Grand Text Auto

Lisa Nakamura is giving the talk Subjects & Objects of Interactivity: Racial Formation and Media Convergence at UC Riverside’s Global Interface Mellon Workshop, this Wednesday (May 25) at 5pm. She’ll discuss the interface-like logic of Jennifer Lopez’s 2000 video “If You Had My Love.”

The Electronic Literature Organization’s new site is now in place.

A very visible feature of the site is a showcase that features exemplary electronic literature. The five most recent items appear at the top of the main page, and everything featured to date is accessible via the “Showcased E-Lit” link just below the search field. The showcase is an excellent descriptive complement to the extant Electronic Literature Directory, a large index of information about e-lit. An RSS feed of the showcase is available so that readers can automatically keep bookmarks to the current entry or syndicate the showcase on their own pages.

Winners of Turbulence’s Comp_05

New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. announced the winners of its Turbulence Comp_05 Juried International Net Art Competition. Five works were selected.

One work is from a French Team consisting of Markia Dermineur and Khalil Bennis (with others) (Markia worked with Stephane Degoutin on Googlehouse) . A second work is from Troy Innocent and Ollie Olson with the Shaolin Wooden men and Harry Lee (Australia). A third work is an Urban interention work from Brazil featuring several artists (Ruiz, Freire, Delacroix, Djahdjah, Carlos, Murmur, and the Wells). The fourth project is “Gothamberg” by Marek Walczak, with Wattenberg, Selbo, Paul, Lehrer, Kindvall, and Crow) from the US– a project which appears to extend Walczak’s Apartment project to larger realms. I’m very excited that a project I’m developing with collaborator Daniel Howe is among this great company, for it succeeded in the competition as the fifth work. This project is called [meme.garden] and is an affective search engine tool-artwork.
Let the production begin!

We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.

We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be less than 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.

In November I went to Germany for “Netzliteratur – Umbrüche in der literarischen Kommunikation,” a fascinating gathering at the University of Siegen. Now the presentations are online as a special issue of Dichtung Digital.

In the writeup of my presentation — Playable Media and Textual Instruments — I try to develop further some of the ideas mentioned in GTxA posts on saying “this is not a game” and the logics along which play proceeds.

Also online are the presentations from Marie-Laure Ryan, Markku Eskelinen, Frank Furtwängler, Mela Kocher, Roberto Simanowski, Philippe Bootz, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Loss Pequeno Glazier, Laura Borras Castanyer, Susanne Berkenheger, and Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer.

Black, Maurice J. 2002 “The Art of Code.” PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. [Department of English.]

As the abstract says:

Arguing that software’s increasing abstraction from hardware has defined computer programming practices for the last half-century, this dissertation shows how that abstraction has shaped the aesthetics, politics, and professional culture of programming. Specifically, the dissertation examines how some programmers have adopted a literary approach to coding, describing carefully crafted code as “beautiful,” “elegant,” “expressive,” and “poetic”; writing and reading programs as literary texts; and even producing hybrid artifacts that are at once poems and programs. This project has two central goals: first, to show how identifiably linguistic sensibilities have influenced programming theory and culture; second, to show how programming theory, as a body of knowledge that thinks deeply about the semantics and organization of textual structures, can contribute to the project of literary study.

While we sometimes like to abuse robots, sometimes we like to frolic with them — see this Chris Anderson blog post.

It’s reminiscent to me of Simon Penny’s charming and nimble Petit Mal.

(Okay maybe this illustration to the left is a bit of a dramatization, but I was inspired by the story.)

(via collision detection)

When I write cute little bios describing what I do as a writer, I usually mention that I collaborate, because, after all, I do. So I was a bit interested to see that the Spring 2005 Authors’s Guild Bulletin has a writeup of a symposium the Guild held. The piece is entitled “Strange Bedfellows: The Rewards and Pitfalls of Collaboration.”

Game development execs are smarter than you might think — they understand what’s important. From a new NYTimes article on the upcoming generation of game consoles:

Relying solely on wide-screen, high-definition images to sell a title creates “empty visual calories,” said Glenn Entis, a vice president and the chief visual officer for Electronic Arts. “We’re looking for an emotional impact.” The company wants to create characters “that feel like there’s a mind” inside, he said.

