Grand Text Auto

Drew Davidson passes along word of the recent fourth Media in Transition conference at MIT. From the list of abstracts and papers, it looks like the conference was indeed an interesting gathering, including quite a bit of work on nonlinearity in movies (e.g. “Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database by Jim Bizzocchi), narrative in computer games (e.g. “Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle” by Robert Buerkle), emergence in nonfiction film (e.g. “The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence” by Rod Coover) and topics in hypertext literature (e.g. “Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia” by Burcu S. Bakioglu). The abstracts suggest some interesting interdisciplinary fusions, and many of the abstracts are also linked to full papers.

Got a “ridiculous and pointlesss” idea along the lines of The Dancing Baby, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, or The Star Wars Kid? Eyebeam is looking for such projects for their Contagious Media Showdown. Large cash prizes are involved: $2,000 for the project with the most page views, $1,000 for the first site with an Alexa rating higher than 20,000, $1000 for the site with the most links from blogs, and $1,000 for the most popular site under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. Act now, web slackers are hanging out waiting for the next stupid but delightful silly thing to email to their list of friends: to participate, you need to reserve a slot by April 30th, and the project needs to be online by May 19th. There will also be a workshop May 7th in NYC by the creators of BPLU, Rejection Line, FundRace, How to Dance Properly, Nike Sweatshop Email, Dog Island, del.icio.us, Blogdex , and Pizza Party. Special guests from The Yes Men and the EFF.

Yes you are!

“You Are Beautiful” is a meme-type sticker and installation art project, centered in Chicago but distributed around the world. The most cool thing about this project is how its creators have taken a simple idea, a phrase that many people like to hear, and distributed it across multiple media, and then created a well-designed network photo archive of its many manifestations; a kinder, more affirming version of the “Andre Has a Posse/OBEY” idea. I was also pleased and waxed nostalgiac when I saw that most of the installations have occurred in my old neighborhood in Chicago. Spread the words.

Nick and I recently got word that Implementation has been accepted by Provflux 2005, both as an intervention (live event) as an exhibition. Implementation’s second gallery exhibition will take the form of mounted photos from the project, a DVD of distance shots, and take-home sticker sheets on display at CUBE2 Gallery in downtown Providence, Rhode Island from May 19th through June 4th, and we’ll be in Providence May 27th-29th for the event itself, with a goal of distributing, placing, and documenting the entire novel in one weekend in one location. Bring your digital camera and camping gear if you want to join us. Implementation joins about 50 other public interventions, games, urban exploration, lost space recovery, and tech mapping projects for this fluxist/situationist/public art happening.

Shelley Jackson Writing

Innovative print and e-writer (electronic and epidermal), Shelley Jackson, visited Stockton last night to give a reading as the featured reader at the Stockpot literary magazine release party. Shelley read a brand-new story with an unpronounceable title in the form of an equation. She was revising it in my office until ten minutes before the reading. It turned out to be a brilliant, absurd story about mortality set in a post-apocalyptic alternate reality, wherein distances are measured in alligators and timothies, and people carry their deaths and obituaries around with them, in many cases finding their obituaries more appealing than their actual lives.

William Gillespie’s Reading

This is pretty darn cool news that must have classicists jumping up and down. The Independent reports that, using infrared imaging technology developed for satellites, Oxford University scientists are now able to decode a horde of hundreds of papyrus manuscripts discovered in the 19th century in ancient garbage dump in Egypt. The “Oxyrhyncus Papyri” were blackened, decayed, worm-eaten and illegible to the naked eye, but the new technology makes them readable. Fragments of previously unknown texts by Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesoid have already been discovered, and the find is expected to yield five million words of texts, “mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian,” and to expand the known canon of Ancient Greek literature by 20%.

