Grand Text Auto

On Thursday, May 17th, at the Institute for Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, in Leicester, a UK Launch of the Electronic Literature Collection will be held. I’ll be introducing the ELC at the at the event, and John Cayley, Jon Ingold, Chris Joseph, and Kate Pullinger will be reading from their work. The first 50 attendees will receive a free copy of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 on CD-ROM.

The ELC was also recently reviewed briefly in El Pais by Stefano Caldano and at greater length by Tim Wright in Realtime Arts.

Submissions are open for the 3rd Ciutat de Vinaros International Prize of Digital Literature. There are three prizes in Digital Narrative (2500 Euros), Digital Poetry (2500 Euros) and a special “Vincent Ferrer Romero” Prize for the best work of Digital Literature written in Catalan (1000 Euros). This is currently the only annual prize competition with a substantial purse that I’m aware of in electronic literature, and all digital authors are encouraged to submit. The judging criteria specify:

• Works that explore and use the possibilities of the computer as a space for creation.

Edward Picot recently posted a lengthy review of The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. Picot clearly spent a good deal of time with the collection, and has both positive and negative things to say about it. I think that Picot has attempted to be fair and balanced in his discussion of the collection, and I’m grateful to him for giving the ELC such careful consideration. He is one of the first people to review the ELC intelligently and at length in English, though as usual, the Swedes are ahead of the game.

In the end, Picot finds the ELC “an essential collection,” and encourages “Anyone interested in the field of electronic literature to get it on DVD,” though along the way he finds a few nits to pick. The collection is actually published on the web and CD-ROM (old-school) and along with Picot I encourage you to get your copy of the free, Creative Commons-licensed collection of electronic literature, and then make copies of it for your friends.

I’d like to just briefly address a few of the points Picot makes, in order to clarify my perspective as one of the editors. I hope that Nick, Stephanie, and Kate will also jump in with comments if they’d like. I’ll restrict my comments to Picot’s critique of the curatorial/editorial aspects of the project. Picot also reviews four works in the collection, two (“The Jew’s Daughter” by Judd Morrissey and “Windsound” by John Cayley) positively, and two (“MyBALL” by Shawn Rider and “Carrier” by Melanie Rackham) negatively. There are sixty works in the collection, and I think that everyone is entitled to their opinion of each of those works. None of them were included casually. Each of the four editors thought that each work merited inclusion.

The Guardian reports that a study of surgeons at New York’s Beth Israel hospital who spent at least three hours a week playing video games performed 42% better at keyhole, or laparoscopic, surgery than doctors who had not. But what games were they playing?

Yesterday, I witnessed Rune Klevjer‘s highly entertaining and presumably successful defense of his dissertation What is the Avatar: Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games at the University of Bergen. In the Norwegian tradition, Rune had to dodge the slings and arrows of his “opponents,” Espen Aarseth from ITU Copenhagen, and William Urrichio from MIT, which he did most skillfully. An amusing and elucidating exchange occurred between Aarseth and Klevjer on the importance of the concept of fiction within computer games that included an extended metaphor in which imaginary tree stumps were agreed to be bears, though Aarseth insisted that the bear behind him was in fact dead and therefore not a threat. Klevjer’s most clever response to an Aarseth jab was to illustrate the difference between indirect and direct discourse as the difference between “throwing you over my shoulder and carrying you out of here” and “politely asking you to leave the room.” Though I have yet to completely read and absorb the above-linked dissertation, my initial impression is that it is a very careful and well thought-out examination of the nature of the avatar(s) in computer games, with a particular focus on the relationship between the player and the avatar in the first-person shooter genre.

An interesting post at Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type estimates that the average Second Life avatar consumes about 1,752 kWh per year. That compares to the average worldwide per capita consumption of 2,436 kWh per year. A lot of juice.

Eyebeam passes along word of The Creative Act, a collaborative project which has declared February “Create-a-Thing-a-Day Month. Participants in the project will make something creative each day during the month of February, choosing a different theme for each week. The project has some interesting constraints, such as that thing should take no less than 20 minutes and no more than 1 hour to make. Participants then post text, or a photo, or some other documentation to the group blog.

I did a short interview with Franz Thalmair about the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, that has just been published by the Austrian webzine CONT3XT.NET. It will also be published next week by the UK-based new media collective furtherfield.org.

