Grand Text Auto

I posted the talk/skit I performed with Rob Wittig at the ELO_AI Conference, All Tomorrow’s Parties. I was planning a talk on the early days of the ELO, but a few weeks before the conference, John Cayley asked if I could modify my talk to make it more specifically focused on the Tribute to Robert Coover, which was a subtheme of the conference. My goal was to keep some elements of that early history, while delivering the sort of light roast that Coover deserved. That is, to make Coover laugh. I think that Coover and the members of the audience who had actually read some of his books appreciated it, though it did leave me with some explaining for the literalists in the audience who actually thought I was seriously considering spanking my maid.

This week’s ELO_AI conference is dedicated to Robert Coover, the American novelist and Brown University professor who cofounded the ELO and has taught electronic writing workshops at Brown since the 1980s. He has been an important advocate for electronic writing, and did a great deal to make it part of the American literary conversation. I’ll be saying more about Coover during my talk at the conference and during the banquet. But I thought I would share this Robert Coover Criticism, a little generator I threw together to mark the occasion. The generator is built from reviews of his work and interviews he has done over the years.

We will have a Fulbright Scholar position available at UiB Digital Culture in 2011-2012 and in 2012-2013. The position is now advertised on the CIES site. Fulbright scholarships are available to US citizens residing in the US. This position is for a PhD with at least two years of related teaching experience. The scholar will teach 1.5 courses per term in electronic literature or digital media aesthestics courses at the undergraduate and graduate level with 50% research time, and will have the opportunity to participate in the European ‘Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice” (ELMCIP) HERA research project events. We will also facilitate lecture visits to other European institutions. The pay is 25,000 NOK per month, and travel expenses are covered by the Fulbright. Although the cost of living in Norway is high, the cost of housing, work-related travel and meals are tax-deductible for the scholar. Travel expenses for dependents are not covered, but there is an allowance of 2000 NOK per month per dependent. Depending on needs and expertise, courses the scholar might teach include DIKULT103: Digital Genres: Digital Art, Electronic Literature and Computer Games; DIKUL105: Web Design; DIKULT203: Electronic Literature; DIKULT251: Critical Perspectives on Information Technologies and Society; DIKULT303: Digital Media Aesthetics; or DIKULT304: Graduate Seminar: Topics in Digital Culture. The position is available either for a semester (5 months) or a year (10 months). A letter of invitation is recommended. If you know anyone who might be interested, they should get in touch with me via the address in the advertisement.

As we prepare to publish a photo book of Implementation we have been gathering and tagging new photographs submitted by people around the world at a dedicated Flickr site. We have gotten in hundreds of new photos and the process of using flickr to organize the material has been very interesting. I’ll write more about that process later, but for now I wanted to share this. Along with some others I have been putting Implementation stickers up in Bergen. As I photograph the stickers that people have put up, I have been recording the location information and adding that to flickr. Above is a Google maps/flickr mashup created with iMapFlickr. With this map, you can explore Bergen and explore Implementation. Have fun.

Ulriken from our porch, originally uploaded by srett.

The sun peeked out this morning on a clear sky, revealing Bergen blanketed in winter splendor, a day after the winter solstice.

The University of Bergen department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies will have two PhD stipends available in 2010. The stipends are awarded competitively to two of the top candidates who apply. Candidates must have completed an MA degree, have an excellent educational and research record, and have a well-developed project description. Digital Culture is one of the groups within LLE. We have a strong possibility of securing a stipend in this round should an exceptional candidate apply. Applications are accepted internationally. The pay for a PhD candidate in Norway is very good. It is treated as a research job, and pay and benefits are commensurable with many assistant professor positions in the US. I strongly encourage researchers who have completed their MAs with a strong research record in digital culture, particularly electronic literature, to apply. The application deadline is Jan 31, 2010, for three year PhD candidacies to begin in September 2010.

Nick Montfort and I are working with a designer to develop a coffee-table photo book version of Implementation, the sticker novel we published in 2004-2005. Originally, most of the photos submitted were of a resolution only suitable for the Web. We are currently looking for readers to help re-implement Implementation and to send in higher resolution photos of stickers in situ. To participate:

1) Email at implementationphotos at gmail dot com with your postal mailing address, and we will send you an installment of stickers from the novel.

2) Choose interesting places to put the stickers up in public environments and stick them there.

