Grand Text Auto

This blog post seems to be getting much more attention than we had expected. It was originally concocted to be a quick set of notes for an introductory “what is machinima” presentation conducted by students in our class… But, since there is interest, we’ll add our core screening list here, and add student final proejcts from class — once they are finished!

in FS49: MACHINIMA, we ask

How should we approach the study of machinima?

How do the aesthetics of machinima differ from traditional video or film?

What is the role of the creator in machinima? Whose work is it?

the PLAYCUBE is home to a performative sweatshop today as students trace where all of their ‘free campus t-shirts’ come from; taking place on the Dartmouth College campus, 1-3pm today. Next week, on the 26th of August, we will host a locally produced Machinima show in the PLAYCUBE at 8pm in Hanover NH.

netpoetic.com, a rather massively multiposter blog, is now hosting writings, news, and conversations about digital poetry and electronic literature: “On these pages you will find links to new digital poetry/literature, ideas about what the heck that might mean, experiments, calls for work, exhibitions, activities, news, his/herstories and just about anything that the authors feel needed.”

Recently on the site I’ve read Sandy Baldwin’s discussion of permissions (”How does chmod relate to the absent body?”) (part 1, part 2) and have learned that Brian Kim Stefans’s arras.net has been reskinned. I’m going to make whatever contributions I can to the site, too.

[As I wrote on netpoetic.com:] Adam Parrish recently taught a class at NYU in the ITP program: Digital Writing with Python. I was very interested to learn about it and to see documentation of the final reading/performance, with some links to students’ blog entries about their projects. Here at MIT, I teach a class called The Word Made Digital in which students do poetry, fiction, and less classifiable writing projects using Python and other systems and languages. And, I know that Daniel Howe has taught the RISD and Brown class Advanced Programming for Digital Art and Literature.

The first issue of the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, from earlier this year, sports a nice article by Alf Seegert, “Doing there’ vs. ‘being there’: performing presence in interactive fiction.” In it, Seegert sharpens the existing discussion of reader-response theory and IF to explain how IF may need to balance between boredom and overstrain and how the writerly role allows for new sorts of presence. He then conducts some good discussions of Jon Ingold’s All Roads (highlighting how the body of the player character is indicated) and Paul O’Brian’s Luminous Horizon (looking particularly at the subjective narration).

“I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed.”

– H. P. Lovecraft, “The Nameless City”

Gregory Weir, who fashioned the very nice piece The Majesty of Colors, has a new game with levels built out of existing texts, including “The Nameless City.” The new platformer is called Silent Conversation, a title taken from poet Walter Savage Landor’s description of reading.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship.

I was recently asked to elaborate on the difference between nn (the research system I developed during my dissertation work at the University of Pennsylvania) and Curveship.

The most important difference is that nn is a research system that I used for making some advances related to computer science, computational linguistics, and narratology. The system was developed to prove certain points; it was used only by yours truly to implement narrative and text generation ideas and to run demos.

This is the third in a series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship.

Before I start descending into detail, I’ll explain why I think Curveship is a big deal.

Curveship does the usual work of an interactive fiction system when it comes to simulating a world: There are discrete rooms that make up the fiction’s locations, actors can inhabit and wander around these rooms, and things can sit in them, be taken and carried off or otherwise moved around. Items can change state, so that a lamp, for instance, can be turned on and off. Items can go into or onto other items, if they allow it. None of this is surprising; plenty of interactive fiction development systems already do all of it very well.

It looks like we have a bound book date for Critical Play, Mary Flanagan’s new book! The time is now! watch for it.

Eric Zimmerman says, “In Critical Play, Flanagan uncovers a secret history of games buried deep inside folk culture, experimental media, and the world of art. Critical Play should be required reading for anyone who cares about the cultural importance and future potential of games.”

Tiltfactor says, “HURRAY!” and is exited to launch the book.

There’s an interview about interactive fiction with Jimmy Maher that is well worth checking out. It’s on on Adventure Gaming Classic. And, Jimmy also has a new game out: The King of Shreds and Patches. This one’s strange story features connections to Shakespeare and Cthulhu.