The website wiihaveaproblem.com offers some photographs of televisions, windows, and various glassware destroyed by overzealous wii-ing. (via the NYTimes)

This week Ben Vershbow from the Institute for the Future of the Book passed along some news about the MediaCommons project. MediaCommons is a project in development for the past couple of years by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and others to start a born-digital scholarly press focused on media studies. At its core, MediaCommons will be a social networking site where academics, students, and other interested members of the public can write and critically converse about a mediated world, in a mediated environment. The site is intended to connect scholars, producers, lobbyists, activists, critics, fans, and consumers in a wide-ranging, critically engaged conversation that is highly visible to the public. At the same time, MediaCommons will be a full-fledged electronic press dedicated to the development of born-digital scholarship: multimedia “papers,” journals, Gamer Theory-style monographs, and many other forms yet to be invented.

The Electronic Literature Organization has released the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. The Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, is an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature, published simultaneously on CD-ROM and on the web at collection.eliterature.org. Another compelling aspect of the project is that it is being published by the Electronic Literature Organization under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5), so readers are free to copy and share any of the works included, or for instance to install the collection on every computer in a school’s computer lab, without paying any licensing fees. The Collection will be free for individuals.

I’m currently at Blogtalk in Vienna, surrounded by bloggers blogging. While I’m going to sit here quietly and pose as a baffled technophobe, I would like to point out that Jill Walker is sitting to my right assiduously “liveblogging” the proceedings (while also having a conversation with Danah Boyd in iChat and flickring photos and responding to email). Amazing. I encourage you to visit jilltxt for updates.

LEA just released an extensive new issue on Digital Poetry. While I’ve just taken a quick look, it appears to be a terrific collection of essays on contemporary digital poetry, in addition to featuring several compelling works in the gallery. The issue edited by Tim Peterson includes essays by Loss Pequeño Glazier, John Cayley with Dimitri Lemmerman, Lori Emerson, Phillippe Bootz, Manuel Portela, Stephanie Strickland, Mez, Maria Engberg, and Matthias Hilner, in addition to works in the gallery by Jason Nelson, Aya Karpinska and Daniel Howe, mEIKAL aND and CamillE BacoS, and Nadine Hilbert and Gast Bouschet. The correlation between the essayists, authors and works reviewed in this issue of LEA and the contributors to the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One suggests to me that the two free publications will make a great pair for teaching. All of the essays in this edition of LEA are available both in HTML and downloadable PDFs.

I was recently interviewed by Simon Mills for framed, his retrospective project of interviews contextualizing digital art and writing between 1998-2004. The interview took shape in the form of several email exchanges over a period of few months. I appreciate the opportunity that Simon gave me to discuss my past and current projects, in addition to sharing my thoughts on the current state of the field of electronic literature more generally.

Rita Raley guest-edited the latest release of The Iowa Review Web focused on texts in which three dimensionality is suggested or realized. In addition to Raley’s contextualizing introduction on three-dimensional electronic literature ranging from Brown University’s cave-writing workshop to other forms of writing for complex surfaces, the issue includes interviews and documentation of works by Dan Waber, Jason Pimble, Ted Warnell, David Knoebel, Aya Karpinska, Sandy Baldwin, William Gillespie, and John Cayley.

Good news for would-be Digital Arts and Culture presenters who, like myself, are just starting to pull out of the warm crush of summer holiday activities:

Due to a large number of requests, the deadline for 500 word abstracts for
perthDAC 2007 has just been extended to the 28th August 2006.

Full details are at: http://www.beap.org/dac/

Please contact conference chair Andrew Hutchison with any questions
about DAC. a.hutchison@curtin.edu.au

perthDAC 2007 – The Future of Digital Media Culture
7th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference
15-18th September 2007, Perth, Australia.
http://www.beap.org/dac

Today’s New York Times Art section has an article on locative media projects featured in the ISEA-linked ZeroOne exhibition going on next week in San Jose, California. Projects range from a pigeon blog to a “sci-fi erotic” narrative told over cellphones that unfolds in different paths depending what train route you follow.

I guest-edited a just-released issue of the Iowa Review Web focused on the ways that different forms of new media writing reconfigure concepts of place and space. Another way of looking at the issue, however, is as a Grand Text Auto takeover of Iowa’s finest web journal. The issue features Jeremy Douglass’ interview with Nick Montfort on his interactive fiction Book and Volume and Brenda Bakker Harger’s interview with Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern on their interactive drama Façade. I also interview Shelley Jackson on the various manifestations of the human body in her corpus of work, and interview Jane McGonigal on alternate reality gaming. A short introduction contextualizes the various approaches that authors of electronic literature have used to conceptualize space and place. I hope that you’ll visit, read, and enjoy. Thanks to the authors and contributors and to Iowa Review Web Associate Editor Benjamin Basan for helping to put the issue together.

