Grand Text Auto

The Creative Capital Foundation has announced that during the 2005-06 grant cycle, they will accept proposals for innovative literature in their emerging fields category. Creative Capital is a nonprofit organization, which acts as a catalyst for the development of adventurous and imaginative ideas by supporting artists who pursue innovation in form and/or content in the performing and visual arts, film and video, and in emerging fields. They work in partnership with the artists whom they fund, providing advisory services and professional development assistance along with multi-faceted financial aid and promotional support throughout the life of each Creative Capital project. In their press release, they define innovative literature as “work created by writers who challenge traditional notions of literary forms and concepts. We are interested in projects by literary artists who are striving to express themselves in alternative ways through manipulating language, formal structures, or new processes.” To apply for a grant, artists must first submit an Inquiry Form, which will be available February 14, 2005 on the foundation’s website. The deadline for completed Inquiry Forms is March 14, 2005; those invited to apply will be notified in June 2005.

I spent most of the MLA convention in a hotel room with my colleagues interviewing candidates for Americanist and Creative Writing positions at Stockton. I could say a lot about this alternatively exhilarating and exhausting experience, but suffice it to say that I left the room having learned a great deal and feeling that the state of literary studies is strong. We talked with bunch of interesting and articulate people who care about teaching, who still like reading, who were able to position their work theoretically but who were not so caught up in subspecialized jargon as to have lost their sense of why they were professing English to begin with. Both in the interviews and in the process of reviewing some 400 plus applications that preceded the interviews, I felt that there was less canned identification with well-established theoretical niche markets, e.g. “Defamiliarizing the Subaltern Otherness of Embodiment in Whiteness Studies,” and real sense of that people are branching off into comparatively new territories. My overall sense is that people are writing dissertations that live less exclusively in theoryland, and spend more time closely reading works of literature in the context of knowledge from other disciplines such as history, art, design, geography, science and yes, even new media.

An interesting place to wander for a while, 99 Rooms is a site of animated interactive photographs of rooms, most of which entice you to explore and find something, to flip a switch of some kind to cause a change in the environment. Each room consists of a photo painted over with an image or character. Outside of the organ music looping in the background, the designers have also done a good job of creating an aural environment to layer to match the photographic, art, and interactive layers. There are some very simple puzzles, and the art seems to have some kind of mythical structure I haven’t figured out yet, not quite a narrative but something near it.

The New York Times reports that Google has forged an agreement with Oxford, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library to digitize and add to its database all of the out of copyright holdings of each library. The Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands have also announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of one million books on the Internet. Pretty exciting news for public knowledge.

Although for the last month or so, I’ve been buried in a variety of teaching and administrative duties, I have found the odd moment here and there to get completely addicted to Flickr, the most compelling web-based application I’ve run across in a long time. Flickr is a photo sharing service. While the services it provides subscribers (unlimited storage, generous uploading allowance, the ability to easily integrate with blogs and RSS) are not in themselves revolutionary, two of the other features of Flickr are particularly intriguing in terms of artistic practice. The first is that Flickr has built their system with the Creative Commons in mind. As you upload your photos, it is simple to select and tick off a CC: license, making photos available in what is already for other use to use in what is already the most extensive Creative Commons photosharing database. The second is that the system allows for easy metatagging, and most flickr users take advantage of it. So you can imagesurf Flickr by keywords, and not only by more obvious criteria, such as color (red), style (blackandwhite) place (Chicago), or date (1969), but also by more conceptual tags (unhappy). Any picture can be tagged with multiple phrases. The result is both an exceptionally useful public resource for anyone interested in sharing and remixing image content, and a fascinating portrait of the zeitgeist. Although the full service costs about $5 a month, the free version is also fairly generous, allowing users to upload 100 photos.

Cory Doctorow’s talk was one of the highlights of the Digital Og Sosial Conference yesterday in Bergen. The talk is available as a Quicktime video. I encourage you to watch the video for yourself, but here are some notes for readers who prefer text. Doctorow made a case that the audience of the conference, primarily librarians, authors, and archivists, ought to take an active interest in the doings of technology and entertainment consortiums looking to enforce copyright and patent laws and to create new ones. When it comes to technology, Doctorow argued, consortiums have a nasty habit of turning features into bugs, of disabling rather than enabling new technologies, and of doing everything they can to take control of technologies (such as the general purpose computer) away from the people who purchase them. Doctorow, on his way to a WIPO meeting where he will represent the EFF, joked that the WIPO in Geneva is for copyright what Mordor in Lord of the Rings is for evil in Middleearth.

