Grand Text Auto

The opera and “robot pageant” composed by Tod Machover, directed by Diane Paulis and with a libretto by Robert Pinsky has finally been staged in Monaco. I won’t see it until it comes to the Boston area in a few months, but I’m delighted to see the project reach the stage. Death and the Powers (discussed in this WBUR interview) has been in the works for about a decade. I wrote about it as we rang in the new year (2006) at Grand Text Auto, and I was very pleased to hear the workshop performance of the opera at A.R.T., here in Cambirdge. By now, we not only have the performances in Monaco: The libretto has been printed in Poetry and is available online at the Poetry Foundation. And those of us in the US can look forward to the March arrival of Death and the Powers in Boston.

“‘When You Are Strange’: Mutual Intelligibility, Intercoporeality, and Accountability in Stranger Encounters”
Brian Lande, Ph.D, Program Manager, DARPA, Arlington VA

Date: Thursday, September 30, 2010
Time: 11:00 am
Place: Engineering 2 Room 399

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the School of Engineering.

I was a sort of “international observer” at the latest ELMCIP Seminar in Bergen, Norway. ELCMIP is a European project, funded by HERA, which looks at the ways electronic literature communities function and foster creativity. On the first day of the seminar (Monday, September 20) I presented about the IF community, supplementing that evening’s screening of Get Lamp at the Landmark Cafe. I offered some thoughts, summarized here, for those working in other types of electronic literature practices.

Better than ever before, the new series of Grow-A-Game cards are out!

Grow-a-Game are colorful, professionally produced brainstorming tools used in top game design programs at major universities, in game design companies, and in high school programs. Version 2.0 now comes in three different sets (Classic, Apprentice, and Expert). Thousands of participants since 2007 have brainstormed games using these values-centered tools. Tiltfactor developed the cards as part of our research with Values at Play, a National Science Foundation research project led by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum.

Last night I premiered ppg256-6 in Bergen, Norway:

perl -le '@d=split/ /,"eros won to tree for fire sex sever ate nice tin elfin wealth";@t=split//,"_bhlmnpstw";{$_=localtime;/(..):(.)(.):(.)(.)/;print"\n$t[$3]".($4%2)."ck $t[$4]".($3%2)."ck\n"if!$5;print"\\"x$5." $d[$1%12] $d[$2] $d[$3] $d[$4] $d[$5]";sleep 1;redo}'

This is the latest in my series of 256-character poetry generators written in Perl. An unusual feature of this one is that it is deterministic: If run at the same time, it will produce the same output. Those who run Windows should check the ppg256 page for a .pl file that will run on that OS, on ActivePerl.

The Small World Exhibition examines how the world is being shaped by new technologies, setting this in the context of the last 160 years of industrial and global change. To accompany the show there will be a series of talks and educational events.

Opening times: Thurs / Fri / Sat 11am – 6pm.
Or by appointment. Please call 01702 470700.

Venue: Chalkwell Hall, Chalkwell Avenue, Southend-on-Sea SS0 8NB

Small World Fair – programme of events:

A series of panel-led discussions with artists, activists, business leaders and academics will debate technology, its impact and implications for progress and society.

The innovative X0y1 project in Spain has released a new Spanish ebook of cyberfeminist writing! Download it here!
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Como parte de las actividades de X0y1 (plataforma para la investigación y la producción artística sobre identidad y cultura de redes), ellos presentan su 1er ebook X0y1 #ensayos sobre género y ciberespacio, Coordina: Remedios Zafra; Traduce: Natalia Pérez-Galdós. Colaboran en esta publicación: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. A ellos hemos sumado la traducción de una breve selección de trabajos sobre estudios de género y cultura digital de investigadoras que trabajan sobre feminismo y tecnología como Mary Flanagan, Gesche Joost o Sandra Buckmüller. Puedes descargarlo en: www.x0y1.net/ebook/

I’m currently working on modeling stories through Answer Set Programming. My last research post was about using retroactive continuity in storytelling as rationalization mechanisms (defined by Abelson’s Goldwater Machine or my adviser’s Terminal Time) for story explanation. As more work goes into using logic programming in representing stories and characters, there are snags along with moments of small novel discoveries. Yesterday, Adam Smith was helping me work out a few snags in the event calculus for this story system. Overall, I want to anecdotally describe what working with believability in technology and expressive intelligence is like, along with giving some insights on formal models of story.

