Grand Text Auto

Starting Monday (August 1) the Alternate Reality Gaming Network will host a group read of The Daughters of Freya. You can sign up on the site for The Daughters of Freya, at a price of $4 USD.

I read a “review copy” of The Daughters of Freya and found it an interesting experience. DoF isn’t usually performed for its readers simultaneously, as are email narratives such as Blue Company. Instead, usually any individual who signs up starts getting messages shortly after registering, which might make it seem more like Online Caroline in its approach. But — unlike Online Caroline in which you seem to be getting normal email messages from Caroline, with normal headers, today’s date, etc. — DoF doesn’t actually create a correspondence between the messages you receive and the messages characters send. A single message you receive might contain several messages from different characters, and the dates of the messages are driven by the story (which, in my reading, took place during a different time of year than my reading).

The result made me realize that there were more types of email narratives than I’d considered. DoF wasn’t trying to create the feeling of corresponding via email with a fictional character, nor of voyeuristically listening in on the email correspondence of others. Instead, it was using email to (a) change the context of reading and (b) build suspense.

Thanks to a tip from Mark at WRT for pointing out Haberdashery — a new text created in a collaborative jam by the writing collective Millenium. It’s published in the summer issue of Bunk Magazine and created using the network-based simultaneous collaborative writing tool SubEthaEdit.

And here’s another potentially interesting deadline…

Deadline Extended to: August 15th, 2005
Judges: Annie Finch, Sabina Murray, Alexandra Tolstoy, Talan Memmott, David Hall, and DJ Spooky

Drunken Boat, http://www.drunkenboat.com, international online journal for the arts, announces its First Annual Panliterary Awards in Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction, Web-Art, Photo/Video, Sound. Submit up to three works, either via email to panlitawards@drunkenboat.com or via physical mail to: Drunken Boat, 119 Main St., Chester, CT 06412. A $15 entry fee must accompany all submissions, either via check or money order, else submitted electronically at: http://www.drunkenboat.com/db7/donate.html. Winners in all categories will be featured in a subsequent issue of Drunken Boat, and will be invited to perform at future multimedia events and performances. All other entries will be considered for publication.

Future Play – July 31
http://www.futureplay.org/

ISEA – Aug 1 (some submissions, others later or past)
http://isea2006.sjsu.edu/calls.html

GDC – Aug 1
http://www.cmpevents.com/GD06/a.asp?option=N&V=1

DAC – Aug 8
http://www.itu.dk/DAC2005/

I just finished reading a fantasy novella titled The Archer’s Flight. As the book’s introduction notes, it was the result of an unusual process:

It was serialized, appearing in seventeen chapters over a year’s time, but that’s not what’s unusual about it. It was published on the Web, but that’s not the unusual part either. What is unusual (and as far as I know, unique) is that this story’s readers chose the actions of its main character. Each published chapter ended in some dilemma for the protagonist, Deica; the audience collectively decided what she would do (via posting and voting on a web site), and their decision led to the next chapter. This was not a group of writers offering advice on what would make the best story; rather, the readers took on Deica’s role, as they would in improvisational theater or a roleplaying-type game. They decided what they would do if they were her.

Mark Keavney is both the author of The Archer’s Flight and the originator of the method used for its creation. He calls this method “storygaming” and describes it in detail in his essay “The City of IF Story.”

Last week I wrote about my interest in reading processes (and discussed Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice). Today, in the same vein, I’d like to discuss a rather different book: Charles O. Hartman’s Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry (1996).

Hartman’s book is presented as a memoir — in which the author reflects on his experiments, as a poet and teacher, with computers. These include assembling his own Sinclair ZX81, designing new computer programs used in the process of composing poetry, employing a famous text generation program created by others, and implementing a program for performing (and student learning of) scansion for poems in iambic and anapestic feet. Hartman continues this work, a decade later, and in fact his scansion program is now available in a new version (Scandroid 1.1) which is GPLed, written in Python, and certified by the Open Source Initiative.

