Grand Text Auto

I had little rest during the five days I spent in Bergen, Norway in between DAC in Perth and the Grand Text Auto Exhibition in Irvine. Tempting as the bed seemed during my interphase jetlag, I was pulled out into the Bergen International Theater for Audiatur 2007. For four days at the end of September, it seemed that Bergen became the international capital of innovative poetry. The Audiatur Festival, in its third biennial iteration, featured a multilingual performance including many of the leading lights of the international sound and constrained poetry scenes. Christian Bök opened the festival with an energetic performance of Kurt Schwitter’s Ursonate and closed the festival with a reading that included highlights of his works Crystallography, Eunoia, and The Cyborg Opera. The talented multicultural Caroline Bergvall was on hand to present cross-cultural prose and poems. I had the pleasure of sitting at a table with Jaques Robuad of the Oulipo who read several of his highly amusing prose works, poems, and a presentation on the work of the Oulipo. Finnish poet Leevi Lehto gave a great performance of a few Finnish classics along with his sound and procedural poetry. The performances of Japanese sound poet and musician Tomomi Adachi were another highlight of the festival. The majority of the performances were recorded, and are available for your listening pleasure. The festival organizers also produced a very impressive 800-page Katalog, which may be the most extensive anthology of contemporary experimental poetry I’ve seen in any language, and certainly in Norwegian.

After much deliberation with my blue ribbon panel and the neighborhood kangaroo, I’m pleased to announce that the winner of the first Annual Alan Turing Memorial International Grand Text Auto T-Shirt Competition is Alex, for his “Grand Text Auto Matrix” design. I thought all of the entries were very creative, from the appropriation of the Grand Theft Auto logo to the Patriotic model to the Lettrist version and Grand Text Eliza and my love of Scrabble nearly drew me to the courageous first entry, but in the end, I was pulled to GTAM because of the fact that it evinced so much reading on the part of the designer (a rare and enviable combination), and because I think it will look cool both at a distance and for the squinty-eyed chardonnay-swilling electronic art lovers who will doubtless pull close to my chest to read it at the GTxA exhibition opening in Irvine. Alex, if you’ll send your address to me at scott at retts dot net, I’ll get your T-shirt and other prizes on their way. I’m ordering mine right now. Hopefully it’ll get there in time for me show up wearing it in Irvine. Thanks to everyone for participating and making this first competition such a success. Remind us this time next year if we haven’t announced the second round.

I’m sure that many of you are interested in the DAC 2007 Perth conference goings-on. There were a lot of good presentations of papers, good people, and some weird bio-art. I’m sure Mary will post some intelligent thoughts here about the content of the conference, and I may as well, at some future date or if I get bored on the plane. In the meantime, here is some low quality footage of the dance party with which we ended the last night of the conference. Fox Harrell is an excellent dancer, and Mary Flanagan does some amazing hyperkinetic lawnmower-and-grocery-shopping-moves. Lisbeth Klastrup was clearly the most agile of the Scandinavians, though Jaakko was nearly as fluid and he won the prize for the coolest T-Shirt — the “conference moderator” shirt with the built-in-clock. I was shuffling at about an equivalent level to Raine Koskimaa, average Finnish dancer.

It just occurred to me. The name is great and the logo is familiar, but sometimes I look at the blue, and the orange, and the sort off-brown and the, what, light blue, same logo, same site, and I think to myself, “I don’t even have a Grand Text Auto T-shirt and if this site was a T-shirt I’m not even sure I’d wear it, man.” We need some cool T-shirts, and I think we need something fresh, textual, vivid, new. Therefore, I announce the first annual Grand Text Auto Alan Turing Memorial T-shirt design competition. Here’s how it works: you design a Grand Text Auto T-shirt at Cafe-Press and post a link to your design here by Friday, September 21, 2007. We select the best T-shirt from the submissions, and I send the winner a T-shirt, and additionally, wear that T-shirt to the Grand Text Auto symposium at the Beall Center for Arts and Technology on October 5, 2007, and maybe some of these other people buy T-shirts too. That’s right, I’ll buy you a T-shirt if you design a cool one. I’ll also send you an autographed photo of Interactive Fiction guru and MIT professor Nick Montfort wearing either a white T-shirt, no logo, or a blue button-down shirt, also no logo. If he refuses to autograph the photo, I will do so myself. Either way, if you win, you get a T-shirt. If you are creative, and strong, and brave, and you act now, and win. What are you waiting for? Add a Grand Text Auto T-shirt to my closet and yours.

