Grand Text Auto

Purple Blurb

MIT, room 14E-310

Monday 4/28, 5:30pm

Free and open to the public, no reservation required

Scott Rettberg

This Monday (2014-04-28) Purple Blurb is proud to host a screening and discussion of narrative video art work done in collaboration with Roderick Coover, including The Last Volcano, Cats and Rats, Three Rails Live, and Toxicity. (The last two are combinatory pieces; Three Rails Live is a collaboration between Coover, Rettberg, and Nick Montfort.) These pieces deal with personal and global catastrophes and are written across languages, with one of the voices in Cats and Rats in (subtitled) Norwegian. They continue Rettberg’s work on novel-length electronic literature projects and his frequent collaboration with others.

The final report of the Media Systems workshop has just been released:

“Envisioning the Future of Computational Media.”

You can download either the executive summary alone or the whole report.

I took part in the Media Systems workshop in 2012 with about 40 others from across the country. The workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Microsoft Studios, and Microsoft Research. As Noah Wardrip-Fruin, co-author and co-organizer of the workshop, writes on the HASTAC site:

After just listening to numerous covers of Main Titles from Blade Runner by Vangelis, I just got word that “Machine Fantasies: A Workshop on Music Technologies – Past, Present, and Future” is happening April 4-5, 2014 here in town, at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center of Tufts University.

Here’s the Boston.com article on our exhibit “Programs at an Exhibition,” which opens Thursday (March 6). Hope to see you at the opening, which is 6pm-9pm.

Nick Montfort & Páll Thayer

Programs at an Exhibition

At the Boston Cyberarts Gallery
141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
Located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line
Phone number: 617-522-6710

The exhibit runs March 6 through March 16.

Opening: 6pm-9pm, Thursday March 6.

I’ll post more on this soon, but for now, let me invite you to the opening of my & Páll Thayer’s show at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery: 141 Green Street, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130, located in the Green Street T Station on the Orange Line, 617-522-6710.

The opening is 6pm-9pm on Thursday March 6.

Purple Blurb, MIT’s digital writing series organized by Prof. Nick Montfort of the Trope Tank, powers on, thanks to the four excellent writers/artists who will be presenting in Spring 2014. All events this semester will be held Mondays at 5:30pm in MIT’s room 14E-310.

March 10, 5:30pm in 14E-310:

Páll Thayer
Microcodes

Short Perl programs that are also artworks, presented for viewers to read, download, and execute. Thayer will trace some key steps showing how he went from his background in painting and drawing to presenting code as his artwork.

Those who have recently started developing electronic literature are welcomed to apply to have work in the Gallery of E-Literature First Encounters. Feb 15 is the deadline; the gallery will be at the “Hold the Light” conference, ELO 2014, in Milwaukee.

The next Electronic Literature Organization conference, to take place in Milwaukee on June 19-21, has just extended its deadline for submission to December 15. Media Art Show proposals and abstracts for academic talks are both welcome.

(The demoparty this Saturday in Montréal.)

And my VIC-20 and C64.

Let’s roll.

Gamebook guru Demian Katz is putting on a conference on interactive fiction, print and online, in Villanova’s Popular Culture Series. The conference does have an academic focus, but also seeks to introduce new sorts of academics to IF.

Info is up now at the vupop site, where you can read about the conference or submit a proposal. Or, if there’s enough light available, examine yourself/take inventory!

Aha – and the deadline for submitting something is November 1!

I was fascinated to find that Non-Event, “a Boston-based concert series devoted to the presentation of the finest in experimental, abstract, improvised, and new music from New England and around the world,” will be bringing several sound poets to the area soon. Steve McCaffery and Christian Bök have graced my Purple Blurb series at MIT recently, and I am very much looking forward to the ululations and other sounds of other sound poets.

Vincent Barras and Jaques Demierre are coming to the misnamed swissnex Boston (it’s in Cambridge) Monday, October 7 at 6:30pm, for $10/$5 for students. That’s tomorrow.

A new short, snappy, and expanding poem by Nick Montfort, Jerome Fletcher, Talan Memmott, Serge Bouchardon, Samantha Gorman, Leonardo Flores, Scott Rettberg, Jason Nelson, and Flourish Klink is now online.

It’s pop, an ELO 2013 anthology. It requires the use of arrow keys. And it was written at the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2013 conference, Chercher le texte, in Paris.

Puzzle out the constraint that was used, and feel free to continue the project…

(I have the feeling that I’ve omitted the name of at least one contributor … please let me know if I left you off the list; I will gladly remedy that on this post and on the pop page itself.)

