Grand Text Auto

This looks like an interesting event for anyone interested in artistic uses of mobile media Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City, October 1-3, 2004 is a three-day event that highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists are using communication technologies to generate new urban experience and public voice. The event explores what is possible when wireless communications (both new and old), mobile devices and media converge in public space.

I’m just about over the jet lag from a brief jaunt to Nottingham, England for the 2004 trAce Incubation Symposium. While the conference didn’t offer any earthshaking new paradigms, it did prove that Electronic Literature is alive and well in the UK, that Ted Nelson is hyperkinetic as well as hypertextual, and that Alan Sondheim still writes more in a week than most of us do all year long. Incubation was a refreshing and energizing gathering of electronic and print writers, performance artists, and teachers who are using the network in a variety of ways. The food was also quite good and the bar kept late hours for thirsty writers.

Nisar Keshvani, Editor-in-Chief of Leonardo Electronic Almanac, passes along this call for papers: LEA Special Issue: New Media Poetry and Poetics

Guest Editor: Tim Peterson

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (ISSN No: 1071-4391) is inviting papers and artworks that deal with New Media Poetry and Poetics. This category includes multimedia digital works(image/text/sound) as examined through the lens of “writing,” specifically any of those concerns central to poetry rather than narrative or prose: reader as active participant in the “ergodic” sense, the use of stochastic methods and chance procedures, and the complex relations between the author, reader, and computer-as-writer/reader which evolve from that interaction. Modes of work that foreground the digital medium (such as “codework”) are also welcome. We would particularly like to emphasize the “poetics” of new media writing as well, that is, the point where aesthetics intersects with politics to create dynamic attempts at social change.

In “Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic,” the Times reports on a video game being developed at the University of Southern California’s School of Engineering as a tool for teaching soldiers to speak Arabic. The game also uses AI, giving characters such as patrons of a Lebanese cafe “arousal levels” to let soldiers in training see if their use of Arabic and non-verbal cues is effective or not. I think this type of military video game sounds much more useful (and less bigbrotherishly frightening) than first-person shooter recruiting games designed to turn mall rats into soldiers.

Critic and novelist Tom LeClair recently published a novel Passing On. While the novel itself is a print novel, in part about a company that takes the dying on trips when they have no one to assist them, LeClair also recently published a Web site, Terminal Tours, which is purportedly the site for the fictional company featured in the novel. I include the link here because I think it’s an interesting example of one modest way that authors can use the Web to extend a fictional universe beyond the bound artifact. Some of the stories and testimonials are also quite funny.

Designer Rick Valicenti and friends are up to some fun letter-play at Playground ’04. Twelve typographers have accepted Valicenti’s “invitation to create an alphabet of 26 characters illuminated not to start a sentence, but to begin a thought.” The project in some ways reminds me of Paul Chan’s conceptual fonts in Alternumerics. My favorite of the Play fonts released so far is Anthony Angelos’s Watch. Each of the letters includes a caricature meant to represent a feeling or phobia.

trAce Online Writing Centre, which has served as one of the most important organizations in new media writing since 1996, has put forth a call for abstracts for a planned book, intended to complement the trAce website. Essays are invited both about the evolution of the trAce community and about the individual and collaborative creative projects published by trAce. Abstracts are due in October and the volume is planned for publication in 2007.

Congrats to the winning authors of trAce’s New Media Article competition.

Review category – “A Bad Machine Made of Words” by Nick Montfort
Opinion category – “Are cell phones new media? Hybrid communities and collective authorship” by Adriana de Souza e Silva
Process category – “Writing 4 Cyberformance” by Karla Ptacek & Helen Varley Jamieson
Editor’s Choice Award – “Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs” by Kate Baggott
Honourable Mention – “Postcards From Writing” by Sally Pryor

This year the Prix Ars Electronica honored two projects that have helped to make vast amounts of human knowledge available and legally accessible. Wikipedia, the free, community-built encyclopedia, was awarded the Golden Nica for Digital Communities. Creative Commons won the Golden Nica for Net Vision.

