Grand Text Auto

My both systematic and breezy presentation at Interrupt 3, phrased in the form of an interruption, began with a consideration of electronic literature’s “ends” and digital poetry’s “feet.” During the beginning of my presentation I played “Hexes,” a digital poem I wrote a few minutes before the session began. I went on to read every permuation of the phrase “SERVICE MY INTERRUPT FUCKFLOWERS,” using a technique famously employed by Brion Gysin on a text that includes a memorable compound word by Caroline Bergvall. I continued to read some hypothetical captions from “Feminist Ryan Gosling” image macros about Donna Haraway. I then read from “Use of Dust,” a new work that is an erasure of Alison Knowles and Janes Tenney’s “A House of Dust.” I concluded with this text:

Mary Flanagan’s Kickstarter campaign for the board game MONARCH is nearly wrapped up, and at 24 hours before close has well met it’s goal with over 300 supporters. In a recent Dartmouth Now article, Flanagan described Monarch as entertaining, beautiful, and “strategic—but not so strategic that it would be off-putting. I think of this as a gateway between popular games and the kind of heavy German board game that you sit down and play for six hours.”  Read the article by Hannah Silverstein here.

Although mostly our discussion is about computing and literature, and only a bit on commerce and the art thereof. Thanks to Andrew Lipstein for interviewing me:

Episode V: “Oh, I should definitely explain why I don’t care about this question.”

Mary Flanagan was recognized by the newly formed Higher Education Video Game Alliance (The Alliance) in their first annual awards program last week. (Read the Alliance Press Release.)  The Alliance was created by higher education leaders from across the country who share best practices, build partnerships and help universities strengthen their video game education programs.

The Alliance selected Flanagan for her work in “Advancing Theory and Research,” breaking ground in both conceptual and methodological domains in the investigation of games.

Flanagan was recognized for her innovative approach as an “academic trailblazer” and “intellectual architect.”

The proceedings of the June 12-14, 2012 Paris conference on the translation of electronic literature are now online. These include a paper by Natalia Fedorova and myself, “Carrying across Language and Code.” The conference took place at Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and Université Paris Diderot, and encouraged me and collaborators to undertake the Renderings project, the first phase of which is now onlne.

One of the wonderful features of Mary’s newest game, MONARCH, is its unique and breathtaking art style. Artist Kate Adams is responsible for the game’s illustrations, and achieves this fantastic look by scratching into scratchboard with blades, as shown in this video! After scratching, scanning, and coloring, the finished product comes out looking like this:

We’re really excited for MONARCH! Check out more of the finished art over at the Kickstarter page. The campaign is funding until March 14th, and Mary needs your help to make the game a reality!

It’s also in Polish, and should serve to inspire Anglophones! As my colleagues in Ubu’s homeland explain:

A Trope Tank Technical Report (“Trope Report”) on the “Texual Demoscene” has just been posted. Here’s the abstract:

The demoscene is a mainly European subculture of computer
programmers, whose programs generate computer art in real time. The
aim of this report is to attempt a description of the textual
dimension of the demoscene. The report is the effect of efforts to
perform an ethnographic exploration of the Polish computer scene; it
quotes interviews with participants of demo parties, where text
plays a significant role: in demos, real-time texts, IF, mags or
digital adaptations. Media archeology focusing on the textual aspect
of the demoscene is important to understanding the beginnings of
digital literature and genres of digital-born texts.

MONARCH is a game by Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan, illustrated by Kate Adams. The game is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. Max Seidman worked on the design of MONARCH’s mechanics and Mary calls him “the balance expert.” Max also runs a game design theory blog, Most Dangerous Game Design. Here, Max shares thoughts on our intentional design that balances complexity with an unfolding, or “elastic,” design to suit a range of players’ interests and playstyles.

The Tiltfactor game design and research laboratory at Dartmouth College (http://www.tiltfactor.org) is seeking applications for a full-time postdoctoral research position in social psychology for the 2015-2016 academic year. Tiltfactor Lab at Dartmouth College designs, creates, and studies games for social impact. The lab’s projects include games that address (and change) biases and stereotypes; games for health, which seek to educate players about issues in public health and health care delivery; and crowdsourcing games, which aim to harness the power of crowds to gather new information.  The postdoctoral researcher will design and conduct formal empirical studies on games.  The lab’s previous games include board games, card games, sports, and digital games. A suite of games addressed gender bias in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), such as the lab’s party games Awkward Moment, Awkward Moment at Work, and Buffalo The Name Dropping Game. Currently, we are working on a National Science Foundation-funded project that uses “interactive text adventures” to improve the classroom climate for underrepresented students in STEM classrooms.  Other current projects focus on topics ranging from counteracting climate change to modeling effective bystander interventions in cases of potential sexual assault.

Words I Have Used Only Once on Facebook

I recently downloaded my Facebook data. The following is a list of words that I used only one time in my Facebook postings. Some of the words are misspellings or parts of URLs but most are are intended words. I’m not sure what use I could put this information to, but it is interesting to me, for instance, that I have used the word “asshole” only once on Facebook, just as I have only written “pseudo-philosopher” in the status line one time.