Howdy from the Digital Og Sosial Conference in rainy Bergen, Norway. It’s been a good conference so far, even though I can’t completely understand the Norwegian language discussion. Talks in the conference have ranged from moblogging to wikis to digital libraries to electronic literature. Tonight was particularly enjoyable. I had fun reading on Implementation on a program with Norwegian e-lit artists Anne Bang-Steinsvik and Morten Skogly, both of whom have authored quite beautiful multimedia pieces. The conference organizers have also done a great job of archiving the event. Quicktime videos of most of the talks, including Howard Rheingold, Torill Mortensen, Danah Boyd, Lisbeth Klaustrup and yerz truly are online on the conference videoblog.

Nick, Scott, Star, Dan, and Emily after IF Walkthroughs

Wednesday night at the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, I played host and interactor for the IF Walkthroughs event. Although Nick has done a pretty good job of familiarizing me with the world of interactive fiction (incessantly) virtually since the first moment I met him at DAC ’99, I have never felt as engaged with this form, with its heritage in the ancient riddle and the Zork games of my adolescence, as I did after interacting with Slouching towards Bedlam by Daniel Ravipinto and Star C. Foster, Nick’s work-in-progress Book and Volume, and Emily Short‘s Savoir-Faire.

This weekend, Mary Flanagan and I will be appearing at NYU Law School as the official GTxA Press Corps to cover the State of Play II: Reloaded conference. The conference program promises an intellectually stimulating couple of days, covering topics at the intersection of law and gaming such as Intellectual Property/Digital Property, Avatar Rights, Virtual Liberty, and Free Expression in Virtual Worlds, Virtual Property/Real World Markets: Making a Living in a Virtual World, The Culture of Play, and Dispute Resolution and Trust Building in Virtual Worlds. It would appear that registration is still open. I won’t be there until Friday, and probably won’t post anything until after the conference, but look for reports from us next week.

Leonardo recently announced a project that is likely to become a great resource for new media students and scholars:

LABS is a comprehensive database of abstracts of Ph.d, Masters and MFA theses in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology. Persons who have received advanced degress in arts (visual, sound, performing, text), computer sciences, the sciences and/or technology which in some way investigate philosophical, historical, critical or applications of science or technology to the arts  are invited to submit an abstract of their thesis for publication consideration in this database.

Jewelboxing looks like a nice DIY packaging solution for folks looking to hawk their short-run digital wares at conference schwag tables, arty bookstores and the like.

This afternoon, NPR’s Talk of the Nation broadcast an interesting story on RFID technology and privacy concerns, and discussed RFID technologies ranging from bracelets to help parents at Denmark’s Legoland theme park find their stray children to subdermal implants which can be used for hospital patients to carry their medical histories under their skin.

Here are a few snaps to go with the video. I thought the show was great. I went with my cousin Michael, who teaches middle school science in the Bronx. He said that he got about 3 months worth of ideas for projects for his 7th grade students from the show. Great work, Mary et al.

Sisyphus by Bruce Shapiro

I may be turning into an intellectual property law geek, but I found Mark A. Lemley’s Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding (click on “Go to Document Delivery” for full text) engrossing. Lemley rehearses some of the ground that Jamie Boyle and Lawrence Lessig cover about the origin of the idea of intellectual property law and the “tragedy of the commons,” explains some of the benefits of leaving room for “free-riding” in the distribution of intellectual property, questions whether property is an apt metaphor for what’s come to be known as intellectual property, and explores some other analogies that might be more appropriate.

From November 10-12, in Bergen, Norway, I’ll be joining Howard Rheingold, Torill Mortensen, Lisbeth Klastrup, Cory Doctorow and others at the Digital Og Sosial Conference, dedicated to mobile, wireless, and handheld technologies and their connections to the social. I’ll be giving a talk on “The Network Novel,” and leading a collaborative writing workshop. The conference is also the first gathering of Elinor, the newly minted Nordic sister organization of the Electronic Literature Organization. Find further details on Jill’s blog.

Bridgeport and Westbound claim to own the musical composition and sound recording copyrights in “Get Off Your Ass and Jam” by George Clinton, Jr. and the Funkadelics. We assume, as did the district court, that plaintiffs would be able to establish ownership in the copyrights they claim. There seems to be no dispute either that “Get Off” was digitally sampled or that the recording “100 Miles” was included on the sound track of I Got the Hook Up. Defendant No Limit Films, in conjunction with Priority Records, released the movie to theaters on May 27, 1998. The movie was apparently also released on VHS, DVD, and cable television. Fatal to Bridgeport’s claims of infringement was the Release and Agreement it entered into with two of the original owners of the composition “100 Miles,” Ruthless Attack Muzick (RAM) and Dollarz N Sense Music (DNSM), in December 1998, granting a sample use license to RAM, DNSM, and their licensees. Finding that No Limit Films had previously been granted an oral synchronization license to use the composition “100 Miles” in the sound track of Hook Up, the district court concluded Bridgeport’s claims against No Limit Films were barred by the unambiguous terms of the Release and Agreement. Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films LLC, 230 F. Supp.2d 830, 833-38 (M.D. Tenn. 2002). Although Bridgeport does not appeal from this determination, it is relevant to the district court’s later decision to award attorney fees to No Limit Films.