This is the second in a series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship. In writing about Curveship in any detail, I’ll have to use terms such as action, event, and order, which sound ordinary but are used in a special way in the system. Furthermore, I’ll have to use terms such as focalization and narratee, which do not sound ordinary, but have a meaning within narratology (a.k.a. narrative theory) and are important to the way Curveship works. I’m going to define a few of these terms – some I’ll save for later. Rather than sort them alphabetically, I’ll group them by how they figure in the system.

I was very interested to learn that Adam Parrish, whose own Interactive Telecommunication Program (ITP) masters project was “New Interfaces for Textual Expression,” is now teaching Digital Writing with Python at NYU’s ITP. The course is concluding; Parrish and his students will mount a final performance on August 5 at 7pm. Parrish eschewed powerful, cryptic Perl for clarity of Python in this course on creating text machines, as I did in putting together The Word Made Digital, which I’ll be teaching again this Fall. His reading list overlaps with mine a bit and includes a nice article on appropriation in writing – I may just rip that right off. I won’t manage to be in New York to hear students read their programs’ output, but I hope the conclusion to the class goes well and that I’ll be able to read and run some things that will give me a sense of the event.

This is the first of a planned series of posts about my interactive fiction system, Curveship. Curveship is an interactive fiction development system that provides a model of a physical world, and its workings, as do existing state-of-the-art IF systems (such as Inform 6, Inform 7, TADS 2, and TADS 3). It will not have as many libraries, and will have no multimedia features, when it is released, but it will provide another significant capability: it will allow IF authors to write programs that manipulate the telling of the story (the way actions are represented and items are described) as easily as the state of the IF world can now be changed. While existing IF systems allow for the simulation of a character who can move around and change the state of the world, Curveship provides for control over the narrator, who can tell as if present at the events or as if looking back on them, who can tell events out of order, creating flashbacks or narrating what happens by category, and who can focalize any character, not just a fixed PC or a hard-coded series of them, to tell the story from the perspective of that character’s knowledge and perceptions.

The Moon Fell on Me is an infrequent, gemlike Web comic by the itinerant Franklin Einspruch, who happened to come to my recent interactive fiction talk at AXIOM. He told me he was trying to do something different with this Web project. Visit his site even briefly and you’ll see that he has done it. No pen was used in the creation of this Web comic. The panels are not organized to lead toward jokes. The lines of images are clearly based on personal experience, but they reach out beyond an individual or subculture. Instead of the occasionally hilarious, forward-a-link, forget-in-moment frames of the typical Web comic – however incisive that comic might be about geeks or life or both – The Moon Fell on Me offers sequential art that is worth looking at again and again, that resonates with its moment and seems worth contemplating beyond it.

Anyone who likes cute animals, culinary pursuits, and gratuitous profanity will love the shit out of Fucking Delicious.

Cybraphon is a project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman). Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.

Cybraphon Demo Song from Cybraphon on Vimeo.

The new edition of Binary Katwalk features the interactive narrative work of Kate Pullinger and works by Caitlin Fisher, Reneé Turner and Christine Wilks.

Binary Katwalk is an online exhibition space for experimental digital work, edited by Jeremy Hight. Each edition will feature artists from around the world and from different points in the spectrum of new media. This edition features five new mini-stories created for Pullinger’s Flight Paths project which is a mixed media communal net based narrative on a large scale, along with three artists she has selected. The next edition of BK will feature codework auteur Mez.

Here’s one of my favorite leftover recipes, salmon hash, modified because we also had a bit of leftover corn on the cob.

Ingredients
———
3 portions leftover grilled salmon, diced
3 cobs grilled sweet corn
10 new potatoes
1 red onion, diced
sprig of rosemary
handful of fresh basil
olive oil, salt, pepper, tabasco, quarter lemon

Serves 4-6 for breakfast or lunch.

