Grand Text Auto

Horse Less Review #2: Put Out Lights has just been put out. In it you will find fiction, poetry, and perhaps other things by Tyler Carter, Thomas Cook, Phil Cordelli, Maria Filippone, Sandy Florian, Michael Geier, Garth Graeper, Matthew Henriksen, Sean Hoade, Mark Kanak, Kirk Keen, Conan Kelly, Andrew Lux, Andrew Lynes, Clay Matthews, Carolina Maugeri, Jim Maughn, Jerry McGuire, Corey Mesler, Nick Montfort, Bryce Newhart, Scott Pierce, Marc Pietrzykowski, Nate Pritts, Maggie Queeney, Marthe Reed, Kate Schapira, Brandon Shimoda, Brian Kim Stefans, Hugh Steinberg, and Bronwen Tate.

Hermeneia, a research group focusing on literary studies and digital technology at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), has teamed up with the Vinaròs Town Council to create a new award for digital literature: the “Ciutat de Vinaròs” Digital Literature prize. Submissions can be in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish or Catalan, and two 2,500 euro awards will be given in the categories of “Narrative” and “Poetry.” The deadline is 8th September 2005, and only unpublished works are eligible. Official details follow.

Drew Davidson passes along word of the recent fourth Media in Transition conference at MIT. From the list of abstracts and papers, it looks like the conference was indeed an interesting gathering, including quite a bit of work on nonlinearity in movies (e.g. “Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database by Jim Bizzocchi), narrative in computer games (e.g. “Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle” by Robert Buerkle), emergence in nonfiction film (e.g. “The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence” by Rod Coover) and topics in hypertext literature (e.g. “Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia” by Burcu S. Bakioglu). The abstracts suggest some interesting interdisciplinary fusions, and many of the abstracts are also linked to full papers.

Alan Liu, author of The Laws of Cool, has some incredibly important questions about reading in the digital age, and he’s started a formidable project to begin to answer them. His Transliteracies project begins with a conference at UCSB in June:

“UCSB Conversation Roundtables on Online Reading” Conference

Launching the Transliteracies Project

June 17-18, 2005 / Univ. of California, Santa Barbara / McCune Room (6020 HSSB)

Electronic games are a new topic of study in the field of information ethics, and an area that my collaborators and I have been working in to ultimately make more socially conscious games.

The International Review of Information Ethics journal has a call out for a special issue on the subject!

Deadline for abstracts: June 30, 2005.

First off, a happy 2nd anniversary to Grand Text Auto – here’s to many more years of writing and conversation by the “drivers” and by the readers and commenters, who also bring direction and make the blog what it is.

I also want to re-welcome Mary Flanagan, who has been with us for a while as a guest and now joins us as a regular “driver.” We’re not planning to expand the driver pool much more, or perhaps any more, but we all continue to admire Mary’s work as a new media critic and creator, appreciated her contributions as a guest driver, and wanted her to remain part of this project. We hope that having her name on the masthead will let her keep contributing to the conversation here and allow her to more easily give us the scoop on her current and future projects.

Check out the multimedia fruits of the Things That Don’t Exist Remix Contest, and if you haven’t seen the Creative Commons video that inspired this festival of digital creativity, check it out [Quicktime]. If you miss the point – maybe that’s because it doesn’t exist?

Remember that unusual alternate orthography, presented in artworks of various media, that I mentioned last year? Will, it turns out that there may be a simple explanation for it. A recently released hypertext report reveals that glyphs made of lines inscribed in circles have something to do with aliens.

Better late than never, I hope — here’s a writeup of my experience of last March’s Game Developers Conference. Perhaps the nine weeks that have passed since GDC has given me some additional long-term perspective on it all.

Personally I had less fun at this year’s conference compared to last year, because I was more stressed out this time. I was to moderate a high-profile panel on interactive story, give a programming talk and live demo with Michael on natural language in games (which we were still preparing for until minutes before the talk), and try to network with game developers that we may try to work with in the future — all self-imposed tasks of course. But all that was enough of a load to put me into a sleep-disturbed funk for the entire GDC week and beyond.

(But now I’m feeling better, especially because our interactive drama project is now so close to completion — it has taken forever to finish up all the niggling details, but we’re really, really close.)

Okay. Informed by this year’s GDC, in this post I’d like to summarize my impressions of the overall state of commercial interactive entertainment development, as well as my take on the state of interactive story development.

