Grand Text Auto

If you thought my last post about a 32 byte (plus 2 byte load address) Commodore 64 demo was esoteric, wait until you burrow into this one.

Back in March at Lovebyte I released a C64 demo that is a total of 6 bytes. I contrived this one so that the 4b of code end up “wedged” into a zero-page routine that runs every time RETURN is pressed. The effect is a pulsing pattern on the border. (You can just as easily make the screen pulse, which I personally find less aesthetically pleasing because the pulsing in that case happens over any text that is on the screen. It’s also a bit more eye watering and more likely to trigger seizures.) While it’s a very simple effect, I don’t know of any demo at all for this platform that has this file size or any smaller one. Some extensive trickery was involved in injecting my code into existing memory contents to produce this effect.

Yesterday I wrote a little demoscene production, an intro, called “Tyger Tyger.” It’s a Commodore 64 machine language program with 32 bytes of code and the requisite 2 byte header, found on all C64 PRG files. It only garnered third place out of five entries in the 256b compos at @party 2021, behind two impressive entries that were for a different platform (DOS) and went to the limit of allowable code (eight times as much).

We had a great panel at SXSW Interactive on March 11, exploring several radical ways in which langauge and computing are intersecting. It was “Hacking Language: Bots, IF and Esolangs.” I moderated; the main speakers were Allison Parrish a.k.a. @aparrish; Daniel Temkin
DBA @rottytooth; and Emily Short, alias @emshort.

I kicked things off by showing some simple combinatorial text generators, including the modifiable “Stochastic Texts” from my Memory Slam reimplementation and my super-simple startup name generator, Upstart. No slides from me, just links and a bit of quick modification to show how easily one can work with literary langauge and a Web generator.

I had five productions (one of them a collaboration) this time around at @Party, the Boston-area demoparty.

Browser demo: “More Tongue.” This was, well, not really a standard demo, even for a browser demo, that generates nonsense poems with compact code. Like everything at demoparties, it’s been released, but I’m going to work on a post-party version, so I’m leaving the party version out of this list.

Wild: “Shortcat.”

Shortcat is a very simple encoding scheme to make bytes (thus computer programs) into pleasing Unicode tweets, IMs, etc. #demoscene

Encoder: cat x.prg | perl -pe ‘binmode STDOUT,”:utf8″;tr/x00-xff/x{2500}-x{25ff}/;’ > x.txt #demoscene

My both systematic and breezy presentation at Interrupt 3, phrased in the form of an interruption, began with a consideration of electronic literature’s “ends” and digital poetry’s “feet.” During the beginning of my presentation I played “Hexes,” a digital poem I wrote a few minutes before the session began. I went on to read every permuation of the phrase “SERVICE MY INTERRUPT FUCKFLOWERS,” using a technique famously employed by Brion Gysin on a text that includes a memorable compound word by Caroline Bergvall. I continued to read some hypothetical captions from “Feminist Ryan Gosling” image macros about Donna Haraway. I then read from “Use of Dust,” a new work that is an erasure of Alison Knowles and Janes Tenney’s “A House of Dust.” I concluded with this text:

Video of my #! reading, which I did at Google Boston on December 2, is now online.

I actually forgot to present a few things. I’d wanted to at least show something from both Memory Slam and Renderings. Ah, well.

Video of my #! reading, which I did at Google Boston on December 2, is now online.

I actually forgot to present a few things. I’d wanted to at least show something from both Memory Slam and Renderings. Ah, well.

Arts at MIT has a nice new article about my book #!, one that is very aptly titled. It’s by Sharon Lacey. I read from the book at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT on October 22.

My next reading, on December 2, will be at Google in the Authors@Google series.

The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction meets once again tomorrow (Monday 2014-11-24) in its regular meeting-place, the Trope Tank. We meet at 6:30 in MIT’s room 14N-233.

There is much to discuss and celebrate, such as the conclusion of the IF Comp – congrats to Sean M. Shore for his 1st place game Hunger Daemon, and to all the other winners. Besides that there’s the recent release of Hadean Lands by PR-IF stalwart Andew Plotkin. And, today there’s a front-page New York Times article about IF, and Twine games specifically. I’m sure I forgot some things we have to celebrate, so come by to see what those things are.

I’m doing two Central Texas readings from my book of programs and poems #! this weekend:

San Antonio: The Twig Book Shop

Friday, Nov 21 at 5pm
The Twig Book Shop
in The Pearl (306 Pearl Parkway, Suite 106)

Austin: Monkeywrench Books

Saturday, Nov 22 at 4pm
Monkeywrench Books
(110 N Loop Blvd E)

Today I’ll offer a discussion of porting and translation in computational art and literature at the ATNE Salon, Boston Cyberarts Gallery. The event’s at 7:30pm; the gallery is in the Green Street T Station, on the Orange Line in Jamaica Plain.