Early in Virtual Muse Hartman tells us of his poetic experiment for the ZX81, a BASIC program called RanLines that stored 20 lines in an internal array and then retrieved one randomly each time the user pressed a key. This sort of random arrangement of fixed possibilities is a common first experiment for those considering combinatory poetry. What Hartman offers in Virtual Muse, however, is an unusual attempt to think through this sort of randomness (chapter 3).

Yesterday I wrote about my interest in reading processes.

Today, in that vein, I’m sharing some thoughts from reading Marjorie Perloff’s Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991). Given its subtitle, you’d think I would have read Perloff’s book a decade ago. But I just picked it up for the first time this summer. In part this is because Perloff’s focus is primarily on writing in a media-saturated culture, rather than writing which employs media other than traditional print (though a number of such examples are considered). As it turns out, I found that Perloff’s book has much to offer someone coming from a perspective such as mine. In particular, her focus on the procedural work of John Cage is of interest. In fact, while Cage is more often mentioned in connection with music than poetry, as Perloff notes in her preface (p. xiii) Radical Artifice is a book about poetry “written, so to speak, under his sign.”

Part of the argument for procedural literacy (Michael’s article, my reply) is that we must learn to “read processes.” That is, we must learn to interpret the operations of systems… not just the outputs. There are a number of reasons for this, a few of which I’ll briefly sketch here.

First, as Ted Nelson began arguing in the 1970s, we’re living in a world increasingly defined by processes — processes designed and implemented by humans. These processes can be designed poorly, or implemented poorly, or designed and implemented to help some people and make life difficult for others… but this is the fault of humans, and it can be corrected (and sooner rather than later, if we can learn to spot bad designs before they’re widely adopted). To put it another way, “the computer just works that way” is a non-argument. The importance of this knowledge lay behind Nelson’s now-famous cry from the front of Computer Lib / Dream Machines: “You can and must understand computers NOW.”

Second, more specifically, we’re entering a period in which the results of computational processes are increasingly used to form assumptions or offered as evidence. This is one thing if we’re forming our assumptions about whether the weekend will be sunny while we’re trying to decide whether to have a picnic — but the results of computer simulations are also increasingly used when we’re in the process of trying to make more weighty decisions about matters such as city planning and greenhouse gas emissions. To take one of my favorite examples, Jay Forrester’s urban dynamics simulations (which inspired SimCity) can be used to try to figure out how to build a healthy city, but we need to view any results from his work through an interpretation of the structures and processes of the simulations — which Garn and others have argued are deeply flawed (for example, by their cities’ lack of dynamic interaction with suburbs).

I recently had an interesting email from Jim Whitehead, a CS faculty member at UC Santa Cruz (who did a great job chairing the 2004 ACM Hypertext conference).

I’ve developed an undergraduate course teaching the fundamentals of game design for non-programmers, pitched at a general undergraduate audience. It’ll be offered next Winter for the first time…

I’m thinking that in this course it makes sense to have students experience and perform critical analysis on some classic video games, to really take apart what makes them fun, see how they create dramatic tension, and determine how the rule system contributes to the game play. I think it would be best to have students study older games, since they’re generally simpler, and don’t take quite as much game play to experience a larger part of the game. Since the graphics are simpler as well, the games have to focus on game play fundamentals to create a fun experience.

So, here are the questions for you, and for Grand Text Auto (assuming this blog has a “Ask GTA” feature, akin to “Ask Slashdot”).

* Is there any consensus on the canon of best games for, say, the Nintendo Entertainment System (or any other older platform for that matter)? Mario Bros. and Zelda seem like shoo-ins, but are there others? Castlevania? Ys?

Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel of the excellent networked_performance blog are this month’s guests on the empyre mailing list. To get a feeling for the conversation you can check out the two initial posts and a recent contribution from Chris Salter.