One potentially interesting turn for blog narratives: there seems to be a trend towards television characters with their own blogs as a way for the networks to cross-market their offerings on the Web. While most of the TV character blogs I’ve run across are fairly lame in-character rehashings of plot events from the show, it is interesting to see the different approaches that production companies are taking to using character blogs in their crossmedia marketing efforts.

The uptight “dork” character from NBC’s The Office, Dwight K Schrute‘s blog is infrequently updated, though his posts, such as his detailed report of his morning itinerary, including what he had for breakfast, the radio show he listened to, and a progress report on his beet farm and throwing star practice, are in character with the nature of his TV persona. The many commenters seem comfortable with addressing Dwight as if he was a real person. NBC seems to have just as as big a problem with blog spam as GTxA. In addition to his blog on the NBC site, Dwight set up a MySpace profile, which immediately blasts the viewer with his favorite tune, the Scorpions’ “Rock Me Like a Hurricane.”

Numerologists are hopping excited, and fearful. The number of the beast, and all that. So in the morning it will be 06:06:06:06:06. This long a series of single digits in a date and time won’t occur again until, um, July of next year, when 7 gets its lucky day.

The Art and Space Science Fellowship at UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory has a call for proposals for Space Art projects. The successful applicant with have a three month residency at the laboratory, travel, food, accomodations, a small stipend, and the opportunity to work with scientists and NASA satellite missions both at Space Sciences Laboratory and at other partnering institutions nationally. Space Arts is a growing interstellar field. A database of ongoing projects is a available at spacearts.info. In reviewing the projects, I note that while many of them are innovative, we have yet to see the first space-based interactive fiction, and that this could pose an even greater challenge for Nick Montfort than getting a running version of Zork installed on the light board atop Philadelphia’s PECO tower.

The call for papers for perthDAC 2007 is out. The theme of the 2007 Digital Arts and Culture Conference will be “The Future of Digital Media Culture” which, I presume, leaves plenty of room for electronic literature and other GTxA type interests. The conference will be held from 15 – 18th September 2007, during the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth. There will be a double blind peer review process for papers. The deadline for 500 word abstracts is 14th August 2006, and the deadline for full papers is 4th December 2006. Although it’s a long, expensive way to go from just about anywhere else, Perth is a wonderful city in a fantastic part of Western Australia, with great culture, food, wine, beaches, parrots, and Aussies. I was there for a couple of weeks last winter/summer and I’m looking forward to going back.

The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed, including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.

It must be national poetry month. In addition to Nick Montfort’s foray into deforestation this morning my email included note of two other strange poetic projects. William Gillespie at Spineless Books announced that to celebrate Charles Fourier’s 234th birthday and the first birthday of Joshua Corey’s Fourier Series, the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award For Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literature (2005), there has been an update to the Fourier Series web suite to include recordings of the author reading (recorded in the offices of Burning Deck Press), a PDF excerpt of the book’s inventive layout, and Fourier Electronique, a ten-minute MP3 poetry remix. The MP3 is haunting, western, and linguistically interesting, well worth a listen. Ken Tompkins also passed along a link to The Fib, a poetic form based on the Fibonacci sequence: a 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8. Although others, including Paul Braffort, have experiemented with the famous pattern before, this seems like a fun form to try on a plane, shortly before bed, or to inflict on one’s students in an Art, Games and Narrative course.

Jill Walker reports that there is a Ph.D. fellowship opportunity at the University of Bergen’s Department of Humanistic Informatics. The Faculty of Arts has seven fellowships available, and proposals are competitive among all the departments concerned. This year, UiB is advertising in English as well as Norsk, and is encouraging international applications. I’ll be teaching at UiB next year and perhaps longer. I would love to see some applicants for the position who are writing about electronic literature or some other aspect of new media in the context of the humanities. Ph.D. fellowships in Norway are richly funded, with a decent salary for four years and additional research funds for books and conference travel. Applicants must have completed an M.A. in a related subject and must prepare a short dissertation proposal. See more details in Jill’s post and in the advertisement.