Grand Text Auto

· → → ·
Book from the Ground
Xu Bing

120 pages

The dot of unconsciousness opens – and then winks out again. The book, one point in a project that Xu Bing has undertaken since 2003, is written entirely as a series of symbols, narrating a daily odyssey (or perhaps a Ulysses) that is read left-to-right and from top to bottom but almost entirely without the use of words or letters – they only appear as part of logos and the like. Symbols derived from Neurath’s Isotype system, which led to today’s airport signs, are used alongside emoticons and computer icons to describe the workplace experiences, fraternal beverage consumption, dating, and insomniac video game play of a rather harried, forgetful, busy, and not particularly productive generic man who lives in a city located on [globe icon]. By borrwing a bit from comic conventions within this typographical framework, not only actions but also thoughts and the topics of discussions are depcited (to me, at least) legibly.

The book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (and the program) have been discussed as “cool” on Fark. (I was hoping for a Photoshop contest with the program’s output, but this is nice, too…)

One of my co-authors, Casey Reas, has issued a 10 PRINT design challenge to the Processing community. There’s already been one program written in reply.

As seen on Bruce Sterling’s blog, we have an 10 PRINT (or, to be precise, a 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10) event tomorrow, Wednesday, here in Boston. The Boston Cyberarts Gallery (formerly AXIOM) is located in the Green Street T station on the Orange Line; the event’s at 7:30pm.

Whether or not you believe games (digital or analog) are a form of art, it is undeniable that there is a huge artistic culture around and in the gaming world.

Without jumping into the games as art debate, I would like to state that I do believe many games are art and many games would not be what they are today without artistic principles and an artistic vision. My time as an art intern at Tiltfactor has only reaffirmed this opinion.

In today’s post, I would like to share some of my favorite game art with you.

Ben Grosser created Facebook Demetricator, a tool that removes counts from Facebook, so that instead of displaying “14,836 people like this” your interface will simply say “people like this.”

I love the concept. I haven’t seen it in action myself, because of my use of a manually-implemented “DeFacebookizer” that, rather than enmeshing me in the most direct possible corporate system of social control and structure, leaves me with only the heterogeneous, diverse, and open communications from people on the World Wide Web. The Web is not a pure wonderland, though. These sorts of communications are, of course, also continually subject to statistical analysis and displays of counts – how many comments on a blog post, for instance. To intervene in the count-obsession of digital media, it makes sense to go to where it is most prominent.

We have a great talk on campus this Friday!

Friday, 19th October 2012 4-5:30PM
Photography, Plugged and Unplugged
Dominic McIver Lopes

Haldeman 041, with reception to follow

From the moment of its invention, photography has been viewed as the contrary of drawing, with profound consequences for the epistemology and aesthetics of photography. When the invention of digital photography was seen to challenge the traditional view of photography, the response was to insist that digital photography breaks radically from analogue photography and to predict that it would acquire a distinct epistemic and aesthetic profile. In fact, however, this dialectic rests on a false picture of the nature of photography (and of drawing too). A new theory of photography that downplays the analogue-digital distinction makes better sense of how we have used and continue to use photographs as evidence and as materials for art. It also suggests how to think about the true impact of digital technology on the art of photography.

What a busy summer at the Tiltfactor Laboratory! As we have been preparing for GenCon and working on our games, we also spent some time at the AVA Gallery in Lebanon, NH hosting a Gamecrafting Workshop for local youth.

We had a wonderful week getting to know our campers and helping them design games! On Monday, campers played games such as Awkward Moment™ and Battleship to learn about games and what makes a game fun. On Tuesday, campers incorporated the game design ideas they learned from Dr. Flanagan and the Tilt staff to create the first prototypes of their games.

Alternate (actually, rejected) titles for the famous journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, recently revealed in Jacket2.

I don’t know about you, but Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews’s cutting room floor is often better than what ends up stuffed into my projector.

For instance, I see that Rhizome, which wound up being used, is on the list.

Maybe the next interactive fiction journal could be called Inventory.

And, I think Salad is still a great title – maybe even a better one today. It’s a dish best served cold.

It’s not bigger and longer than Star Wars, but it is more uncut: “Death of the Author [Psycho Shower Scene RECON]“ by Dick Whyte. This, somewhat like the later famous Star Wars video, is a “reconstruction of Alfred Hitchcock’s famous shower scene from Psycho using amateur YouTube remakes.” 57 of them.

If you got that and you’re ready to increase the avant-garde, see also “John Cage – 4’33″ [May ’68 Comeback Special RECON]“ and “Andy Warhols Eat A Hamburger [38 Scenes From YouTube RECON].” All from 2010, but recalled here for your enjoyment.

(PDF version here)

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
cont…@tiltfactor.org
603.646.1007

Dr. Mary Flanagan, director of Tiltfactor Laboratory and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College, will deliver several talks this summer and fall on such topics as critical play, games as an art form, and games as a medium for social change. Scheduled venues include the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Games for Change Festival, and the IndieCade Conference.

I went last weekend to visit the Big Reality exhibit at 319 Scholes in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It was an adventure and an excellent alternative to staying around in the East Village on March 17, the national day of drunkenness. The gallery space, set amid warehouses and with its somewhat alluring, somewhat foreboding basement area (I had to bring my own light source to the bathroom), was extremely appropriate for this show about tabletop and computer RPGs and their connections to “real life.” Kudos to Brian Droitcour for curating this unusual and incisive exhibit.