I’m organizing a small conference, The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice in Bergen, which will take place from November 8-10 at UiB and at Landmark Café. The gathering is focused on the increasing use of the network as a space and medium for collaborative interdisciplinary art practices including electronic literature and other network-based art forms. Researchers will present papers exploring new network-based creative practices that involve the cooperation of small to large-scale groups of writers, artists, performers, and programmers to create online projects that defy simple generic definitions and disciplinary boundaries. Panel topics (abstracts) include:

I’m at a seminar in Oslo focused on mixed reality narrative. A couple of interesting projects: Julianne Pierce from the UK artist group Blast Theory presented Ulrike and Eamon Compliant, in which the interactor is put in the role of one of two IRA terrorists, about to undergo interrogration, and Rider Spoke, an interactive performance piece for cyclists. Petr Svorovsky from the Oslo National Academy of the Art also presented Flirtman, a mobile phone game in which players control a human avatar. Petr had some interesting observations about how people related to social codes differently when controlling the actions of another human being than they did when controlling a virtual avatar.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of the Nordic Digital Culture Network, a Nordplus Higher Education network which we have been working to develop for the past year. Linking together digital culture programs from the Nordic and Baltic region, the Digital Culture Network facilitates curriculum development, student and faculty exchanges, and innovative teaching ideas and best practices. Students studying in the programs in the network will benefit from increased student and teacher mobility and enhanced opportunities for study. All the programs in the network — the University of Bergen in Norway, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden, IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark, and the University of Jyväskylä in Finland — are leaders in the field of digital culture in their respective countries. Network participants will facilitate student and faculty exchange ranging from express visits to semester or yearlong exchanges, joint programs and master’s degrees. We are launching network activities this activities this fall and spring with faculty exchanges between the institutions, and will add programs, such as student exchanges and a summer school for digital culture, in coming years. I also encourage students from other countries in Europe, North America, and elsewhere to explore the exchange and M.A. program opportunities detailed on the site. For instance, both Bergen and Jyväskylä welcome applications to our M.A. programs in digital culture from well qualified international students. While international students are responsible for their own living expenses, they are not required to pay tuition.

Anyone who likes cute animals, culinary pursuits, and gratuitous profanity will love the shit out of Fucking Delicious.

Cybraphon is a project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman). Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

The new edition of Binary Katwalk features the interactive narrative work of Kate Pullinger and works by Caitlin Fisher, Reneé Turner and Christine Wilks.

Binary Katwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, edited by Jeremy Hight. Each edition will feature artists from around the world and from different points in the spectrum of new media. This edition features five new mini-stories created for Pullinger’s Flight Paths project which is a mixed media communal net based narrative on a large scale, along with three artists she has selected. The next edition of BK will feature codework auteur Mez.

Here’s one of my favorite leftover recipes, salmon hash, modified because we also had a bit of leftover corn on the cob.

Ingredients
———
3 portions leftover grilled salmon, diced
3 cobs grilled sweet corn
10 new potatoes
1 red onion, diced
sprig of rosemary
handful of fresh basil
olive oil, salt, pepper, tabasco, quarter lemon

Serves 4-6 for breakfast or lunch.

Just a quick post here to say I think Beck gets the Web in ways that a lot of contemporary recording artists don’t. While a lot of bands give you discographies and tour dates and bios and the like, maybe a few sample tracks, I’m impressed with the Web strategy Beck is embracing on his site. As far as I can tell, he is not directly promoting his albums, his tour dates, or his merchandising on is site at all. Instead, he is using the Web site as an occasion to make and distribute cool stuff with his friends. His new site has features including Record Club, a project to informally re-record a classic album in a day with other musicians, and release a new track on the site every week. “Irrelevant Topics” will feature Beck informally interviewing other musicians at length about whatever comes to mind, released in serial installments. The first part of the first interview, with Tom Waits, is a fantastic discussion with one of America’s best songwriters. Planned Obsolescence is a weekly DJ set mixed by Beck’s crew. In an age when anybody can put on a pirate hat and download any album without paying a dime, this type of creative approach to using the web as a experimental platform for music and its environments is exactly the type of thing that might make me want to support an artist buying his CD or MP3 or concert ticket or T-shirt. Beck’s crew is using Web 2.0ish tools and social media like facebook and vimeo to reach their fan base and share their funky new readymades.

The mammoth 10th anniversary issue of the online journal Drunken Boat is now out. I have a piece “Electronic Literature (in Performance)” in the DB Electronic Arts and Literature folio about the work presented at last year’s Electronic Literature in Europe conference, describing many of the works and including video documentation of many of the performances. Jessica Pressman also has an excellent essay, “Charting the Shifting Seas of Electronic Literature’s Past and Present” close reading e-lit from the Drunken Boat archives and discerning emerging genres, and there is a new hypertext poem, “That Night” by Steve Ersinghaus and James Revillini, among other delights. The other folios in the 10th anniversary issue of Drunken Boat include the Mistranslation project, with contributions from a number of digital poets, a huge collection of materials from Black Mountain College, 100 new poems, conceptual fiction, visual poetics, nonfiction, and a folio on arts in Asia. It is less a journal issue than an entire library of interesting literary production. I look forward to exploring it in more depth.

