Èditions du Centre Pompidou, 1998

Arrest images as photographs; play about the photo with the movie camera’s voyueristic, predatory gaze; add a narrated commentary that is both surprising and yet inevitable: such is the modus operandi of Chris Marker, who most famously employed these methods in the 1962 La Jette (The Jetty) and who has used them to great effect since then, for instance in the 2001 Souvenir d’un avenir (Remembrance of Things to Come), a film he made with Yannick Bellon. In the former film, which Twelve Monkeys is based upon, a man in an apocalyptic future travels back in time to recapture his society’s past, able to do so because of the single memory he retains from his youth. In the latter, Denise Bellon’s photographs are revealed as portentous records of the time between the wars.

These two films demonstrate Marker’s artistic obsession with memory and the way in which his unusual use of still photographs and a commenting voice can play upon the topic beautifully. Given this sort of work, it should not be surprising that Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory contains wonders.

I just whacked down a bit of the trAce Web site to my iBook’s hard disk in violation of the DMCA. Then Sid and I went down to the White Dog and read Scott Rettberg’s Kind of Blue, an email novel in the vein of, and following up on, Rob Wittig’s Blue Company. Damn.

If you read all the subject lines one after another they make this sort of INSANE FUCKING POEM that is like the chapter titles of If on a winter’s night a traveller assumed into heaven or something. (The word “fuck” occurs only 45 times in the 105 email messages that make up Kind of Blue, by the way.) Reading KOB in one sitting made the summer of ’02 rush back to me like a frozen margarita, slightly hurting the roof of my mouth. It’s all there: the fallout from 9/11, that season’s stage of the economic slump, the Enron scandal, Rettberg’s desperate struggle to avoid working on his dissertation, male fantasies of getting lesbians to “jump the fence.” It sounds too good to be true but YES even if you weren’t lucky enough to be one of the original recipients of this email novel, you can read it all, right now, or at least during your next three or four lunch breaks. It only takes about two hours. You can see how much is left because the links turn kind of purple as you go. If you use wget to download it you can even read it offline, in the tub. Or in a bar.

I saw <ALT> Digital Media at the Amercian Museum of the Moving Image the other day. It’s a great space for interacting with and appreciating visual works. Unfortunately, the MOMI’s big video game exhibition is no longer up, and about half the pieces in this smaller exhibition (installed on two PCs) were down, but there were several pieces to enjoy, including Cory Archangel’s I Shot Andy Warhol, the stimulating commercial videogame Rez, and two Potent Objects from a series by Camille Utterback and Adam Chapman.

I’ve just recently completed a translation of Olvido Mortal, an award-winning Spanish interactive fiction work. (You can try it on the Web should you not want to download it.) It was a rather involved process to carry across into English both its langauge and its workings, even though this piece is quite short and the author, Andrés Viedma Peláez, had written and coded clearly. But I found it a rewarding experience, and I’m glad to help share one of the gems of Spanish interactive fiction with the English-speaking world.

In some ways I hesitate to discuss Hipster Bingo, even in its exciting randomized form, because it is only superficially computer-based and is a pseudo-game. People don’t really play it – I don’t think. It’s more like some sort of gristly, low-quality blog fodder rather than being an interesting work of art or literature or gaming. But it’s a somewhat interesting mockery of a game, nonetheless, and it’s going to give me an excuse to briefly go off (in different directions) about irony and the use of computers in social situations.

But first, let me invite responses from anyone who has actually played (rather than just ironically admired) this “game.” Please, if you’ve printed out a bingo card for use, or sat wirelessly in Verb or Alt (or your local equivalent) covering your laptop’s monitor with “Stickies” notes as you spot those people who seem to have stepped out of Vice magazine, let me know about it. How was Hipster Bingo’s gameplay? I want to read the review.

This fine story from CNN relates some findings from a study, done under the auspices of the Pew Internet & American Life Project by Steve Jones at UIC. Jones found that gaming didn’t gnaw away at work or social activities, but coexisted with them, as gamers multi-tasked; it appeared to be a social activity itself, and not as male-dominated as it has been made out to be.

… and where am I? Yes, Scott McCloud has completed a “mature” new comic called The Right Number, and placed a smidgen of it online for free. The rest can be bought for $0.25 (after you buy a $3 debit card.) It’s a interesting-looking piece which I’ll read as soon as I run out of free things on the Web to read.

I do appreciate McCloud putting his mouth where my money is; as an advocate of micropayments, who sees such a system as important for supporting independent creative types, he’s doing well to attempt to get this process going. Coming from micro-cost comic culture, the system does seem to make sense in some ways. But like Noah, I’m not going to get behind such a system until there are ways to provide free public access, the sort of access that libraries now provide for our antiquated book medium.

