Grand Text Auto

Aya Karpinska has just published a piece for the iPhone and iPod Touch, Shadows Never Sleep. You can get it for free from the iTunes App Store – just search for it by title. Aya writes:

the piece uses a combinatory structure and the rhetoric of children’s literature to tell the story of a restless shadow on a nighttime adventure. I describe it as a “zoom narrative” which takes advantage of the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPod Touch to allow readers to swipe their fingers across the screen and zoom in and out of images instead of turning pages.

FDG ’09, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research involving computer and console games, game technologies, game play and game design. Previously known as the Conference on Game Development and Computer Science Education (GDCSE), this year’s conference broadens its scope to cover the breadth of game research and education. The conference is targeted at researchers making contributions that promote new game capabilities, designs, applications and modes of play.

The next Media in Transition conference (see reports from the last one: 1 2) will focus on storage and transmission – a hot topic in digital media that continues to heat up. Note that although the deadline is not until January 9, submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, so those with ideas for the conference should submit now.

Media in Transition 6: stone and papyrus, storage and transmission

International Conference
April 24-26, 2009
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his seminal essay “The Bias of Communication” Harold Innis distinguishes between time-based and space-based media. Time-based media such as stone or clay, Innis agues, can be seen as durable, while space-based media such as paper or papyrus can be understood as portable, more fragile than stone but more powerful because capable of transmission, diffusion, connections across space. Speculating on this distinction, Innis develops an account of civilization grounded in the ways in which media forms shape trade, religion, government, economic and social structures, and the arts.

Rilke turned to writing poems in French because there was no good word for “absence” in German. J. R. Carpenter’s in absentia presents place and the lack of place in English and French, mashing up a Google map (or, actually, a satellite view) of Montréal with rental and real estate annotations by herself and others. (The standard schmear of mash-up gaudiness is not present here, I should note.) “The guy upstairs cross-dresses; his unsteady stiletto gait traipses heavily over my head. The girl next door turns tricks, for cash or beer or kicks I couldn’t say; five in the morning, five in the afternoon, her headboard bucks at the wall behind mine.” Even those interested in video games will find something to pursue in these locational texts, as Ubisoft’s involvement with the local community is one of the subjects of discussion.

Malcolm Ryan has started a new project on his new blog, Words on Play, to review one book a week, covering topics such as game design and interactive narrative. The list is not restricted to those books that have just recently been released. The review project was prompted, in part, by his recently starting a list of “Secret Books of Game Design” – books that are not explicitly about the topic, but which are well-known by designers.

I’m pleased to announce, and link to, the first work in Inform 7 by a major poet. Now, it does compile without any trouble in its current form, but the file might need further editing to actually produce a playable, enjoyable game. Is anyone up to it?

The latest issue of The Iowa Review Web, volume 9, number 2, is out. This is a special issue on “Instruments and Playable Texts,” guest-edited by long-singing hypertext star Stuart Moulthrop, author of the 1991 Victory Garden and winner of the 2007 Vinaròs prizes in both narrative and poetry. One of his prize-winning pieces, “Under Language,” is included in the new TIRW number.

Ian Bogost just pointed me to a page on building your own modern version of Tennis for Two, the proto-Pong, proto-Odyssey game that Willy Higinbotham devised in 1958. It’s just the thing to do with that oscilloscope you have lying around. Interesting that the game is in side view and has a net, unlike the first wave of digital tennis games that were to follow.

Sorry, our blog went south for the summer. We’re back now.

Three of us (Andrew, Michael, and yours truly) attended the first AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies in November of last year just outside Washington D.C. Andrew provided a summary of the talks and mentioned that the gathering was a productive and interesting one. I found the talks and discussion to be very stimulating, and some new collaboration has developed from contacts I made at that gathering. Now, the call for submissions is out for the sequel: the AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, to be held at Stanford University on March 23-25, 2009.

AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II

Narrative is a pervasive aspect of all human societies. Human beings make sense of the world by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. In addition, stories as a form of entertainment play a central role in our social and leisure lives. As a result, story and narrative have become a key interest for Artificial Intelligence researchers. The role of narrative as a primary mechanism for organizing human experience has been recognized in many fields, spawning multidisciplinary research that encompasses philosophy, art, psychology, cultural and literary studies, drama, and other domains.

Remember the Codework workshop at WVU – the one about the relationship between creative writing and programming? Maybe not, but my posts on on Emmett Williams’s IBM Poem and programs Ted Nelson likes were from there. Nineteen short position papers from the workshop are now available online in PDF. Although the index is somewhat uninformative, listing only the participants’ names, there is a good store of material for those interested in investigating what transpired at the workshop. I’m not up to playing favorites right now and suggesting any reading, and I’m certainly not up to writing a summary of all nineteen papers, but please drop a note on here if you find something particularly interesting in this pile. I’ll try to do the same as I revisit these in the future. I know from participating in the workshop that there are a lot of interesting arguments and discussions in there.

• Brown is raising Interrput 2008, an electronic literature festival that will run October 17-19.
• Henry Lowood’s article about the Machinima Archive explains some of the value of preserving records of player perfomance. Thanks to Matt Kirschenbaum for the link.
• A growing list of teaching projects that use Inform 7 appears now on Emily Short’s site. Short has been quite busy of late; she has a new biweekly column at Game Set Watch and continues to kick out the reviews for Play This Thing. Her game Metamorphoses has also been translated to Russian.

As part of his recent research, Edgar Huang of the Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis School of Informatics has posted a list of (currently) 170 new media programs in the US that offer a bachelor’s degree or higher. Any program that appeared to declare itself as a new media program was included. For whatever reason, I see that there are some interesting omissions, such as MIT’s Media Lab / Media Arts and Sciences Program and Brown’s Literary Arts program, with its fellowship each year for an electronic writer. (Additionally, in the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, we have a digital media option for our undergraduate writing degree, which I suspect makes us a new media program, since a “BFA in Art with a Digital Art Concentration” warrants inclusion on the list.) But aside from the issue of omissions, which are inevitable in any large-scale attempt like this, it’s very interesting to see the range of programs represented, from those focusing on commercial multimedia production to performance-based programs and those growing from the visual arts. Even the term “computer science” makes appearances (two) on the list. Interestingly, given that Noah has spoken about this issue in years past, I can find only two program names on this list that refer to writing or the literary: Virginia Commonwealth University’s Media Art and Text Ph.D. Program, brought to you by VCU’s Department of English, and the Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media from North Carolina State University.

A Review of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
The MIT Press
2008
316 pp.
$35.00

Matt Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms is an extraordinary investigation into the surfaces the computer writes upon – not screens and paper, but the surfaces inside itself, chief among them the whirling, capacious, and surprisingly robust hard drive. Mechanisms explains how we can see through the myths of digital transience and ephemerality, and through layers of software and hardware abstraction, to understand how bits in digital storage systems can be durable, highly descriptive of writing activity, and shaped by material and formal factors as well as the cultural and economic circumstances of their creation. While other storage technologies (RAM, floppies) and other material aspects of the computer (screen and teletype, data and program) are discussed in the book, the hard disk, pictured on the cover and discussed in historical detail chapter 2, serves as the omphalos of the argument, which continues to sweep across the floppy-disk-based works of digital writing Mystery House, Afternoon: A Story, and Agrippa and to enlighten us about how digital writing is written to disk and read into culture.

2nd ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism and Context – SRMC08

October 31, 2008, in conjunction with ACM MM 2008 Vancouver, BC, Canada

… In the workshop we will investigate the application and practice of story to multimedia story creation, artificial intelligence and social networks. This workshop would be of interest to those investigating traditional multimedia research involving search and retrieval, content analysis, media summarization and semantics, as well as those researchers developing new forms of story expression, narrative based interface design and user-generated story-sharing platforms. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, knowledge representations, social networks, and technologies for interactive systems point to a reemergence of story models as useful tools for multimedia research. Mechanisms for navigating these representations and constructing and sharing stories from them provide new directions for multimedia, networks and human interface design. Building story systems that are aware of narrative contexts, social dynamics and cultural relevance offers the potential for computer assisted generation, sharing and understanding of stories that are purposefully connected to the lives and experiences of an active audience …

Paul Chan’s 1st Light (video from artreview.com) (video from YouTube) is now running on the floor at the ICA in Boston. The work was also shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

As Variety and The Hollywood Reporter relate, Paramount has just reached for its wallet after hearing a pitch for the movie Atari by writers Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman. Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way will produce the film, which is to star DiCaprio as Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Gamers and others from the Internet comment on Kotaku and Digg.

Ian Bogost and I will be glad to help whip potential moviegoers into a frenzy with our book Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform, which will be out by the beginning of 2009.

By Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern

(This is the text of the talk we gave at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference just now. Mark Marino already has a reply online.)

Introduction

In the 1960s, Eliza, and specifically that system running the famous Doctor script to impersonate a psychotherapist, prompted conversations and controversies about anthropomorphic concepts of the computer, artificial intelligence and natural language understanding, user interfaces, and even psychotherapy. Decades later, Janet Murray hailed the system as the first electronic literature work, saying it was at that point still the most important one. All this was the result of a rather small amount of code that lacked multimedia elements, contained very little pre-written text, and was developed by a single person, Joseph Weizenbaum.

At the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference, I just heard the ReVisioning Electronic Literature: Origins and Influences panel – featuring a dynamic trio straight out of Southern California.

Jessica Pressman presented her work on Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota as digital modernism. She showed us the beginning of Pound’s first canto alongside a transcription of the beginning of Dakota. She compares this text machine with Bob Brown’s proposed machine “The Readies” (1930) to speed up and automate reading, keeping up with the technology of “the talkie.” A 1931 collection (out of print) was assembled to be read on the Readies machine. Pressman showed a Flash presentation of William Carlos Williams’s poem from the collection, hypothesizing that it might have appeared like that when read with the machine.

The latest panel at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference featured fascinating talks about metafiction and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and one about interactive fiction: Jimmy Maher’s talk “A New Approach to the Storygame: Blending the Crossword with the Narrative,” based on his paper “Toward Games that Matter: The Promise and Problems of the Storygame.” The concept of “storygame” as Maher discusses it is broader than “interactive fiction,” in that it includes computer games that have narrative aspects, but computational simulation of some sort is required for a storygame. Maher distinguishes “three-dimensional” works that present a world (you can get lost in a good book) with the “two-dimensional” work in which the qualities of the text are foregrounded; related to Burgess’s type 1 and type 2 authors. Genre literature is often the previous; literary fiction the latter – but great literature can do both. The idea can be extended to games: Chess is two-dimensional, in that we don’t imagine battlefields and everything happens on its surface. War games through D&D and Adventure are three-dimensional.

I just heard some great talks here at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference.

David Benin presented a collaboration he and Chris Calabro did at UCSD: Hors Catégorie, an experiment in affective, embodied interactive fiction. The piece deals with the Tour de France doping controversy, among other things. (Because the UCSD computer science server doesn’t have MIME types set correctly, clicking on the “story file” link may net you a browserful of special characters. Just save the result and you should have a z5 file.) Benin took some of my discussion in Twisty Little Passages as a point of departure, seeking to distinguish the possible from the potential and characterizing IF as offering possible narratives and a gift of open-ended engagement that provokes thought.

Sue Thomas spoke this morning at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference about the concept of transliteracy that she and others have put forth. Online resources about this idea can be found at Transliteracy.com and in the First Monday article “Transliteracy: Crossing Divides.”

The First Monday article defines this concept, an enlarged idea of literacy, as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social network.”

I just learned from Alice Robison that at the next Thomas R. Watson Conference there will be a special workshop on digital storytelling – as the announcement says,

We are also very excited to announce that in the spirit of this year’s Watson Conference theme, “The New Work of Composing,” we will host a three day digital storytelling workshop on the University of Louisville’s campus October 13-15, 2008. Workshop instruction will be provided by the Center for Digital Storytelling. Their website, www.storycenter.org, offers dozens of playable stories, a history of their organization, and links to valuable resources. Daniel Weinshenker, Director of the Center’s Denver office, will be teaching the Watson Conference Workshop. …

Sure, this may be a little off-topic for Grand Text Auto, but I can’t help mentioning how continually amazed I am by the intelligence of those sea-dwelling, eight-legged invertebrates. Here’s an incredible picture of an octopus solving a maze, for instance. (Thanks to Philip Tan for news of this.)

Adam Parrish, who left a poetry machine in a comment here on Grand Text Auto, has recently completed a hardware device that does (at a high level) the same sort of thing: Autonomous Parapoetic Device (APxD mkII). This resulted from his work at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he wrote the thesis “New Interfaces for Textual Expression.” Other text machines of his include the rubbery, non-computational but nevertheless combinatorial Poem Sphere, a Markov generator that looks suitable for installation in the Exploratorium, and a keyboard that enforces lipogrammatic writing. Check it out – even if you don’t enjoy watching as sausages are made, you’ll like reading about his several projects that extrude the Oulipian ideals into meatspace, by mechanical, electrical, and elastic means.