Grand Text Auto

A Ukraniam team of cavers has descended 2,080 meters (6,822 feet, or about 1.29 miles) to the deepest point ever explored within a cave. The group of nine plunged into the deepest known cave, Krubera, near the coast of the Black Sea. They were part of the Ukrainian Speleological Association’s Call of the Abyss project, funded by the US National Geographic Society. The May issue of National Geographic features spectacular photographs from the expedition.

Shelley Jackson Writing

Innovative print and e-writer (electronic and epidermal), Shelley Jackson, visited Stockton last night to give a reading as the featured reader at the Stockpot literary magazine release party. Shelley read a brand-new story with an unpronounceable title in the form of an equation. She was revising it in my office until ten minutes before the reading. It turned out to be a brilliant, absurd story about mortality set in a post-apocalyptic alternate reality, wherein distances are measured in alligators and timothies, and people carry their deaths and obituaries around with them, in many cases finding their obituaries more appealing than their actual lives.

It is reported that in the next few months a browser-friendly version of what is arguably the biggest, longest-running AI project in history, Cyc, will be made available, allowing laypeople (and bots?) to access its massive common-sense knowledge base and continue tutoring it, a process ongoing for 22 years now.

There is already a limited form of Cyc available, with a recent major update.

It will be very interesting to begin playing with this knowledge base and reasoning engine, and imagining artistic applications of it. There’s already a precedent for this — six years ago Michael applied some of Cyc’s knowledge base in his ideologically-biased documentary history project Terminal Time, a collaboration with Paul Vanouse and Steffi Domike.

A show of original, non-digital art based on 8-bit video games has just opened at Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight in Los Angeles. The main site requires Flash; the gallery, with 17 images of art from the show, doesn’t. (Via Dennis; The sculpture Pac-Man, pictured, is by Peter Gronquist.)

We must admit that Adam Cadre was there first, with a painting based on Joust. Although we must also admit (as Adam does) that he ripped the idea off from Matthew Bowman.

William Gillespie’s Reading

A new beta version of Processing, a system for sketching out creative works of visual interactive art, was released today. As a sometime user of earlier versions, I’m glad to see the new one out. Processing 85 is a release of the language which is translated into Java but allows you to sidestep importing of libraries and other details, and may be more fun than Fortran 77 and Smalltalk 80 put together. Thanks to Hanna for the tip.

If you are traveling to Boston for the Cyberarts 2005 events, please make a stop to see work at the South Shore Art Center in Cohasset for the TechArt II show. The TechArt ongoing exhibition series in conjunction with the Boston Cyberarts Festival proves to be a vital source of new ideas about technologically-informed creative work which reflects on computer-centered culture.

Some of the themes which emerge in TechArt II are recurring in the field of digital art as a whole: computers paintings, computer-assisted filmmaking, robotic machines and environments, and computational architectures were all themes. Highlights include

Christian Bök, poet, pataphysician and author of the unfractioned Eunoia, came down to our crazy death country from his native Canada and did a great reading at the Writer’s House today. He read some from his first book of poems, Crystallography and presented some new work, including sound poems from Cyborg Opera, mentioned before on here. His new, pun-riddled “Umlaut Factory” really seemed to break new eggs, I mean ground. I also couldn’t help noticing that it contains the word-palindrome “feel a cop cop a feel.”

This is pretty darn cool news that must have classicists jumping up and down. The Independent reports that, using infrared imaging technology developed for satellites, Oxford University scientists are now able to decode a horde of hundreds of papyrus manuscripts discovered in the 19th century in ancient garbage dump in Egypt. The “Oxyrhyncus Papyri” were blackened, decayed, worm-eaten and illegible to the naked eye, but the new technology makes them readable. Fragments of previously unknown texts by Sophocles, Euripides, and Hesoid have already been discovered, and the find is expected to yield five million words of texts, “mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian,” and to expand the known canon of Ancient Greek literature by 20%.

