Grand Text Auto

In the ewriting world, the “artifactual” tradition is made up of work that presents itself as fictional digital artifacts. So, for example, Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse is a 1993 work presented as a box of items inherited from your uncle — floppy disks with “his” files, audio tapes of “his” recordings, etc. Email narratives and blog fictions (which have both gotten some press attention of late) are artifactual uses of the network. And now we have a game that’s an artifactual use of the console.

Lifeline (Wired News, GameSpot) is a relatively new game that transforms a console, controller, microphone, and television into, well, a console, controller, microphone, and television. You’re a survivor of a space station catastrophe, trapped in the old security station, and using your controllable display to guide another survivor through the steps needed for those who remain to keep living. You guide the other survivor by talking with her over your microphone.

I’ve been enjoying two relatively-new blogs from cool folks: Michelle Higa and Jenny Cool. Also, Jonathan Phillips (who I saw at 040404 and Nick and I saw at Digital Narr@tive) is a busy guy, as two of his collaborative projects show — in the last month the Scale journal has had a new issue and a new call, and the open source SVG editor Inkscape has had a new release. And the speakers for Incubation3 have been announced, including Ted Nelson and Mark Amerika. Finally, don’t forget that the ALT+CTRL deadline is June 1, and May 28 is the short papers deadline for Hypertext 2004 (where the keynote speaker will be Doug Engelbart).

First Person has just made its online debut, with the Cyberdrama section appearing on electronic book review this week. The material online includes essays by Janet Murray, Ken Perlin, and GTxA’s own Michael Mateas, as well as response material from Espen Aarseth, Bryan Loyall, Will Wright, Victoria Vesna, Gonzalo Frasca, Brenda Laurel, and the essayists.

One reason that Pat Harrigan (my First Person coeditor) and I are excited to be working with ebr is that they’ve been quite successful at growing meaningful academic exchanges around their past publishing projects. Of course, the blogsphere has some interesting tools as well (as our recent thread on narratology and game studies demonstrates) but ebr creates a space for somewhat less rapid-fire dialogues, which grow into shapes different both from those that develop in glacial print publication and in hyperheated comment threads. I hear that Jane McGonigal and Mark Barrett are already working on responses to Cyberdrama. Hopefully some GTxA readers will decide to jump in as well!

Nick posted a while back about issue 1 of Chaise. Now the deadline nears for submissions for Chaise issue 2.

CHAISE Magazine is the way things ought to be. It’s a biannual bite-sized showcase of cutting-edge artwork, distributed free of charge…

I’ve just started experimenting with txtkit. One begins reading by typing searches into a Mac’s terminal window. Then the machine’s desktop is replaced by an OpenGL-rendered representation of a collaborative reading space. Matching sentences unfurl vertically when selected, against a background of a slowly-rotating spirograph-like structure that represents the cluster of search results. And then the visualizations that connect with the readings of others kick in. Have any GTxA readers experimented with this? What do you think?

Current texts available for collaborative reading include a selection by Lev Manovich, a selection by project originator Hans Ulrich Reck, and Lawrence Lessig’s new book (another benefit of free culture). Here is some material culled from the project web pages:

WWW @ 10 is an “interdisciplinary conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade.” WWW @ 10 abstracts are due April 15th. Scheduled speakers include Ted Nelson and Cory Doctorow — Jill and I are on the Program Committee (so send in stuff we’ll like!).

I’m at 040404 today, a “Colloquium on New Media and the Unfolding of New Structures in Old Spaces” at UC Berkeley.

Upcoming talks include: Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley — Peer Pressure: Bodygames and Collective Telepresence; Warren Sack and Michael Dale, UC Santa Cruz — Drawing by Derive; and Jane McGonigal — Avant-Game: Flexible Structures through Site-specific Play.

More to come in the “extended” version of this entry.

ALT+CTRL is a festival of independent and alternative games coming this fall from the Cal-(IT)² Game Culture & Technology Lab and the Beall Center for Art and Technology at the University of California, Irvine. The deadline for submissions is June 1, so there’s a bit of time yet. It’s also possible to become a sponsor of the event, if you’re of the right sort of profile. The announcement says:

I went to a meeting of the IGDA Game Writers’ Special Interest Group at GDC. The organizers began to talk about the white paper published by the group late last year. And they were met with blank stares. Finally, the question was asked — who there had read the white paper? Only a few hands. Who there had heard of the white paper? The same few hands. Then the meeting’s moderator told us — these were hands of the people who wrote the white paper.

