Grand Text Auto

I’ve been thinking about a few things related to academic blogs, but rather than roll them all into one mega-post I think I’ll post them one at a time. For starters, I was struck by some reasons for academic blogging noted by Liz Lawley and a group of social software all-stars:

• speed of publishing (and dissemination),
• spontaneity,
• the ability to publish (and get feedback on) work in progress,
• an increased authorial/personal voice (in contrast to the typical passive voice of academic writing),
• bypassing of the editorial process, and
• increased distributed peer review.

Part of what struck me about this list is that is doesn’t include some of the main reasons we had for starting GTxA.

Leonardo recently announced a project that is likely to become a great resource for new media students and scholars:

LABS is a comprehensive database of abstracts of Ph.d, Masters and MFA theses in the emerging intersection between art, science and technology. Persons who have received advanced degress in arts (visual, sound, performing, text), computer sciences, the sciences and/or technology which in some way investigate philosophical, historical, critical or applications of science or technology to the arts  are invited to submit an abstract of their thesis for publication consideration in this database.

Jewelboxing looks like a nice DIY packaging solution for folks looking to hawk their short-run digital wares at conference schwag tables, arty bookstores and the like.

Jill got the scoop already: At the second event in the Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series, on Friday, Noah and I gave readings and talked about new media history.

The Interactive Project Lab (IPL) is a collaboration between the Banff Centre’s Banff New Media Institute, the Canadian Film Centre’s Habitat New Media Lab in Toronto, and L’Institut national de l’image et du son in Montreal. Habitat is now accepting applications for slots in a 6-week IPL “Project Makeover” workshop that begins November 5th. Applications will be accepted until Friday, October 22nd at 5:00pm. The twelve (12) positions in the IPL Workshop will be awarded to the first twelve qualified applicants who apply. (The Habitat announcement follows.)

From the gaming house of Gonzalo Frasca comes the first political videogame for a non-U.S. presidential election, the election in Uruguay: “Cambiemos” (Let’s Change.)

“Cambiemos” is a short, positive game that is both fun and seems to be good at expressing political principles: rebuilding is important, rebuilding takes work and cooperation, you have to be perceptive as you work, … even “you can fix your mistakes if you have time,” I think. It’s not a Boalian system for working out people’s political approaches through play – and unless Boal runs for office again, I don’t think any political campaign would pay for Gonzalo to whip up one of those – but it is something else that’s pretty interesting. I have to admit that like it better than the Dean game, which was more of a campaign volunteer’s manual than an interestingly-presented political statement. “Cambiemos” is easy to play, not being fast-paced at all. It also has good gameplay, and is aesthetically pleasing, making good use of black-and-white and color images.

Coming up for air after several intense weeks of crunch time at work, west coast travel and Façade debugging, I will simply link to Rob Zubek’s recent post summarizing a recent series of articles, essays and discussions about Interactive Story, starting with comments from Spielberg and Zemeckis, then a reaction from Chris Remo (who last month ranted well with “I kill you”), and follow-up reactions from Walter Kim and the Slashdot Games community.

A new piece, [ FALLUJAH . IRAQ . 31/03/2004 ] is up at Turbulunce. It’s one of seven there by Michael Takeo Magruder. Some of his other pieces there are more intricate and offer interactvie options; this one is simpler in its form, meditative, and worth a look, even if your time is short. It has sound, so unmute as you visit the piece.

This afternoon, NPR’s Talk of the Nation broadcast an interesting story on RFID technology and privacy concerns, and discussed RFID technologies ranging from bracelets to help parents at Denmark’s Legoland theme park find their stray children to subdermal implants which can be used for hospital patients to carry their medical histories under their skin.

What exactly happened to the link-and-node hypertext novel? We don’t have to carry out that much of an investigation to see what’s going on with Flash poetry, or the network novel, or interactive fiction. But what’s up with the venerable form used by the soi-disant wunderkinder authors of The Unknown, the one in which Victory Garden took root, in which Shelley Jackson stitched together her Patchwork Girl?

Well, I’ll keep you in suspense no longer: Folks are still writing these sorts of things. Below, I’ll mention a few nice aspects of two recent, lengthy works of hypertext fiction I’ve managed to dip into. I’ll be reading more, when I can afford to, of both Praying to Frank, the first hypertext novel by Damon M. Smith, and a new work by veteran hypertext writer Edward Falco, Circa 1967-1968.

Thanks to a tip from Scott, I recently visited the “Orange Lounge” at South Coast Plaza (part of the Orange County Museum of Art) — a space “devoted exclusively to the presentation and interpretation of video, computer and Internet-based art, audio works, and other forms of new media.” A welcome addition to the SoCal scene!

The inaugural show (which closed September 26) was titled “Hypermedia.” Unfortunately, none of the work happened to “branch or perform on request.” But I enjoyed the show, and there was even a piece of game-oriented elit!

Aspect: The Chronicle of New Media Art has a new call for participation. This issue’s theme “reflects an interest in artwork that conveys some levity or joy in its subject matter.” Aspect is a DVD magazine, and they seek video that documents artworks in experimental, installation, digital, and other formats hard to communicate well on paper. Deadline 15 December 2004. (More info follows.)

A Review of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm
Loss Pequeño Glazier
Salt Press
2003
112 pp.
$14.99

Loss Pequeño Glazier may have just experienced his geek apotheosis on Slashdot last December, but he’s a poet whose digitally engaged work, both creative and critical, has been progressing since before the time of Mosaic. His book of poems Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm is an engaging investigation of how the projects of poetry and computer technology can jostle our cultures and our imaginations. It’s “The Comedian as the Language C,” a voyage to the south, powered by Unix.

London’s Dali Museum has put on a show of the art of Myst, focused on the new Myst IV Revelation (185 MB demo available at that site). When even the Just Adventure review of the show refers to it as “a reasonably enlightening, if more than slightly blatant, piece of marketing fun,” it doesn’t cause me to wax too enthusiasic. The marketing (and perhaps art) must have been effective, though, since the reviewer also noted that the fourth Myst “goes way beyond Exile in terms of presenting a living, atmospheric world.” The new installment should have just been released, but I haven’t found a review yet. Thanks to Martin Hadis of Internetaleph for the news.

News Reader, by Noah, David Durand, Brian Moss, and Elaine Froehlich, is now available for download from the Turbulence site. This is the second of two news-eating textual instruments (Regime Change, discussed earlier, being the other) for Mac OS X and Windows, and this one plays on (initially) mainstream stories loaded live from Yahoo! News. “Playing these stories brings forth texts generated from alternative press stories,” the artists explain, “portions of which are introduced (through interaction) into the starting texts.”

I’m in So Cal for Alt+Ctrl (where I’m giving a lunchtime talk tomorrow, and attending the opening on Thursday evening) which gave me a chance to attend the first talk in UC Riverside’s “Global Interface” series. N. Katherine Hayles gave the opening talk: “Living in Computational Spaces: Means and Metaphors.” The alternative title, drawn from her forthcoming book, was My Mother was a Computer. Below are my notes.

The games begin: you can now download entries in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition. Thanks to Stephen Granade for organizing the Comp yet again this year. There are 38 entries: 9 TADS 2, 20 Inform/Z-code, 1 Hugo, 2 TADS 3, 1 Hugo, 1 Inform/Glulx, 1 Adrift, 1 Alan, and 2 Windows games. The rules specify that over the next six weeks, the judges (that’s you, unless you’re an author of a game or not interested) can play each for at most two hours before voting. Anyone who has played five or more can vote, although judges are ask to play as many as they can. More about how to judge is online, as are the rules the authors have to abide by and information on the history of The Comp. There are prizes, including US $500.

The discussions were lengthy and inspiring at code and creativity 3.0 (participants included John Klima, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Alex Galloway, Ruth Catlow, and yours truly Mary Flanagan), hosted by Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais at the University of Maine. Conversations hovered around the idea of computer gaming and how gaming interfaces with / against larger political and cultural issues.

Mark Marino (of the Barthian and bachelor bots) sends word of Global Interface, a yearlong, interdisciplinary workshop on cyberculture that is just starting up with a talk from Kate Hayles on Monday, Oct 4. Meatspace meetings will happen monthly at UC Riverside. as is explained in the proposal. The diverse set of participants includes faculty from music, dance, and computer science. “The interface serves as the nexus between artist, viewer, programmer, technology, and industry,” the blog for the workshop declares. Mark and the other organizers hope that this blog will foster intersections and conversation online, too, and there’s a plan to post extensive notes on all the talks.

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Commodore International is about ready to roll out the new C32 (to be marketed as the VIC 40 in Europe), the world’s first hardware implementation of Infocom’s Z-Machine. There’s only one piece missing: Dave Bernazzani needs you to write interactive fiction for its 32kb Z-Carts.

Simultaneously-opening shows at the MIT List Center and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts will be the first major exhibition of the work of Cerith Wyn Evans in the U.S. There’s a reception at MIT next Thursday (the 7th) and artist talks on the following Saturday (the 9th). As the MIT press release states, these “site-specific projects explore the complex relationships between image and word, poetry and science, divination and earthly communication, and spoken and written language.” (More details follow.)

of him who knew the most of all men know
who made the journey; heartbroken; reconciled;
….
open the copper chest with the iron locks;
the tablet of lapis lazuli tells the story.
(tr. David Ferry)

Apropos of only a few things digital, today I held and examined, illiterately, several 4,000-year-old Sumerian texts and one that was slightly more recent: one of the surviving tablets of clay upon which is written, in cuneiform Akkadian, part of the first known epic, Gilgamesh.

“ALT+CTRL: A Festival of Independent and Alternative Games” will be at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology from October 5th to November 24th. I’ll be around to be part of a panel of First Person contributors on October 5th, and also for the opening on October 7th. I’m looking forward to seeing folks there! (More info follows.)

I went out toward Atlantic City this weekend to hear William Gillespie and Talan Memmott read. On Friday, they kicked off Scott’s Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series this semester at Stockton, as promised. It was great to hang out and talk shop with those three throughout the weekend; I also enjoyed getting to talk to Stockton and community attendees at the reading who were interested in e-lit. The longer format allowed Talan to take us through some of several pieces, including a good bit of his in-progress piece dealing with René Margritte, one that joins visual transformations and 3D-like spaces (somewhat like those seen in Lolli’s Apartment) with the art-critical vein of his writing (seen also in The Berth of V.ness and Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]). William read from and discussed Table of Forms, The Unknown, 2002, and Trade Names, also talking about the form of 20 consonant poetry that he invented. I’ve heard Talan and William read many times before, sometimes in blitzkrieg readings (which I’ve been guilty of organizing). The short showcases have their uses, but it was good to hear these two go through some of their work in more depth out at Stockton, where I got a better sense of the overall questions, structures, and themes that their work engages.

Scott is quoted in Sunday’s New York Times in a story by Samantha Storey on sticker art:

Scott Rettberg, a scholar in new media, attributes the resurgence of stickers to low-cost inkjet printers and “the ubiquity of the global network.” “Cheap printers give artists the ability to mass-produce work intended for public consumption,” he said, “and stickers are easier to place than traditional graffiti.”

I’m mighty proud for my Implementation coauthor. More details are on the Implementation site. The nice links to sticker art sites from the story will remain available there after the Times pulls the story from the Web and Lexis-Nexizes it even deeper into inaccessibility.