Grand Text Auto

The Creative Capital Foundation has announced that during the 2005-06 grant cycle, they will accept proposals for innovative literature in their emerging fields category. Creative Capital is a nonprofit organization, which acts as a catalyst for the development of adventurous and imaginative ideas by supporting artists who pursue innovation in form and/or content in the performing and visual arts, film and video, and in emerging fields. They work in partnership with the artists whom they fund, providing advisory services and professional development assistance along with multi-faceted financial aid and promotional support throughout the life of each Creative Capital project. In their press release, they define innovative literature as “work created by writers who challenge traditional notions of literary forms and concepts. We are interested in projects by literary artists who are striving to express themselves in alternative ways through manipulating language, formal structures, or new processes.” To apply for a grant, artists must first submit an Inquiry Form, which will be available February 14, 2005 on the foundation’s website. The deadline for completed Inquiry Forms is March 14, 2005; those invited to apply will be notified in June 2005.

There’s much news from Turbulence these days. First, they’re sponsoring (with the Andy Warhol Foundation) another juried international net art competition (deadline March 31). They’re also sponsoring (with Emerson College) a lecture series this spring titled “Floating Points 2: Networked Art In Public Space.” The speakers include (01.26.05) Anne Galloway; (02.23.05) Andy Deck and Ricardo Miranda Zuniga; (03.30.05) Jeff Knowlton, Naomi Spellman, and Pete Gomes; and (04.27.05) Elizabeth Goodman, Teri Rueb, Julian Bleecker and Andrew Shoben/Greyworld. And the events don’t stop there — with Art Interactive they’re firing up a Boston edition of The Upgrade! Yael Kanarek, Teri Rueb, Larissa Harris, and kanarinka are already scheduled for the Spring. Finally, Turbulence’s latest artist studio has launched, featuring hypnotic “Flash Polaroids” by Brian Kim Stefans.

Those in NYC on Saturday will want to head to the Chelsea Art Museum for a 2pm reception and talk celebrating two events: the opening of Lev Manovich’s “Mission to Earth” installation (which will run through the 26th) and the publication of his collaborative DVD Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005) created with Andreas Kratky.

In addition to Manovich, Saturday’s talk will also include luminaries Christiane Paul, Barbara London, Marty St. James, Sue Hubbard, and Ken Feinstein. The Soft Cinema DVD includes, in addition to the work of Manovich and Kratky, contributions from DJ Spooky, Scanner, George Lewis and Jóhann Jóhannsson (music), servo (architecture), Schoenerwissen/ Office for Computational Design (data visualization), and Ross Cooper Studios (media design).

Looks like A Theory of Fun for Game Design, by game designer Raph Koster, is now out, as Andrew mentioned it soon would be. Perhaps that explains why Koster didn’t update his blog in 2004.

It was great getting to hang out with Christian Bök at MLA, even if his university wrote a horribly-headlined publicity article about him. His work in progress, The Cyborg Opera, attempts to take poetry straight from the influences of jazz into techno music. Parts of the poem, using ordinary English words, imitate the sound of the music from different segments of Super Mario Bros. You can get a sample of this work in these two bits of it, “Motorized Razor” and “Mushroom Clouds” [MP3]. Yes, Christian sounds pretty much like that in person, although he uses the word “cadenza” less often.

Tired: Not a new concept, but “The Year in Photos” from The New York Times offers some gripping images from Iraq, the campaign, and elsewhere in the world and nation. Wired: The year in search queries with Google’s “2004 Interactive Zeitgeist.” Expired: Wired News publishes “What Gamers Want: Year in Review.” Apparently the N-Gage was a flop. Wait, this article is from a year ago…

I spent most of the MLA convention in a hotel room with my colleagues interviewing candidates for Americanist and Creative Writing positions at Stockton. I could say a lot about this alternatively exhilarating and exhausting experience, but suffice it to say that I left the room having learned a great deal and feeling that the state of literary studies is strong. We talked with bunch of interesting and articulate people who care about teaching, who still like reading, who were able to position their work theoretically but who were not so caught up in subspecialized jargon as to have lost their sense of why they were professing English to begin with. Both in the interviews and in the process of reviewing some 400 plus applications that preceded the interviews, I felt that there was less canned identification with well-established theoretical niche markets, e.g. “Defamiliarizing the Subaltern Otherness of Embodiment in Whiteness Studies,” and real sense of that people are branching off into comparatively new territories. My overall sense is that people are writing dissertations that live less exclusively in theoryland, and spend more time closely reading works of literature in the context of knowledge from other disciplines such as history, art, design, geography, science and yes, even new media.

