Grand Text Auto

Call for Papers and Works: Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe

September 11-13th, 2008 at the University of Bergen in Bergen, Norway.

The Fall 2008 Bergen Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe will build upon the work of the e-poetry seminar held in Paris in February 2008 at the University Paris 8, the 2007 e-poetry conference in Paris, the 2007 Remediating Literature Conference in Utrecht, and other recent activity in the field of electronic literature in Europe. The goals of this gathering are:

1) To provide an opportunity for European researchers to share and discuss their current research on electronic literature, e-poetry, and digital narrative forms.

2) To provide a forum for European authors of electronic literature to share, demonstrate, read, or perform their work.

3) To discuss and explore the foundation of a European research network focused on electronic literature, funding opportunities for such a network, and network activities.

The seminar will last three days and will include about 20-30 participants. The day-long meetings during the first two days will consist of short presentations of papers in panel format. Additionally, there will be performances, readings, and demonstrations of electronic literature in the evenings. The third day of the conference will be dedicated to proposing and discussing the formal establishment of a research network on electronic literature in Europe. Paper presentations should be in English. Presentation and performances of works can be made in English or in the native language of the presenter.

Yesterday was our fifth birthday. Happy Birthday GTxA!

Ian Bogost writes in “The Rhetoric of Exergaming” that gross motor activity in the living room is inhibited by coffee tables. That seems to be true in many cases, but not when your coffee table is also a functional NES controller. Kyle Downes has built such a furnishing and functional piece of hardware, which also serves as a storage box. A glass tabletop places the unit in beverage-supporting mode. While playing the NES with this controller may not qualify as a fitness activity, it’s certainly a change and engages more than the player’s thumbs. If this trend of controller embiggenment, kicked off by Grand Text Auto‘s own Mary Flanagan and her [giantJoystick], keeps rolling along, we might be playing casual games on ginormous cell phones before too long. Oops – we already are. (Thanks to Hanna for the tip about Downes’ project.)

In early 2007, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a reading of all of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

On May 15, 2008, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities will host a reading of another work that first appeared on a long scroll of paper – Adventure, in its original version by Will Crowther. “As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds, MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University.” This table-read is at noon on the basement level of McKeldin Library, in MITH’s conference room – at the table, I presume. And the reading may contain spoilers!

Personally, I’m struggling to keep my health up so I can continue playing this game, but if you’re the other way around, and in Baltimore, check out the second day of the Fourth Annual Games for Health Conference 2008. And, dear reader, if you are attending, drop us a note about how the conference is going or a link to anything you have online about your experiences.

May 8-9, 2008 / Baltimore Convention Center / Baltimore, Maryland / Web site for registration: www.gamesforhealth.org

A Review of Prehistoric Digital Poetry:
An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995
By Christopher T. Funkhouser
University of Alabama Press
2007
408 pp.
$75.00 cloth/$39.95 paper

This is an incredible compendium of decades of seldom-noticed work, guided by poetics, that has been done with language and computers. The work surveyed in this book is not “prehistoric” in the sense of being before history was developed; nor does it include pre-computer work that anticipated or laid the foundations for digital practice. But Funkhouser’s effort is clearly archaeological in terms of its scale and effort, and it is an attempt to recover a prehistory in the sense that our awareness of digital media history usually has the graphical, popular Web as its starting point. This recognition of our digital blind spot, or dark age, was what also motivated me and Noah to try to fill in a similar gap with The New Media Reader, which collects materials from WWII to the WWW.

Why must you hate gamers, game studies? Thus rants classics professor Roger Travis in The Escapist. Ian Bogost rants back.

Here’s something that’s new on the Web: Planet Interactive Fiction, an aggregration of blog posts (from Grand Text Auto among other fine places) about IF. Christopher Armstrong has set this up and, as you can see from a visit, it’s buzzing with useful IF information and discussion.

The book reviews at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies have been an extremely valuable resource for digital media scholars. The site has been online since 1996; it provides information about events and courses as well as about books. The book reviews in particular have helped those with different approaches (from literature, the visual arts, history, the social sciences, law, and so on) learn about important new media work in adjacent areas, and, of course, has helped to keep scholars aware of the new books available for personal consumption and use in courses. The site has been an important part of the discourse about digital media, one of the really important sites, along with ebr (Electronic Book Review), for discussion of book-length studies and arguments.

For one thing, I have to note that interactive fiction must be resurgent. There’s a vodka ad placed in a few Cambridge, Massachusetts bus stops that refers to text adventures pretty directly.

The Atari 2600 could have been a player-programmable system! Fathom that.

If you were old enough to hold a joystick in 1978, you have encountered the work of Rob Fulop. Early in his career Rob made a name for himself as an Atari 2600 game programmer and designer, responsible for the highly successful cartridges Demon Attack (Billboard’s Video Game of the Year in 1982), Cosmic Ark (1982), Fathom (1983), as well as the 2600 ports of Missile Command (1981) and Night Driver (1978) from the original arcade games.

This has been so overexposed as to finally oblige a post – so, sorry if you’ve already heard it. There’s a set of backup files from the main Infocom disk that exists and seems to be in very small-scale but discernible circulation. Among other things, it contains emails about the eventually scuttled sequel to the game Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky, design notes for this sequel, and two early very incomplete but working mock-ups of it. Andy Baio’s lengthy post on Waxy.org unearths an email conversation about the never-completed game Milliways, ak.a. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe from more than 20 years ago.

