Grand Text Auto

Hi, I’m Michael Mateas. My particular interest in the topics of this blog is thinking about, and making, artificial intelligence-based interactive experiences. AI techniques enable interactive art to be more porous to human meanings, to generate responses that more deeply incorporate interaction. In my work I’m interested in developing AI techniques and architectures that enable new forms of interactive experience. I’m currently working with Andrew Stern on the interactive drama Façade, which he described in more detail in his first post. Previous work includes Terminal Time, an interactive video piece that constructs ideologically-biased documentary histories in response to audience feedback, and Office Plant #1, a desktop robot that responds to the social and emotional tone of the email you receive.

At the Chicago Humanities Festival last winter, I heard Richard Powers give a reading called “Literary Devices”. Powers is an unusual writer, perhaps best known for his humanistic novels about artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2) and virtual reality (Plowing the Dark).

I’ve been corresponding with IF author and theorist Emily Short recently about an issue that relates to all sorts of digital practice and interactive design — perhaps to all sorts of art-making. One thing I’ve heard over and over in discussion of the design of virtual spaces, computer games, and other sorts of works is that creators have to constrain the interactor, limiting a world of possibilities to just a few so that the experience can be controlled and contained.

I don’t like this assumption. It harkens to the “Pirates of the Caribbean” approach: put the docile participant in a little car on a track and bring them the experience of the space in exactly the order you want. Of course, some might say that this destruction of possibility is exactly what Oulipian techniques, of which I am so fond, enforce. Italo Calvino talked very directly about this idea of eliminating possibilities, specifically in relation to the computer generation of literature, in his lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts.”

I just got back from eNarrative 5, part of the last weekend of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. One of the most interesting moments for me was this morning, when longtime hypertext scholar George Landow said (to my ear) that we haven’t really tried hypertext fiction.

He said most hypertext fictions that we see as successful really use hypertext as their container, not as their fundamental structure. Works like afternoon and Patchwork Girl use links as the connections between narrative loops. Landow’s done a lot of work in non-fiction hypertext (e.g., The Victorian Web) and in these works such loops don’t tend to exist — instead each page stands nonlinearly related to many others in the work. He speculated, building upon a comment he attributed to Robert Coover, that such total nonlinearity in literature might actually be more appropriate for what we think of as poetry (functioning by analogy) than for fiction.

Hi world. I’m Andrew Stern, happy to be making the first post on our new group blog, grandtextauto.org. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Nick Montfort, Michael Mateas, Stuart Moulthrop and I have been meaning to get this blog started for some time now. We’ve got lots of stuff we need to discuss about digital narrative, poetry, games and art, with each other and anyone who wants to join in.

We’ve been greatly inspired by the other wonderful, thoughtful, substantive blogs out there on digital practice and theory, such as Gonzalo Frasca’s ludology.org, gamegirladvance from Jane Pinckard / Justin Hall / et al, Jill Walker’s blog, Greg Costikyan’s blog, etc., just to name a few.

For me this will be a chance to have a focused public discussion about where things are going with digital fiction, and some ways to get there. By digital fiction, I *don’t* necessarily mean what one might call stories, or games. More generally, I mean deeply interactive experiences involving characters, situations, and conflict, in whatever new forms these experiences may take.