We are pleased to issue an open call for applications to “Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines.” This workshop, to be held at the University of Maryland in College Park, MD, on May 6-8, 2015, is being led by Dartmouth College and the University of Maryland, with the support of the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Sloan Foundation.

For Immediate Release
Contact: info @ maryflanagan.com

April 14, 2015 (Hanover, NH) – From the game lab that brought you Awkward Moment® comes a hilarious new party game, designed this time to let the adults in on the awkwardness! Today, Tiltfactor Laboratory is excited to announce the release of our newest card game, Awkward Moment at Work.

We are pleased to announce the publication of our recent National Endowment for the Humanities supported white paper on archiving and appraising academically produced computer games. “A Unified Approach to Preserving Cultural Software Objects and their Development Histories,” is aimed at providing a first step towards an archival methodology for computer games and their development documentation. The report provides an in-depth look at the development of Prom Week, EIS’s social simulation game, with a focus on its development process, context, and documentation. We highlight key moments in its development timeline, and elaborate on the different types of documents produced, and the challenges encountered in gathering everything together for deposition into the University of California’s Merritt Repository.

World-Renowned Expert in Game Design Creates a Revolutionary Experience For All Players

SHORT Title: Mary Flanagan releases first pro-girl board game

Contact: monarch@maryflanagan.com

BROOKLYN NEW YORK 9th February 2015 – Mary Flanagan, the contemporary artist and Dartmouth professor known also for her game research lab Tiltfactor.org, brings her extraordinary creative insight to create the first “Pro-Girl Board Game.” Known for her thinking on why the ‘Pinkification’ of toys hurts women, Flanagan brings forth a new generation in board gaming for all.

To continue the trend of three-letter publications presenting reviews of #!, ebr (Electronic Book Review) has just published a review by John Cayley – an expert in electronic literature, an accomplished cybertext poet, a teacher of e-lit practices, and someone who has created digital work engaging with the writings of Samuel Beckett, among other things.

It would be difficult to ask for as thoughtful and detailed a review as Cayley provided. Nevertheless, now that ABR and ebr have offered reviews, I do hope that IBR, OBR, and UBR will follow suit.

Steven Wingate’s review of my book #! (pronouonced “Shebang,” Counterpath Press, 2014) appears in the current American Book Review and seems to be the first review in print.

I was very pleased to read it. Wingate discusses how the presentation of code provided a hook for understanding what programs do, much as bilingual editions allow a reader to learn more (at least a bit more) about a different language by skipping back and forth between recto and verso. An important goal of mine was to offer more access to computing and to show that code can be concise and open. I aimed to do this even as I wrore rather obscure and difficult programs, such as the ones in Perl, but certainly when writing Ruby and Python, the languages Wingate finds most pleasing.

This Spring, Andrew Plotkin (a.k.a. Zarf) is the Trope Tank’s writer in residence. Andy will be at the Trope Tank weekly to work on one or more of his inestimable projects — as a game-maker, programmer, and platform developer, he has been working furiously for many years. (His home page is modest in this respect; See also his latest game, Hadean Lands.)

Happy New Year! My New Year’s poem for 2015 is a one-line BASIC program for the Commodore 64: “The Era Canto.”

The first review of Megawatt has appeared, and it’s quite a detailed analysis of the book, its relationship to Watt, and how the code and output text, in their presentation here, relate. The review is by Hannes Bajohr at 0x0a.

It’s in German. Here is the automagical Googly translation.

There were so many excellent novel generators, and generated novels, last month for NaNaGenMo (National Novel Generation Month).

I thought a lot of them related to and carried on the work of wonderful existing literary projects — usually in the form of existing books. And this is in no way a backhanded complement. My own NaNoGenMo entry was the most rooted in an existing novel; I simply computationally re-implemented Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt (or at least the parts of it that were most illegible and computational), in my novel generator Megawatt (its PDF output is also available). For good measure, Megawatt is completely deterministic; although someone might choose to modify it and generate different things, as it stands it generates exactly one novel. So, for me to say that I was reminded of a great book when I saw a particular generator is pure praise.

Not literally on stickers, no. This technical report from the Trope Tank is “Stickers as a Literature-Distribution Platform,” and is by Piotr Marecki. It’s just been released as TROPE-14-02 and is very likely to be the last report of 2014. Here’s the abstract:

Dartmouth College, in collaboration with the University of Maryland, has received an award for a cooperative agreement from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities to fund a workshop, “Engaging the Public: Best Practices for Crowdsourcing Across the Disciplines.”

This project will explore how “crowdsourcing” can encourage wide audiences to engage in humanities projects by participating in and contributing to research. The workshop is tentatively scheduled for May 2015; check the Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives’s website, crowdconsortium.org, for updates.

NEH Press Release
@NEH_ODH

Video of my #! reading, which I did at Google Boston on December 2, is now online.

I actually forgot to present a few things. I’d wanted to at least show something from both Memory Slam and Renderings. Ah, well.

Video of my #! reading, which I did at Google Boston on December 2, is now online.

I actually forgot to present a few things. I’d wanted to at least show something from both Memory Slam and Renderings. Ah, well.