Grand Text Auto

Among other questions and conversation about the Electronic Literature Collection, I was pleased to get an email from Katherine Parrish (creator of MOOlipo, educational co-ordinator on Project Achieve, poetry generator generator) with a series of questions about volume one – questions that we probably deserve. One of these (about our selection criteria) was already asked by Jim Carpenter on his blog, where Scott and I left replies. I assume a few other people may be interested in this discussion. Katherine agreed to let me share her questions here along with my answers, so, they appear below…

Continuing notes from the Montreal Game Summit. The conference opened today with a keynote from NOA President Reggie Fils-Aime. While a pretty standard business talk about how Nintendo is innovating (“The Wii Proposition” etc.) I was impressed with the numbers he had to back this up. My favorite statistic: in September sales data, 20% of Nintendo DS purchasers reported they “have never played a videogame before,” and this number is growing. So they really do seem to be growing markets.

The MACHINE team here at Penn just watched Jason Nelson‘s video presentation – a bit later than would have been ideal, but as Autostart was packed with presentations and Jason’s video was sharing a computer with Scott’s head, there wasn’t a chance to see it earlier. Jason cruised through several of his pieces and encouraged us to develop projects that help technical and creative collaborators work together.

Here are some comments from the rest of the peanut gallery…

Notes from the first day of the Montreal Game Summit (excluding final keynote of the first day, which starts in a few minutes). Arrived at 1:00am this morning; feeling some serious jet lag starting in…

Penn has a journal of undergraduate research writing, now in its third issue. The journal is called Res, and the current issue (available in print and linked as a PDF from the main page) is about digital culture. Jordan Straff’s “Facebook: Revolutionizing the College Experience” provides the perspective of a student at the institution where Facebook originated. In medias Res you’ll also find an article on the digital archiving of concrete poetry, one on the copyright-inflicted woes suffered by documentary filmmakers, and two about podcasting. Hopefully the authors will continue their searching out and writing about digital media, and we’ll have more to read from them in years to come.

A new research laboratory on hypermedia art and literature, nt2: New Technologies, New Textualities, has recently started up in Montreal, “to promote the study, reading, writing, and archiving of new textualities, of hypermedia and cyberart.” Bertrand Gervais at the Université du Québec à Montréal is director of nt2, which draws together researchers from Concordia, Université de Montréal, Université de Laval, and Université de Ottawa. We were fortunate to have coordinator Anick Bergeron and Alice van der Klei join us at Autostart and provide a pamphet – both slick and well-thought-out – explaining the lab’s goals and research directions and laying out the main questions it seeks to address.

The Story of Tetris, a venerable BBC documentary now online, is certainly worth seeing, although, as is always the case when the story of video games is told in popular culture, it’s about money money money business and money. This time the story is told well, featuring thrills, blunders, and a plucky underdog negotiator who keeps a video diary. There are some politics thrown in, and no doubt played up, to make things interesting, and some nice video of a very early version of Tetris running on an old Russian computer – for the true fetishists.

This week Ben Vershbow from the Institute for the Future of the Book passed along some news about the MediaCommons project. MediaCommons is a project in development for the past couple of years by Kathleen Fitzpatrick and others to start a born-digital scholarly press focused on media studies. At its core, MediaCommons will be a social networking site where academics, students, and other interested members of the public can write and critically converse about a mediated world, in a mediated environment. The site is intended to connect scholars, producers, lobbyists, activists, critics, fans, and consumers in a wide-ranging, critically engaged conversation that is highly visible to the public. At the same time, MediaCommons will be a full-fledged electronic press dedicated to the development of born-digital scholarship: multimedia “papers,” journals, Gamer Theory-style monographs, and many other forms yet to be invented.

At Autostart I was given a wonderful gift, Craig Conley’s One Letter Words: A Dictionary. This is one of several strange and unusual dictionaries by Conley. I read about the online genesis of the book and was hoping to share the Web version with everyone here. Unfortunately, the free Web edition of the one-letter lexicon had to sacrifice itself for the good of its HarperCollinsPublished cousin, in a touching and grisly scene; it – alas – is now only available via the Internet Archive.

We’re actively fundraising and team-building for our interactive comedy-melodrama in development, The Party. Getting this project off the ground is a big and challenging task, and we’re looking for collaborators and partners.

