Grand Text Auto

Most users of the Internet by now know about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), or House Bill 32611, and the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PROTECT IP Act or just PIPA), or Senate Bill 9682– after all, when English-language Wikipedia blacks out people are going to notice. Joining Wikipedia in the act of protest were such sites as Reddit, Google, Mincraft, and many others. At this point it would be quite a feat for any wired member of the English-speaking world not to know that, for once, the Internet community at large has rallied around a cause.

Often, artistic pursuits are described as abstractions. They are interpretations of material. Rarely are they thought of as scientific pursuits. However, there are many new media artists who take it upon themselves to bridge the gap between what is seen as science and art. Especially when dealing with digital art, where so many computations are made to display the graphics we see, science can often be not the medium but also the subject of many artworks. Joseph Scheer and Andreas Müller-Pohle each have different takes on what scientific art entails.

To immigrants, Tijuana marks the frontera, or last stop before entering the United States. To American tourists it’s known as “T.J.,” a place to get inexpensive pharmaceutical drugs, dental work and plastic surgery. If you’re a visitor you become acutely aware of the “safe district” and the “not so safe district,” depending on how you see it. But few visitors venture beyond Tijuana’s main drag known as “Avenida Revolución.”

Women workers in maquiladora factory

A New Avenue for Change

It turns out you don’t have to camp outside in a tent in frigid climes to pitch a successful protest. The Electronic Disturbance Theatre has been doing them comfortably since 1997. Using simple technologies such as E-mail, HTML, and Java, the EDT has managed to launch a series of “denial of service attacks” on corrupt regimes from the Mexican Stock Exchange to the World Trade Organization. These attacks focus not on the places themselves, but on their websites.

The Medium Involved

But my credit card company says otherwise…

My new media art students will be posting over the next 8 week a series of introspective blog posts on digital/ new media artists. Our aim is to post one every day or every other day. Enjoy, comment, discuss!

Our rather populous Winter Team (12 of us) has begun a new round of design and development for our STEM Bias project. No genre is left out: board games, card games, iPad/web games, and of course, performative games!

Meet Zara, our design guru; Jasmine, doing a balancing act; and Andrea and Viviana, busy modding!

It is currently a “Tiltfactor Week”: Our own reality show! Teams have a week to research and prototype a concept to playable completeness. It might not be pretty–it is raining ice outside, we’re disregarding any sense of game aesthetics, and if you ask about the hours of hard work students will put into project games–you may hear groans. But– I think our players will be happy with the results!

We are very excited to announce that Prom Week has been nominated as a finalist in Technical Excellence for the 2012 Independent Games Festival!

We’ll be posting more info about Prom Week, how it works, and information about our release date soon.

Whooo hooooo!!!

Wednesday January 18, 2012 4-7pm
304 North Fairbanks

Come greet the new year with the folks behind Dartmouth’s Game Research Lab for an open house! Play video games and board games! Meet our student designers, staff, and founder Mary Flanagan– and play games! This time we will be playing Kinect games, and showing our own new games including POX for iPad and prototypes for our gender stereotyping and STEM field-related games, and we’ll discuss our new after school programs in Lebanon! And, we’ll play XBOX Kinect games and eat Thai food!

Huzzah!

Dene Grigar, vice president of the Electronic Literature Organization and one of the organizers of the excellent e-lit gallery and reading here at the MLA Convention, just gave a great presentation about the importance of platform in the development and reception of electronic literature. I was pleased initially to see that there was not only this presentation with “Platform” in the title, then very interested to hear about her work in a lab with original older computer hardware and her discussion of platform differences and changes through the years.

Radical Books of 2011, 7/10

Silence: Lectures and Writings, John Cage, 50th anniversary edition, Wesleyan University Press, 9780819571762

I recently gave a talk at the ASAP/3 conference that sketched the history of computers as tools & playthings. I’ve learned my lesson on giving dominantly visual talks: if you don’t have good notes then they are a major bummer to give in the future, plus nobody else can read them. What was I thinking when I made a slide with two blue arrows on it? You’ll find that you can basically read my notes off each page of the pdf: it’s almost exactly what I say during the talk. You’ll have to imagine my voice though. Two video segments (one of John Cimino showing off the Spore Creature Creator, another of Steve Jobs discussing computers as bicycles for our minds) are missing, but otherwise it’s complete. From the talk:

Radical Books of 2011, 6/10

Galerie de Difformité, Gretchen E. Henderson, &NOW Books, 9780982315637

Cross the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book with fragmented, cut-up, torn-up, stretched, and unconventionally printed text. Skip the “of” of an English title and give it a French name, using the “de” form. Bend book into blog. Deformity here includes transgressing the boundaries of authorship and inviting “user-generated” fascicles. Work the book’s text into something despicable or respectable: Fill out the form. Click to put Ye Ugly Face on Facebook. The story’s play of conspiracies and resurrections resonate with the transformations of the reading process that book and reader enact. Further, the exercises in textual topology – and lettered exhibits calling for further deformation – show that remixing is not just for one-note works such as Dramatic Chipmunk. The book, and indeed this thoughtfully developed artist’s book, can also serve as seed for elaborate transformation and convolution.