My friend Martín Hadis has just written and coded up a new site on the life and works of Jorge Luis Borges. (Martín is coeditor of Borges Profesor, a collection of Borges’s lectures on English literature.) The new site is available in Spanish and English, offers not only bibliographical information but also a Web directory and suggestions on how to begin reading Borges’s stories and poems – and it should continue to grow in the future, hopefully to incorporate more information about Borges’s influence in the digital realm.

In typing up a recent comment to add to the neverending thread on the category “Games in Virtual Environments” I realized that I know very little about which traditional games are played in different cultures. Well, not very little, perhaps – but I don’t exactly know what I do and don’t know about this. Certainly, I’m aware that lots of people will know what chess is, and that all sorts of consumer products (games included) have made their way to other markets, but I think I have a much better sense of what literature and art is known cross-culturally than I do when it comes to non-computer games.

After a discussion with some friends about spelling bees (which seem to have originated in America), we realized that this sort of contest would be absolutely absurd in Japan, where words are spelled exactly as they are pronounced. In crossword puzzles there are plenty of national differences; sources indicate that we find “American, cryptic, quick, freeform, coded, French-style and clues-in-squares crosswords.” But it isn’t only within language games that we can find these sorts of variations.

As we get serious about studying new forms of art and new sorts of games, the question of how to draw categories for consideration arises. Defining categories isn’t just some tedious Scandanavian pastime; it’s also a way of figuring out why exactly we are more interested in some stuff than in some other stuff. Do we like certain types of literary works because they are presented on a computer, for instance, or because they require effort from the reader, who participates in determining what is read? (This is the implicit question asked in Cybertext and in some of Espen Aarseth’s earlier writing.)

Espen, Stephen Granade, and some others have been discussing the virtues of the category “Games in Virtual Environments,” as an alternative to “computer games,” here on Grand Text Auto. The “virtual environment” is a feature of interest to me (it’s part of my definition of interactive fiction, while “game” is not) and also, I think, of interest to Stuart. In fact, I do think there is something more interesting about richly world-simulating computer games than one sees in computerized versions of card and board games. But this idea for a category also raises some questions.

I caught up with Michael in Atlanta on my way back from ACH/ALLC. Michael and I got to talking about (among other things) programs to generate stories, poems, and other creative texts. He mentioned that he benefits from looking at thoughtful symbolic architectures for this sort of thing, such as Minstrel, but really finds nothing of interest in the statistical approaches taken by systems like Gnoetry and Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet.(Correct me if I’m misrepresenting you, Michael!) On the other hand, I do think there’s something to the way that these statistical systems manage to knit together a new sort of voice – something that makes the process of the generator interesting to consider – and I’ve written about this a bit in an article that is forthcoming in The Cybertext Yearbook 2003. Interestingly, a paper by Greg Lessard at ACH/ALLC described a limerick generator he had developed, called VINCI, so this topic is still a current one.

Our discussion led to questions about how, in this specific case of creative text generation, symbolic/rule-based AI can be integrated with statistical AI to achieve some of the advantages of each. …

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. May 19 – May 23.

DAC is my “home conference” and the only place I know of where art, literature, music, performance, and games for the computer come together with serious scholarly discussion of new media. I’ve presented work there since the second time they put it on, in Atlanta in 1999, and the conference has been host to an array of great discussions and ideas, as well as leading me rather immediately to collaborate with Noah and with William Gillespie. Thus, I was determined not to miss DAC this year, even if it meant traveling halfway around the world in a pet carrier. Fortunately, it wasn’t that bad.

Here at DAC I’ve seen many great presentations and had several discussions that were provocative. I won’t try to repeat what’s been blogged about this already on the conference site; I do hope to post more on the conference later. Among many digital artist and researcher friends here, several are part of the new Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen. (Of these folks at the Center, Espen, Lisbeth, and Susana are here at DAC.) I haven’t actually talked to Espen much about this, however; he and Noah and I instead have been spending time (and lots of money) trying to defeat House of the Dead 3.

I’ve been corresponding with IF author and theorist Emily Short recently about an issue that relates to all sorts of digital practice and interactive design — perhaps to all sorts of art-making. One thing I’ve heard over and over in discussion of the design of virtual spaces, computer games, and other sorts of works is that creators have to constrain the interactor, limiting a world of possibilities to just a few so that the experience can be controlled and contained.

I don’t like this assumption. It harkens to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” approach: put the docile participant in a little car on a track and bring them the experience of the space in exactly the order you want. Of course, some might say that this destruction of possibility is exactly what Oulipian techniques, of which I am so fond, enforce. Italo Calvino talked very directly about this idea of eliminating possibilities, specifically in relation to the computer generation of literature, in his lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts.”