Grand Text Auto

So you’re an artist, and you work with new media, and you want to go to graduate school. If you’re a composer, you go to an electronic music program. If you’re an installation artist, you go to an electronic art program. But what if you’re a writer?

As far as I know, there’s only one writing program in the world that offers a yearly fellowship in electronic writing — Brown’s. And this year the deadline for application has been moved up to December 15th. Anyone who wants to throw their hat in the ring had better get movin’.

I just discovered the online journal Image and Narrative via Jan Baetens’s review of The New Media Reader. Image and Narrative is described as “a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology in the broadest sense of the term” and its current issue includes essays with titles like “Comic strips and constrained writing” (which hits a couple of my interest buttons right there).

On nettime Mark Stahlman writes:

As the fellow who “coined” the term NEW MEDIA (circa 1990, in preparation for the America Online IPO, whereupon Steve Case awarded me this email address), I have often been asked — So what the HECK is (er, are) New Media, anyway?

I couldn’t help but answer:

“Simulations and games, in many forms and for many subjects, are among the most recent innovations in instructional technique. Some are hardly ‘new media,’ however, because they are as simple and familiar as card or board games.” (p.93)

– James A. Robinson, “Simulation and Games.” In _The New Media and Education_, edited by Peter H. Rossi and Bruce J. Biddle. Aldine Publishing, Chicago, 1966.
http://www.getcited.org/pub/101220511

Then I realized that GTxA folks might be interested in the rest of this chapter’s introductory paragraph:

Marie-Laure Ryan and I recently began an email discussion about The Impermanence Agent. As our conversation turned toward the impact of the Agent’s textual alterations, and the relationship of such techniques to story, Marie-Laure suggested that we open our dialogue into a conversation on GTxA. As happened with our previous, impromptu exchange (in the comments on my review of her Narrative as Virtual Reality) we’re hoping for contributions from this site’s drivers and visitors. Our plan is for things to kick off tomorrow, with Marie-Laure posting an initial message as a comment on this entry. We’ll see where things go from there…

Still on the road, in Amsterdam I picked up a copy of Christiane Paul’s new Digital Art. As far as I know, this is the only current book dedicated to a discussion and survey of digital art — rather than broader topics like “art and technology” or “information arts.” It’s essential reading, and not simply because it’s a source of information not coherently collected elsewhere. Paul (who curates new media art for the Whitney Museum and edits Intelligent Agent) also brings a deep understanding of the field to the book’s organization and selection of work. The one complaint I’m sure some will have is that the book is rather slight (a little over 200 pages), and therefor far from comprehensive. Also, as part of the Thames and Hudson “World of Art” series it inherits a certain picturebook character. But it will serve admirably as an introduction for students and also hold some new information or insights for most of us in the field. (I, for example, found the short discussion of Charles Csuri’s work more helpful than those I’ve read in the past.) I’m certain Digital Art will be a touchstone of the field for years to come.

Perhaps it’s obvious to say, but the arcade still had it all over any other public context when it comes to interface innovation. Except perhaps the more elaborate setups at science museums and in interactive art installations.

For example, it may not be obvious in my last post, but the interface for that game is a real drum, not the tap pads of DDR or of the Western-style drum games. The drum in this game can make a range of sounds as players hit it on the main surface, on the rim, with different degrees of pressure, and so on. The way you play the drum makes a difference both on the level of music and on the level of gameplay. That’s why I stopped to take a picture of it.

I also stopped to take a picture of this direct-manipulation coffee cup (the text on it reads “Drink me. Drive me.”). The cup is part of a network racing game of a pretty standard sort — except for the interface.

Wandering around Shibuya, and into the big Sega arcade, I found people playing a traditional Japanese version of the drumming version of Dance Dance Revolution.

Later, outside the train station, a group of kids were playing bongo drums. The crowd cleared a circle around them so another group of kids could take turns pop lock dancing to the beat. My first experience with hippy/hip-hop fusion. I’m liking being back in Tokyo.

The Iowa Review Web this month features Stuart Moulthrop. In addition to the official publication of Pax (mentioned in this space earlier) the feature includes an interview with Stuart conducted by yours truly. It was this conversation with Stuart that really got me thinking about the notion of “instrumental texts” and I suspect it’ll prove similarly thought-provoking for many. Here’s an excerpt to get you started…

Noah Wardrip-Fruin: Talk with me about the idea of an “instrumental text”…

In the Narrative as Virtual Reality comments thread, I’ve suggested rather strongly that those who plan to discuss hypertext should read the work of Ted Nelson — as both the term “hypertext” and the ideas it describes come from his writings.

Of course, such suggestions often lead to the question, “Where can I read Nelson’s writings?” Unfortunately, they aren’t found in the local chain bookstore, and perhaps not even in the local research library. So I’ve put together a few pointers.

I’ve been working on a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality for Computers and the Humanities, the journal of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. It needs to be short, explain why the journal’s audience might be interested in Ryan’s topic, and also give my personal take on the book. I’d be very interested to hear comments on the draft below.

Last year Andrew Stern sent out an enthusiastic email message about Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality. He called it one of the best books to address interactive drama.

Interactive drama is an area of investigation that attracts scholarly and popular audiences. At its broadest, it covers the wide range of computer experiences that have story content, some form of performative enactment, and a means for the audience (whether a full theatre or a single person in front of their PC) to alter some aspect of this story or enactment. The group interested in interactive drama includes English professors who see it as a future form of literature, media scholars who see it as an approach for understanding computer games, computer scientists who see it as the next major application for artificial intelligence, and entertainment executives who see it as the next stage of cinema. Interest in interactive drama has contributed to the success of past books such as Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre, Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck, Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext, and Mark Stephen Meadows’s Pause and Effect.

Stern is one of the leading practitioners in the area of interactive character and drama. After getting his email I decided to do a web search and see what else I could learn about Narrative as Virtual Reality. To my surprise, I found almost nothing. There were some weblog comments, but few did more than mention the book’s existence. I didn’t find a single online review, and I found few references to offline ones. At the end of this process, my interest was piqued. A book came out from a major academic publisher on a topic of current interest — and to someone as well informed as Stern it was an exciting addition to the literature, but the field as a whole had largely ignored it. It was a bit of a mystery. And so, in order to have a reason to delve into this mystery myself, I set out to review this volume.

I’m posting from the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Melbourne, Australia. I’m presenting Tuesday, and while I might find myself prattling, it’s actually prate that I’m excited about. prate is Brion Moss’s new project — an n-gram text generator in the tradition of the DOS program Babble! My DAC presentation, along with this post, is the first announcement of its availability. It’s written in Java and works well cross-platform (I used it for a performance at Brown last month, running on a Mac). This is an initial ‘geek release’ (light on documentation) of a project that’s going to evolve, and that will also provide the basis for some future collaborative work that Brion and I have up our sleeves (our past projects together include The Impermanence Agent).

I just got back from eNarrative 5, part of the last weekend of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. One of the most interesting moments for me was this morning, when longtime hypertext scholar George Landow said (to my ear) that we haven’t really tried hypertext fiction.

He said most hypertext fictions that we see as successful really use hypertext as their container, not as their fundamental structure. Works like afternoon and Patchwork Girl use links as the connections between narrative loops. Landow’s done a lot of work in non-fiction hypertext (e.g., The Victorian Web) and in these works such loops don’t tend to exist — instead each page stands nonlinearly related to many others in the work. He speculated, building upon a comment he attributed to Robert Coover, that such total nonlinearity in literature might actually be more appropriate for what we think of as poetry (functioning by analogy) than for fiction.