Grand Text Auto

Happy new year!

A few updates related to our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 …

Booksellers had some problems keeping the book in stock in recent weeks. The MIT Press is addressing this by printing more copies.

Leonardo Flores of I ♥ E-Poetry is writing about 18 remixes of Taroko Gorge, one each day for the next 18 days.

The book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (and the program) have been discussed as “cool” on Fark. (I was hoping for a Photoshop contest with the program’s output, but this is nice, too…)

One of my co-authors, Casey Reas, has issued a 10 PRINT design challenge to the Processing community. There’s already been one program written in reply.

Slashdot is on the case of 10 PRINT, too, with the usual diagonal PETSCII lines as well as slashes and backslashes. The Slate review and the code are the main topics of discussion so far, but perhaps some are also beginning to dig into the book or PDF.

There’s lively discussion of the 10 PRINT book and the 10 PRINT program, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, (via the Slate review) over at Reddit. The Enterprise Java port of the program, contributed early on, is truly classic.

Geeta Dayal reviewed 10 PRINT in Slate. As far as I know, this is the first published review of the book, and I greatly appreciate how it traces the discussion of mazes and other topics, pointing out the many cultural and well as technical touchstones.

Over at Stack Overflow they have a nice thread going with several shell scripts that implement 10 PRINT.

Daniel Haehn has written a 3D version of the 10 PRINT program in WebGL.

And my lab’s server is back up after a power outage here in Cambridge, MA, so the PDF of the book that was hosted there is once more available.

As seen on Bruce Sterling’s blog, we have an 10 PRINT (or, to be precise, a 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10) event tomorrow, Wednesday, here in Boston. The Boston Cyberarts Gallery (formerly AXIOM) is located in the Green Street T station on the Orange Line; the event’s at 7:30pm.

Our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 has been printed and bound and is making its way to bookstores now. It’s featured in a current exhibit at Hampshire College, and three of us ten co-authors did a reading to celebrate the release at the Harvard Book Store yesterday, where the first copies were available.

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

A technical report is to arrive today.

No need to worry about what will become of you without a technical report! The report, the fourth “Trope Report” in the Trope Tank series that started this year, is here:

In “Carrying across Language and Code,” Natalia and I discuss issues of translation and computational writing. With reference to electronic literature translation projects in which we have been involved as translators or as authors of the source work, we argue that the process of translation can expose how language and computation interrelate in electronic literature. Various small poetry generators, a cybertext poem, and two works of interactive fiction are discussed in this report.

As I wrote a few days ago, I made a statement about “Taroko Gorge,” and all of its vandals, at the ELO conference in Morgantown, WV.

Sepand Ansari created a Beckett-based “Taroko Gorge” remix at the ELO conference. And now I have the URL for this piece, “Waiting for Taroko Gorge.”

Kathi Inman Berens has created “Tournedo Gorge” “to mash the space of computation with the female, domestic, and tactile,” as she discusses in her blog post.

This was my statement for the “Taroko Gorge Remixed” panel yesterday (June 21) at the 2012 ELO conference. The panel was organized by Mark Sample and also featured Scott Rettberg, J. R. Carpenter (who joined us by video chat), Talan Memmott, Eric Snograss, Flourish Klink, and Andrew Plotkin. In attendance and part of the discussion were Leonardo Flores and Sonny Rae Tempest, who did work based on the Taroko Gorge code after the panel was proposed.

It is curious that I was invited to be part of this panel today, for I am the only speaker in this session who has not created and released a remix of Nick Montfort’s “Taroko Gorge.”

I presented the last ppg256 poem (ppg256-7) in Paris today at &Now.

Here are the current versions of all of the ppg256 poems/programs:

http://nickm.com/poems/ppg256.html

I delivered this as the opening keynote at DiGRA Nordic 2012, today, June 7.

1. The World of the Scene

Welcome to the world of the scene, to the summer of 2012, to that Earth where the demoscene is pervasive. Computers are mainly part of our culture because of their brilliant ability to produce spectacles, computationally generated spectacles that are accompanied by music, all of which is produced from tiny pieces of code, mostly in assembly language, always in real time. The coin of the realm is the demoscene production, which includes graphics and chiptunes but is principally represented by demos and their smaller cousins, intros. The coin of the realm – although these are not exchanged commercially, but freely shared with all lovers of computation and art, worldwide.

