Grand Text Auto

This semester, students in my New Media Studies course produced podcasts. Their assignment was to create a story on some aspect of their interaction with new media and contemporary communication technologies. The resulting podcasts are available on the Digital Life website. I’m pretty pleased with the results. Students covered topics ranging from music downloading, to creating an online radio show, to instant messaging, to MySpace, to World of Warcraft, to online poker, to Deviant Art, and other online manifestations of Indy Culture. In preparing for the assignment, we listened both to popular podcasts and more importantly, to well-produced NPR shows such as This American Life. Some of the better-produced podcasts borrow techniques, such as using appropriate sound effects, editing together choice bits of several interviews, creating an overall narrative arc, and integrating musical interludes, from those NPR-style talk shows. Overall I’m satisfied with their work, and with the assignment. It has both enabled them to see the relative ease with which some kinds of new media artifacts can be produced, and offers a format that really allows their individual (Jersey) personalities to shine through.

I’ve posted a set of photos from the E-Fest. Highlights of the fest included some beautiful interfaces by current Brown e-writing fellow Daniel Howe and next year’s fellow Aya Karapinska, new work by Stuart Moulthrop, an excellent 10 minute presentation on Perec and Beckett by Gale Nelson, a short paper on Memory and Real Time by Wendy Chun, Jim Capenter’s three-laptop poetry generation performance (video clip), and Brian Kim-Stefans’ absurdist sense of humor.

Though Mr. Wardrip-Fruin will not defend the monster until May, word on the street here at the Brown E-Fest is that the days we’ll be able to speak of Master Wardrip-Fruin are numbered. It’s soon be Doc. One member of Noah’s committee described reading the new media wunderkind’s tome as “the most exciting thing that’s been going on in my life . . . lately.”

Last week I was in Norway, where I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Bergen to Jill Walker and Elin Sjursen‘s students in the Web Design and Aesthetics course. Talan Memmott was also there to give a talk. Talan showed some interesting new e-lit work I hadn’t seen before, including some work that is not yet on the web. Memmott showed work from two different streams of his creative practice, “network phenomonology” works such as his well-known Lexia to Perplexia, and a different “history of art” stream that includes new media interpretations of the lives and works of artists such as René Magritte. Talan’s been working in particular lately in a combinatory vein, and many of his works include both combinatory text and music. Of the newer work he showed, my favorite was “The Hugo Ball,” a recombination of a nonsense poem of 78 unique words by the Dadaist poet. As you mouse over the face of the Hugo Ball, it recombines and speaks the 78 words to you as they flash on the screen and the face “speaks” the words in layers of visemes. It’s a fun, and vaguely creepy, piece. While he was there, Talan was also interviewed for Bergen Student Television. The interview is available online for your viewing pleasure.

Also new from Norway, by way of New York City, is Hanna-Lovise Skartveit’s Take the F-Train, a fun and innovative online documentary about the F-Train in NYC, and by extension, about the population of the great melting pot itself. The piece includes a mixture of drawn characters, video of the train’s interior, and interviews with riders of the F-Train, many of whom are immigrants living in New York. The documentary captures the cosmopolitan nature of America’s largest city. The project is part of a larger Digital Storytelling project funded by Norwegian Radio/TV NRK.

This fall the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, soon to be the new home of the Electronic Literature Organization, has lined up a great series of lectures focused on electronic literature and digital archives. I’ll be giving a talk, “Wherefore Genre? Categorizing Contemporary New Media Writing” on March 7th, and there are many other talks I wish I could attend, including talks by Johanna Drucker and Jerome McGann, Shelley Jackson, Alan Liu and Joseph Tabbi, and Scott McCloud.

This just in . . . I’ve heard like none of the details, but Holy Toledo! Façade body-slammed the competition and took first place at the Slamdance Festival. Congrats to Michael and Andrew, and I look forward to the footage of you guys in your tights and Mexican wresting masks.

There is a superb interview of Robert Coover available in RealAudio from KCRW’s Bookworm program. The first part of a two part interview was broadcast today, and the other half will be broadcast on the 15th. The first part of the wide-ranging interview provides an overview of Coover’s career and some insights into his process, themes, methods and interest in formal innovation. There are some gems in the interview, such as the fact that Coover finished writing The Public Burning, his novel about the Rosenberg execuations and Nixon, in the British Library while sitting on the same hard wooden benches where Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto.

(Update: The full paper “A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics” by Michael Mateas and Nick Montfort is online.)

They approach the podium. The screen goes dark, then blue. There is some struggling with cords and configurations. Fingers and bodies struggle with the oppressive apparatus, and conquer it. Their title and names appear on the screen. Then we begin.