A couple of quick links worth reading:

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, Matt Kirschenbaum muses on the challenges and opportunities for future literary studies in an era when the material basis of authorship—including journals, notes, correspondence, and manuscripts—is increasingly born-digital in hamlet.doc.

And over at if:book, Dan Visel considers tabs, nonlinearity, and parallel reading styles in tab, tab, tab.

Hypertext innovator Stuart Moulthrop has been a guest researcher at the University of Bergen for the past two weeks. Over the past couple of days, Stuart gave a couple of wonderful lectures. In the first Stuart proposed that we supplant the commonplace notion of “content” based on withholding or separating off with the idea of “d8a” (pronounced ‘dataleet’), based on the ideas of giving in and giving out. Moulthrop encouraged the audience to consider new forms of secondary literacy based on an understanding of participatory procedurality. In his second presentation, today, Stuart showed several newer pieces of his electronic writing, including a brand new work, “Under Language,” in which the users’ interaction with parts of the poem/game affect the procedural properties of the work. Based on your reading of/interaction with particular lines of the poem, you might for instance, crash it, change its visual presentation, adjust its volume, or change a variety of its other properties. It is a particularly interesting work from the perspective of “codework” because the operations of the program are part and parcel of the work as it is presented to its reader in a particularly intriguing way that would be difficult for me to explain until you see the program in operation. “Under Language” is a work in progress, that Stuart has been working on while he has been at UiB, and one that I think will be interesting to a lot of people interested in codework and procedural literacy when it is published. But that is not what this post is about. This post is to notify you that we have discovered what the future of hypertext is all about. It is a Norwegian band named, simply, Hypertext. Moulthrop and I will attend their show tomorrow night in Bergen.

Leonarado/Olats, the French branch of Leonardo, have recently published an online book, Phillipe Bootz’s Les Basiques : La Littérature numérique. A quick browse based on sketchy French language skills suggests that the extensively hyperlinked 15 chapter document provides a very good historical introduction to some forms of electronic writing, with a particular focus on francophone work, from the prehistory of electronic writing in avant-garde traditions, through hypertext, combinatory forms, and animated interactive poetry. Les Basiques would make a nice companion to N. Katherine Hayles’s Electronic Literature: What is it?.

A new issue of the Iowa Review Web has been published, guest-edited by Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Coverely Luesebrink, and featuring the work of Donna Leishman. Titled “MultiModal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman and Electronic Writing,” the issue features an in-depth double interview of the two artists, essays by each artist on the other’s work, essays by Talan Memmott on Leishman and Nelson’s work, and links to their works, including Leishman’s Deviant, Nelson’s Pandemic Rooms and much more. The issue provides a good case study on these two innovative electronic authors. I also note that TIRWeb is sporting a new interface. I think I like it better than the last, though I’m still not sure if I’m completely sold on the design.

In one small step for literature on the web, the MLA International Bibliography has decided to index scholarly web sites including thematic research collections, electronic archives, portals, language maps, research tools, teaching tools, blogs, discussion list archives, and video presentations. It’s great to see the MLA begin to acknowledge that much of the conversation and practice of literary studies now takes place on the web. The guidelines for inclusion are however much in line with peer-review practices of print journals: each site must be examined by an indexer; relate to language and literature; identify the editor and editorial board; have a stated editorial policy; identify the publisher, sponsoring organization, or both; and provide for archiving. I’m not sure if literary sites that would clearly fall into the common practice of literature on the web, such as The Iowa Review Web, the electronic book review, or the Electronic Literature Collection would necessarily meet all of these criteria. Does the fact that ebr doesn’t have a formal editorial board, for instance, mean that it should not be indexed, in spite of the fact that it has been the home of high-quality literary discourse for more than a decade? It will be interesting to see how this project pans out. To bring web sites to the attention of the MLA for consideration in the bibliography, send an email message that includes the URL to bibliography@mla.org.

One nice aspect of the Remediating Literature Conference was that there was a good mix of different types of electronic literature discourse, from highly theoretical frameworks and schema, to historical contexts for electronic literature, to talks focused on close readings, and more pragmatic talks from some writers and artists on the processes involved in writing and publishing electronic literature.