William Gillespie arrives, is interviewed, and learns how to mourn Derrida at the Slought Foundation, where we meet the unfractioned Christian Bök. Back at the Convention Center, in a panel on Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein describes Reading, PA as “a place aggressively without aesthetic decoration.” Poets manifest themselves: Joshua Corey, Jena Osman, and Bob Perelman among them. Author, artist, scholar, and publisher Johanna Drucker, who has the same effect on electronic literature scholar/authors as Indiana Jones did on his archeology class, describes an Ivanhoe game and then joins Christian Bök, Scott, and me back at Slought in a public discussion, opening the exhibit of Implementation there. Matt Kirschenbaum unfolds the NORA project’s plan for doing text mining on large corpora of literature. At the book exhibit, an intrepid loot collector scores a fountain pen as well as a shopping bag with an enlarged image of an Ayn Rand postage stamp. An editor who has flown The Chronicle of Higher Education for a new, web-based publication interviews a room full of so-called “bloggers.” Visiting humanists are lured to a German restaurant, an English pub, and a sushi bar. XML markup and a 1983 USENET posting appear on a screen thanks to transparencies and an overhead projector. The heavy security at the convention provides the only hint that the Culture War may still be going on.

Apple Computer got Graphing Calculator in its stocking at the end of 1993 (and early in 1994), thanks to Santas Ron Avitzur and Greg Robbins. After their contracts had ended, they covertly entered their old building and spent six months finishing the program, “sneaking into an eight-billion-dollar corporation to do volunteer work.” Read the story from Ron; there are comments on Slashdot about this tale, too. The article on design lessons from Graphing Calculator is a good one, too, with suggestions that may not be startling, but are still certainly valid.

An interesting place to wander for a while, 99 Rooms is a site of animated interactive photographs of rooms, most of which entice you to explore and find something, to flip a switch of some kind to cause a change in the environment. Each room consists of a photo painted over with an image or character. Outside of the organ music looping in the background, the designers have also done a good job of creating an aural environment to layer to match the photographic, art, and interactive layers. There are some very simple puzzles, and the art seems to have some kind of mythical structure I haven’t figured out yet, not quite a narrative but something near it.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute is joining the ranks of schools offering game-related degree programs with its new four-year undergraduate program in computer game design. Like Georgia Tech’s undergraduate program in Computational Media, Worcester’s program combines training in computer science and the humanities (though the article incorrectly says that Worcester program is “the first field of study of its kind” to do this – Tech’s program has already launched). Interestingly, the article quotes CMU ETC’s Jesse Shell as having reservations about such programs. The ETC’s approach is to bring in students with traditional undergraduate training in the arts, humanities or engineering/computing and train them to be interdisciplinary at the masters level (similar to the approach in Tech’s IDT masters program). Schell is concerned that students in an interdisciplinary undergraduate program will have breadth without depth. My response is that at the masters level it may be too late to create designer/programmers who truly have interdisciplinary skills, people who won’t just be prepared to work as anonymous specialists on large game design teams, butwill rather be the leaders who invent new genres of interactive entertainment.

Greg Cato, a friend of mine from my Carnegie Mellon days (we met in Simon Penny’s Agents and Embodiment seminar), has a new game blog up: overanalyzed.com. His most recent post describes his experience trading MMO currency in real-world markets from his perspective as a former day-trader. His frank discussion of the intersection of virtual and real marketplaces spawned a recent terra nova thread.

Once again, there’s a new section of First Person live at electronic book review. The essays in this section (The Pixel / The Line) are all by artists who create texts for computational media that behave radically differently from texts on the printed page. They explore the relationship between text and image, the meaning of the “digital,” and the new bodily relationships with text that can be created with new media. The section includes:

• John Cayley’s essay, Literal Art: Neither Lines nor Pixels but Letters (with responses from Nick Montfort and Johanna Drucker)

Our interactive drama Façade is almost done — except we don’t have a completed music/sound score. Michael and I are very interested to find one or more talented composers or sound designers, to collaborate with us on creating a soundtrack for this dynamic, one-act interactive drama.

If you’re interested, please send email to andrew@no-spam-interactivestory.net and michaelm@no-spam-cc.gatech.edu (removing no-spam-), including a link to some samples of your sound/music work.