Pioneer in computer music (incl early computational sound generation + composition, musique concrete, etc) James Tenney will be presenting work in nyc on Sunday, May 8, 2005 at 8:00 PM

james tenney’s “postal pieces” (1965-71): a rare performance of Tenney’s Postal Pieces (1965-71). Postal Pieces is supposed to be “a remarkable series of eleven works printed on postcards.”

After spending several hours in the Apple Store Soho a week ago and being bombarded with the classic dancing silhouettes from various ipod ad campaigns from all directions, I must disclose my discomfort with depictions of the body, race, the individual, and general ‘hipness’ these campaigns infuse into the sale of albeit charming products.

I was a visitor to Apple Soho the day after the New York Times reported that 50 iPods have been stolen on NYC subways this year due to owners being easily identifiable (the distinctive white earbuds). Luckily, iPod theft represents a smaller number than cell phone theft on the subway… This is also after realising that with over 10 million iPods sold in Feb 2005 every single person in this city, and then some, could wear the thin white sash as a badge of honour. There are great figures online for the success of the iPod, such as “1.79 iPods sold every minute in 2003” and 300 million downloads from the music store marking an extreme shift in technology and cultural distribution/consumption. In fact we now have fans making ads for Apple.

I’ve been unable to reach Google.com for the last few minutes. I also can’t reach Google.ca, Google.co.uk, Google.es, Google.de, Google.at, etc. And no one on ifMUD can reach any of ’em, either.

Well, while we wait for Google News to come back up and tell us what’s happened: Teoma, Altavista, Yahoo.

(Update: Google became available again within two minutes of my posting this, but then went on the blink again. Seems that 15 minutes later all but Groups and News are working, at least from my standpoint.)

In The Rake, a magazine for and about the Twin Cities, there’s a recently Slashdotted article about Post-Its (part 1, part 2) by Greg Beato, who used to write for the late, great Suck.com. The article chronicles Art Fry’s invention of the Post-It, initially as a sort of sticky bookmark rather than a radically reduced cover letter, and describes some early suggestions for naming the product: “Jot and Jerk” and “Mount and Show.” The article is mainly a wacky corporate chronology of innovation and success against all odds, but it’s interesting to think about how Post-Its played into our ecology of writing.

There’s a nice writeup of music-game-maker Harmonix, developer of FreQuency, Amplitude, and Eyetoy: AntiGrav, today in the Boston Phoenix. With the recent Karaoke Revolution 3, the company may be working towards one day pleasing even demanding machine-learning researchers/karaoke software developers such as Lawrence Saul. And with a realistic virtual bear costume included, who knows what other niche markets Harmonix may be embracing?

Steve Ince of the blog Writing and Design just launched his Juniper Games site, with some information about his in-the-works Juniper Crescent – The Sapphire Claw. The game has also been previewed at Adventure Gamers. (“For the less technical, one word will suffice: sweeeet!”) Good luck to Steve in polishing off this production.

Putting First Person online was a very positive experience. I make this declaration now that there’s a new section of the project live at electronic book review (which includes a piece by GTxA’s Nick). With this, all the book’s essays are online — along with most of its responses, and much material the book doesn’t hold.

Making all this material available in collaboration with a web-based electronic journal broadened the conversation around the project, made it possible for the conversation to continue in new ways (as it does today with a response by Matt Kirschenbaum), made the material accessible to an audience that doesn’t buy hardcover university press volumes, and apparently didn’t hurt sales of that volume in the least (it went for a second printing less than a year after it first hit the shelves).

The essays in this section (New Readings) attempt to develop, via a combination of close reading and broader theorizing, modes of engagement appropriate to particular forms of digital writing.

I had a great time seeing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on opening night yesterday. It looks to be the first successful film based on an e-book (okay, it’s a fictional e-book, but still) and there were visual and narrative elements of it that resonated with today’s digital culture and economy in a funny, uncanny way.

The movie wasn’t perfect, but there was a lot to like and a lot to laugh at. I so enjoyed myself that I became even more puzzled than I was before about the handfuls of invective that many reviewers of the film have been flinging at it, risking damage to their digital watches in the process. Let me try to gather some of these attacks into categories and figure out where they could have originated…

“Jesus Christ! Where is Tom Bombadil?!?”

From the camp that believes that there must be an injective mapping between the book and the movie, or that the movie is simply a lossless storage medium for the contents of the book, also allowed to have some pictures and stuff as long as Legolas’s footwear is appropriate. Such filmgoers, infected with an aesthetic sort of Protestant Fundamentalism, must find The Shining and Fight Club to be travesties for not disgorging everything in the original texts.