The E-Poet and organizer of the recent E-Poetry Festival in Paris, Patrick Burgaud, gave an interesting talk on how he came to e-poetry and the frustrations and constraints involved in writing poetry for the electronic media. Burgaud described his initial interest in creating “language-independent” poetry, which resulted in him “inventing visual poetry, unfortunately twenty years after it had already been invented” and how this interest in visual poetry emerged into an interest in using the computer. Burgaud described some of the many constraints involved in writing e-poetry, including the challenge of creating work for multiple platforms, the problems involved in creating work for multiple screen resolutions and video-card configurations, the balance between creating work that can be quickly downloaded and work that is satisfactorily developed, etc. “In creating epoetry,” said Burgaud, “I must always hedge between what I would like to do and what it is possible to do.” Burgaud described himself as a poet, rather than as a programmer, and described a kind of poet-hacker aesthetic, which involves piecing together scripts and code written by others, and hacking them, attempting to bend them to his poetic purpose. “I am using my lack of knowledge, and using my mistakes, to find out what I’m making.” He described the process of writing an Epoem as being much like dropping a pinball through a pachinko machine — the poem changes as it hits each constraint, and the path is not predetermined, but a product of the process. Burgaud said that he had learned to accept that his work would be different depending on the machine on which it was viewed, and that he had come to accept a certain lack of control in this regard.

Katherine Hayles’s keynote talk at the Remediating Literature Conference was focused on the concept of Intermediality.

Steven Wolfram — Cellular Automata. Complexity of system comes from the interaction of many individual agents.

Emergence: Flocking Behavior

*Digital and analog synergistically cooperate

Analog: Transfer of information between differently embodied morphological resemblance.

Digital: Error control, fragmentation, and recombination.

Marie-Laure Ryan’s opening keynote at the Remediating Literature conference was focused on “Self-Reflexivity in Net.art.”

Self-reflexivity is part of the nature of human intelligence. Self-reflexivity is a distinct feature of human language, mathematical systems, and computer code. Self-reflexive contemplation is often a response to curiosity aroused by a new medium. One example of is the character of Don Quixote, whose habit of silent reading is what drove him crazy. Initial anxiety surrounding print culture.

Digital text — part of a new medium, uncertainty with regard to place in traditional media/print culture.

Feedback loop, Recursivity, Self-Reflexivity
— examples of self-reflexivity in net art.

Input>Process>Output

Recursivity — patterns, mandlebrot sets, fractal spirals, optics/mirrors. In computer code, we see semiotic functions that generate copies of themselves.

Ryan’s focus is on self-reflexivity in manmade artifacts rather than on self-reflexivity in the natural world — self-reflexivity in systems based on feedback loops.

I spent three days last week in the Netherlands for the Remediating Literature Conference. The University of Utrecht is one of the older universities in Europe, founded in 1630, and has an atmosphere suffused with literary and political history. Among the former faculty of the institution, for instance, is the philosopher Descartes. The conference banquet was held in the same hall that the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, was signed in. This environment, a place where many historical transitions have occurred, provided a great setting in which to contemplate the changes that literature is undergoing in its relationship to other media and art forms in the twenty-first century. Topics addressed during the conference included remediations of literature into film, radio, and theatricality, the future of textual studies in an increasingly digitized world, the relationship between narratives and computer games, and most prominently, the theory and practice of electronic literature and net art. About ninety academics from all over Europe, the United States, and elsewhere participated in the conference. My attention was naturally drawn towards presentations on electronic literature, though there were many other presentations I would have wished to attend if simultaneous presence was a physical possibility. Following are some notes on Marie-Laure Ryan’s and N. Katherine Hayles’s keynotes, and several other talks. I’ll post the notes on Ryan’s and Hayles’s talk separately from my other notes. My congratulations to the organizers on an excellent conference. Not only was the conference content excellent, the food was superb as well, particularly the succulent duck breast served at the conference dinner. And not only was wine served throughout, but (a rarity in academic conferences) it was quite good wine — a lightly oaked chardonnay with hints of vanilla served with the seafood salad, and a flavorful bordeaux with the duck. Props for the attention to culinary detail.

The ELO has just announced a call for papers and works for a major electronic literature conference next May in Washington state. I have posted the announcement below. The conference website is not yet online, but will be available on eliterature.org in August.

Update: The conference site is now online.

Update 2: The schedule for the conference has been posted.

Visionary Landscapes: Electronic Literature Organization 2008 Conference

Thursday, May 29-Sunday, June 1, 2008
Vancouver, Washington
Sponsored by Washington State University Vancouver & the Electronic Literature Organization
Dene Grigar & John Barber, Co-Chairs

I recently made a contribution to TAGallery, a project of cont3xt.net. The project is an experiment in using del.icio.us to collaboratively tag interesting sites related to new media art and literature. Each curator/participant is contributing a short “exhibition” of ten links on a theme. Predictably, I suppose, I contributed a collection of electronic literature links.