At Brown we’ve renamed the Creative Writing program “Literary Arts.” This encompasses regularly-offered workshops in fiction, poetry, playwriting, electronic writing (combining writing with designing computational contexts for the writing), and the recent additions of screenwriting (now that we have someone to teach it) and cross-disciplinary workshops (which encompass hybrid forms of text as well as things that are closely related to performance, installation, and video art). So, now that it’s in the name of the department, I find myself using the word “literary” a lot more than I used to — and using it to mean, roughly, “a common element in all the types of art we make in our department.”

Obviously, that’s not a very rigorous way of using the term. And a couple times recently, when I’ve used “literary” to refer to that common element in the digital media work we do, I’ve gotten pressed to unpack what I mean. At which point, of course, I can’t help but flash all the way back to college —

My sources at ACH tell me that Mark Wolff just delivered a great paper called “Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms.” Here’s an excerpt:

Intelligent Agent continues to be one of the most provocative and wide-ranging publications on the digital media scene. Now published in an online, modular format, IA‘s recent releases include David J. Leonard arguing that sports video games replicate “the ideologies and nature of nineteenth century minstrelsy” and Donato Mancini (in a review of Writing Machines by N. Katherine Hayles) asserting that the “emergence of electronic literatures in the 20th century and the ever-increasing use of new media in literature means that the acceptance of media and materiality as dimensions of literary meaning is inevitable.”

Today in Trópico — the Brazilian online magazine of Art, New Technologies, Cinema, and Culture — there’s an interview with yours truly by Cícero Inácio da Silva. We cover many topics familiar to GTxA readers, from critical readings of simulations to the pleasures of the forthcoming Façade.

In November I went to Germany for “Netzliteratur – Umbrüche in der literarischen Kommunikation,” a fascinating gathering at the University of Siegen. Now the presentations are online as a special issue of Dichtung Digital.

In the writeup of my presentation — Playable Media and Textual Instruments — I try to develop further some of the ideas mentioned in GTxA posts on saying “this is not a game” and the logics along which play proceeds.

Also online are the presentations from Marie-Laure Ryan, Markku Eskelinen, Frank Furtwängler, Mela Kocher, Roberto Simanowski, Philippe Bootz, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Laura Borras Castanyer, Susanne Berkenheger, and Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer.

Hermeneia, a research group focusing on literary studies and digital technology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), has teamed up with the Vinaròs Town Council to create a new award for digital literature: the “Ciutat de Vinaròs” Digital Literature prize. Submissions can be in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Catalan, and two 2,500 euro awards will be given in the categories of “Narrative” and “Poetry.” The deadline is 8th September 2005, and only unpublished works are eligible. Official details follow.

Putting First Person online was a very positive experience. I make this declaration now that there’s a new section of the project live at electronic book review (which includes a piece by GTxA’s Nick). With this, all the book’s essays are online — along with most of its responses, and much material the book doesn’t hold.

Making all this material available in collaboration with a web-based electronic journal broadened the conversation around the project, made it possible for the conversation to continue in new ways (as it does today with a response by Matt Kirschenbaum), made the material accessible to an audience that doesn’t buy hardcover university press volumes, and apparently didn’t hurt sales of that volume in the least (it went for a second printing less than a year after it first hit the shelves).

The essays in this section (New Readings) attempt to develop, via a combination of close reading and broader theorizing, modes of engagement appropriate to particular forms of digital writing.

This weekend and next (April 30 & May 1 // May 7 & 8) we’ll be having two different exhibitions of literary virtual reality at Brown. The exhibitions will employ a room-sized immersive stereo display (Brown’s Cave) and a spatialized sound system (controlled by Max/MSP) to present 10 projects created by writers, musicians, visual artists, and computer scientists. Because we’re having small shows (6 people) spread out at 45 minute increments over the course of the day (11am to 5pm), reservations are required. Reservations are made by calling Brown’s David Winton Bell Gallery at 401-863-2932. This show, “Works from the Cave II,” is the sequel to our Cave exhibition for the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival.