This weekend and next (April 30 & May 1 // May 7 & 8) we’ll be having two different exhibitions of literary virtual reality at Brown. The exhibitions will employ a room-sized immersive stereo display (Brown’s Cave) and a spatialized sound system (controlled by Max/MSP) to present 10 projects created by writers, musicians, visual artists, and computer scientists. Because we’re having small shows (6 people) spread out at 45 minute increments over the course of the day (11am to 5pm), reservations are required. Reservations are made by calling Brown’s David Winton Bell Gallery at 401-863-2932. This show, “Works from the Cave II,” is the sequel to our Cave exhibition for the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival.

Got a “ridiculous and pointlesss” idea along the lines of The Dancing Baby, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, or The Star Wars Kid? Eyebeam is looking for such projects for their Contagious Media Showdown. Large cash prizes are involved: $2,000 for the project with the most page views, $1,000 for the first site with an Alexa rating higher than 20,000, $1000 for the site with the most links from blogs, and $1,000 for the most popular site under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. Act now, web slackers are hanging out waiting for the next stupid but delightful silly thing to email to their list of friends: to participate, you need to reserve a slot by April 30th, and the project needs to be online by May 19th. There will also be a workshop May 7th in NYC by the creators of BPLU, Rejection Line, FundRace, How to Dance Properly, Nike Sweatshop Email, Dog Island, del.icio.us, Blogdex , and Pizza Party. Special guests from The Yes Men and the EFF.

A contemporary poetry conference that includes the words “blogs” and “online” in its call for papers definitely deserves some of Grand Text Auto’s fat pipe. They’ve got a sweet URL, too.

CUNY Conference on Contemporary Poetry
Graduate Center, City University of New York
November 3-6 2005

Abstracts due: September 15, 2005.

…according to the the New York Times. Specifically, two articles you’ll probably either love or hate: from last weekend’s magazine, a preview / excerpt of Steven Johnson’s upcoming book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, on how the complex narratives and game-like structures of today’s best television shows give your mind a cognitive workout; and, separately, a harsh review of certain pieces at this year’s Boston Cyberarts Festival (a few being the type of work I’d probably call push-button art, if I were in a crotchety mood).

Yes you are!

“You Are Beautiful” is a meme-type sticker and installation art project, centered in Chicago but distributed around the world. The most cool thing about this project is how its creators have taken a simple idea, a phrase that many people like to hear, and distributed it across multiple media, and then created a well-designed network photo archive of its many manifestations; a kinder, more affirming version of the “Andre Has a Posse/OBEY” idea. I was also pleased and waxed nostalgiac when I saw that most of the installations have occurred in my old neighborhood in Chicago. Spread the words.

Nick and I recently got word that Implementation has been accepted by Provflux 2005, both as an intervention (live event) as an exhibition. Implementation’s second gallery exhibition will take the form of mounted photos from the project, a DVD of distance shots, and take-home sticker sheets on display at CUBE2 Gallery in downtown Providence, Rhode Island from May 19th through June 4th, and we’ll be in Providence May 27th-29th for the event itself, with a goal of distributing, placing, and documenting the entire novel in one weekend in one location. Bring your digital camera and camping gear if you want to join us. Implementation joins about 50 other public interventions, games, urban exploration, lost space recovery, and tech mapping projects for this fluxist/situationist/public art happening.

After finding that no such resource seems to exist, I’ve started to assemble a bibliography of creative work in HyperCard, a very influential early system used for artistic, literary, and gaming purposes. My list is no doubt very incomplete right now – I was not an early Mac user and don’t have first-hand experience of HyperCard work from back in the day. But I do have more than 50 works listed, so this may be the beginning of a useful resource.

I plan to continue to working on the list and hope that others with more HyperCard experience and knowledge can help out. I’m now dedicating this bibliography to the public domain and inviting others to contribute to it by leaving comments here on Grand Text Auto. A wiki might be more appropriate for such a bibliographic barn-raising, but I have a blog set up and don’t have a wiki that I can use for something like this, so I’m putting the list up on the blog…

7pm this Monday at Brown, and then 7pm Tuesday at the Boston Public Library, Turbulence and the Electronic Literature Organization will present their first co-sponsored event. Re:Writing: Writers, Computers, and Networks will feature performances by four writers who bridge the net art and e-literature communities. In addition to John Cayley, and Thalia Field (at the BPL) or Yael Kanarek (at Brown), they also feature two GTxA drivers who are on the ELO board and have recently had Turbulence commissions: Nick and yours truly. The events are presented as part of the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival (and supported by Brown’s Literary Arts program and the LEF Foundation).