The deadline for the Turbulence juried international net.art competition is March 31st. They’ll be giving 5 commissions of $5k each, and they’re looking for:

Projects that experiment with new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and creativity and engage the user as an active participant. Collaborations may be between visual artists, sound artists, programmers, scientists, and others. Proposed works may include the use of wireless devices such as cell phones and palm pilots to access and add to the experience of the net.art work.

Let’s face it. We’ve pretty much exhausted the story/game discussion, at least as formulated in the question, “What does Tetris have to do with Hamlet (or Half-Life)?” First Person exists to replace this with a more interesting question.

The contributors to First Person certainly consider games like Tetris. But they also discuss the “not games” and playable art I wrote about last month. They consider the politics of playable simulations, and the ways they may be employed for more explicitly political ends. They examine the ways that time functions in games, as well as the lack of dramatic compression in The Sims. They present concepts for game analysis and approaches to game design. They discuss the necessity of a field of ludology, and debate how it might be defined.

Talan Memmott and I will be reading this coming Friday evening (7pm) at the UCLA Hammer Museum as part of the HyperText series co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization. At the Hammer I’ll be previewing Regime Change — a collaboration with Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich commissioned by Turbulence. (The 19th is the anniversary of the start of the bombing of Baghdad.)

Then, just two days later (Sunday the 21st), there will be another HyperText reading featuring Natalie Bookchin and Ingrid Ankerson at 7pm. This will be preceded at the Hammer by another reading, at 5pm, this one featuring John D’Agata and Ben Marcus.

If you’re in the early or middle stages of a scholarly new media project related to “evidence” or “mobility” then you can’t go wrong by applying (hopefully by March 12th) for one of the Vectors Fellowships this summer. If you’re selected they’ll fly you out to the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication for the week of June 21-25, give you a $2k honorarium for showing up, and give you continuing support from designers and programmers through the completion of your project.

The new version of criticalartware brings something like the “history-enriched digital objects” approach to the pathways connecting the site’s contents. Then the contents and relationships are made available for others to visualize in new ways. It’s like a wiki about interesting tech/art stuff with connections that strengthen and fade through reading (and the possibility for terms to link in more than one direction). Unfortunately, it appears one has to go through a registration process just to start reading. I did, and it’s an interesting site, but the high barrier to initial perusal seems misguided.

From a message about criticalartware:

In the ever present techno-social fabric of operating systems, desktops and software, criticalartware seeks to examine the pre-internet era of early phase “Video Art” and the growth of software art in the channels of contemporary “New Media” theorypractices. We are interested in “software” as a construct and context during these two art historical moments and the ways in which software functions as art and art functions as software. These two moments function as brackets in frames of reference that will form the basis of our activities.

Used to be, one good way to artistic notoriety was to be put on trial for obscenity. Sure, it wasn’t an easy experience, but it catapulted debate about the quality of your work into the top ranks of artistic discussion. And, as an added bonus, it created a certain illicit thrill around the consumption of your product. Obscenity trials did wonders for the careers of James Joyce, Henry Miller, and of course “Madame Bovary c’est moi.”

Now, of course, you’d have to get as desperate a publicity hound as the pre-September 11th Rudy Giuliani on your side to get anyone worked up about the offensiveness of your art. And even then your chances of getting into any real legal trouble would be just about nil. But a new path has opened — copyright violation.

That’s right, copyright violation is the new obscenity. Create a piece of illegal art and the chances aren’t bad that a giant apparatus of authority will come crashing down on you and drag you on a long, painful tour through the legal system. And drag your work into the public spotlight at the same time.

“The Enemy Within” is a basically informative — if unexciting — overview article about viruses and worms in the Sunday Observer. But someone appears to have decided that stating the article’s topic honestly wasn’t going to cut it. Hence the headline, and these two sentences that ended up just under it:

He’s 21, he’s got dreadlocks, likes punk bands… and his hobby could wreck your computer in seconds. Clive Thompson infiltrates the secret world of the virus writers who see their work as art – while others fear that it is cyber-terrorism

E-FEST 2004
Readings, Symposia, Performances
February 17-19

Brown University Program in Literary Arts will present E-Fest 2004, a celebration of electronic literary art February 17-19. The program will feature readings by John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, Talan Memmott, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Brian Kim Stefans, Aya Karpinska, Alan Sondheim and more.

