Grand Text Auto

I wish I could make it! The Untitled conference will feature Kenny Goldsmith’s exploding head and much much more.

I arrived at ITU-Copenhagen just in time for the first keynote of the ninth AoIR (Association of Internet Research) conference – my first AoIR.

Mimi Ito has been studying and speaking about mobile media recently, but the topic she took up at AoIR in her keynote was youth participation in networked publics. Drawing on more than 4,000 questionnaires and more than 5,000 hours of observation, she and her team put together a deep and broad ethnographic study.

J. J. Abrams, the creator of Lost, says that it would be “really fun” to develop an all-text interactive fiction.

And, a collector acquires an amazing manuscript: A typed-out text by recently departed Thomas M. Disch, specifying the interactive fiction Amnesia.

Proposals for Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art) are now being sought. The deadline is 15 December 2008.

Five writers will be commissioned to develop chapters for a networked book about networked art. The chapters will be open for revision, commentary, and translation by online collaborators. Each commissioned writer will receive $3,000 (US).

Networked Committee: Steve Dietz (Northern Lights, MN) :: Martha CC Gabriel (net artist, Brazil) :: Geert Lovink (Institute for Network Cultures, The Netherlands) :: Nick Montfort (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA) :: Anne Bray (LA Freewaves, LA) :: Sean Dockray (Telic Arts Exchange, LA) :: Jo-Anne Green (NRPA, MA) :: Eduardo Navas (newmediaFIX) :: Helen Thorington (NRPA, NY)

Dear Pod people, I’ve been interviewed by Trevor Dodge and Shane Hinton and am on the latest First Wall Rebate, a podcast “focusing on games and the cultures that spawn them.” If this sounds keen, drink it in through the earbuds and let me know what you think, either here or on the First Wall Rebate site.

For those in or near Cambridge, MA:

STEVE MERETZKY
Monday (Oct 6) at 6pm
MIT’s Stata Center, 32-141

Award-studded “game god”* Steve Meretzky will speak on Monday (Oct 6) at 6pm in MIT’s Stata Center, 32-141.

Steve Meretzky’s first job in computer gaming was at the Cambridge company Infocom, which was the leading interactive fiction developer. Meretzky became the company’s most prolific author, writing Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos and co-authoring The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with Douglas Adams.

Meretzky has since worked at Legend Entertainment, Boffo Games (which he co-founded), and WorldWinner. He is currently at Blue Fang Games.

Moon Stories, The Trials and The Storyteller are three delightful miniature games (perhaps the last is a toy) by Daniel Benmergui. It takes a few seconds to start playing them, and they take a few minutes to master – or, you can check the walkthroughs. Whatever the case, check out the games, in which simplicity and uncanniness of presentation and play are combined in particularly pleasing ways.

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture is one of at least three open-access journals (without page fees) that cover digital media and computer gaming. (DHQ and Game Studies are the others that I know of.) Volume 2, number 2 is just now out. Support freedom! Read and write for unchained periodicals such as this one, flowing freely with scholarly output as they are!

There are 35 entries in this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, and all are now proffered on a virtual plate for your consumption! The deadline for voting is November 15.

As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.

The Alphabet Game:
a bpNichol Reader
bpNichol
Edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson
Coach House Books
2007

bpNichol was obsessed with the alphabet and its relationship to experience and, as he wrote it, thot. He drove this obsession like the engineer of a transcontinental train through the landscapes of sound poetry, the book-length and life-long poem, and even digital poetry. Nichol inked drawings and wrote for lungs, typewriter, press, television (specifically, Fraggle Rock) and Apple ][ (his remarkable poem, First Screening, is available online thanks to Jim Andrews and others). The editors of The Alphabet Game made the bold (but never procrustean) choices necessary to give a sense of the tremendous scope and depth of Nichol’s work in a single volume, and to present this work beautifully. They have started an online Nichol archive as well. For those who care about the materiality of poems, or word and image, or page and screen – and for those who love poetry and the alphabet – this book is essential.