Just a quick post here to say I think Beck gets the Web in ways that a lot of contemporary recording artists don’t. While a lot of bands give you discographies and tour dates and bios and the like, maybe a few sample tracks, I’m impressed with the Web strategy Beck is embracing on his site. As far as I can tell, he is not directly promoting his albums, his tour dates, or his merchandising on is site at all. Instead, he is using the Web site as an occasion to make and distribute cool stuff with his friends. His new site has features including Record Club, a project to informally re-record a classic album in a day with other musicians, and release a new track on the site every week. “Irrelevant Topics” will feature Beck informally interviewing other musicians at length about whatever comes to mind, released in serial installments. The first part of the first interview, with Tom Waits, is a fantastic discussion with one of America’s best songwriters. Planned Obsolescence is a weekly DJ set mixed by Beck’s crew. In an age when anybody can put on a pirate hat and download any album without paying a dime, this type of creative approach to using the web as a experimental platform for music and its environments is exactly the type of thing that might make me want to support an artist buying his CD or MP3 or concert ticket or T-shirt. Beck’s crew is using Web 2.0ish tools and social media like facebook and vimeo to reach their fan base and share their funky new readymades.

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Previously, Pookie and JR had only ever met at parties.
For the first few nights, Pookie and JR keep to their corners.
JR changes Pookie’s water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
JR cooks slowly, foraging in this strange kitchen.
Tonight’s dinner puts one withered leek out of its misery.
JR hasn’t been sleeping much lately.
Pookie keeps his thoughts to himself.
To be continued…

Next week, the Purple Blurb series offers a second special summer talk by a leading researcher in creative text generation. Rafael Pérez y Pérez will speak on …

If you have an announcement of a faculty job opening in digital media or want to mention an upcoming event (conference, workshop, or symposium), this is the place on Post Position for that. Just leave a comment.

The mammoth 10th anniversary issue of the online journal Drunken Boat is now out. I have a piece “Electronic Literature (in Performance)” in the DB Electronic Arts and Literature folio about the work presented at last year’s Electronic Literature in Europe conference, describing many of the works and including video documentation of many of the performances. Jessica Pressman also has an excellent essay, “Charting the Shifting Seas of Electronic Literature’s Past and Present” close reading e-lit from the Drunken Boat archives and discerning emerging genres, and there is a new hypertext poem, “That Night” by Steve Ersinghaus and James Revillini, among other delights. The other folios in the 10th anniversary issue of Drunken Boat include the Mistranslation project, with contributions from a number of digital poets, a huge collection of materials from Black Mountain College, 100 new poems, conceptual fiction, visual poetics, nonfiction, and a folio on arts in Asia. It is less a journal issue than an entire library of interesting literary production. I look forward to exploring it in more depth.

Literactiva is a new blog, in Spanish, about interactive narratives and literature of several types – interactive fiction, games, and digital poetry. Users can rate the different items that authors Grendel Khan and Depresiv have reviewed. Recent reviews brought to my attention a Lovecraftian, epistolary, online game called De Profundis (English page) and the IF Ofrenda a la Pincoya (which you can play online).

After some discussion this spring, the contributors to Grand Text Auto (including me) decided to make a change. We noticed that while Nick Montfort had kept up a steady pace of interesting contributions to the blog, the rest of us (four of whom have become parents in the last two years) have been blogging at a much more occasional pace, to the extent that it was no longer really fair to call it a group blog, since Montfort was pulling most of the weight. Nick started his own blog, Post Position, a couple of months back. This does not however mean the end of GTxA altogether. The format of the group blog has changed, and now has begun life as an aggregator of our individual blogs, including this one. We’re also keeping open the possibilities of doing other things as a group, such as the exhibition that was recently at the U of I and previously at the Beall, creative projects or distribution of creative projects, symposia and such. And I think the change from a group blog to an aggregator will be interesting. In the past I’ve used this space in a different way from my posts to GTxA. Maybe more idiosyncratically, or personally. The new GTxA will likely be a mash-up of individual blogging styles. I hope that, if nothing else, the new arrangement will inspire to blog here more than once or twice a year. I should at least be sharing some of the awesome links I share with my friends at facebook.