After some discussion this spring, the contributors to Grand Text Auto (including me) decided to make a change. We noticed that while Nick Montfort had kept up a steady pace of interesting contributions to the blog, the rest of us (four of whom have become parents in the last two years) have been blogging at a much more occasional pace, to the extent that it was no longer really fair to call it a group blog, since Montfort was pulling most of the weight. Nick started his own blog, Post Position, a couple of months back. This does not however mean the end of GTxA altogether. The format of the group blog has changed, and now has begun life as an aggregator of our individual blogs, including this one. We’re also keeping open the possibilities of doing other things as a group, such as the exhibition that was recently at the U of I and previously at the Beall, creative projects or distribution of creative projects, symposia and such. And I think the change from a group blog to an aggregator will be interesting. In the past I’ve used this space in a different way from my posts to GTxA. Maybe more idiosyncratically, or personally. The new GTxA will likely be a mash-up of individual blogging styles. I hope that, if nothing else, the new arrangement will inspire to blog here more than once or twice a year. I should at least be sharing some of the awesome links I share with my friends at facebook.

Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.2 (Spring 2009) has been published. The issue includes a cluster of articles on finishing digital humanities projects, edited by Matt Kirschenbaum, a cluster of articles on data mining, edited by Mark Olsen, three articles including my piece “Communitizing Electronic Literature“, and a review by Johanna Drucker of Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.

I’ve been too busy parenting to blog, but have no fear. After months of debating whether or not prelinguistic children should have their own avenues of online expression, Jill and I gave in and let Jessica get her own laptop. Here she is writing her first blog post, as mother and grandmother look on expectantly. Coming soon, posts on the importance of board books in the new media landscape. Also, musing on the nature of remote controls (colored buttons more fun than grey). And. . . why adult food is always better than baby food unless too spicy. Plus. . . liquids are fun to blow bubbles in and dump.

Tokyo Garage is a remix of the classic and elegant generated nature poem Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort. He wrote the code, which I did not feel the need to improve upon. I might well get sued for this piracy tribute. I hacked the words to make it more about urbanity, modernity, and my idea of Tokyo, a city I have never been to.

From Jan 17-20, Post-Moot, A Radically Inclusive Online Anthology of Responses to the Inauguration of the President-Elect Barack Obama, presents a monument to tolerance and an experiment in radical democracy:
Everyone is encouraged to send ANY and ALL responses to this historic event (no matter what your point of view). . . in TEXT, POEM, PHOTO, SOUND-FILE, SPEECH, SONG, TWEET and SHORT VIDEO forms.
Comment: http://www.postmoot.net
Email: postmoot@gmail.com
Tweets: http://twitter.com/postmoot
Sound/photo/vid: post@postmoot.posterous.com

ISEA 2009 will be held from 23 AUGUST – 01 SEPTEMBER 2009 in Belfast, Colraine, Derry, and Dublin, Ireland. Proposals for papers and art projects are due this Friday, Nov. 21, by midnight. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. Conference themes include Citizenship and Contested Spaces, Interactive Storytelling and Memory Building in Post-conflict society, Interactive Textiles, Positionings: Local and Global Transactions, Transformative Creativity – Participatory Practices, Tracking Emotions, Posthumanisms: New Technologies & Creative Strategies, and Entertainment and Mobility.

Reading of The Unknown at Columbia College, Chicago, Sept 25, 2008 from Scott Rettberg on Vimeo.

The University of Bergen Department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic Studies Digital Culture Research Group
is pleased to welcome guest lecturer Donna Leishman.

Wednesday, November 5th, 14:15-16:00, HF-bygget 265

Lecture open to the public: “Dissonance in Multi-Semiotic Landscapes”

Dr. Donna Leishman is Course Leader BA (Hons) Illustration and Deputy Head of Media Arts & Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee, Scotland. Her work combines critical writing and practice-led research in digital art with a particular interest in the intersection of narrative with internet based interactivity. Themes in her research include developing and exploring the role of the participant in these exchanges and developing a canon of practice that questions standard paradigms of behaviour. Her works of interactive animated narrative including “RedRidingHood” and “The Possession of Christian Shaw” can be explored at www.6amhoover.com.