Montfort, looking dapper in a trademark wrinkle-free button down blue shirt, black pants, black shoes and wearing a multiplicity of university-issued rings, began the presentation by invoking Donald Knuth’s discussion of reading the program SOAP as like “hearing a symphony.” Montfort then discussed the idea of code as having an aesthetic for human readers. He cited the observation from Maurice Black’s dissertation that while terms like “elegant” and “beautiful” flow freely in discussions of code in computer science, they have been exiled from the vocabulary of literary and cultural theory. This idea of an established notion of coding aesthetic provides a context for the discussion of the “dark side to coding,” obfuscated code, which is “contrived to foil human legibility rather than enhance it.”

I really enjoyed the ELINOR reading Friday night at the Copenhagen LiteraturHaus. I get so used to seeing the same crowd of folks presenting work in electronic literature, that it’s always a wonderful and pleasant shock to see people from other parts of the world than the one I’m accustomed to exploring ways of working with literary texts in digital environments in their own ways, in their own language. Performing artists included poet Christian Yde Frostholm from Denmark, Johannes Helden from Sweden, Marko Niemi from Finland & Noah Wardrip-Fruin from Northern California and elsewhere. Helden read his poem to an accompanying digital animation and soundtrack. Frosthelm’s work was a fascinating version of what from the perspective of a non-Swedish-speaker seemed to be a Beckettian story adapted in Flash making use of patterns and repetitions, words clumping and clustering and rearranging themselves on the screen. Of the Scandanavian authors I was most impressed with Marko Niemi‘s work, a variety of simple but distinctive and thoughtfully language experiments in flash and html. Niemi writes both in Finnish and English, and presented English language work at the reading. Jill Walker was the emcee, and the host of the Literaturhaus kept the bar open late, as the DAC attendees clustered round tables with old friends and new. Noah’s reading of Talking Cure and video demo of Screen were also highlights of the evening. Torill posted a great photo of Noah’s reading from the portable Talking Cure intallation on Flirckr. Jill also posted several photos of the reading.

I was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic, Julia Keller, for an article published in the Trib this Sunday, “Plugged-in Proust: Has e-lit come of age?” (archive). William J. Mitchell, head of the Media Arts and Sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also interviewed for the piece, which examines the relationship between control and reading technologies.

I’ve gotten some sweet packages in the mail from Amazon over the past couple of weeks. My longest-anticipated purchase finally arrived from England. For the past year, I’ve had the Oulipo Compendium on order from Amazon UK. It seemed impossible to find a copy of the 1998 Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie, online, or in any used bookstore. I was beginning to think that the Oulipo Compendium would turn into my Holy Grail book. I searched depsondently at my favorite used bookstores. The Strand in New York didn’t have it, nor Myopic Books in Chicago. Lo and behold, two weeks ago it arrived, laden with pounds and pounds of shipping charges and great expectations. To my delighted surprise, the Compendium is not in fact the 1998 edition but a revised and updated 2005 edition. I had seen the 1998 edition and often coveted it, but I’ve recently had the pleasure of spending some fruitful hours with the new edition. The book is organized in a pleasingly cross-referenced hypertextual encyclopedia, and provides an immersive introduction to the Oulipo, both as a historical introduction to the group, its writers, and their work, and as a kind of workbook. Hundreds of Oulipan writing techniques ranging from the lipogram to the avalanche are explained and exemplified. It’s the type of book that makes you want to spend the afternoon playing with language at your keyboard. I’ll be teaching the book next semester in a new course titled “Art, Games, and Narrative.”

I’ll be giving a talk this evening on Implementation in the contexts of Situationism, Fluxus, and sticker art campaigns this evening at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference in Chicago. For the first time this year, the conference includes a stream of presentations on electronic literature. The conference will also include a stream for ecocriticism; a stream for the conference theme of cognitive science and emergence; and a stream for work in the visual arts. The plenary speaker is Gerald Edelman, winner of the Nobel Prize. Invited Artists inclue Eduardo Kac, Warren Neidich, Allison Hunter, Eve Andree Laramee, Daniel Wenk, Zane Berzina.
Keynote panels will match invited artists and prominent critics, among them Cary Wolfe, Barbara Stafford, and N. Katherine Hayles.

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the first Electronic Literature Collection. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted until January 31, 2006. Up to three works per author will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

Matt Kirschenbaum just sent out an exciting announcement about a new journal that will serve as a forum for scholarly and creative work in electronic media. Digital Humanities Quarterly will publish scholarly articles, editorials, experiments in interactive media, and reviews of books, web sites, new media art, and digital humanities systems. Importantly, this will be a free, open-access journal, and both critical and creative work will go through a peer review process.

Call for Submissions
Digital Humanities Quarterly

Submissions are invited for Digital Humanities Quarterly, a new open-access peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Submissions may be mailed to submissions@digitalhumanities.org. A web submission form will also be available soon.