You might ask, what’s their plan to accomplish this?

I heard about GTxA commenter Raph Koster’s “The Laws of Online World Design” recently on ifMUD. It’s a provocative and thoughtful list of principles, some of which were evident back in the days of Habitat. While the page itself is not new – an Internet Archive search shows the page has been around at that location since 2000 – and there are no arguments offered for why these laws obtain, the page is still well worth reading, and has several thoughts that apply to one-player games as well.

Having used the Internet Archive to check the date this page was first posted, I also fetched the May 11, 2000 version of the page (the earliest one) and then ran diff on this old page and the current HTML. Which leads me to wonder…

Fredrik Ramsberg just started a Game of the Week page to foster good ol’ USENET discussion on rec.games.int.fiction (also accessible via Google Groups). Discussion of Jacqueline Lott’s The Fire Tower is already underway…

New on Turbulence is “Why Rock?” The piece offers sound works by net artists with “real or supposed rock affinities.” Talan Memmott (real rock affinity) is one. And then – I never thought of Richard Stallman as a rocker (mp3), or, actually, as a net artist, but hey.

The project includes texts by Frédéric Madre and tutor to the Talking Heads Alan Sondheim, whose sound work Zing (wav) and whose oddly compelling video Ennui (mp4) is linked. Sondheim’s text ends with “fuck this didn’t go anywhere it’s not sounded out // (too _male_”. Alan, you’ve got a decent list of rockers who you know but let me tell you Charles Bernstein actually read on stage with Sonic Youth. You are cool and all and your video is pretty seriously frenetic but man.

Horse Less Review #2: Put Out Lights has just been put out. In it you will find fiction, poetry, and perhaps other things by Tyler Carter, Thomas Cook, Phil Cordelli, Maria Filippone, Sandy Florian, Michael Geier, Garth Graeper, Matthew Henriksen, Sean Hoade, Mark Kanak, Kirk Keen, Conan Kelly, Andrew Lux, Andrew Lynes, Clay Matthews, Carolina Maugeri, Jim Maughn, Jerry McGuire, Corey Mesler, Nick Montfort, Bryce Newhart, Scott Pierce, Marc Pietrzykowski, Nate Pritts, Maggie Queeney, Marthe Reed, Kate Schapira, Brandon Shimoda, Brian Kim Stefans, Hugh Steinberg, and Bronwen Tate.

Hermeneia, a research group focusing on literary studies and digital technology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), has teamed up with the Vinaròs Town Council to create a new award for digital literature: the “Ciutat de Vinaròs” Digital Literature prize. Submissions can be in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Catalan, and two 2,500 euro awards will be given in the categories of “Narrative” and “Poetry.” The deadline is 8th September 2005, and only unpublished works are eligible. Official details follow.

Drew Davidson passes along word of the recent fourth Media in Transition conference at MIT. From the list of abstracts and papers, it looks like the conference was indeed an interesting gathering, including quite a bit of work on nonlinearity in movies (e.g. “Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database by Jim Bizzocchi), narrative in computer games (e.g. “Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle” by Robert Buerkle), emergence in nonfiction film (e.g. “The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence” by Rod Coover) and topics in hypertext literature (e.g. “Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia” by Burcu S. Bakioglu). The abstracts suggest some interesting interdisciplinary fusions, and many of the abstracts are also linked to full papers.

Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, has some incredibly important questions about reading in the digital age, and he’s started a formidable project to begin to answer them. His Transliteracies project begins with a conference at UCSB in June:

“UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference

Launching the Transliteracies Project

June 17-18, 2005 / Univ. of California, Santa Barbara / McCune Room (6020 HSSB)

Electronic games are a new topic of study in the field of information ethics, and an area that my collaborators and I have been working in to ultimately make more socially conscious games.

The International Review of Information Ethics journal has a call out for a special issue on the subject!

Deadline for abstracts: June 30, 2005.