Many exciting things here at ICCC-12 (the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2012) in Dublin, but here are those that come from MIT, Writing and Humanistic Studies, and Comparative Media Studies:

I represented my lab, The Trope Tank, by presenting by the position paper “Small-Scale Systems and Computational Creativity” by Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova. The Trope Tank has a longer technical report that deals with this topic, written for a more general audience: “TROPE-12-02 – XS, S, M, XL: Creative Text Generators of Different Scales” by Nick Montfort.

Mark Sample has posted five basic statements, ahem, I mean 5 BASIC statements, on computational literacy.

I must point out that while they are all programs, the third and fifth ones actually include multiple statements. And, the program that number 4 is referring to is:

10 PRINT "GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD"
20 NEW

Very much worth a read – from the standpoint of understanding programming and its cultural intersections generally, not only because Mark is promoting the book that he, I, and eight others wrote, which will be published in November.

Developers of digital storytelling systems, take note: The call for papers for the Fifth International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling is now out. Conference to be held November 12-15, 2012 in Spain.

Congratulations to Jimmy Maher on his just-published book, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. As you might expect, Amazon has a page on it; so does Powell’s Books, for instance.

This MIT Press title is the third book in the Platform Studies series. Jimmy Maher has done an excellent job of detailing the nuts and bolts of the first multimedia computer that was available to consumers, and connecting the lowest levels of this platform’s function to cultural questions, types of software produced, and the place of this system in history. The book considers gaming uses (which many used to brand the Amiga as nothing but a toy) but also media production applications and even, in one chapter, the famous Boing Ball demo.

Here’s a post from a computer scientist (Paul Fishwick) that not only embraces critical code studies (CCS), it suggests that collaborations are possible that would be a “remarkable intersection of culture and disciplines” – where the object of study and the methods are shared between the humanities and computer science. Radical.

Take the natural splendor of Taiwan’s beautiful canyon and add side fighting action. Or, just see how Damian Esteves has already done it in yet another Taroko Gorge remix.

Codings shows the computer as an aesthetic, programmed device that computes on characters. The works in the show continue and divert the traditions of concrete poetry and short-form recreational programming; they eschew elaborate multimedia combinations and the use of network resources and instead operate on encoded letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols that are on the computer itself.

////////////////////////// Giselle Biguelman
///////////////////////// Commodore Business Machines, Inc.
//////////////////////// Adam Parrish
/////////////////////// Jörg Piringer
////////////////////// Casey Reas
///////////////////// Páll Thayer

Curated by Nick Montfort
Pace Digital Gallery

Feb 28th – March 30th, 2012 (with regular gallery hours Mon-Thu 12-5pm).

Designer Gulch by Brendan Howell is another remix of my oft-remixed poetry generator, Taroko Gorge. This one is installed in the lobby of the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule.

Yo dawg, I hear you like blog posts. So I put a link to a blog post in your blog post. The link goes to my “Curator’s Note” on In Media Res about very short programs to generate music, in which I also mention how poorly suited prevalent Web systems are for transmitting and discussing code.

An interview that James J. Brown, Jr. did with me is now up as part of the latest issue of JEP: The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

It’s entitled “The Literary and the Computational: A Conversation with Nick Montfort.”

I’ve banged up against some fairly conservative, and indeed rather backwards, ideas about what publishing is recently; it was great to talk with Brown and see him and JEP representing a much more positive idea.

A group of sonic and code explorers has been discovering excellent super-short C programs that, piped to an 8-bit audio device, generate music. Here’s the first video and a second video with sounds and code.

Here’s the code for one example, “Lost in Space,” from video #2:


main(t){
for(t=0;;t++)putchar(
((t*(t>>8|t>>9)&46&t>>8))^(t&t>>13|t< <6)
);}

If you are also a righteous Ubuntu user, you can paste that into a file (let’s call it “lost_in_space.c”) and compile it with:

% gcc lost_in_space.c -o lost_in_space

Then, pipe it (or pretend to pipe it, using padsp, since recent versions of Ubuntu don’t have /dev/dsp) to your audio device using:

In his just-released “Argot Ogre, OK!” Andrew Plotkin presents mash-ups and remixes of (almost) all the “Taroko Gorge” remixes to date (and of course the original “Taroko Gorge”), producing such poignant lines as “LAWN DARTS linger” along with single-source remixes and some different stanza shapes. Anyone interested in this thread of poetry generation projects should check it out and should certainly “view source.” Or don’t, if you don’t want to discover more about the secret of the monkey.