After Twisty Little Passages and First Person, the academic book I’ve been most looking forward to reading is Alan Liu’s Laws of Cool, years in the making and just released by University of Chicago Press.

The Laws of Cool is a study of the relation of the contemporary humanities and arts to information culture, and of information culture itself to the now dominant business paradigm of “knowledge work.” What crucial perspective on knowledge do the humanities and arts still contribute when the primary mission of knowledge is business? Reciprocally, how do “knowledge work,” “lifelong learning,” “learning organizations,” and so on offer critical insight into the contemporary humanities? And finally, what is the mediating role of information technology as both the servant of the knowledge economy and the medium of the new humanism and aesthetics of technological “cool” (as it is so often called on the Web)?

Via Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s coin-op (just added to the GTxA blogroll), Yellow Arrow is a sticker art/collaboratively authored viral narrative project. Project participants post a yellow sticker pointing to something they think is important in the urban landscape, and then send a short email description to the yellowarrow.org server via their phone. Each sticker has an individual ID. When other users encounter the sticker in the public space, they then can send an email to yellowarrow.org to retrieve the description the tagger left behind.

Via Brandon, a wicked cool word tool: WORDCOUNT

is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Grand (1804) Text (1339) Auto (17171), fer instance.

As you would expect, the art installations were done very well throughout the venues of ISEA 2004. The conference made a statement about the vitality of electronic arts by the sheer immensity of the event itself. There was so much art in so many different venues on the Silja Opera, in Tallinn, and in Helsinki, that it would have simply been impossible to see it all during the conference, particularly if one also intended to catch a panel or two. I caught the principal exhibitions in Tallinn and the Kiasma exhibition in Helsinki, but I missed several shows at smaller venues and a bunch of site-specific work scattered around the two cities. The ISEA catalog is a full-length book, and it would take a work of that length to comprehensively discuss the art at ISEA. I can offer only a glimpse of what was on display at the conference in these notes.

Thanks to the New Jersey Humanities Council, this fall, a maelstrom of electronic literature activity is descending on the Atlantic City area, with The Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. There will be three panel events in the next three months. On September 24th, two of the best-known authors of hypertext fiction, Talan Memmott and William Gillespie will present their work and discuss electronic fiction. Both are or have been graduate fellows in creative writing at Brown University, and both have been recipients of the trAce/AltX award for new media writing. Each is also known for publishing activities in the electronic media. Memmott is the editor of the Beehive hypermedia journal, and Gillespie the publisher of Spineless Books. The second event will feature two of the best-known critics of new media. On October 15th, Grand Text Auto’s own Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the co-editors of The New Media Reader published by MIT Press, will give presentations on the history of new media. Montfort is the author of Twisty Little Passages, the first book-length study of interactive fiction, and Wardrip-Fruin is the editor of First Person a book about interactive drama. (But of course you knew that). The final event, on November 19th, will feature Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson, the co-editors of the leading new media poetry journal Poems That Go. All these events are free and open to the public. This fall the very full Stockton event calendar will also include visits from novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, poet Sharon Olds, and filmmaker Michael Moore. I’m psyched.

One for location-based buffs, via Howard Rheingold et al., a list of urban mobile games.

The Tallinn portion of the ISEA conference was focused on wearable computing. Although I didn’t attend many of the panel sessions on this topic, my general impression from the keynote, from the exhibition, and from the runway of the fashion show at Club Bon Bon in Estonia is that wearable computing has a long way to go. It seems that as a culture, we have not yet worked out how (or if) we want computers to function in our clothing. Another problem with wearable computing is that the majority of current funding for the technology comes from either a) the military-industrial complex or b) the fashion industry. This makes sense, but the sources of funding seem to constrict the imagination of designers in a variety of ways. The military wants wearable computing that will make for better soldiers, that will make for safer military service and better killing machines. The fashion industry is by its nature interested in disposable objects, in making things that serve an aesthetic purpose of limited duration.

CNN is running a story on the upcoming October issue of Playboy, which will feature a photospread on the Women of Gaming — that is the virtual characters. Perhaps it won’t be too long before all of Playboy’s photospreads are CGI. The story also covers a slough of recent adults-only games, and discusses potential industry concerns that “female characters appearing topless could reinforce the outdated stereotype of gamers as shut-in losers who lack any sort of social skills.” It also notes, however that the gaming demographic is now generally older than it used to be, with the average gamer a crusty 29 years old, and the average game buyer 36 years old, making it a good match for Playboy’s (33 year-old median) demographic.

Andrew Stern, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas, and Scott Rettberg raise a toast to Nick Montfort while onboard the ISEA Silja Opera “Interfacing Sound” Cruise in Mariehamn Harbor, Finland. Analysis of said event to follow, later.