The last of the senior animators of the original core group at Disney (a.k.a the “nine old men”), National Medal of Arts recipient, and co-author of The Illusion of Life, the gold standard character animation reference.

Putting aside unnecessarily pretentious claims such as “The worlds first piece of online conceptual video game art”, Stewart Hogarth’s The Naked Game is brilliant.

Welcome to the Naked Game. What you are seeing is a primitive version of ‘Pong’, being played by two artificial intelligences, with the entire code governing the mechanics of the game exposed below it, and the variables affecting the mechanics to the right. Furthermore, you can remove lines of code and see the effects in real time.

I kind of think of this as the Web 2.0 indie game version of HAL devolving as he sings “Daisy”.

As mentioned earlier, I very much enjoyed the first HASTAC conference. Now registration has opened for the second HASTAC iteration, themed “TechnoTravels/TeleMobility.” I’m also happy to say there will be a substantial selection of software studies content, including a panel featuring information from the first North American software studies workshop, special software studies presentations by Lev Manovich and Jeremy Douglass using the massive-resolution HiPerWall display at UC Irvine’s branch of Calit2, and a short talk by yours truly on the Expressive Processing blog-based peer review project.

Via Water Cooler Games — Chris Crawford’s presentation yesterday at the Game Developers Exchange in Atlanta, on his “Nine Breakthroughs” useful in developing Storytron. Good stuff!

Update: The Storytron site has a new look! They’re still beta, but getting close to an initial launch.

I suppose “digital materiality” (among other things, the topic that Matthew Kirschenbaum treated so well in his recent Mechanisms) is no longer widely considered an oxymoron. A scholarship is being offered this year along library and information science lines for PhD study of “Digital Materiality and the Management of Cultural Heritage Collections.” Follow the link for contact information:

Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) is offering a once-off Vice-Chancellor’s Strategic Research Scholarship for a PhD in Digital Materiality. …

From the call:

Indiecade invites independent game artists and designers from around the world to submit interactive media of all types – from art to commercial, ARG to abstract, serious to shooter – for consideration. Work-in-progress is encouraged.

A diverse jury of industry leaders will select entries for top prizes at the IndieCade @ Open Satellite Festival. All entries for the Festival will also receive consideration for presentation at the other 2008 IndieCade international showcase exhibitions.

Submissions Deadline: April 11, 2008 at Midnight PST.

For more information and to enter: www.IndieCade.com.

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Chris Funkhouser is author of the excellent volume Prehistoric Digital Poetry, which I hope to write about at greater length before too long. He told us today during the Codework workshop at WVU about Emmett Williams’s “The IBM Poem,” a 1966 computationally-generated poem and system for generating poems. I can find little information about this poem on the Web – certainly, not the specification of how the generator works, which Funkhouser was kind enough to hand out to us on paper.

Here is a partial implementation (Update: a complete implementation; my earlier version is still available) of the poem-generating process in Python which I just wrote up. You may modify or do anything you like with this. I dedicate this program to the public domain as described in the linked document. I’ve uploaded a text file containing the program that also appears in this post, below.

I just got to hear Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext,” author of Computer Lib/Dream Machines and Literary Machines) kick off the Codework workshop with his talk here at West Virginia University. I did not take notes during Nelson’s talk. The basic ideas he expounded (as one might guess) were the ones expressed in his books and in the last talk of his that I heard, in 2001 at Brown. He showed some examples of cross-document connections and transclusion in Xanadu Space, and demonstrated the underlying data representation, ZigZag.

Putting The New Media Reader together with Noah years ago meant amassing a huge variety of material from different sorts of sources. This diversity, and the sheer amount of text and images, made the book difficult to compile and edit. We knew that despite rather extreme efforts from us and from others at The MIT Press, there are minor errors throughout the book.

Daniel C. Howe and Aya’s Karpinska’s present to us, that is. I’m sure you think you don’t have time to look at it, but it’s worth the trip to their “No Time Machine,” which fetches statements from the Web about how people don’t have time, dropped into new dialogues. It’s a very pleasing piece in terms of how it sounds, looks, and ticks along. Among other things, it serves as a new media clock, along the lines of Speaking Clock, Sine Clock, and 12 o’clocks. I also found, among some flashes of humor, that it is deeply saddening to read. It is, after all, a true reflection of the things people say and write as they discuss missed opportunities and hopes they have decided not to attain.

(Update: April Foolery!) The official Website for the movie Superbad (IMDB) seems to have been hacked or something. The promotional content has been replaced with incomprehensible junk that seems to serve no commercial purpose.

Unless … a Superbad video game or similar spinoff is nearing launch, and this update signals the beginning of a new alternative realty game to promote that product.

(Update: somewhat obvious April Foolery!) News of a very surprising and innovative move in journalism: The former Los Angeles Times has transitioned to become The Los Wikiless Timespedia, “continuously updated by the fine people of Los Angeles and the World.”

“We tried basically all the gimmicks we know,” said new Editor-in-Chief Tony Cahter, recently promoted from the depleted typesetting staff. “Different fonts. Moving Marmaduke to the front page. Everything.”

The wiki news system allows readers to enter and edit articles as they please.