Radical Books of 2011, 5/10

Holocaust Museum, Robert Fitterman, Veer Books, 9781907088346

Here is an extraordinary list, a simple and straightforwardly organized book of metadata (in this case, photo captions) that gives a very detached view of the 20th Century’s most unthinkable occurrence. What is fascinating is that while the book comments on some of the tropes of memorials, Holocaust museums, and records of trauma in general – enumeration, detachment, clear identification and humanization of individuals – it nevertheless becomes an effective testimony of the Holocaust and of how it was inextricably involved with ordinary life and events and histories, beyond the horrors that were ordered and organized:

Radical Books of 2011, 4/10

Found Poems, Bern Porter, new edition of a 1972 Something Else Press book, 9780982264591

Radical Books of 2011, 3/10

Motes, Craig Dworkin, Roof Books, 9781931824446

Short titles (or none) followed by hardly longer texts – the form is due to Bob Grenier’s A Day at the Beach and his materially innovative Sentences. Dworkin does something new, showing this is no one-trick pony and has use beyond a single poet. Zak Smith was the first to do a picture for every page of a novel (Gravity’s Rainbow) only to be followed by Matt Kish’s 2011 demonstration that the conceit had legs. Similarly, Dworkin innovates in Motes by being the second to try his hand at an unusual way of writing, and to show that it can amplify his different voice:

It’s a totally new take on Track & Field. Thanks to inky for the tip … Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment! is by Pippin Barr of ITU-Copenhagen.

Radical Books of 2011, 2/10

It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, Lisa Pearson, Siglio Press, 9780979956263

The writing here ranges from conceptual and all-text (as in Fiona Banner’s The Nam, composed of impassively typed descriptions of everything that happens in six famous Vietnam War films) to the highly visual (as in Suzanne Treister’s transformation of daily newspaper headlines into alchemical diagrams). One of Hannah Weiner’s journals in excerpted in manuscript; another selection is of small pages with brief, seemingly quotidian image-and-phrase pairings: from Docking Competitions by Erica van Horn & Laurie Clark. Some selections are entire works; others are excerpted well. A particularly nice selection is from the early computer poem A House of Dust by Alison Knowles and James Tenney, which shows the material nature of late-1960s computer output along with the formal possibilities the computer holds for recombining language. The twenty-six selections cover considerable visual, verbal, and conceptual terrain and produce excellent combinations of word and image that provoke and compel.

In our current project on implicit bias and stereotype threat, we are making some games for middle-school aged girls. One of the problems we consistently encounter in designing these games is the societal taboo against girls gaming, and its effect on our target audience. This piece by Clementine, a lab affiliate, sheds a little light on why there is a dearth of women and other marginalized groups in online games, and why it’s important to have a welcoming community.
-Max

Radical Books of 2011, 1/10

Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, Matt Kish, Tin House Books, 9781935639138

Combining his lack of formal artistic training, found paper from a used book store, and a 552-page paperback edition of Melville’s classic, Matt Kish – with the charm of an outsider artist but without the institutionalization or insanity – produces an utterly compelling visual journey through Ishmael’s adventures. There are striking colors and textures, odd forms – sometimes cranial, sometimes robotic. Unrolled image-by-image on Kish’s blog, the book-based drawings now make for a whale of a book; the original art is also, now, for sale (or sold). Unlike Tom Philips’s A Humament, the project doesn’t occlude text with image, rewriting a novel. Yet it is a forceful engagement with the page, with particular quotations, and with a encyclopedic story of obsession. The drawings are spare, powerful, and varied, in a flat illustrative style that doesn’t explain but does document one lengthy encounter with Moby-Dick.

Happy Holidays from the Tiltfactor team! If you are scrambling for last minute gifts, here are some more suggestions, this time from Tiltfactor intern Shaun and project manager Sukie:

“Fire in the Library” is an article in the new Technology Review about digital archivist, documentary filmmaker, and cat impersonator Jason Scott.

“The Curse of Cow Clicker” is an article in the new Wired about game developer, ontologist, and cowpocalyptic force Ian Bogost.

Enjoy your holiday season with these fine profiles.

I recently had the chance to revisit the Gendered Conference Campaign, which is not new (it’s more than two years old) but is (unfortunately) still relevant. Without fixing blame on conference organizers, this page lists several “all-male” academic conferences (those where all the invited speakers are men) and offers useful, concrete suggestions for including women in your own conference.

The journal New River has a new issue, very nicely designed and with a diverse selection of work. Editors Brianna P. Stout and Christopher Linforth have five different sorts of collaborative works, by Andy Campbell and Lynda Williams; Chris Funkhouser and Amy Hufnagel; Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova (who translated my “Concrete Perl,” “The Two,” and “Through the Park” into Russian); Jason Nelson and several Virginia Tech collaborators; and Alan Bigelow with those readers who respond. Here’s the link to my three poems, which are short computational works that operate on the level of the letter, word or phrase, and sentence.