First off, a happy 2nd anniversary to Grand Text Auto – here’s to many more years of writing and conversation by the “drivers” and by the readers and commenters, who also bring direction and make the blog what it is.

I also want to re-welcome Mary Flanagan, who has been with us for a while as a guest and now joins us as a regular “driver.” We’re not planning to expand the driver pool much more, or perhaps any more, but we all continue to admire Mary’s work as a new media critic and creator, appreciated her contributions as a guest driver, and wanted her to remain part of this project. We hope that having her name on the masthead will let her keep contributing to the conversation here and allow her to more easily give us the scoop on her current and future projects.

Check out the multimedia fruits of the Things That Don’t Exist Remix Contest, and if you haven’t seen the Creative Commons video that inspired this festival of digital creativity, check it out [Quicktime]. If you miss the point – maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist?

Remember that unusual alternate orthography, presented in artworks of various media, that I mentioned last year? Will, it turns out that there may be a simple explanation for it. A recently released hypertext report reveals that glyphs made of lines inscribed in circles have something to do with aliens.

Better late than never, I hope — here’s a writeup of my experience of last March’s Game Developers Conference. Perhaps the nine weeks that have passed since GDC has given me some additional long-term perspective on it all.

Personally I had less fun at this year’s conference compared to last year, because I was more stressed out this time. I was to moderate a high-profile panel on interactive story, give a programming talk and live demo with Michael on natural language in games (which we were still preparing for until minutes before the talk), and try to network with game developers that we may try to work with in the future — all self-imposed tasks of course. But all that was enough of a load to put me into a sleep-disturbed funk for the entire GDC week and beyond.

(But now I’m feeling better, especially because our interactive drama project is now so close to completion — it has taken forever to finish up all the niggling details, but we’re really, really close.)

Okay. Informed by this year’s GDC, in this post I’d like to summarize my impressions of the overall state of commercial interactive entertainment development, as well as my take on the state of interactive story development.

Pioneer in computer music (incl early computational sound generation + composition, musique concrete, etc) James Tenney will be presenting work in nyc on Sunday, May 8, 2005 at 8:00 PM

james tenney’s “postal pieces” (1965-71): a rare performance of Tenney’s Postal Pieces (1965-71). Postal Pieces is supposed to be “a remarkable series of eleven works printed on postcards.”

After spending several hours in the Apple Store Soho a week ago and being bombarded with the classic dancing silhouettes from various ipod ad campaigns from all directions, I must disclose my discomfort with depictions of the body, race, the individual, and general ‘hipness’ these campaigns infuse into the sale of albeit charming products.

I was a visitor to Apple Soho the day after the New York Times reported that 50 iPods have been stolen on NYC subways this year due to owners being easily identifiable (the distinctive white earbuds). Luckily, iPod theft represents a smaller number than cell phone theft on the subway… This is also after realising that with over 10 million iPods sold in Feb 2005 every single person in this city, and then some, could wear the thin white sash as a badge of honour. There are great figures online for the success of the iPod, such as “1.79 iPods sold every minute in 2003” and 300 million downloads from the music store marking an extreme shift in technology and cultural distribution/consumption. In fact we now have fans making ads for Apple.

I’ve been unable to reach Google.com for the last few minutes. I also can’t reach Google.ca, Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.de, Google.at, etc. And no one on ifMUD can reach any of ’em, either.

Well, while we wait for Google News to come back up and tell us what’s happened: Teoma, Altavista, Yahoo.

(Update: Google became available again within two minutes of my posting this, but then went on the blink again. Seems that 15 minutes later all but Groups and News are working, at least from my standpoint.)

In The Rake, a magazine for and about the Twin Cities, there’s a recently Slashdotted article about Post-Its (part 1, part 2) by Greg Beato, who used to write for the late, great Suck.com. The article chronicles Art Fry’s invention of the Post-It, initially as a sort of sticky bookmark rather than a radically reduced cover letter, and describes some early suggestions for naming the product: “Jot and Jerk” and “Mount and Show.” The article is mainly a wacky corporate chronology of innovation and success against all odds, but it’s interesting to think about how Post-Its played into our ecology of writing.