Grand Text Auto

If you liked this, you very well might like this.

(Update: The full paper “A Box, Darkly: Obfuscation, Weird Languages, and Code Aesthetics” by Michael Mateas and Nick Montfort is online.)

They approach the podium. The screen goes dark, then blue. There is some struggling with cords and configurations. Fingers and bodies struggle with the oppressive apparatus, and conquer it. Their title and names appear on the screen. Then we begin.

Montfort, looking dapper in a trademark wrinkle-free button down blue shirt, black pants, black shoes and wearing a multiplicity of university-issued rings, began the presentation by invoking Donald Knuth’s discussion of reading the program SOAP as like “hearing a symphony.” Montfort then discussed the idea of code as having an aesthetic for human readers. He cited the observation from Maurice Black’s dissertation that while terms like “elegant” and “beautiful” flow freely in discussions of code in computer science, they have been exiled from the vocabulary of literary and cultural theory. This idea of an established notion of coding aesthetic provides a context for the discussion of the “dark side to coding,” obfuscated code, which is “contrived to foil human legibility rather than enhance it.”

I really enjoyed the ELINOR reading Friday night at the Copenhagen LiteraturHaus. I get so used to seeing the same crowd of folks presenting work in electronic literature, that it’s always a wonderful and pleasant shock to see people from other parts of the world than the one I’m accustomed to exploring ways of working with literary texts in digital environments in their own ways, in their own language. Performing artists included poet Christian Yde Frostholm from Denmark, Johannes Helden from Sweden, Marko Niemi from Finland & Noah Wardrip-Fruin from Northern California and elsewhere. Helden read his poem to an accompanying digital animation and soundtrack. Frosthelm’s work was a fascinating version of what from the perspective of a non-Swedish-speaker seemed to be a Beckettian story adapted in Flash making use of patterns and repetitions, words clumping and clustering and rearranging themselves on the screen. Of the Scandanavian authors I was most impressed with Marko Niemi‘s work, a variety of simple but distinctive and thoughtfully language experiments in flash and html. Niemi writes both in Finnish and English, and presented English language work at the reading. Jill Walker was the emcee, and the host of the Literaturhaus kept the bar open late, as the DAC attendees clustered round tables with old friends and new. Noah’s reading of Talking Cure and video demo of Screen were also highlights of the evening. Torill posted a great photo of Noah’s reading from the portable Talking Cure intallation on Flirckr. Jill also posted several photos of the reading.

This session includes:
– Ole Ertløv Hansen: Neuroaesthetics and the Digital Interactive Experience
– Lewis, Nadeau: Inter-inactivity
– Robert Sweeny: Net_work_ed

More DAC…

I have only a few selected links from the three interesting talks in this panel, not even sketchy notes; but here they are:

First up was Signe Schou, René Toft: A Theoretical Model for Experience and Social Interaction in Digitally Enhanced Environments; a detailed theoretical model which I could not hope to relate here, even had I made it to the beginning of the presentation – but I’ll link more information about it if I can find it online.

Next, Lone Koefoed Hansen, Jakob Wamberg: Interface or Interlace? Or How Art is Mediated in Augmented Reality. The fascinating works discussed included The Path of Illusion, Blendie, Exhale (breath between bodies), and Augmented Fish Reality.

There are three papers in this session:

– Douglass, Marino, Dena: .Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies
– Scott Rettberg: All Together Now: Collective Knowledge, Collective Narratives, and Architectures of Participation
– Mateas, Stern: Procedural Authorship: A Case-Study of the Interactive Drama Façade

Friday opened with a great session, dealing with non-commerical games. Who’d have thought?

Ludica – Losh – Camper

Please join us [for the Upgrade! at Eyebeam, New York City,] on Thursday, December 8, for a talk with poet, writer and programmer Nick Montfort. We’ll celebrate the launch of his new work Book and Volume, and close 2005.

[Details below…]

William Gillespie and I have a new piece, rather simple but jointly written in an interesting way, and programmed in Processing. We wrote it from the end to the beginning, alternating sentences. It’s in the new issue of BathHouse Magazine: A Journal of Hybrid Arts. Here’s “The Executor.”

Now I’m in the second track of session 4, which includes:

– Maria Engberg: Stepping into the River
– Louisa Wei & Huaxin Wei: Illustrative Narratology for the Digital Artist/Designer
– Dene Grigar & Steve Gibson: Ephemeral Writing

In the third session of DAC we went to two parallel tracks of short papers. I’m in the second set, where the presentations are:

– Laura Ermi & Frans Mayra: Players’ Emotional Experiences with Digital Games
– Cynthia Haynes: DisArmageddon Army: Of Gods, Mods, and God Mode Rhetorics
– Lorna Macdonald: Designing for Location-Dependence

OK, I guess it’s my turn to blog now. So it continues…

I do not promise notes of this extent about every session, particularly since there are no electrical outlets nearby. But here are some notes about the first session.

Engeli – Bogost – Hutchison

A voice-recognition-enhanced version of Lynn Hershman Leeson’s DiNA, a head-and-shoulders chatterbot focused on discussing current affairs, will soon be debuted as part of her show “Selected Works: 1976 – 2005” at the Bitforms gallery in New York. Here’s a NYTimes article from last Sunday briefly reviewing the history of Hershman’s pioneering work over the decades.