Chris Funkhouser’s SoundBox 2012 has been posted in the online gallery space of DDDL, which I believe stands for Digital, Digital, Digital, digitaL. Or maybe Digital Digital Digital Littérature? There is a rich array of work up there; Chris’s contribution blends sounds with the carefully-recorded speech that he has recorded across many conferences and beyond, providing a rich audio record of activity in electronic literature and E-Poetry. As the description of the work says,

Noah Wardrip-Fruin was an organizer the Media Systems workshop at UCSC just over a year ago, August 26-29, 2012. It was an extraordinary gathering about computational media and its potential, with famous participants from a variety of disciplines and practices. The workshop’s sponsors were also remarkable: the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Microsoft Research, and Microsoft Studios. Now, Noah is working to put high-quality videos of talks from this event online, and to offer some very useful framing discussion of those talks.

Next Saturday (September 21, 2013) is Boston Software Freedom Day. This event, like the Boston Festival of Independent Games yesterday, is also taking place in Cambridge rather than Boston – at Cambridge College, 1000 Mass Ave, between Central and Harvard Squares.

Come by to hear about and discuss freedoms on the computer and online, privacy, and government transparency. I’ll offer one of the very quick lightning talks at the end of the day, discussing some of the history of creative computing and its relationship to software freedom.

The event is not only libre, but also no-cost. And the cake to celebrate the 30th anniversary of GNU is not a lie.

There’s a nice article by Illya Szilak, with a discussion/reporting by Melinda White, about the Library of Congress Electronic Literature Showcase. This ran April 3-5; I was down there to read from Ad Verbum and Taroko Gorge and to speak about electronic literature’s history with libraries on the last day of the event and exhibit. And it was an excellent exhibit.

Thanks to Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara, the Trope Tank has a new technical report, TROPE-13-01: “Electronic Literature for All: Performance in Exhibits and Public Readings.”

This report covers readings of interactive fiction done by the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, the Boston area IF group, and the exhibit Games by the Book, discussed previously on here. But there is much more detail in this report about how these attempts managed to share computational works (works that are both games and e-lit) with the public. If you are interested in outreach and presentations of this sort, please take a look.

Here is the call for artistic proposals for the ELO 2013 “Chercher le Text” in Paris!

The “chercher le texte” event deals with literary issues and text-oriented multimedia practices on digital devices: digital books, texts generated or animated through programming, fiction hypertexts, “manipulable”, playable works, or on the contrary works whose very program embraces literariness. The considered devices range from computers to mobile devices, including social networks. They can be used in various contexts: installations, performances, personal devices designed for digital reading. These contexts range from solo reading to collaborative or participative reading.

Kathi Inman Berens storified some nice media elements relating to the 2013 electronic literature exhibit and reading at the MLA Convention.

The news service of my school at MIT, the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, has an article about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10.

Also, there has been some furious and pretty amazing program creation and compaction going on in DOS/x86 land. It all seems to have started when demoscener Trixter (a.k.a. Jim Leonard) decided to port 10 PRINT to x86 assembly. His first, straightforward version was 42 bytes long, but he was quickly able to chop it down by replacing the random number generator with a single instruction: 25 bytes. Getting ready of some of the nice and tidy but strictly unnecessary startup and shutdown code brought the program down to 15 bytes. Then, thanks to the clever use of an opcode that I’d never heard of before which is meant for string comparison and is called SCAS, he was able to trim the code to 13 bytes — the shortest he thought it could ever be.

Happy new year!

A few updates related to our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 …

Booksellers had some problems keeping the book in stock in recent weeks. The MIT Press is addressing this by printing more copies.

Thanks to the good work of guest organizer Gretchen Henderson, the Purple Blurb schedule for Spring 2013 is already set! I hope to see you locals at some or all of them.

All Spring 2013 events are Mondays at 5:30pm in MIT’s room 14E-310. This is in the East wing of Building 14, across the building’s courtyard from the Hayden Library. Building 14 is not part of the Media Lab Complex. The Spring 2013 schedule is thanks to guest organizer Gretchen Henderson.

February 11, 5:30pm in 14E-310

Jason McIntosh

Presents the Interactive Fiction “The Warbler’s Nest”

Thanks to the good work of guest organizer Gretchen Henderson, the Purple Blurb schedule for Spring 2013 is already set! I hope to see you locals at some or all of them.

All Spring 2013 events are Mondays at 5:30pm in MIT’s room 14E-310. This is in the East wing of Building 14, across the building’s courtyard from the Hayden Library. Building 14 is not part of the Media Lab Complex. The Spring 2013 schedule is thanks to guest organizer Gretchen Henderson.

February 11, 5:30pm in 14E-310

Jason McIntosh

Presents the Interactive Fiction “The Warbler’s Nest”