Jill Walker was interviewed by the BBC World Service program The Word on Blog Fictions, along with Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian, political blogger and Stuart Hughes, a BBC journalist who started blogging while he was in Iraq. The interview is currently available in realaudio at the The Word‘s site. While you’re tuning into radio archives online, an April 7th NPR Talk of the Nation show on the politics and economies of virtual communities is also worth a listen.

In “Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally” (archive), New York Times reporter Adam Baer covers e-mail fictions including Intimacies by Eric Brown and Rob Wittig’s Blue Company 2002 and interviews e-lit experts including Rob, Thom Swiss and GTA’s Noah Wardrip-Fruin. People interested in Blue Company *begin shameless plug* might also like its sort-of sequel Kind of Blue.

William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Rob Wittig
Reporting from Notre Dame University
&Now Conference April 5-6, 2004

W: Compared to the Holocaust Conference going on up in Massachusetts this weekend, I think &Now was an especially fun place to be. The presenters were freaks for the most part, freaks and Lydia Davis, from the fringes of word art. Those who write and have other people publish books of stories or poems were probably in the minority. There was abundant electronica, collaborative text-collage performance, multimedia performance fiction, text-image-sound, and even a critic.

We’re reading Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen in my Internet Writing & Society class, and discussing AI. While googling around trying to see if there was a working version of Depression 2.0 out there, I ran across Jabberwacky, a Web chatterbot that took 3rd place in the 2003 Loebner Prize.

Yesterday I attended Jan Rune Holmevik’s dissertation defense at the University of Bergen. While I haven’t yet had a chance to read it in its entirety, from attending his defense, I can report that his dissertation, TraceBack: MOO, Open Source, and the Humanities, includes a great historical overview of the open source movement, as well as a history of LinguaMOO and the development of Encore. His dissertation in Humanistic Informatics also included a program, the Encore MOO system that he and Cynthia Haynes developed. In conjunction with his successful defense, he also released Encore 4.0, which is is distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Gratulerer Jan Rune!

I just ran across Sent, which is being billed as “the first major exhibition of phonecam art in the United States.” The exhibition will include contributions both by amateurs and by invited professional artists and celebs, including Weird Al Yankovic.

I recently downloaded the demo of ToySight, software that uses the mac’s iSight camera to integrate object and motion control into a variety of videogames and “toys.” The demo includes “Freefall,” a game in which you stand in front of the camera with arms extended as your avatar falls through the clouds, trying to collect balloons and land on target, and “Laser Harp,” a toy harp in which you pluck strings that appear in front of your image. It might just be the gee-whiz factor, but I see a lot of potential for this kind of cam-based interaction (admittedly not enough to buy the package, but I looking forward to playing more of the games with my friend’s daughter when she gets it). I wonder what kind of electronic literature we might dream up for this form of interaction? Maybe something like Noah et al’s Talking Cure could soon be coming to a laptop near you.

The students in my New Media Studies course this term produced Blog on Blogs, a review of several different types of weblogs. This semester was the first time we dedicated significant class time to weblogs, along with electronic lit genres including hypertext, new media poetry, and interactive fiction. I think it worked out pretty well as a class assignment, in that it both required the students to put some critical thought into weblogs as a genre, and to regard their own web writing as public discourse.

A link off of Grimmelman’s article led me to the curious AgoraXchange project, which will launch in January. A team including net artist Natalie Bookchin and political theorist Jacqueline Stevens is behind the project, the goal of which is to create an MMG that poses an “alternative to the present world order” guided by four decrees that include the abolition of inherited property rights. The ambition of the project appears to be to create a game that will be instructive in reshaping global society. While such a simulation is unlikely to overthrow capitalism, the idea is a refreshing turn from many MMGs that seem hell-bent on promoting the acquisition of virtual wealth as the highest virtue to which gamers can aspire.