(Unusually, the bot’s programmer, Colin Klingman, actually gets a mention in the article. But why not get double-billing with Hershman, something I’ve argued is necessary for programmers of non-trivially interactive art?)

Jesper Juul’s new book Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds is now out from MIT Press. I have not yet seen the book, but it has some basis in Jesper’s very high-quality dissertation of the same name, and I’m willing to recommend that people at least take a serious look at it for that reason alone. Jesper describes the book on his blog, The Ludologist, as being “brand new, all together nicer, more readable, more fun, and just better.” It’s evident from the companion site that he has put many new efforts into this new Half-Real.

I was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic, Julia Keller, for an article published in the Trib this Sunday, “Plugged-in Proust: Has e-lit come of age?” (archive). William J. Mitchell, head of the Media Arts and Sciences program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was also interviewed for the piece, which examines the relationship between control and reading technologies.

Games need BLUE SKIES! … We want to play in a HAPPY PRETEND LAND, not a shit version of an American slum full of mixed-race gangsters wearing licensed sportswear!

Indeed, if I lived in the U.K., I’d be desperate for blue skies …

I’ve gotten some sweet packages in the mail from Amazon over the past couple of weeks. My longest-anticipated purchase finally arrived from England. For the past year, I’ve had the Oulipo Compendium on order from Amazon UK. It seemed impossible to find a copy of the 1998 Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alistair Brotchie, online, or in any used bookstore. I was beginning to think that the Oulipo Compendium would turn into my Holy Grail book. I searched depsondently at my favorite used bookstores. The Strand in New York didn’t have it, nor Myopic Books in Chicago. Lo and behold, two weeks ago it arrived, laden with pounds and pounds of shipping charges and great expectations. To my delighted surprise, the Compendium is not in fact the 1998 edition but a revised and updated 2005 edition. I had seen the 1998 edition and often coveted it, but I’ve recently had the pleasure of spending some fruitful hours with the new edition. The book is organized in a pleasingly cross-referenced hypertextual encyclopedia, and provides an immersive introduction to the Oulipo, both as a historical introduction to the group, its writers, and their work, and as a kind of workbook. Hundreds of Oulipan writing techniques ranging from the lipogram to the avalanche are explained and exemplified. It’s the type of book that makes you want to spend the afternoon playing with language at your keyboard. I’ll be teaching the book next semester in a new course titled “Art, Games, and Narrative.”

its sunset at quarter to five out here on a 450 acre patch of land in Connecticut called ‘i-park,’ where i’m doing an artist’s residency. The sky is currently a mix of purple and deep deep blue. Several other artists are here, a ceramicist from Russia, a painter from Australia, and a sculptor from Wales at the moment. I’m pleased to be with people who are engaged with other materials unrelated to screens and cables.
It’s very quiet here.

• Updated “Interactive Fiction Entrees” with suggested IF for newcomers – ten pieces that you can download, and five remarkable old-school pieces that aren’t freely available these days, except perhaps as abandonware.
• Perform (Perceptron Classifier in Inform), for my fellow Inform programmers.

I presented several digitial pieces to Charles Bernstein‘s English 589.301 / Comparative Literature 577.301 class (Modern, Modernist, Contemporary: Reading Poetry/Poetry Reading) yesterday night. I selected these to connect to existing discussion in the seminar and to make for an interesting sequence. I wasn’t trying to develop a “greatest hits” album, but a series of pieces that was interesting to show and briefly discuss for this particular group.

I think it went extraordinarily well – we not only went through enough of each of these pieces to allow everyone to see how they are operated (so that they can be pursued and read closely later on), but we even got into discussion of scriptons and textons, the Cave at Brown, and obfuscated code. Many thanks to the seminar participants who showed up the night before Thanksgiving! Here’s the lineup I came up with…

Hanna Wallach spoke today at Penn about women in free and open source software development. She described the pervasive nature of free software, the “four freedoms” that are referred to in the word “free,” and the distinction between the terms “free” and “open source.” Hanna also mentioned several commercial free software endeavors and many large-scale cases of free software use. She also showed a map with many Debian developers indicated, throughout the globe – at least one in Antartica.

The startling statistic that introduced Hanna’s discussion of women in free software: while 28% of proprietary software developers are female, only about 1.5% of free software developers are. This is certainly the sort of result that provokes a vigorous WTF? reaction, isn’t it?

I had a most unusual visitor a few weeks ago.

We have a couple of tenure-track faculty openings in the Digital Media program at Georgia Tech.

Positions in Digital Media

Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture is seeking to fill two (2) positions at the rank of assistant or associate professor in the emerging discipline of Digital Media. Applicants should have expertise in one or more of the fields listed below and be prepared to teach at the undergraduate and graduate level in LCC’s suite of programs in computational and digital media. A Ph.D. in an appropriate field is required, as is computational proficiency and a demonstrated capacity for significant original research/creative work. Expertise in educational technology is desirable, as is a proven record or significant potential in generating external funding.