We’ve posted a job ad on Gamasutra, seeking a Business Development Director for Procedural Arts. If you, or someone you know fits the job description, please have them apply! Serious applicants only, please.

We’ll be traveling to the SF, LA, NYC and Seattle areas over the next month or two, available to meet potential candidates.

In opening the discussion that started Autostart, Jena Osman, poet and director of the creative writing program at Temple University, asked several good questions of the attendees. We could have easily filled the remaining time in the discussion with trying to answer these, but we moved along to hear other poets’ perspectives and didn’t get to really discuss Jena’s questions, although I know that some of us were turning them over in our minds. Fortunately, Jena was kind enough to provide her questions and to allow us to post them here. I’ll starting by doing this, and perhaps will offer some answers in comments (rather than as some sort of top-level annotation) in a bit.

I’m interested in the differences in terms of the reading process between texts that are pre-digital and then put up online and texts that are made with the screen in mind. it seems like they’re calling for two different kinds of attention. At least two. With the former I always feel a strain, that I’d much rather print it out and read (but maybe that’s generational). Unless they somehow acknowledge this transfer from hard text to screen – like Brian Kim Stefans’ rendition of Creeley’s “I Know A Man” or his other “One Letter at a Time Pieces.” (And I’m curious to learn about other examples of digital transcription.) But with etexts, I often feel like I’m reading much more for process and activity than for content – I’m reading the action of reading. What does it mean to separate out the act of reading from the text itself so distinctively?

Continuing the recent trend of feature articles about games and game designers in highbrow magazines (1 2 3), Will Wright is profiled in The New Yorker by one the magazine’s tech-friendly writers, John Seabrook, and accompanied by a sweet illustration by Istvan Banyai (one of my favorite contemporary illustrators).

While the material on Spore, E3, etc. will be very familiar to GTxA readers, the piece does delve into Will’s background and personal life more than anything else I’ve read on him.

(Also there’s a new short piece on serious games in The Utne Reader.)

Our featured readers ready for the discussion after the reading: Stuart Moulthrop, Aya Karpinska, Aaron Reed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, and Mary Flanagan. The piece “Talking Cure,” by Noah and others, was the last one presented and can be seen on the flat panel in the upper left.

The Electronic Literature Organization has released the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. The Collection, edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, is an anthology of 60 eclectic works of electronic literature, published simultaneously on CD-ROM and on the web at collection.eliterature.org. Another compelling aspect of the project is that it is being published by the Electronic Literature Organization under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5), so readers are free to copy and share any of the works included, or for instance to install the collection on every computer in a school’s computer lab, without paying any licensing fees. The Collection will be free for individuals.

What better time to post about Autostart than from an electronic writing ‘jam’ at the Kelly writers’ house at UPenn? Its been a fun two days here. Yesterday was filled with compelling

The full announcement and Web site with participant bios are already up, but here’s a quick run-down of what’s coming up at the Writers House:

The festival is in Philadelphia, PA, at 3805 Locust Walk on the Penn campus. We’re celebrating the release of the Electronic Literature Collection volume 1, which is being published on CD-ROM and the Web. AUTOSTART attendees will get a copy of the CD edition.

The big events are the discussion (1-2:30pm) and the reading (5:30-7:30pm) on Thursday. There’s an open house between these to allow people to drop in for discussion with festival participants, to see the ELC vol 1, and to take tours of it given by me and Stephanie Strickland.

Join me at this weekend’s Stumptown Comics Festival, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. I’ll probably have the only interactive exhibit there, besides the hundred or more comic artists themselves ;-)

I thought I’d bring Façade there, since its dramatic content and visual style were heavily inspired by Adrian Tomine’s Optic Nerve and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball, and comics folks might dig it. Check out this Lichtenstein, anything look familiar?

Also I’m looking for an illustrator for a poster to visualize and promote The Party. Right now I’ve got my eye on the work of Portland’s Colleen Coover, which is fabulous, but who knows who else I’ll meet.

October 31st is the deadline for submissions to a digital narrative panel, co-sponsored by GTxA compatriots Writer Response Theory, at the “3rd Online Congresss of the Observatory for Cybersociety.” Full papers are required, and 10-32 pages is the normal range, though the length restrictions are flexible. More details follow.