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a multimedia piece on electronic literature including an article (archive), a video piece, and a podcast interview with N. Katherine Hayles. Look for video link under the screenshot of the Electronic Literature Collection, and the audio interview off to the right. The Chronicle covered the Open Mouse/Open Mic reading at the ELO’s recent “Future of Electronic Literature” Symposium in College Park Maryland. Although the preoccupations of the reportage are a bit noob-ish (the video reporter mentions that the reading was plagued with technical difficulties when in fact it was a comparatively glitch-free evening in comparison to others, and many of the reporters’ questions were focused on the fact that there is not a massive popular audience for electronic literature rather than more interesting concerns — Who is the Stephen King of electronic literature? Well, ahem . . . King is a tough one but Robert Coover is sort of our Oprah . . .), it is nonetheless great see this esteemed weekly showing an interest in electronic lit, and Hayles’s audio interview is well worth the price of admission (particularly if you already subscribe to the Chronicle).

First of all, let me point in brief to networked_performance for Simon Biggs’ very good report on the E-poetry 2007 Festival in Paris. I agreed with him that Robert Simanowski’s close reading of “Listening Post” was one of the best of the academic papers presented during the conference. I was also a fan of Jim Carpenter’s presentation, in which he talked in a clear and pragmatic way about best practices for writing good code for e-poetry, including distributing source code so that others can learn from it. Carpenter recently released a new version of his poetry engine, which will write some pretty good poems for you. There were many other papers and panel discussions as well, though this festival was primarily about the poetry. For four nights in a row, there were three to four hours of poetry readings. The E-Poetry scene is much more performance-oriented than other venues for electronic writing, and some of the performances were much more video art or performance (for example one work allegedly about the objectification of women included the performer disrobing on stage — providing the Festival with an early controversy, which all such gatherings require) than they were electronic writing as it is usually understood. That was fine with me. Overall, I appreciated my first experience of this very vibrant scene that exists between visual, conceptual, performance, computer, and writing. I also enjoyed the opportunity to meet many writers I have worked with and communicated with extensively online in person, in addition to spending time with old friends in one of the world’s great cities. Rather than a more formal report, I offer you this cellphone video extravaganza — short clips of 30 seconds to a minute of many readings from the festival. Forgive the quality — it was my phone used in dark crowded rooms filled with poets drinking in the poetry, after all.

Jeorg Piringer Performing at Divan Du Monde on the first night of the E-Poetry 2007 Festival in Paris.

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce two new additions to its series of publications. N. Katherine Hayles’s primer, “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” and Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” are now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website.

N. Katherine Hayles’s “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials. This primer serves the twin purposes of reaching general readers and serving students and institutional audiences by providing descriptions of major characteristics of electronic literature and reflections on the nature of the field. This piece will also appear as the introductory chapter of Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007). The book will also include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One — a compendium of 60 digital works of poetry and prose, published by the ELO in October 2006.

Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” outlines and analyzes the critical issues relating to the description and classification of e-lit. Tabbi describes an approach that will allow the ELO Directory and other digital resources to be more useful, maintainable, transparent, and integrated with evolving technologies. The work organizes the terms of the problem into a call for an overall strategy of editorial and community-driven discourse about e-lit that will also be dependent on metadata solutions that are convergent with those described and implemented in other ELO publications.

After a late night of epoetry readings in a smokefilled theater in Montmartre (more on that later) and the excess you’d expect, after getting lost in St. Denis (I think I wandered into one of the neighborhoods where they set cars on fire during the riots), I finally found my way to Auditorium X and have witnessed a few panels here at Paris 8. Just a quick note: Pedro Reis (of Fernando Pessoa University) gave a presentation on an upcoming publication, a collection of epoetry in Portuguese which will be published both online and on CD-ROM, the Po-Ex project.