At Law Meme, James Grimmelman has written an excellent article in the wake of the State of Play conference: “Free as in Gaming?.” Grimmelman’s article follows up (extensively) on a question posed by Yale Law Professor Yochai Benkler at the conclusion of the conference, after Second Life had announced its decision to allow players to retain copyright to in-game intellectual properties:

“You’re creating this world in which people come to play and be creative, and yet you’ve given this world a system that has been extensively criticized as limiting creativity. Haven’t you just given them a new set of hurdles to creativity?”

Lawmeme reports that Second Life, an avatar game discussed in recent posts, has made a decision to let player-characters keep the intellectual property rights they create. Players, for instance, have the right to sell movie rights for their character. See Participant Content under the Second Life terms of service agreement. Of course, the player also grants Second Life nonexclusive rights to the content, but nevertheless, this is a fascinating decision with regard to virtual property. I think it also has some interesting implications regarding the idea that games can be a creative environment, in which players actually make new “works” that could have some economic value.

This is probably old news to most of you, but I just heard about the US Army’s latest recruiting tool, America’s Army. The army spent $4.5 million to develop the game, and is reporting that it has been wildly successful. In a Chicago Tribune story, the game’s project director, Col. Casey Wardynski, reported that on the night of Oct. 28 alone, “1.3 million games got played . . . At six minutes a game, that’s 150,000 hours of game play, where kids were virtually inside the Army.” Wardynski praises the game as a cost-effective recruiting tool. The game takes kids from basic and special forces training to virtual battlefield operations.

I guess it’s one way to keep those body bags filled.

What’s next? The CIA could be at work on America’s Effective Intelligence: Mission One — Learn to Translate Arabic. Maybe the State Department is working on America’s Diplomats: Mission One — A Nonviolent Solution.

Nah. Where’s the fun in that?

Poet Jason Nelson visited Stockton last week to give a reading and to visit with my New Media Studies students. Nelson is the hyperkinetic wizard behind heliozoa.com and a future project that hovers around technology culture called Secret Technology. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals including Beehive (Brown University), Boomerang (UK), Epitome (Madrid), 3rdbed (NYC), Nowculture, Blue Moon Review and others. In addition his work has been featured in art galleries worldwide.

Just to followup on my earlier post on intellectual property: The EFF has launched a campaign to encourage the WIPO to reconsider its opposition to open source and collaborative approaches (actually, even worse, its US Patent and Trade Office-led refusal to even discuss open source and collaborative models). If you disagree with this decision, you can express your opinion by sending a letter to the USPTO through the EFF.

Back home in Chicago a few weeks ago, I played Girlfriends with my niece Kayley. Maybe Disney isn’t all bad. Kayley’s four and half years old. The experience of playing this game, designed for girls six years old and up (sure she’s an overacheiver) was interesting for several reasons — not just because my goddaughter is always a pleasure, a giggling joke-telling, nonstop kinetic force of nature. It got me thinking about literacy, and about how computers are influencing the way that the current generation of post-toddlers are learning to read and write. Kayley, for instance, can’t yet read. They’ll cover that next year, probably. But she can install a Windows program (in this case the Girlfriends CD-ROM), can distinguish the Next button from the Previous button, and can agree to an End-User License. With no coaching at all, she was able to install the program, and to complain about the fact that she’d already installed it, but that the Windows box was buggy, and that the password interface was a big pain.

I recently read Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, a properly alarmist text about the Internet, the law, copyright, and the slow steady creep towards a future in which every text, film, song, picture, and thought that runs across your consciousness is licensed property, in which the spectrum is owned by highest bidder, and in which innovation is patented to such an extent that new innovation becomes nearly impossible.

Lessig is a constitutional scholar, a Stanford law professor who is scared shitless about the poorly-thought controls currently and relentlessly being placed on our intellectual lives by “the extremists in power.” Lessig was the chief architect of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the legal action which attempted to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act, and the chair of The Creative Commons Project. I won’t give Lessig’s book a proper review in this forum, but I would like to highlight a few points, and suggest that, as new media creators, many Grand Text Auto participants and readers might want to take some proactive steps contra the current intellectual property paradigm.