The UK has launched an initiative to release materials from the archives of the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University, and the British Film Institute in a form of the Creative Commons. The Creative Archive Licence will make materials available to the British public to remix and use in noncommercial projects. The terms of the Creative Archive Licence are no commercial, share alike, give credit, no endorsement, UK only. Within those stipulations, materials including 100 hours of of radio and television from the BBC and silent comedy and drama from BFI are being released for the British public to “Find it, Rip it, Mix it and Share it.” Although it’s a shame that the Creative Archive Licence will be UK only, the release of these and other materials should be a boon to artists and educators. It also makes a great deal of sense to me that publicly funded work should be made available for reuse by the public that funded it. One can only imagine the benefits that artists and educators would reap should NPR and PBS launch a similar initiative.

I spent some time last night over at Gavin Inglis’ Bareword. Scottish writer Inglis is one of the few hypertext authors I’m aware of who has written hypertexts according to the “branching path” model frequently discussed as a structural model but rarely utilized. I was familiar with Inglis’ Same Day Test, which tells the story the day in which its first-person protagonist goes (or doesn’t) for an AIDS test. The reader of SDT is offered choices of the “choose-your-own-adventure” variety. One smart design decision Inglis made with this work was to put all of the links at the bottom of the page rather than in the body of the text, which at the very least encourages the reader to finish one lexia before making a choice and moving on to the next. The story is tightly structured, advancing the reader through the course of the protagonist’s day.

Implementation next to the tower

Originally uploaded by marinella.

The first photos of the Italian translation of Implemenation, from Marinella in Pisa.

A new memorymap group has formed at Flickr. People are annotating satellite maps from Google Maps of places that are important to them. I can see a lot of narrative potential in the form.

Psy-Geo Provflux 2005 is looking for people to propose, plan, and/or participate in a weekend of interventions, lectures, shows, and other events that encourages others to reinvent their social spaces May 27-29 in Providence, Rhode Island. Looks like it will be a weekend of happenings. Submissions are due April 15th.

Gamespy reports that Warner Brothers has employed a full-time troupe of 20 actors who will interact live with players of Matrix Online. “These people will assume the roles of popular characters, interact with players, and generally move the stories in ways that only live “actors” can.”

I was just home in Chicago for a couple of days, and had a chance to visit the Museum of Science and Industry, which is currently host to Game On, an exhibition on the history, culture, and future of video games. We visited the Museum of Science and Industry quite often when I was a child, both as a family and on class field trips, so it was both gratifying and strange to see the games I played as an adolescent historicized in a museum context. This exhibition, which was previously shown in a slightly different arrangement at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, is the most extensive exhibition of its kind, certainly more comprehensive than the respectable Digital Play exhibit at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York.

This exhbition was arranged, for the most part, very intelligently. For one thing, the majority of the exhibit is playable. More than 100 historically important video games are available for play, most in their original platforms, or in the best available emulator. This made me wonder about the curatorial problem of keeping multiple copies of the hardware available and running. I’d imagine that over the six month run of a popular exhibition, they will go through a lot of controllers, for instance, many of which might now be difficult to find. But an exhibition of video games that you could not play would be about as useful as exhibition of video art that you could not watch.

I’ve just added links to three active blogs of note: The Institute for the Future of Book’s if:book, the Eyebeam reBlog, and the Creative Commons Blog.

Talking Head David Byrne is going around the country giving lectures on his artistic practice using Microsoft Powerpoint:

I have been working with PowerPoint, the ubiquitous presentation software, as an art medium for a number of years. It started off as a joke (this software is a symbol of corporate salesmanship, or lack thereof) but then the work took on a life of its own as I realized I could create pieces that were moving, despite the limitations of the “medium.” I have shown these pieces in galleries and museums and most recently have produced a book with a DVD (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information) as means of presenting these curiosities.)