The end of electronic literature, or electronic literature without end? In today’s Guardian (a newspaper – those, of course aren’t anywhere near dead) Andrew Gallix offers a tentative eulogy for electronic literature, suggesting that it is, at best, getting inextricably mashed up with art. His piece ends by asking “Perhaps e-lit is already dead?”

The 5th International Joint Workshop on Computational Creativity has concluded here in diurnal, delicious Madrid. This was a small and valuable gathering focused on how computers can model the creative process, but embracing a variety of different media and forms: stories, music, movies, visual art, and even interior decorating.

Riddles for a Naked Sailor
Mary Azrael
Pictures by Howard Kaye
Stonevale Press
1991

“My name is small / in any tongue” offers riddle fifteen, which might also indicate the slight regard in which riddles are held. In the United States, they are particularly dismissed. Most think of riddles as no more than knock-knock jokes for children. The great American riddlemaster, Emily Dickinson, knew better. She used the form to question nature and art, to open the mind to new perceptions. While many poets drop a headless metaphor now and then into their writing, few books of literary riddles are written. (Two by May Swenson are exceptions, but even those were published as children’s books.) This collection of twenty-four riddles is pleasing, cosmological in its reach, and well-illustrated. An image of the answer is usually a crime, but the ink blots here are visual riddles themselves. The digital media connection? It’s to systems that asked to be solved, such as adventure games and particularly interactive fiction, which, like the riddle, has a surface all of text – with golden treasure hidden inside.

If you’re in or near the Boston area, we have some great events for you at MIT. This semester’s Purple Blurb series at MIT will continue our tradition of great readers and speakers, and will be totally sweet. We have Steve Meretzky (October 6), Jesper Juul (October 27), and Jason Scott (November 17). Details follow later in this post …

Also, check out the Comparative Media Studies Colloquium Series. The speakers include Lev Manovich (November 6) and Grand Text Auto’s very own Michael Mateas (November 20).

Here are the specifics for Purple Blurb:

Deadline extended to Monday 1 December 2008 5pm US EST.

Another excellent-sounding workshop on computing and story is coming up, this time at the Intelligent User Interfaces conference. Note the extended deadline, that the workshop welcomes demos, and that all those who attend IUI are welcome.

Common Sense and Intelligent User Interfaces 2009:
Story Understanding and Generation for Context-Aware Interface Design

February 8th, 2009, Sanibel Island, Florida
An IUI 2009 Workshop

Website: http://csc.media.mit.edu/iuiStories/
Send questions to csiui-pc@media.mit.edu
Organizers: Catherine Havasi, Henry Lieberman and Erik T. Mueller
Deadline: now 1 December 2008 5pm US EST

“Knowlege is stories” – Roger Schank

“Hey, hey, ho, ho – Video-game censorship has got to go” by Aaron Delwiche has recently been posted on FlowTV. The article, which focuses on the Xbox 360 port of America’s Army, calls for more critical thought about video games, and critical exploration of them through design, rather than censorship. This is an appealing position, but there seem to be some other important points to make:

September 30 is the deadline – coming up in just a few weeks – for submissions to volume two of The Electronic Literature Collection. Note particularly that old and new work is welcome; there is a new editorial board; there is to be similar Creative Commons licensing and publication on both disc (DVD, this time) and Web; and, documentation of an e-lit piece on video is acceptable this time around. If you want to get an idea of what counts as “electronic literature,” you can read the definition on the Electronic Literature Organization site or, probably even better, take a look at the diversity of work included in the first volume of the ELC. Here are all the details from the call on the ELO site:

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 2. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted from June 1 to September 30, 2008. Up to three works per author will be considered; previously published works will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection is a biannual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. Volume 1, presently available both online (http://collection.eliterature.org) and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, has been used in dozens of courses at universities in the United States and internationally, and has been widely reviewed in the United States and Europe. It is also available as a CD-ROM insert with N. Katherine Hayles’ full-length study, Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).

