Grand Text Auto

I will be speaking on behalf of my artistic practice and Tiltfactor with Christopher Robbins, of the Ghana Think Tank, at TransTalks: Practice Makes Practice, a series of conversations among invited speakers, the MFA students in the Parsons Transdisciplinary Design program, and the public dedicated to exploring design’s capacity to investigate, disassemble and reframe the political, economic and social forces that define our everyday practices.

The goal for Flanagan is to allow the conversation to follow a similar path to the design process:  How do each of these artist/designers decide upon their design question? What methodologies are developed that shape that question? What outcomes could be considered successful? And importantly, in the form of a post-mortem across several projects as a reflective form of practice, How does failure play into particular experimental design endeavors?

I was recently notified that “The Purpling” was no longer online at its original published location, on a host named “research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu” which held The Iowa Review Web site. In fact, it seems that The Iowa Review Web is missing entirely from that host.

My first reaction was put my 2008 hypertext poem online now on my site, nickm.com, at:

http://nickm.com/poems/the_purpling/

Fortunately, TIWR has not vanished from the Web. I found that things are still in place at:

http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/

And “The Purpling” is also up there. Maybe I was using a non-canonical link to begin with? Or maybe things moved around?

When I first entered this class, I had a very clear definition of art, and interactivity wasn’t part of it. Anything that involved interaction was automatically a game. Engaging the user was an automatic distinction for me between what was art and a display.

I really began to understand new media art differently when analyzing interactive works. In many ways, interactive works become more forcibly engaging than static artworks are. For example, when passing by a classical painting or a photograph in an art gallery, a viewer can simply pass by with only a short glance to the work. Whereas, with interactive art, the person becomes the life for the work: a sound is heard, letters move, an image changes, a form is displayed on a screen. All becomes very apparent to the user that he/she is important to this work’s well-being. And so he/she stays.

Yesterday I held a paperback of Expressive Processing in my hand for the first time.
(This takes its price down to around $13 at places like Amazon.) I’ve also learned a number of interesting things about the book since it was published — learning more about what others think of it, of course, and also more about how the research and thinking behind the book is influencing my own work as a digital media creator. I wrote about the creation-focused set of lessons last month, in a post called Humanities-Based Game Design.

When one considers the breadth of new media art that has been popularized in the last several decades, a major trend emerges: they’re about big messages. Famous pieces we’ve examined this term, from Domestic Tension to The French Democracy, all have a serious thematic purpose. Rarely are works intended for fun or entertainment considered legitimate “art,” as though fun and artistic merit are mutually exclusive. Consider Roger Ebert’s assertion that “video games can never be art.” These arguments devolve largely into discussions of semantics, essentially claiming that entertainment is not artistic. But this seems to contradict the most basic idea of art: that which is aesthetically pleasing to behold.

Here’s a post from a computer scientist (Paul Fishwick) that not only embraces critical code studies (CCS), it suggests that collaborations are possible that would be a “remarkable intersection of culture and disciplines” – where the object of study and the methods are shared between the humanities and computer science. Radical.

“Losing my anonymity in this world I think is something that I find terrifying.” Alex O’Laughlin

For many of us this, this statement rings true. The public life is brutal, demanding, and demeaning. To be a public figure is to be subject to public scrutiny in every word and deed. To lose a part of oneself to others. To be, as Sarah Chalke described it, a little less human. Perhaps this is why, more and more, people are swarming upon opportunities to test out the experience without truly sacrificing a part of themselves. That is, they re taking on pseudo-anonymous identities through networked gaming, online forums, and their corollaries.

It’s this Friday in Brooklyn, and I’ll be one of six competitors.

This Friday night I’ll be competing in the First Annual World Palindrome Championship. If you insist, you can call it the First or the Inaugural World Palindrome Championship, but that’s the name of the event.

Er, Eh – Where?

The event will take place in Brooklyn at the New York Marriott at the Brooklyn Bridge. The competition, with a 75-minute time for palindrome composition based on a prompt, will kick off the 35th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and will start at 8pm. (Those cruciverbalists like to stay up late.) It’s all run by Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. The championship is the first thing on the tournament schedule.