If you’re not a music/sound person, please forward this announcement to any musician friends who may be interested in this opportunity to collaborate on Façade. If you’ve got a blog, feel free to re-post this open call.

A few notes on what we’re looking for:

The SIGGRAPH Panels program is up. They’re accepting panels in a two-phase process this year. First, panel proposals were submitted Nov. 3 and a selection of panel topics was accepted. Now everyone can submit position papers to the accepted panels; panels will be dynamically composed out of the best submissions. Most of the panel topics are of interest to GTxA readers including:

• Rethinking The Narrative Thread: Where Do Movies End And Videogames Begin? Discussing The New Storytelling Paradigm
• Believable Characters: Are AI-Driven Characters Possible, and Where Will They Take Us?
• State Of The Art In Game Research: Games on the Horizon and Beyond

It seems that blog readers and commenters can serve as focus testers for book authors — at least this happened in the case of Marrit Ingman, who convinced Seal Press to publish her memoir about depression, based on the feedback and encouragement from frequenters of her blog. In fact, as this NYTimes article describes, several books have been born from blogs.

But a word of caution is contributed by a certain assistant professor of new media studies at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey — that blogs aren’t quite the same as books. Where’d he get that idea? ;-)

Remember how the Fight Club game was in development and how all these, you know, gamers suggested that a Fight Club game should have a point to it, you know, like the book and the movie did, and how they bemoaned that the game concept was lame and missed out on the main thing the movie was about?

Well, the game’s out. I saw it proffered for sale in a store the other day. It seems that not only does it miss the point, it totally sucks in just about every other way. Fortunately, a Slaughterhouse Five game is in the works and will allow you to kick German ass escaping from a prisoner of war camp – in the end you’ll be rewarded by getting out only to be spectacularly killed in the bombing of Dresden.

A review of Half-Life 2 on the new Game Brains website praises the game’s design for making its linear plot feel intuitive and uncontrived. Meanwhile, the newly-formed under-the-radar studio Telltale Games is interested in creating “television adventure games”, according to a new Adventure Gamers article. For more, read an interview on Gamespot with Telltale CEO Dan Connors.

“They Come in a Steady Stream Now” is a new electronic literature piece by Richard Powers, author of the novels Prisoner’s Dilemma, The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2, and Plowing the Dark, among others. It’s told (basically) in seven emails, which are delivered in a Flash faux-email-reader frame.

I learned about the piece from Jill, who learned about it from Eric, and, reading the comments that these two made about the story, I see that they didn’t like it very much. I liked it a lot, as it happens, and I’ll try to explain why.

The New York Times reports that Google has forged an agreement with Oxford, Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library to digitize and add to its database all of the out of copyright holdings of each library. The Library of Congress and a group of international libraries from the United States, Canada, Egypt, China and the Netherlands have also announced a plan to create a publicly available digital archive of one million books on the Internet. Pretty exciting news for public knowledge.

Mark Marino (Barthes’ Bachelorettes, Grand Thieves Audio) has stopped fiddling with his radio dial long enough to blow the horn of summoning. There’s a graduate conference coming up at UCR, and he’s pointed out six special session CFPs – a full cylinder of ’em? – that will be of interest to Grand Text Auto-readin’ grad students:

(dis)junctions: theory reloaded (april 8-9, 2005)

The University of California Riverside’s 12th Annual Humanities Graduate Conference
CFP: (dis)junctions: Multiple-Media Panels (grad) (1/7/05; 4/8/05-4/9/05)

1. Media Crossings: Intersections of Film, Television, and Digital Culture
2. Online Gaming and Society
3. Original Hypermedia, Net.Art, Mods, Flash

The gang’s all here. For the first time since our group blog began over a year and half ago, the five of us got together in the same physical place.

Noah, Scott, Andrew, Michael, and Nick

We’re gutted, and we may never again check the price tag on a GameCube. Jeff Minter’s spectacular and innovative project Unity, which promised (some thought) to make Rez look like Qix, has been shelved. Check out the demo screens that Games Asylum has lined up, and share your sympathy and your support for Jeff (a.k.a. the Yak) on his warm and sometimes fuzzy blog, where the Yak posted the official announcement and commented on it. Thanks a lot to Intelligent Artifice, bearer of the bad news.

A Novel Approach to Games — an interview with D. B. Weiss, author of Lucky Wander Boy, a story of childhood, obsession and videogames — is the featured article this week at The Cultural Gutter.