It looks like Bob Stein has been busy. The founder of the late 80s/early 90s CD-ROM publisher Voyager, he’s moved from Nightkitchen, the e-book development platform his team developed from the mid 90s until earlier in this decade, to The Institute for the Future of the Book, which was founded last year. It looks like many aspects of Nightkitchen will be preserved within the Institute, but moved from a for-profit to a not-for-profit framework. The Institute for the Future of Book has secured generous funding from the Mellon Foundation (a $1.3 million grant), the MacArthur Foundation, and its colocated host institutions, The Annnenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. The mission described on the Institute’s site is “is to play an important role in developing the form and function of books in the digital era.” The Institute will develop tools, including TK4, a new, open source version of expanded book software, will host two symposia next year, and also hosts a pretty cool blog. I notice that Kim White, the author of The Minotaur Project, which was one of the works shortlisted for the 2001 Electronic Literature Award, is one of the Institute for the Future of the Book’s six staff members. This should be an organization worth watching.

My colleague Ken Tompkins recently sent along a link to John Udell’s Walking Tour of Keene. The short video demonstrates how Udell used Google Maps in concert with a bookmarklet to create a walking tour of an area in his hometown that rides on top of the Google Maps UI. Waypoints are marked with GPS data on the Google map and then linked to his content (jpgs and quicktime clips). Udell explains how he did it in a followup post. Other hacks to Google Maps are being posted on a Google Maps Hacking Wiki. Although the current hack is kludgey, it suggests exciting possiblities for location-based narratives that could be delivered in a web browser via the Google Maps interface.

Exocog: A case study of a new genre in story
A research report by Jim Miller describing the process of writing and distributing a story on the Internet not as narrative text, but as a set of Web sites whose content evolved over five weeks.

Situationist International Online
I’ve spent some good hours here recently. The situationists were anticopyright from the beginning, which has made this quite extensive archive of texts from the situationist movement which reached its height in the 1960s possible, including a complete archive of Internationale Situationniste and Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

I’m violating our policy of generally not posting job listings simply for shits and giggles. St. Cloud University is hiring an Assistant Professor of New Media/History of Rock and Roll:

St. Cloud State University seeks applications for New Media/History of Rock and Roll, Assistant Professor, tenure track position to begin August 29, 2005. Salary commensurate with experience and qualifications.

Today’s Times has an interesting article, “When the Sous Chef is an Ink Jet” about Homaro Cantu, a chef in Chicago who serves edible photos and sushi prepared on an inkjet printer. The restaurant serves edible menus. Cantu is also looking into levitating foods and innovative ways to utilize class IV lasers in food preparation. Of course this makes me think of what type of edible story I might like to tell, a novel that you could really sink your teeth into.

Mostly for Noah. Not many new revelations in the comment thread of the recent Slashdotting of Ted Nelson’s Xanadu, although I hadn’t realized that in addition to Olivia Newton-John, Rush recorded a song with the same title.

It’s not William S. Burroughs’ birthday or anything, but I’m teaching cut-ups tomorrow and thought I’d share:

• The Lazarus Corporation Text Mixing Desk
  The text mixing desk includes a Burroughs style cut-up engine, a transgenderiser, a rasta patois translation device and a watergate-style “expletive deleted” module, all selectable as outboard modules to the main mixing desk.
• WSB recordings at Ubuweb
  including a nice explanation of cut-ups.
• The Naropa Audio Archives
  Plenty of Burroughs lectures free for the taking and don’t miss Alan Ginsberg reading William Blake.
• Nobody Here, Just Me
  Nothing do with Burroughs, really, but a nifty hypermedia site with lots of little rooms and moments of narrative.

Johanna Drucker described Implementation in this way during the “Ubu meets Gertrude (Towards A Post-textual Avant-garde)” event featuring Johanna Drucker, Christian Bök, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, from the December 28th event at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. The full audio archive is now online. Johanna and Christian are smart, darn smart. Nick and I are sort of B- smart, but we did write the stickers.

Hey this is a cool project: Grafedia is attempting to write a hypertext on the streets of New York. All it takes is a picture cellfone and some magic chalk. Like the Yellow Arrow project, the idea of this project is that people mark things as significant in the physical world, and then to remark them in cyberspace. Grafedia encourages users to upload images, audio and video. To make Grafedia, you simply write a word (with a blue underline) somewhere in the world, and then email a corresponding media file to (that word)@grafedia.net. This makes me want to get one of them newfangled mobile phone things with video capabilities. Via Turbulence.