The term “New Media” is expanding, since its emergence out of Pop Art, Fluxus, and other earlier movements, to mean many things. It is digital, it is interactive, it is dynamic, it is animated, it is dangerously hactivist…it is an expression of changing times and cultures, of the horizon called the future coming closer to us. One particular instance of New Media which has branched out into its own discipline is “Bio Art,” such as that practiced by British artist Jane Prophet in her project Silver Heart, seen below.

Codings shows the computer as an aesthetic, programmed device that computes on characters. The works in the show continue and divert the traditions of concrete poetry and short-form recreational programming; they eschew elaborate multimedia combinations and the use of network resources and instead operate on encoded letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols that are on the computer itself.

////////////////////////// Giselle Biguelman
///////////////////////// Commodore Business Machines, Inc.
//////////////////////// Adam Parrish
/////////////////////// Jörg Piringer
////////////////////// Casey Reas
///////////////////// Páll Thayer

Curated by Nick Montfort
Pace Digital Gallery

Feb 28th – March 30th, 2012 (with regular gallery hours Mon-Thu 12-5pm).

We talked about digital sound as well as some poetic and visual art matters on a panel on Feb 15 here at MIT with David Cossin, Ben Hogue, yours truly (Nick Montfort), Evan Ziporyn, and Joe Paradiso … backed for a while by ppg256-3:

Designer Gulch by Brendan Howell is another remix of my oft-remixed poetry generator, Taroko Gorge. This one is installed in the lobby of the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule.

by goyo

BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP! — BEEP!

“Our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert.”

Kenneth laughs, quoting the prophecy of Donna Haraway. He wiggles his fingers limply as the cyborg pins him to the wall. “It’s quite apt, don’t you think?” He turns to me and grins. “Who knew that giving all artificial lifeforms links to communicate with each other would lead to this? Now I’m the canvas, and this– this machine, the painter…” He turns and stares the creature in its webcam. “What’s your name, then?”

“ALICE.”

The following is a response, or perhaps companion, piece to Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from the War.

I didn’t go- none of us did.
They thought we went, but we didn’t.

Here.

We were here.
They didn’t think so, so they screamed at us
and shot at us
and wanted us to die.
“Maluus zebr” they said about
each of us in turn.

But here it is, I still have it.

And this- see the dust
still caked into the fibers?
I shouldn’t have it, they have rules about trophies,
but this is from when we were bombed
out of bed-
well, I wasn’t in bed.

Imagine that you could make a person suffer, and no one would ever know. Would you do so? Were you to pose that question in person, few if any would claim to exercise such a power. But wipe away any identifying factors, and give the respondent total anonymity—how will they respond?

But my credit card company says otherwise…

An exhortation for those creating or researching electronic literature to please submit to Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints, the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization conference. The gathering will take place June 20-23, 2012 in Morgantown, West Virginia. A juried Media Arts Gallery Exhibit will be held from Wednesday, June 13 through Saturday, June 23, 2012 at The Monongalia Arts Center. Registration costs have been kept down to make it easier for writers and artists who don’t have institutional travel support to be part of the event.

The deadline for abstracts & proposals is November 30, by the way.

We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context we cannot properly describe.

  –Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form

 h            d d     k x  v  d r k y  p  s b a  b  a  n  i  k  d   u  u 
v   r  c q  i  e  z   j s s  v h   t l  i  r k k n  k       n n     m    
         z b    q   b   k x  m  d u  z f  s  g p u z v y       v m  f   s
  i  u  p  p z   r n t  k f   b h v  q l  x w h x  f  x    c i w     v f 
k h   l  a i      o q  s z n z  u n c l    w      d     a  d a  m j  b e 
 m  n b q o u o e  n   s    r b o j     b  q q t q s   f n i  f     u  l 

Concrete Perl

a set of four concrete poems realized as 32-character
Perl programs

by Nick Montfort

• All the Names of God
• Alphabet Expanding
• ASCII Hegemony
• Letterformed Terrain

You can download the linked Perl files and/or simply copy and paste the following four lines, which correspond to the four titles above:

• perl -e '{print"a"x++$...$"x$.,$,=_;redo}'
• perl -e '{print$,=$"x($.+=.01),a..z;redo}'
• perl -e '{print" ".chr for 32..126;redo}'
• perl -e '{print$",$_=(a..z)[rand$=];redo}'

(Seen at a university in Cambridge, MA – not MIT or Lesley University.)

I’m at a fine gathering, The Network as a Space and Medium for Collaborative Interdisciplinary Art Practice. This is a workshop Scott Rettberg organized here in Bergen, Norway. Here’s a tiny glimpse of it.

First, Daniel Apollon has very deftly provided us with a video of last night’s electronic literature readings / presentations by nine readers: Jörg Piringer. Roderick Coover, J. R. Carpenter, John Cayley, Renée Turner, Serge Bouchardon, Chris Funkhouser, Talan Memmott, and Michelle Teran. It was remarkable for being an extremely long e-lit reading that was also very compelling throughout and offered a wide range of work, never lagging at any point during the three hours. The video is just over 11 minutes.