Grand Text Auto

At the University of Colorado/Boulder they’re having a Special Year in Art and Mathematics and calling now for conference papers and digital artworks. Deadline March 1!

Here are quick pointers to two literary pieces I’m currently playing. Stuart Moulthrop’s Marginal Effects: A Disorder of Attention is now online at Tekka (and available to non-subscribers). This was presented, in its first version, at DAC 2001’s A Night at the Cybertexts. Along with John Cayley’s Instrumental (also presented there) this was one of the first pieces that got me thinking about “instrumental texts” — texts which can be played, but aren’t quite games. Meanwhile, Robert Coover offers his Chicago Cryptogram — which can’t be manipulated, but can be played and won. It’s online at the site for the new “twice-yearly print journal of politics, literature, and culture” n+1.

Not all playable computational media is graphical. In fact, some of the most popular early computer games were entirely textual. Games like Adventure and Zork were even at times played on teletypes, with the interaction recorded on scrolling reams of paper, rather than on terminals with screens. (Of course, an excellent tracing of the history of this textual interactive fiction can be found in Nick’s Twisty Little Passages.)

But when we think of playing with computers, we generally think of graphical experiences, those that follow in the tradition of Spacewar! rather than Adventure. Created on the PDP-1 at MIT in the first years of the 1960s, Spacewar! was the first modern video game. Two players each had a custom-made controller, which they used to control the flight of a virtual spacecraft on the PDP-1’s CRT. The spacecraft were pulled toward the star at the center of the screen by simulated gravity, and could fire projectiles at one another. A spacecraft hit by the central star or a projectile would be damaged. These are still among the central logics of graphical gaming today — the ability to move graphical objects that on some level represent the player, the ability to fire projectiles, a simulation of some form of physics, and “collision detection” when one thing runs into another. These logics aren’t only the basis for play in experiences such as Half-Life, but also (leaving aside projectiles) in pieces such as Text Rain.

We’re accustomed to seeing successful combinations of graphical logics and game rules repackaged repeatedly. Games such as Pac-Man and Tetris have had many authorized and unauthorized versions “skinned” with different surface graphics and different graphical arrangements, but with the essential logics of graphical movement and gameplay preserved. Such combinations, within a larger range of variation, are also the basis for our identifications of game genres such as “side-scrollers” and “first-person shooters.”

Christiane Paul was Lo-fi‘s guest curator for January, and the show she put together is called News Readers. The pieces range from large public artworks to small rectangular applets made with Processing. Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss’s Energie_Passagen (Energy_Passages) “reproduces the linguistic space of the city in form of a data flow. Hundreds of catchwords taken from current newspaper reports appear in a projected ‘information flow’ and are spoken by artificial computer voices. As soon as passers-by select individual words, thematically related networks of terms start to perform in this flow, which can also be experienced as an audiovisual echo.” Ed Burton’s Recent Events “dissolves three texts into a fluid suspension of letter tokens. The dissolved texts are drawn from a live source, updated on the hour, every hour. In their gathering stream, these tokens grow sticky tendrils towards potential neighbours, coagulating to form clots of recovered text.” I’m also pleased to say that my News Reader collaboration with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich is included. (Thanks to Turbulence for the tip and the commission.)

The WWW@10 conference looked back on the Web’s first decade – and, of course, inevitably invited thoughts about the next decade. Now, on the conference site, you can see video of heavyweights from different eras offering their thoughts. Ted Nelson, for example, speaks on “The Metaphysics of Structure and the Future of Literature.” Cory Doctorow asks “Web 2.0 = AOL 1.0?” and goes on to explain “how the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to break the Internet – and you’re not invited.”

There’s much news from Turbulence these days. First, they’re sponsoring (with the Andy Warhol Foundation) another juried international net art competition (deadline March 31). They’re also sponsoring (with Emerson College) a lecture series this spring titled “Floating Points 2: Networked Art In Public Space.” The speakers include (01.26.05) Anne Galloway; (02.23.05) Andy Deck and Ricardo Miranda Zuniga; (03.30.05) Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, and Pete Gomes; and (04.27.05) Elizabeth Goodman, Teri Rueb, Julian Bleecker and Andrew Shoben/Greyworld. And the events don’t stop there — with Art Interactive they’re firing up a Boston edition of The Upgrade! Yael Kanarek, Teri Rueb, Larissa Harris, and kanarinka are already scheduled for the Spring. Finally, Turbulence’s latest artist studio has launched, featuring hypnotic “Flash Polaroids” by Brian Kim Stefans.

Those in NYC on Saturday will want to head to the Chelsea Art Museum for a 2pm reception and talk celebrating two events: the opening of Lev Manovich’s “Mission to Earth” installation (which will run through the 26th) and the publication of his collaborative DVD Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005) created with Andreas Kratky.

In addition to Manovich, Saturday’s talk will also include luminaries Christiane Paul, Barbara London, Marty St. James, Sue Hubbard, and Ken Feinstein. The Soft Cinema DVD includes, in addition to the work of Manovich and Kratky, contributions from DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/ Office for Computational Design (data visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).