FILE is one of the world’s most significant gatherings for consideration and exhibition of computational language. It has taken place in São Paulo, Brazil for each of the last five years, and currently entries are still open for 2005 (until May 1). Standing backward (in English) for “Electronic Language International Festival” or forward (in Portuguese) for “Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica,” FILE includes an exhibition of digital text art, a symposium with the same focus, a section specific to games, and a parallel electronic music festival. FILE will be in early October this year — so perhaps I’ll see you in Brazil this fall? (We’ll make sure to go to Rio before heading home.)

The UK has launched an initiative to release materials from the archives of the BBC, Channel 4, the Open University, and the British Film Institute in a form of the Creative Commons. The Creative Archive Licence will make materials available to the British public to remix and use in noncommercial projects. The terms of the Creative Archive Licence are no commercial, share alike, give credit, no endorsement, UK only. Within those stipulations, materials including 100 hours of of radio and television from the BBC and silent comedy and drama from BFI are being released for the British public to “Find it, Rip it, Mix it and Share it.” Although it’s a shame that the Creative Archive Licence will be UK only, the release of these and other materials should be a boon to artists and educators. It also makes a great deal of sense to me that publicly funded work should be made available for reuse by the public that funded it. One can only imagine the benefits that artists and educators would reap should NPR and PBS launch a similar initiative.

We knew it would happen… what took so long, really? Virtually Jenna is, I believe, the first fully explicit, hard-core 3-D animated virtual sex game. Billed as “gamerotica”, it’s more like lewdology. Ostensibly the goal is to get Jenna’s Excite-O-Meter to the max, but based on the graphic sample videos on the website, I suspect players may be content to just, well, screw around. According to a review in Wired you can control male or female sex partners for Jenna, sex toys and a disembodied hand, as well as a camera for pornographic photo shoots, in all their high polygon-count, texture-mapped glory.

The latest SPAG Newsletter, number 40, features interviews with Roberto Grassi of the Italian IF community and Ruben “Urbatain” Nieto of the Spanish IF community.

I just stumbled upon “Collecting and Preserving Infocom Interactive Fiction” [PDF] [PS] by Adam Mathes, who got a Library and Information Science Masters recently from UIUC:

I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. … Although not commercially popular today, the genre may be of great scholarly and historical importance as interactive electronic games grow both in general popularity and as subjects worthy of academic study. … Much like rare books, older computer programs are in need of conservation if their intellectual material is going to be accessible today and in the future. … a special collections library is well suited to the large task of preserving these works …

The sixth annual Ludum Dare 48-hour Game Programming Competition, aka LD48, starts tomorrow at 10pm US EDT. As of this moment, 21 hours and 36 minutes before competition begins, there are currently 123 entrants, ready to go with their compilers and libraries of choice, and presumably large caches of caffeinated beverages, frozen burritos and power bars.

Latin for “to give free play to“, Ludum Dare (pronounced ‘Lude-um Dar-ay’) “is a ‘mostly from scratch’, timed, solo coding challenge where all willing game developers spend their allowed time making the best game they can under a common theme”. Voting is almost over for choosing that common theme, which includes ideas such as “repetition”, “kitchen combat”, “goop”, and “that tickly feeling in your stomach (not quite love)”.

If you’re in the mood to see interminable video of Final Fantasy VI being re-enacted by video game consoles (that is, the video game consoles are the characters), check out Sega Fantasy VI (in English). Update: link changed; thanks, DoomRater.

I had never heard of the WonderSwan, the PC-FX, or the Playdia before this. And, I must say, some of the parts I watched were quite touching. Maybe it’s just that sappy music, though.

I spent some time last night over at Gavin Inglis’ Bareword. Scottish writer Inglis is one of the few hypertext authors I’m aware of who has written hypertexts according to the “branching path” model frequently discussed as a structural model but rarely utilized. I was familiar with Inglis’ Same Day Test, which tells the story the day in which its first-person protagonist goes (or doesn’t) for an AIDS test. The reader of SDT is offered choices of the “choose-your-own-adventure” variety. One smart design decision Inglis made with this work was to put all of the links at the bottom of the page rather than in the body of the text, which at the very least encourages the reader to finish one lexia before making a choice and moving on to the next. The story is tightly structured, advancing the reader through the course of the protagonist’s day.

Notes on Defending the Galaxy: The Complete Handbook of VideoGaming
edited by Michael Rubin
written by Michael Rubin, Carl Winefordner, and Sam Welker
illustrations by Rudy Young and Jeff Webber
photographs by Michael Rubin
Gainesville, Florida: Triad Publishing Company
1982
224 pp.

I recently borrowed Defending the Galaxy from Paul Shaffer, who not only is currently the Eniac curator here at Penn, but also happens to have worked for Scott Adams of Adventure International back in the early 1980s as a play-tester.

In a nice list of video game firsts published in the February 1984 issue of Computer Games magazine, Defending the Galaxy is listed as “The first ‘complete’ guide to video gaming (manners, maladies, dress, etc.)” We might take this declaration with a grain of salt, because the list happens to be drawn up by Michael Rubin, the editor of Defending the Galaxy. But it turns out to be an interesting book, for reasons that may not be obvious at a glance.

Hello all, I’m at CHI 2005 and have enjoyed catching up with Georgia Tech, RPI, UWashington, and Oregon colleagues–including GTXTers Michael M and Andrew S!! I’ve found the serious games panel and the social interaction panels to be engaging and relevant. I presented a new paper in the “Social Behaviors” session written with Howe and Nissenbaum on the topic of ‘values in design’– specifically, designing a socially-oriented game while at the same time incorporating and verifying particular values within the game design.

Implementation next to the tower

Originally uploaded by marinella.

The first photos of the Italian translation of Implemenation, from Marinella in Pisa.

A new memorymap group has formed at Flickr. People are annotating satellite maps from Google Maps of places that are important to them. I can see a lot of narrative potential in the form.

Idle Thumbs — a scrappy, well-written games journalism site that I think is getting ever more impressive — has a new piece called Games Beyond ‘Games’, reporting on last February’s Innovation in Games Symposium in the Netherlands. A quote from a struggling indie game developer who presented at the symposium:

[T]here is a market for innovative games, there is a desire to make them, there is a need to do research into them, but the games industry is not the place where this will happen.

And speaking of the Orisinal games, you’ll find a creative review of several of them Idle Thumbs as well.

Mind’s Heart
  by Robert Creeley

Mind’s heart, it must
be that some
truth lies locked
in you.

Or else, lies, all
lies, and no man
true enough to know
the difference.

Poet Robert Creeley died on March 30. Charles Bernstein has recently updated the Creeley page on PennSound and the EPC Creeley page at the University of Buffalo, where this prolific and influential poet taught before recently moving to Brown. The EPC page has links to many obituaries. The main page of Conjunctions is now filled with tributes to Creeley, including one from e-lit writer and Brown student Brian Kim Stefans, who, in his Roger Pellett persona, reworked some of Creeley’s poems.

Maeda Path is a Flash game, with sound, by Jared Tarbell. It’s based on a short online game that John Maeda coded for Shiseido. “This game represents one component of a multipart series studying the astounding work of long time computational artist John Maeda.” Via Elastico.

Matt Kirschenbaum gave a talk today called “‘Every Contact Leaves a Trace:’ Computer Forensics and Electronic Textuality,” at Penn’s History of Material Texts Workshop. (The abstract is online.) He discussed the Department of Defense Clearing and Sanitization Matrix and how the seemingly extreme measures required to destroy digital data contradict the first wave of scholarly writing on the transient, unstable nature of digital text, from “the usual suspects.” He pointed to the luminous spectacle of Tron as one possible inspiration for this early discourse of speed and light.