New media art gives us the opportunity to explore further what networking can do for communities on a small and global scale.  In most cases, digital networking allows users to interact with an inflated number of people than they would have interacted with in person.  For some, this interface allows the user to gain confidence and encourage more self-disclosure.  Yet, for others, it is an outlet for harsh language and hurtful comments.

Can games have meaning beyond its context of entertainment? In the past, I never considered game development as a possible aspect of creating new media art. Indeed, many games created share no commonalities with the principles of new media art. The fact that games contain digitally-rendered content alone is not sufficient for their admittance into the art world. However, according to Christiane Paul, a renowned new media artist and curator, “games are an important part of [new media] art’s history in that early on they explored many of the paradigms that are now common in interactive art” (Paul 197). So, what constitutes a game that is also a piece of new media artwork? This is a serious and provocative question for me to consider, as my final group project in my new media class involves the creation of a piece of new media art with playful, game-like tendencies.

Imagine hiking across the lone desert with the sun beating down on you. You wipe your brow and taste the salty dry sweat on your brow. Your heart keeps tempo while you try to stay focused on the trail ahead. Suddenly, memories come rushing through your head. You remember the distant past like it had just happened. But the blisters on your toes bring you back to the desert. Then there are fleeting memories of how you got deported the last time. How the marriage didn’t work out and you couldn’t prove it. They didn’t want to hear your story. Instead they put you on a southbound bus to Yuma. You are an immigrant en route to El Norte in search of a better life. Carol Flax and Trebor Scholtz’s web artwork entitled, “Tuesday Afternoon” puts you in the shoes of the person who is willing to risk everything including their life to reach the United States.

We have an amazing Spring 2012 Purple Blurb lineup, thanks to this academic year’s organizer, Amaranth Borsuk, and featuring two special events and readings by two leading Canadian poets who work in sound, concrete, and conceptual poetry. The Purple Blurb series is supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund and MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. All events are at MIT and are free and open to the public.

Monday, March 19
5:30 PM
6-120

Steve McCaffery

Author of Carnival, The Black Debt, Seven Pages Missing
Professor and David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters, SUNY Buffalo

The term “New Media” is expanding, since its emergence out of Pop Art, Fluxus, and other earlier movements, to mean many things. It is digital, it is interactive, it is dynamic, it is animated, it is dangerously hactivist…it is an expression of changing times and cultures, of the horizon called the future coming closer to us. One particular instance of New Media which has branched out into its own discipline is “Bio Art,” such as that practiced by British artist Jane Prophet in her project Silver Heart, seen below.

I gave a lecture yesterday with Jesper Juul and Clara Fernandez-Vara called “Knowing the Past: Game Education Needs Game History.” It was part of the Game Education Summit at GDC and Frank Cifaldi wrote a nice discussion of a couple of the key themes for Gamasutra.

We put our slides together on Jesper’s computer, so I don’t have them all, but here are mine with my presenter’s notes (what I actually said varied, of course).

The nice thing about teaching game history now is that we’re very close to agreeing on the list of essential games, from around the world, that students need to master in an introductory game class

Grouping like things together is something that we are taught to do from an early age, but what do we do with things, people and circumstances that blur the lines and the groups? In the work of Luis Gispert, we are forced to confront these issues in a new light through the contrast that is created between what we see and what we expect. A lot of Gispert’s work features a mixture of common stereotypes that are present in today’s society and puts them out of context creating a contrast. Once these stereotypes are out of context we are then forced to analyze why and how we associate certain activities, behavior, dress, and objects to certain people and certain cultures. Through this process Gispert is able to reveal some issues that are not often confronted, recognized, or thought about by the viewer.