Literary Machines
Theodor Holm Nelson
Mindful Press
1990
Edition 90.1 was reviewed; 93.1 is available from Eastgate Systems

An incredible multisequential volume about inventing hypertext, reforming copyright, reimagining quotation, and reworking education and reading. It extends from the viscous soup of the politics of computing to the nuts and bolts of how a hypertext system can, for instance, represent arbitrarily large integers compactly. The systems humanist is presented as an alternative to the techie “noid” and humanist “fluffy.” Nelson proposed to reshape literacy and publishing far more profoundly than Haussman altered Paris. Although he admits that a next-generation system might be needed at some point, the general approach is to think about the problem long and hard, devise a more or less flawless system, and then just implement it, never iterating. We should be glad that Xanadu was sketched, not completed. The dynamic, incisive, and continually revised and evolving writings of Ted Nelson have participated in thought and culture in a way that no crystalline, fully armed and operational literary machine could have.

Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet
By Lisa Nakamura
University of Minnesota Press
2008
ix, 248 pp.

There’s solid discussion of movies, a J. Lo video, and magazine pages – what really impresses is the exploration of less mainstream user-created digital images: AIM buddy icons of veiled cartoon bodies presented in a few animated pixels, the All Look Same CJK quiz site, and signature images used on pregnancy-related sites. Uncovering these overlooked artifacts helps to show how the body (racial, gendered, sexually oriented, and sometimes pregnant) is manifesting itself throughout cyberspace, being shaped, presented, and questioned by those often dismissed as mere “consumers.” The application of visual studies to the digital realm is deft; even though we don’t get the details of the emergence and technology of, say, GIF89a, digital materiality is treated well. Narkamura critiques existing surveys of Internet use by different racial groups as missing subtleties and overlooking how “users” produce and well as consume new media, errors she didn’t make in this eye-opening book.

From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing
Edited by Atsushi Akera and Frederik Nebeker
Oxford University Press
2002
xi, 228 p.

The fifteen short essays barely cover the basics, sometimes repeat information, and focus doggedly on industry, not creative or personal use. Yet this is a valuable, interesting collection. The essays identify forces and lineages in computing history, rather than just laying out the bare chronicle. Information technologies before electronic computing are discussed, although the first part of Campell-Kelly and Asprey’s Computer: A History of the Information Machine is better overall on that topic. Also, the authors manage, in their compressed writings, to dip into delightful details: how Vannevar Bush’s invention of the torque amplifier allowed for analog integration to be done via a disk-wheel; why William S. Burroughs’s “crank-activated adder” was a success; the story of ADR’s AUTOFLOW, the first software product, which produced largely useless but obligatory flowcharts. There are some notable omissions, such as the notebook computer, along with great “further reading” lists and appendices on sources.

The deadline is October 15, 2008 for the second HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition, which has participatory learning as its theme. Apply for big bucks – or, if you’re an upstart but don’t have a gigantic digital learning project to fund, apply for smaller but quite helpful bucks:

Innovation in Participatory Learning Awards support large-scale digital learning projects
$30,000-$250,000

Young Innovator Awards are targeted at 18-25 year olds
$5,000-$30,000

Check the site for all the details.

Ian Bogost’s game Honorarium is now available on EA’s Sims Carnival (direct link to the game). In it, you pick up puzzle pieces and match them to give a lecture or to answer the occasional question of an urchin-like character – presumably a student, who emits a heart after a correct answer to express either enlightenment or having on a crush on you. If you do well, you get invitations to go elsewhere and give lectures with famous landmarks visible out of the window of otherwise identical classrooms. I have not gotten to the level where you get to be on The Colbert Report.

It’s good to see expanding and continuing opportunities for residencies in digital media – for both scholars and artists.

At Cornell, there’s a chance for six to eight people to earn Society for the Humanities Fellowships to study “Networks/Mobilities” – relating to the theme of the recent HASTAC II conference in Irvine and Los Angeles. Those selected will work with two senior scholars in residence. In Fall 2009, this person will be Keller Easterling, Associate Professor of Architecture, Yale University. The Spring 2009 scholar will be Brian Massumi, Professor of Communications, University of Montreal. Application procedures, requirements, and terms. The hard deadline for receipt of all application materials is 1 October 2008.