My contribution to the Tate’s e and eye project has just gone live: “e and eyeToy.” Where else can you get Myron Krueger, Camille Utterback, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, EyeToy: Play and much more all bundled into one short essay?

Also, if you’ve called for an “e and eye” reservation, but found them all full, I’ve been told that the Tate has now expanded the number of available reservations. The next event is tonight, after which there’s one on the 30th of October and the series concludes on the 13th of November.

iDream Interactive’s Rot Rox, which “simulates a human friend,” is claimed to be the first Apple OS X Dashboard widget “with Personality.” You might find higher-quality friends and better conversationalists by joining a cult, but this is a slick and telling piece of work. It runs on a proprietary, underpowered, new, and trendy platform (the Dashboard); incorporates about the level of verbal skill that Eliza did 40 years ago, but without the clever framework of a therapeutic session; and integrates standard Mac voices and an eye-follow-mouse gimmick. My opinion of the bot may be artificially deflated, because it is supposed to do something clever with iTunes, which I don’t use – perhaps there’s a great gimmick there. Of course, I wanted a better conversation and a more amusing framework for this interaction. I’m not sure exactly how to break the ice in the “there’s a metal man on your dashboard” situation. As the digital equivalent of a stress ball or other corporate toy, though, there’s no point in being disappointed about this empty robot-suit. It’s a good thing that people are continuing the march of bots and virtual characters into new niches of the digital world.

Those who can’t make it all the way from Texas to Philadelphia for AUTOSTART next week can still catch a grand several days of electronic media art…

.::::: TEXELECTRONICA ’06 :::::.
International Forum, Exhibition & Performance-Series featuring
Electronic Media Art & Music (Dallas/Ft Worth, Texas, USA)

–Theme: SPIN: SOCIETY, PERSONA, INTERACTIVITY & NETWORKS–

* 3-Day Forum: Fort Worth Modern Art Museum, Oct. 27-29
Free for the public with a suggested donation of $15 for 5
sessions, or $5 per session.
* Kickoff event Thursday night Oct. 26th starting at 7pm
* Nightly Exhibitions & Performances: DFW area art spaces

Ian Bogost announces his and Persuasive Games’ new Arcade Wire game, Oil God.

+ =

You are an Oil God! Wreak havoc on the world’s oil supplies by unleashing war and disaster. Bend governments and economies to your will to alter trade practices. Your goal? Double consumer gasoline prices in five years using whatever means necessary: start wars, overthrow leaders, spawn natural disasters ? even beckon the assistance of extra-terrestrial overlords. The game explores the relationship between gas prices, geopolitics, and oil profits.

Rumor has it that Ian’s original game idea, Crack God, was deemed too controversial and not newsworthy enough by his editor.

Michael and Noah are at a A Multi-Discipinary Approach to Computer Games at UC Irvine. We’re trading off coverage (and remember that we’re just reporting it as we hear it — don’t quote the speakers without hearing it from them). Today’s speakers come from backgrounds ranging from CSCW (Bonnie Nardi, “Liminoid Play in World of Warcraft”) to computer graphics (Bill Tomlinson, “A Technique for Improving Cross-device Graphics and Animation for Multi-Device Games”) to AI (Michael’s “Towards Game Generation”) to game design (Tracy Fullerton’s “Process of Discovery: The Night Journey Project as Game/Art Research”).

Spreading the disciplinary umbrella further, the first speaker is Walt Scacchi discussing “Computer Gaming as a Social Movement.”

If you want to spend a few days of gloomy January in beautiful Italy, and you are interested in how current research on computer games calls for clarification of philosophical issues, then hopefully you have an abstract ready to go (or nearly so). The deadline for “The Philosophy of Computer Games” — to be held in Modena/Reggio Emilia, Italy, on January 25-27, 2007 — is tomorrow, October 16. Details follow.

A new group of digital maquettes for “america jesus tOrture,” Joseph Nechvatal’s recent series of paintings, is now online. Nechavatal’s paitings are acrylic on canvas, created with digital assisstance and, in this case, incorporate images from the Abu Graib photographs. Images of some of his other computer-robotic assisted paitings have been published in Drunken Boat. More can be seen on Nechvatal’s site.