Grouping like things together is something that we are taught to do from an early age, but what do we do with things, people and circumstances that blur the lines and the groups? In the work of Luis Gispert, we are forced to confront these issues in a new light through the contrast that is created between what we see and what we expect. A lot of Gispert’s work features a mixture of common stereotypes that are present in today’s society and puts them out of context creating a contrast. Once these stereotypes are out of context we are then forced to analyze why and how we associate certain activities, behavior, dress, and objects to certain people and certain cultures. Through this process Gispert is able to reveal some issues that are not often confronted, recognized, or thought about by the viewer.

A number of people asked me to post my introductory slides from the “What is a Research Game” session at the Game Developers Conference yesterday. Here they are with my presenter notes.

Well, what is the current role of games in universities? Here’s the stereotype: Social scientists still talk with people, but now those people are WoW players, Humanists still think deep thoughts, but now they’re about Passage, Computer Scientists still build systems, and still only far enough to publish papers, Educators still do the same type of instruction, but now they add points and badges, Artists still make and exhibit pieces, but now they reference game culture

This week, be sure to catch three new media artworks installed along Berry Main Street on the Dartmouth College campus. The projects were produced in the New Media Art class offered through Studio Art, taught by Professor Mary Flanagan. The students will be on-site and available to answer questions about the work on TUESDAY MARCH 6TH 2012 from 3-4pm.

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In the Front Hall: Uplift Me

By Hannah Collman ’15,  Kayla Gilbert ’12 and Shloka Kini ’13

Take the natural splendor of Taiwan’s beautiful canyon and add side fighting action. Or, just see how Damian Esteves has already done it in yet another Taroko Gorge remix.

Have you ever played UNO, Scrabble, Hearts, or Dominoes? Chances are that you have. Classic card and board games are widely popular. According to Mattel, 30,000 games of Scrabble are started each hour. According to Hasbro, more than 275 million games of Monopoly have been sold worldwide. With online, mobile, and handheld versions of classic games available, it is difficult to quantify how popular they are, but also easy to see how ubiquitous they remain.

IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (T-CIAIG)

Call for papers: Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games

Special issue editors: Ian Horswill, Nick Montfort and R. Michael Young

Stories in both their telling and their hearing are central to human experience, playing an important role in how humans understand the world around them. Entertainment media and other cultural artifacts are often designed around the presentation and experience of narrative. Even in video games, which need not be narrative, the vast majority of blockbuster titles are organized around some kind of quest narrative and many have elaborate stories with significant character development. Games, interactive fiction, and other computational media allow the dynamic generation of stories through the use of planning techniques, simulation (emergent narrative), or repair techniques. These provide new opportunities, both to make the artist’s hand less evident through the use of aleatory and/or automated methods and for the audience/player to more actively participate in the creation of the narrative.

Codings shows the computer as an aesthetic, programmed device that computes on characters. The works in the show continue and divert the traditions of concrete poetry and short-form recreational programming; they eschew elaborate multimedia combinations and the use of network resources and instead operate on encoded letters, numbers, punctuation, and other symbols that are on the computer itself.

////////////////////////// Giselle Biguelman
///////////////////////// Commodore Business Machines, Inc.
//////////////////////// Adam Parrish
/////////////////////// Jörg Piringer
////////////////////// Casey Reas
///////////////////// Páll Thayer

Curated by Nick Montfort
Pace Digital Gallery

Feb 28th – March 30th, 2012 (with regular gallery hours Mon-Thu 12-5pm).

While I have been advocating the use of reactive planning for over a year now, there is often a large amount of middleware between a game environment and the reactive planning agent that needs to be defined in order to make use of ABL in games. The goal of this article is to provide a tutorial for interfacing a game environment with a simple ABL agent.

Leonardo Flores presents his “Taroko Gary,” a mash-up remix of Gary Snyder’s “Endless Streams and Mountains” and my “Taroko Gorge.” (Update: I changed the URL on February 28, 2012.)

We talked about digital sound as well as some poetic and visual art matters on a panel on Feb 15 here at MIT with David Cossin, Ben Hogue, yours truly (Nick Montfort), Evan Ziporyn, and Joe Paradiso … backed for a while by ppg256-3: