Grand Text Auto

“Renderings: Translating literary works in the digital age” by Piotr Marecki & Nick Montfort has been published, and is available online.

Typographers, fashionators, and makers of things most beautiful: Mary Flanagan and the Tiltfactor team are looking for an inventive new partner in design! We just posted an opportunity for an excellent graphic designer in our creative lab for social impact at Dartmouth College.

We do both print and digital projects, as you likely know, so we are looking for someone with a broad range of skills. Apply with your portfolio if you have inventive design chops and care about our mission. Remote work is possible, but for us to consider that, please be both an excellent designer and very organized.   The official posting is here!

I just gave a talk at the local demoparty, @party. While I haven’t written out notes and it wasn’t recorded, here are the slides. The talk was “Book Productions: The Latest in Computer-Generated Literary Art,” and included some discussion of how computer-generated literary books related to demoscene productions.

My minimal book Sliders has been published by my press, Bad Quarto. The book contains 32 poems, some of which are only one word long. In a break from tradition, they are not computer-generated.

Currently Sliders is only available for sale at the MIT Press Bookstore, 301 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, Mass.

This post is more technical than most of our blog posts.  If you’re not making computer games then this probably won’t be of terrible interest to you.

SALON 256 is a forum for presentation and discussion of very small creative computer programs. Such programs have featured in digital art and poetry, electronic literature, computer music, and the demoscene.

YOU are invited to present a tiny program of yours:

Monday May 1 . 5pm-7pm . MIT’s 14E-304

Presenters already confirmed:

• Mike “Dr.Claw” Piantedosi
• Angela Chang
• Sofian Audry
• Nick Montfort

Programs in an interpreted language are fine, as long as the code is 256 bytes or less; compiled programs with an executable file of 256b or less are fine, too.

Tiltfactor had the honor of hosting its first ever Game Jam in the lab as a part of the national Arctic Climate Game Jam (http://climategamejam.org). We had a great turnout, with creativity and free Thai food flowing through our participants’ veins. Esteemed Professor Ross Virginia, director of Dartmouth’s Institute of Arctic Studies, came and spoke to participants about the climate game jam and answered questions about climate change in general.

We split participants into 4 teams and they each will be creating games and coming back next week to present them. We will also be posting their projects on the blog next week. We can’t wait to see what they come up with!

The Trope Tank invites applications for a writer in residence during academic year 2017-2018, to start July 1 and with most involvement during the Fall, January, and Spring terms at MIT.

Our mission is developing new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language. More can be discovered about the Trope Tank here:

http://nickm.com/trope_tank/

Recent projects of the Trope Tank include Renderings:

Gordon, W. J. (1907). Round about the North Pole.

Max and I recently had the opportunity to talk to Barnard students in Stephanie Pfirman’s Exploring the Poles first year seminar about how games can be used as tools for effective communication.

To start things off, Max introduced Buffalo, and the students played for ten minutes. From our vantage point, it looked like there was fierce competition.

Our lab director, Mary Flanagan, is one of thirty fellows in the Higher Education Video Game Alliance. Read more about it in the Dartmouth news.

We’ve just received funding to design, create, and study a digital game intervention prototype to decrease loneliness in elderly populations, specifically in rural communities! We also have new support to continue our construal research (whether and how digital and non-digital platforms activate differing default levels of cognitive construal) by studying youth in a learning environment–this through the Neukom Institute at Dartmouth.

These projects, along with work on women in STEM, bias, and bystander intervention keep the team buzzing. Yay team!

Recently, at the suggestion of our writer in residence, Milton Läufer, we in the Trope Tankt have been producing digital files for discussion at meetings. These productions, almost always computer programs but not constrained to be such, must be at most 256 bytes.

It’s been extremely productive in terms of thinking about digital media, platforms and programming languages, and how we approach creative projects — and even other projects — generally. Postdoctoral researcher Sofian Audry prompted us to discuss this some at the last meeting.

So far we have three sets of 256b files which have landed in this directory, organized by date and with file names that indicate who wrote what:

Love is not Constantly Wondering if you are Making the Biggest Mistake of your Life. Portland, OR: Perfect Day Pub, 2011.

Roflcon III. Cambridge, MA: Self Published, 2012.

Bottke, Allison, Heather Gemmen Wilson, Gary Locke. Friend or Freak. Colorado Springs, CO: Faith Kidz, 2004.

Ball, Jonathan. Ex Machina. Toronto: BookThug, 2009.
(Also available from the MIT Libraries)

Bourbaki, Nicholas. If. Livingston, AL : Livingston Press, the University of West Alabama, 2014.

Burk, Jeff. Super Giant Monster Time! Portland, OR: Eraserhead Press, 2010.
(Also available from the MIT Libraries)

Carr, Mike. Robbers and Robots. New York: Random House, 1983.

This past week, I attended and presented three posters at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in San Antonio, Texas. The conference began for me with the Intervention Science Preconference, which made its SPSP debut. The day was filled with talks about how we can harness social psychology to create interventions to benefit society. Some of the highlights included listening to Dr. Mikki Hebl talking about her work on sexism, Dr. Betsy Levy Paluck discussing her research on creating anti-conflict interventions for adolescents, and Dr. Stephanie Fryberg describing her work with the newly founded school for the Tulalip tribes. During the poster session, I presented two of our studies on climate change to the other preconference attendees. At the main conference, I presented a poster on our work on gender bias in understanding STEM narratives as well as a poster on how relationship beliefs impact the way people think about ending relationships. Overall, it was an excellent conference and getting to hear about the current research in the field was invigorating.

New research from Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Lab will be presented at theSociety for Personality and Social Psychology (#spsp2017) conference in San Antonio this week! Our fiction in STEM research, “Interpretations of a Science Bias Narrative Vary by Gender,” will be discussed by Gili Freedman and includes the work of Kaitlin Fitzgerald, Melanie Green, Gili herself, Geoff Kaufman, and Mary Flanagan.

Here are some venues at which to catch Mary Flanagan speaking or showing art in the spring of 2017:

• First off, Mary’s work [bombscotch] is showing in the PUSH PLAY exhibition January 12 – March 4 2017 at the Hedreen Gallery, Seattle http://www.gamescenes.org/2017/01/event-push-play-january-12-march-4-2017-hedreen-gallery-seattle-1.html
• Also in January: I’m in HACKING / MODDING / REMIXING as Feminist Protest at the Miller Gallery CMU that begins January 28 http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu/exhibitions/HackingModdingRemixing/index.php
• In February, she’ll be at the College Art Association speaking on the panel, ‘Game Studies at 20’ 17 Feb hosted by John Sharp with Ian Boost, Janet Murray, Espen Aarseth. http://ow.ly/2fmV307OPCI 
• Mary will be speaking at the Board Game Studies Colloquium http://bgs20.tors.ku.dk  Copenhagen, Denmark 17-20 May!

Tiltfactor’s director Mary has found herself quite into Instagram. You’ll find her posts crossing all the domains in which she works: the art world, Tiltfactor, game industries, writing, and other curiosities. Find her Instagramming over at @critical.play, https://www.instagram.com/critical.play/

My New Year’s poem for 2017 is Colors, a 1KB Web page, online at http://nickm.com/poems/colors.html and here it is, too:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html style="overflow:hidden">
<head><meta charset=utf-8>
<!-- Copyright (c) 2016 Nick Montfort <nickm@nickm.com>   2016-12-31, 1KB

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is,
without any warranty.

My New Year’s poem for 2017 is Colors, a 1KB Web page, online at http://nickm.com/poems/colors.html and here it is, too:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html style="overflow:hidden">
<head><meta charset=utf-8>
<!-- Copyright (c) 2016 Nick Montfort <nickm@nickm.com>   2016-12-31, 1KB

Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is,
without any warranty.

Happy 2016 in review! It is now a tradition for us to take a moment this time of year to give thanks for everyone’s contributions and debrief a little on studio happenings.

Bineshii Hermes-Roach ’17 has had Tiltfactor on her radar since she arrived at Dartmouth. “During my freshman fall, I spoke with Max Seidman (a senior Tiltfactor game designer) at the activities fair and always kept Tiltfactor in the back of my mind, hoping one day I could involve myself with the lab.”

Bineshii explains that in the winter of her sophomore year she decided to take an off term and, after applying to work at Tiltfactor, receive a part-time position for game design that she kept through the spring. This past summer, for Dartmouth’s heralded Sophomore Summer, Bineshii applied for and was granted a summer game design fellowship at Tiltfactor.

Computational Media is all around us — video games, social media, interactive narrative, smartphone apps, computer-generated films, personalized health coaching, and more. To create these kinds of media, to deeply understand them, to push them forward in novel directions, requires a new kind of interdisciplinary thinker and maker. The new graduate degrees in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz are designed with this person in mind.

Did you know that our recent construal research is used by corporations like Samsung as they consider digital vs paper virtues? Or that game design teachers are modding Tiltfactor’s Grow-a-Game to consider issues of female exclusion in organizations? 

Dr. Mary Flanagan, Professor in the Department of Film & Media Studies, and founding director of Tiltfactor Lab, at Dartmouth College notes that such examples show the real world impact of university research and innovation efforts. “If we can provide businesses and organizations with novel and equitable ideas and methods for future change, we are scaling up the impact of our research and creative approach,” she says.