It’s Banned Books Week, and the American Library Association released the annual most challenged books list for last year. A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict library materials on the basis of the objections of a person or group. The most challenged books of 2004 were:

1. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier for sexual content, offensive language, religious viewpoint, being unsuited to age group and violence
2. “Fallen Angels” by Walter Dean Myers, for racism, offensive language and violence
3. “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture” by Michael A. Bellesiles, for inaccuracy and political viewpoint

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy in Shandy Hall, Coxwold, York, in the 18th Century. The innovative nonlinear novel is often cited by contemporary new media writers as an influence on their creative practice. It was recently announced that Shandy Hall will now house Asterisk*, a center for the study and development of narrative. Rather than simply developing the site as a museum dedicated to Sterne’s life and works, the center will be dedicated to innovation in both old and particularly new work. Asterisk* will support residencies for artists, “we envisage that these residencies will take forward current practice in a variety of narrative engagements: with diverse media, non linearity, digression, interactivity and audience participation, particularly (though not exclusively) where these intersect with technology.” The center will also commission new works, host exhibitions and performances, lectures and events, and a web forum. Last year hypertext author Deena Larsen completed a short hypertext, Shandean Ambles, during a three-day residency at the site. Asterisk* is now accepting applications for two three-week residencies this fall, one intended for a new media artist and the second for a writer with minimal technical background interested in integrating new media into his or her practice. Asterisk* also intends to gather an extensive library of innovative interactive literature at Shandy Hall.

The designers of the 8-room Tressants Hotel in Menorca, Spain, designed each room to be representative of one of the conceptual cities described by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities.

Every night for 1001 nights, Barbara Campbell is performing a short text-based work via web video. Her project 1001 Nights Cast is structured around the frame of tale of Scheherazade and 1001 nights. Participants contribute stories through the following procedure: each morning Campbell wakes and scans the headlines for a short phrase to use as a prompt. She then creates a watercolor image of the text of the prompt, which she posts to the site. Reader participants then respond to the prompt, writing story 1001 words or less in length. Each night Campbell reviews the day’s submissions and adapts one for performance, or, if she’s received no suitable submissions, generates a text by other means, such as a Google search. The stories are preserved in on the site as a text archive, though the video performance occurs only live, at a scheduled time published on the site. As of August 15th, fifty-seven nights into the project, it seems to be going well. Thirty-four different authors have contributed stories. The stories don’t seem to be interwoven into each other outside of the frame tale, so each story stands on it own. Although the editing process is expedited, the 1001 word length, longer than a short short but shorter than a typical short story, is conducive to concise stories with a well-honed sense of economy.

The Flux Gallery in Queens is presenting Comix Ex Machina, an exhibition of “devices that present a series of narrative images to the viewer by means of a mechanical process, either interactively or automatically.” It looks pretty nifty.

Elin Sjursen, the blogger behind Bloggerdy Doc, is doing an interesting variation on the blog tip jar with Help Send Mr. Teen to Summer Camp. In an effort to send her teenage son to camp this summer, she’s making photoshop art in exchange for donations to the summer camp fund. If you send her a high resolution image along with your donation to the summer camp fund, she’ll send back a piece of photoshopped artwork, such as Rex, this photoshopped bat-dog.

I am pleased to announce the winner of the 60 Second Story Competition.

After much deliberation, The judges selected “Charles” by Steve Himmer as the winner of the first 60 Second Story Competition, citing its humor, clarity, and completeness as a story. Steve will be receiving a one-minute supply of chocolate, and a one inch by one inch edition of his story will be printed by Spineless Books. Steve Himmer teaches writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of an unpublished novel about a bear, and also writes at onepotmeal.com.

The runners-up included “Faith” by Ed Falco in second place, a tie between “The Golden Age” by Roderick Coover and “Pillow, Pillow” by Jason Nelson for third, and “Florence” by Christine Wilks in fourth.

Today’s New York Times offers an article that investigates the origins of the joystick and credits it as one of the most overlooked acheivements of the last century.

I recently ran across this ambitious and obsessive illustration project: Zak Smith’s Illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow includes an image for every single page of Pynchon’s masterpiece. All the images are available on the site. The whole collection was exhibited at the 2004 Whitney Biennial and is now in the permanent collection of the Walker Museum in Minneapolis.

The Electronic Literature Organization’s new site is now in place.

A very visible feature of the site is a showcase that features exemplary electronic literature. The five most recent items appear at the top of the main page, and everything featured to date is accessible via the “Showcased E-Lit” link just below the search field. The showcase is an excellent descriptive complement to the extant Electronic Literature Directory, a large index of information about e-lit. An RSS feed of the showcase is available so that readers can automatically keep bookmarks to the current entry or syndicate the showcase on their own pages.

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.