The program will open with an overview of electronic writing activities at Brown University, including readings by Talan Memmott and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, with a special performance by Thalia Field and Jamie Jewett. Wednesday’s program includes panels and discussions with artists and theorists in the field including George Landow, Roberto Simanowski, and Alan Sondheim. An evening reading will feature John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland, Brian Kim Stefans, and Aya Karpinksa. Thursday will feature artist demos and the introduction of new books on digital media. [Including Nick’s Twisty Little Passages.]

“This is not a game” is what some hypertext fiction authors began to say of their work in the late 1980s. As Stuart Moulthrop notes in our interview at The Iowa Review Web, they said this to differentiate themselves from the work coming out of the interactive fiction community, and the comparison wasn’t meant to be neutral.

“This is not a game” is a slogan of alternate reality gaming. As Jane McGonigal tells us in her “‘This Is Not a Game’: Immersive Aesthetics and Collective Play” (pdf, html) gameness is denied in these experiences that are made up of elements found on far-flung web servers, on voicemail systems, and even on bathroom walls. For the Cloudmakers — formed to solve the mysteries of The Beast, the promotional game for the movie A.I. — this denial may have been a vital ingredient in the belief of some players that their group was also suited to solving the mysteries of the September 11th attacks.

The new issue of Six Billion is titled “Veterans of Foreign Wars.” Six Billion is an online magazine that “showcases narrative journalism’s many forms — text, photography, sound, film/video, illustration, and interactive — in a single, versatile medium.” The new issue includes:

• BETTY MORRIS’ dispatches from late-1930s Europe, on the brink of “the great war”
• A film by Cambodian director RITHY PANH that confronts Khmer Rouge agents of torture
• WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN’s portrait of the war on immigration at the U.S.-Mexican border
• A radio-documentary of disaster in Afghanistan by SCOTT CARRIER
• And more …

At GTxA we tend to focus on the non-non-fiction uses of new media, but this is worth noting. The competition for unpublished new media articles. The deadline is April 30th.

At NYU I worked with the Improv folks, and I’ve remained interested in responsive animated characters. (After all, we couldn’t have projects like Facade without them.) This year’s meeting of the UK’s Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB) is themed Motion, Emotion and Cognition. Included within it is a symposium on “Language Speech and Gesture for Expressive Characters.” The abstract submission deadline is nearly upon us — 9 January, 2004. I haven’t found a copy of the CFP online, so I’ll post a copy of the email CFP here.

I remember this from when I moved to New York in 1994. One of the first new media people I met, I think it was Adrianne Wortzel, introduced me to If Monks Had Macs — a wild collection of HyperCard experiments and more. Now I see Matt Neuburg’s note in TidBits that If Monks is back:

The new issue of The Iowa Review Web is out, and it includes a couple of nice things. First, there’s a new piece from hyperfiction pioneer Judy Malloy. Malloy’s “narrabase” work “Uncle Roger” was one of the first hyperfictions I heard about (in an old issue of Leonardo) and it’s now available on the web in an annotated 2003 edition. The TIR Web piece is a new one, titled “Afterwards.”

Also worth checking out is an Interview with Tal Halpern by Patrick F. Walter. In addition there’s a link provided to Halpern’s “Digital Nature: the Case Collection. version 2.0” — an artifactual hypertext commissioned by Turbulence that I’m just beginning to explore.

The Politics of Information is an essay collection in five parts edited by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills. This fall it’s been appearing at electronic book review, and garnering some interesting responses. I’ve been happy to see a few contributions from folks I’ve met at DAC and ELO gatherings: Matt Kirschenbaum’s essay compels us to go further with the notion of “software studies” (see also Matt’s blog); Laura Sullivan’s essay reports on teaching a course that brings together radical politics and hypertext production; and an email roundtable proposed by Geert Lovink discusses net.activism with Chris Carter, Ricardo Dominguez, and Bruce Simon.

Recently I’ve been reading Nick’s new book, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. Of course, I liked it right off (how can you not like a scholarly book with the spoilers marked?). But today, reading further, I realized that I’ve been waiting for a book like this.