The Electronic Literature Collection UK Launch event I attended Thursday night in Leicester, England went very well. About 40 people turned up for the salon, including many of trAce regulars, interested local people, and people who took the train up from London. I gave a short introduction to the Collection, and Kate Pullinger, Jon Ingold, and Chris Joseph, read from the work. In his introduction, John Cayley discussed the context of electronic literature with the traditional literary world and the art world, showed a bit of Translation, and asked us to think about whether this form of literary art was literature or something else entirely. Jon Ingold gave what was possibly the best short introduction I have yet heard interactive fiction, in particular the brutality of the constraints involved in writing IF, before guiding the audience through a short reading of All Roads. In her presentation of her work with Chris Joseph on Inanimate Alice and other projects, Kate Pullinger raised questions about the economic models for electronic writing, and discussed how Inanimate Alice is in part an experiment in developing a commercial model for e-lit. She also discussed iStories, a project she is working on with Chris to develop a commercial toolset of electronic literature applications that would enable authors with little design or programming experience to more easily develop works in Flash. Donna Leishman also sent in a prepared text which a De Montfort Ph.D. student, Jess Laccetti, read to the crowd while Chris demonstrated a bit of Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. We had a short but spirited panel discussion afterwards, discussing the differences between teaching elit as creative writing and teaching it as literature, economic models for electronic lit, and other things. One of the encouraging things about this event was that a number of readers who had never before encountered e-lit were in the audience, were clearly actively interested in what they saw and heard. I also met a Polish Ph.D. student, Mariusz Pisarski, who is currently living in London and writing his dissertation about e-lit, and overheard a couple of people from London say that they heard about the event at Grand Text Auto ; ). It was a very good evening, and I’m grateful to the Institute of Creative Technologies, particularly Chris Joseph for putting it together. Jess has also blogged the event, and posted short videos of Kate Pullinger’s and Jon Ingold’s readings.

We are four. We can now speak. And yet we still have no idea what phentermine actually is, or what it does. Sure, we can Google it, but we stop ourselves, and we do not research, and we do not buy it. I feel guilty because, I’ll be the phirst to admit, phentermine is my greatest phan. Phentermine has left comments on posts I wrote several years ago that even I have never read. Phentermine is thine. Phentermine has mine in it. I feel that I somehow own it, and yes, I miss you too, phentermine. And yet. At the same time I feel a certain distance from you phentermine. I have heard though I am not sure that it is true that you cause syphilis in monkeys and that you are related to anorexia in children. I don’t believe it about the monkeys but I believe it about the kids. I know that just by naming you you will clog up my filters, but please say something phentermine. Please explain. Or let’s just break it off here. Let’s start phresh. I’ll be honest, your name creeps me out, it makes me think of graveyards and comic book heroes and long lost loves and valentines I never sent. I don’t know what I can’t do without you so I will go on, phentermine.

The Electronic Literature Organization’s Future of Electronic Literature Symposium last week at MITH at the University of Maryland, College Park, was a great event, bringing together e-lit writers, scholars, and an interested public together for an open mouse/open mic, a daylong symposium, and an ELO board meeting. Highlights included Katherine Hayle’s keynote (nicely summarized at jilltxt), considering the idea of “literary” vs. “literature” and providing very intelligent close readings of a variety of works of electronic literature, readings from new works by Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, Nick Montfort, Deena Larsen, and others, as well as three very good panel discussions. The process-intensive panel (also very GTxA-intensive) looked at the idea of process from several different angles ranging from process-intensive collaboration, to natural language interface processing, to story generation. The international panel featured demonstrations of electronic literature from around the world, including works in Spanish, French, Catalan, and Nordic languages, and also highlighted the fact that electronic literature is a global movement — ELO isn’t the only organization concerned with this work, but has shared interests and opportunities for collaboration with organizations including nt2, Elinor, Hermeneia, and others. The Future of Electronic Literature panel was also an engaging discussion of how new technologies might effect electronic literature, and how new ways of organizing material and collaborating might effect the way that we shape the field. I hope my compatriots will fill in some of the details here. In the meantime, enjoy some photos of the goingson: flickr sets posted by me, Jason deVinney, and Laura Borras.

I’m at a panel about an interesting group — Share Global is a a network of groups with an open source/fluxus ethic to new media performance, who get together on a weekly basis and have audio and video mixing jam sessions, along with featured sets. Share started in New York, and has modes in Montreal, Weisbaden, San Diego, Los Angeles, Melbourne, St. Petersburg, and Geneva. Anyone who wants to can participate. The Share groups build their own infrastructure, mixing boxes, etc. and collaborate in these face to face meetings and also network with other nodes on the network. Pretty cool — if you live in one of the node cities, you might drop in and plugin your laptop if you choose.

Yesterday I attended a talk on authorship including a presentation by net artist and theorist Alok Nandi, who was one of the developers of the web version of the French-language graphic novel Les Cites Obsures, developed in the 1990s, which looks like a very beautiful and compelling hypertext narrative/art project. A community developed around the project, with many readers contributing original artwork, drawings and animations.