Once again, there’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. The essays in this section (The Pixel / The Line) are all by artists who create texts for computational media that behave radically differently from texts on the printed page. They explore the relationship between text and image, the meaning of the “digital,” and the new bodily relationships with text that can be created with new media. The section includes:

• John Cayley’s essay, Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters (with responses from Nick Montfort and Johanna Drucker)

I’ve just been shown two new approaches to collaborative networked writing. TurtlePox (on which Jill scooped me) makes a collaborative writing game out of social engineering email viruses, and pushes the virus metaphor. So, for example, last week I got an email with a story about a turtle that needed my help, with a link at the bottom to “participate.” I changed my strain to infect more people each round, and then passed it on to a few people, including “someone” @gmail.com. She changed the order of the initial email’s paragraphs, and then passed it on to folks, including someone @danah.org. That someone passed it on to people, including someone @mail.rit.edu, and lowered the number of infections per round. The someone @rit then rewrote the first paragraph to make it a proclamation of the iconic nature of the story in the following two paragraphs, then passed it on, including to someone @usc.edu. Each of us was making only the types of changes the system allowed us. On the site you can see the strand transformations (which are being reset, except for the strand sent to me) and also a map of its spread across the U.S.

The Quillion is a quite different type of collaborative networked writing. As the author puts it, “I took my favorite things about LiveJournal, Wikipedia, SorryEverybody.com, and Lowbrow.com, and smashed them together into a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster, except without the tragedy and death. Yet.”

I just got back from Europe (my most recent post was from an AI lab in Zurich) where I attended a great gathering at the University of Siegen organized by Peter Gendolla und Jörgen Schäfer. Titled “Netzliteratur — Umbrüche in der literarischen Kommunikation,” it featured Marie-Laure Ryan, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Roberto Simanowski, and yours truly as the U.S. participants. Others came from Germany, France, Spain, Finland, and Switzerland. (Program PDF.) One of the highlights for me was finally meeting people who I’d corresponded with (like Marie-Laure) or who I’d long heard of (like French participants Philippe Bootz and Jean-Pierre Balpe). Everyone’s papers will be online at Dichtung Digital before long, so I won’t say too much about the presentations here — except to note that Markku Eskelinen’s was based on his excellent Six Problems in Search of a Solution: The challenge of cybertext theory and ludology to literary theory, already online at DD.

The deadline is December 15th for applying to Brown University’s graduate program in Literary Arts, the only organization I know of that offers a two-year fellowship for electronic writers. It’s a great opportunity to work in the company of writers who care intensely about language and innovative forms, support and appreciate deep engagement with computational media, and don’t have to deal with the weird politics of differing funding levels (Brown’s program only accepts as many people as it can support). Fall 2005 will mark the fifteenth year of writing workshops for electronic media at Brown.

In my previous post on writing Fable I outlined some of the work that the Lionhead writers (lead by James Leach) undertook while crafting the game’s story and the lines delivered by the more than 200 speaking characters in that story. But the story is only part of Fable. There’s also a sizable virtual world — and it not only provides a setting for the story, and a sandbox to play in when not concentrating on the story, but also another means of controlling some of the characters in the story. This means that the two types of writing that are discussed in these posts can both provide lines for the same speaker, and that in some cases the logic of the story and the logic of the world are connected via characters, widening the possibilities of Fable. More on this below.

First, however, let’s take a look at the writing of Fable‘s world.

The new issue of Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art is now available, and is a great collection for those with an interest in electronic media and writing. Titled “Text and Language,” this issue’s DVD includes full-screen video of projects such as Text Rain and Screen. Each piece also has a commentary track by a noted curator (e.g., George Fifield for Text Rain, Christiane Paul for Screen). An issue of Aspect can be viewed in a computer or in a stand-alone DVD player.

I talked with Mark Napier earlier this year at Eyebeam about the new work he was doing. Now he’s posting some of it on his website. It’s remarkable. Check out King Kong Revisited (and then perhaps some related demos and source code). I want to play art games with this sort of attention to graphics, to visual innovation.

I’ve started to get quite annoyed by something I’m thinking of as the “numerist fallacy.” It seems to come up mostly in discussions with humanists and artists who are interested in software but haven’t been involved in much software development.

Its most ridiculous form is the idea that, because digital information is stored as ones and zeros, computers somehow inherently introduce binarism (black and white thinking) into situations where they are used. Luckily, this is somewhat rare. More common is the idea that somehow, if one wants to consider something like the structure of a digital archive deeply — in order to enable more informed critique — one should get down to the numerical nature of the archive and understand how the numbers are being manipulated.

There’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. This section, “Hypertexts and Interactives,” includes essays by:

• hypertext publishers, editors, and researchers Mark Bernstein and Diane Greco (discussing hypertext fiction and describing “two exotic hypertext systems, tools suitable for hypertext narrative but dramatically unlike the tools currently in use”),
• hypertext poet and theorist Stephanie Strickland (who, through the move captured in her title, “intends to install the stenographer, and not her employer, as the crucial creative/receptive presence in digital art”), and

In 2003 I visited the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was amazing. A collection of remarkable writers and editors and students in a beautiful, fascinating environment. While I was there I talked about The New Media Reader, and Robert Coover and I did a reading/presentation of writing for digital media.

Next summer I’ll be back at SLS, this time to offer a workshop. Jonathan Lethem, William T. Vollman, and a bunch of other exciting writers will be there, and so will editors from Fence, The New York Review of Books, and Faber & Faber. Read on for my course description, and for information on a contest that awards free airfare, accommodations, and full tuition to SLS.

In the U.S., many people don’t vote because they’re not sure of their polling place. This year the Internet will help, with sites like MyPollingPlace. Also, this year people who are told they aren’t registered to vote can cast “provisional ballots.” As electoral-vote.com tells us, “If you are sure you are in the correct polling place and the officials claim you are not registered, ask for a provisional ballot and fill it out correctly. You are entitled to one by law.“

It’s a sad fact that, in the mid-1990s, as the field of digital media anticipated by Ted Nelson’s 1974 Computer Lib / Dream Machines exploded in size, the book was out of print and many new to the field were largely unfamiliar with Nelson’s work — and quite a few even with his name.

Wired magazine, the most prominent publication for new and aspiring ’90s ‘digerati,’ ran a story in June 1995 that introduced many to Nelson’s work. Unfortunately, the piece was dedicated to making Nelson out in the worst possible light — beginning with its title, ‘The Curse of Xanadu.’ Nelson was called ‘the king of unsuccessful software development.’ (I won’t link to the article, but you can find it via web search, if you’re looking for drivel.)

There are many ways of disputing the presentation of Nelson in Wired‘s article, but at this moment it might be more interesting to make a comparison with a figure from digital media’s history that Wired has presented rather differently — Nicholas Negroponte. Wired has identified Negroponte, among many glowing appellations, as ‘the Media Lab’s visionary founder.’ My question here is: What made Nelson ‘unsuccessful’ and Negroponte ‘visionary’ in Wired‘s estimation?

I’ve been thinking about a few things related to academic blogs, but rather than roll them all into one mega-post I think I’ll post them one at a time. For starters, I was struck by some reasons for academic blogging noted by Liz Lawley and a group of social software all-stars:

• speed of publishing (and dissemination),
• spontaneity,
• the ability to publish (and get feedback on) work in progress,
• an increased authorial/personal voice (in contrast to the typical passive voice of academic writing),
• bypassing of the editorial process, and
• increased distributed peer review.

Part of what struck me about this list is that is doesn’t include some of the main reasons we had for starting GTxA.

The Interactive Project Lab (IPL) is a collaboration between the Banff Centre’s Banff New Media Institute, the Canadian Film Centre’s Habitat New Media Lab in Toronto, and L’Institut national de l’image et du son in Montreal. Habitat is now accepting applications for slots in a 6-week IPL “Project Makeover” workshop that begins November 5th. Applications will be accepted until Friday, October 22nd at 5:00pm. The twelve (12) positions in the IPL Workshop will be awarded to the first twelve qualified applicants who apply. (The Habitat announcement follows.)

Thanks to a tip from Scott, I recently visited the “Orange Lounge” at South Coast Plaza (part of the Orange County Museum of Art) — a space “devoted exclusively to the presentation and interpretation of video, computer and Internet-based art, audio works, and other forms of new media.” A welcome addition to the SoCal scene!

The inaugural show (which closed September 26) was titled “Hypermedia.” Unfortunately, none of the work happened to “branch or perform on request.” But I enjoyed the show, and there was even a piece of game-oriented elit!

Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art has a new call for participation. This issue’s theme “reflects an interest in artwork that conveys some levity or joy in its subject matter.” Aspect is a DVD magazine, and they seek video that documents artworks in experimental, installation, digital, and other formats hard to communicate well on paper. Deadline 15 December 2004. (More info follows.)

I’m in So Cal for Alt+Ctrl (where I’m giving a lunchtime talk tomorrow, and attending the opening on Thursday evening) which gave me a chance to attend the first talk in UC Riverside’s “Global Interface” series. N. Katherine Hayles gave the opening talk: “Living in Computational Spaces: Means and Metaphors.” The alternative title, drawn from her forthcoming book, was My Mother was a Computer. Below are my notes.

Simultaneously-opening shows at the MIT List Center and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts will be the first major exhibition of the work of Cerith Wyn Evans in the U.S. There’s a reception at MIT next Thursday (the 7th) and artist talks on the following Saturday (the 9th). As the MIT press release states, these “site-specific projects explore the complex relationships between image and word, poetry and science, divination and earthly communication, and spoken and written language.” (More details follow.)