7pm this Monday at Brown, and then 7pm Tuesday at the Boston Public Library, Turbulence and the Electronic Literature Organization will present their first co-sponsored event. Re:Writing: Writers, Computers, and Networks will feature performances by four writers who bridge the net art and e-literature communities. In addition to John Cayley, and Thalia Field (at the BPL) or Yael Kanarek (at Brown), they also feature two GTxA drivers who are on the ELO board and have recently had Turbulence commissions: Nick and yours truly. The events are presented as part of the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival (and supported by Brown’s Literary Arts program and the LEF Foundation).

FILE is one of the world’s most significant gatherings for consideration and exhibition of computational language. It has taken place in São Paulo, Brazil for each of the last five years, and currently entries are still open for 2005 (until May 1). Standing backward (in English) for “Electronic Language International Festival” or forward (in Portuguese) for “Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica,” FILE includes an exhibition of digital text art, a symposium with the same focus, a section specific to games, and a parallel electronic music festival. FILE will be in early October this year — so perhaps I’ll see you in Brazil this fall? (We’ll make sure to go to Rio before heading home.)

It’s been a while since we posted the news in January, so just a quick reminder that the deadline for Turbulence’s juried international net art competition is tomorrow.

The feedback on my previous post about the show I’m curating at ACMI was a great help. So here’s another post, focusing on a different group of pieces.

Again, I’m framing my thoughts in terms of how pieces will be displayed. Recently I’ve been thinking about text-only work. It seems there are great opportunities here. For example, to show pieces like Eliza in their original context (as they are almost never presented now). As Nick has pointed out in his “Continuous Paper” essay, “Weizenbaum had an IBM 1050 in his office, a print terminal which featured a Selectric typewriter ball.” That’s to say, Eliza wasn’t originally presented on any sort of screen, but rather on a text-only display essentially like a souped-up typewriter. Through ACMI it seems possible that the use of a number of interesting text-only displays could be explored, showing pieces that originally were experienced via those interfaces along with anachronistic pieces.

As the seasons change, there’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. The essays in this section (Beyond Chat) are by theorist/practitioners who create projects that seek to intervene in our understanding of communication via digital media. The contents include:

• Warren Sack’s essay, What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like? (with responses from Phoebe Sengers and Rebecca Ross)
• Victoria Vesna’s Community of People with No Time: Collaboration Shifts (with a response from Stephanie Strickland), and
• Natalie Jeremijenko’s If things can talk, what do they say? If we can talk to things, what do we say? (with responses from Simon Penny and Lucy Suchman).

I’m in the process of curating a show for ACMI, the Australian Center for the Moving Image. The show’s title will be “Playable Fictions” and it strikes me that the GTxA audience would be a great one to ask for feedback on my in-process plans. I’d be happy to hear — via comments or trackbacks — suggestions for particular pieces, categories of work, or exhibition strategies.

ACMI is a relatively new and large museum in Melbourne which, in addition to traditional exhibition spaces, includes theatres, screening rooms, and production facilities. They were one of the partners for DAC 2003, and since that time they’ve opened a number of additional spaces, which will soon include an area designed for the display of games and other software (where my show will be focused). So far they seem very open to ideas, such as having a DVD in the catalog (for accommodating software and digital video), as well as including some work that goes beyond the borders of the exhibition space.

I didn’t have a chance to comment on Michael’s Why Johnny Must Program post back in January. I started to write a comment earlier this evening, but then realized I should just make a new top-level post. In this post I’m going to agree with Michael about procedural literacy, disagree with him on the same point, argue for the unavoidable synthesis of my two opposing points of view, and then make the case that we need another layer on top.

To put that a bit more clearly, the short version of my argument is that procedural literacy is only one of three types of education around these issues that we should be offering students of digital media (students focused on scholarship and/or creation of computational media).