I was delighted to be at the first NYU ITP Code Poetry Slam a few hours ago, on the evening of November 14, 2014. The work presented was quite various and also very compelling. Although I had an idea of what was to come (as a judge who had seen many of the entires) the performances and readings exceeded my high expectations.

A reading I did from historical computational poetry kicked off the event. I read from a new set of reimplementations, in JavaScript and Python, that I developed for the occasion. The set of four pages/Python programs is called Memory Slam. It contains:

Nick Montfort presents #! in the atrium of MIT’s building E15, just steps from the Kendall T stop. It’s October 22, Wednesday, at 6:30pm, and thanks to the List Visual Arts Center. The book is Montfort’s new one from Counterpath Press, consisting of programs and poems. Please, come join me!

Here are some photos from the opening of the show More Human at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery on September 12.

The site for the show also features a PDF of the catalog [2.5 MB].

My piece in the show is From the Tables of My Memorie. I read a bit from the piece last night, when I spoke at Boston Cyberarts with several other artists about our work and the theme of the show.

I’ll be speaking at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery again on November 19, this time about ports and translations in computational art – the topic of my Renderings project. That event is at 7:30pm. The gallery is in the Green St T Station on the Orange Line.

ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program) at NYU is having a Code Poetry Slam on November 14. And they are seeking entries now! Send them along no later than November 7.

Call for Participation

THE END(S) OF ELECTRONIC LITERATURE

The 2015 Electronic Literature Organization conference and festival will take place August 5-7th 2015. The conference will be hosted by the Bergen Electronic Literature research group at the University of Bergen, Norway with sessions at venues including the University of Bergen, Det Akademiske Kvarteret, the Bergen Public Library, the University of Bergen Arts library, and local arts venues. Bergen is Norway’s second-largest city, known as the gateway to the fjords, a festival city and cultural center with a lively and innovative arts scene.

DEADLINES

I will be reading from and discussing three recent books this Thursday at 7pm the Harvard Book Store here in sunny Cambridge, Massachusetts. These are:

#!
Counterpath Press, Denver
a book of programs & poems (pronounced “shebang”)

World Clock
Bad Quarto, Cambridge
a computer-generated novel

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
MIT Press, Cambridge
a collaboration with nine others that I organized, now out in paperback

These all express how programming can be used for poetic purposes, and how
new aesthetic possibilities can arise with the help of computing. Also,
some portions of these (which I’ll read from) are quite pleasing to read
aloud and to hear.

Yes, the first event is today, the date of this post…

September 12, Friday, 6pm-8pm

Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA
“Collision21: More Human” exhibit opens – it’s up through October 26.
“From the Tables of My Memorie” by Montfort, an interactive video installation, is included.

September 18, Thursday, 7pm-8pm

Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA
Montfort reads from #!, World Clock, and the new paperback 10 PRINT
http://www.harvard.com/event/nick_montfort/

September 24, Wednesday, 7:30pm

Boston Cyberarts Gallery, 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA
Montfort joins a panel of artists in “Collision21: More Human” for this Art Technology New England discussion.
http://atne.org/events/sept-24th-collision21-more-human/

An upcoming exhibit, a group show here in town, features a work of mine…

Collision21: More Human

The exhibition Collision21: More Human will be at the Boston Cyberarts
Gallery September 13-October 26, 2014, with an opening on Friday, September
12th from 6 to 9pm. This is a group show dealing with two closely-related
concepts: human self-modification and the human modification of our
environment. Formed by artists and technologists, the COLLISIONcollective is
premised on the sometimes abrupt intersection between art and technology.   

Here’s a conference coming up in April, with a January 1 deadline:

International Symposium

“Textual Machines”

April 18, 2015

The University of Georgia

Athens, GA

Keynote speakers

• Janet MURRAY, Professor at the School of Literature, Media and Communication
  at the Georgia Institute of Technology and interaction designer.

• Serge BOUCHARDON, Professor at the University of Technology of Compiegne and
  author of interactive fictions.

Themes and topics

(These pertain to Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7, and specifically today’s presentations. Perhaps, if you’re here, you will laugh. If you aren’t here, my regrets.)

codewiz and I (nom de nom) showed a wild demo at @party yesterday (June 14) at MIT.

It was “Waves 3 Ways (Topsy’s Revenge).” Indeed, there’s video.

The concept is based on one-line C programs to generate music, the earliest of which were by viznut. I (nom de nom) wrote a C expression in this style to generate a waveform that could be output as sound but
also consisted of all printable ASCII characters. The source is about 1kb, without much effort at compression. And the sound, in addition to driving speakers, can be (and was) connected to a Tesla coil.

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 5/5, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Jill Walker Rettberg

“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to Understand Ourselves”

This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 5/5, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Jill Walker Rettberg

“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to Understand Ourselves”

This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 5/5, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Jill Walker Rettberg

“Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to Understand Ourselves”

This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.