Yesterday I posted an interview with Joe Tabbi about the Electronic Literature Directory. Those interested in the new Directory project should check out this post by John Vincler which compares the version 1 and version 2 Directory with reference to the entries for Patchwork Girl.

Recently, there has been increased interest in building games that dynamically adapt to players. One of the common approaches to building adaptive games is dynamic difficulty adjustment. However, most of these approaches are limited to parameter tweaking such as adjusting weapon strength or reducing spawning times, and do not modify levels in response to difficulty adjustment. My system attempts to overcome this limitation by incorporating parameter tweaking into procedural content generation. The system creates new levels on the fly in response to the current performance of the player.

I interviewed Joseph Tabbi, author of Cognitive Fictions and editor of electronic book review, about the Electronic Literature Directory project that he’s currently heading. I took over from Joe early this summer as president of the Electronic Literature Organization. The Directory, which has already had success in its “version 1″ form, has been reworked to allow collaboratively-written and richer writing about e-lit work.

nm: Joe, what sorts of people are going to find something compelling in the Electronic Literature Organization’s new Directory?

At the recent 2010 Computational Intelligence in Games conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, there were competitions for making race car controllers, human-like FPS bots, and Ms. Pac Man players, among others. The competition that drew my interest, however, was the Mario level design competition, which challenged entrants to create procedural level generators that could generate fun and interesting levels based on information about a particular player’s style. The restrictions on entries (use only fixed numbers of gaps, coin blocks, and Koopas) meant that the winner would have to be cunning: it wouldn’t be easy to just estimate player skill and make the level more or less difficult by adding or removing obstacles; you would instead have to find ways to place obstacles that made the same obstacles more or less difficult. And because entries would be played by players at different skill levels, they would have to be flexible and adjust their output over a broad range of difficulties to get a high score. Finally, because score was based on the audience’s relative rating of enjoyment between level pairs, there would be no way to game the system and optimize some metric set without making truly enjoyable levels. Between these constraints, the winning entry should have been a demonstration of the power of procedural content generation to adapt to players of different skill levels, which is one of several reasons that PCG is useful in games. Unfortunately, the competition design may have been a bit too clever.

Mary Flanagan’s collaborator at Tiltfactor in the rather hush-hush Book of Jing manga project, Jonathan Jay Lee, has had a solo show in Hong Kong and been featured in Penninsula magazine as a “rising star” in the comics world.

Go Jonathan!
And… a sneak peak — Book One!

I recently participated in the CIG 2010 Mario level generation competition. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of being added to the level. The result is a computationally efficient approach to generating a large space of randomized levels.

A level created by the probabilistic multi-pass generator

The generation process consists of several phases, which place additional object types in the level. The following passes occur during generation:

I’m serving now as the president of the Electronic Literature Organization. We’ve been working to move the site to a new server, which has unfortunately left most of eliterature.org down for a while. (We did make a point of getting the Electronic Literature Collection, volume 1 back up as soon as possible at the new site, so that teachers, students, and other readers would have access to it.) I’m sorry for the inconvenience. My thanks go to the ELO directors who worked on this and to our new system administrator, Ward Vandewege, for managing the transition. Our new host and our retooling should mean that we will be able to avoid outages like this in the future, and that we will be able to better develop the site and our other ELO projects.

Eden, by Pablo Holmberg, Drawn & Quarterly, 2010

Yes, these comics sometimes veer into the extremely sappy, but they’re metafictional and wonderfully fabular throughout. Eden collects more than 100 simple four-panel strips featuring a diminutive, somewhat rabbit-like king, or at least, someone who wears a crown, in a magical land. An extremely insightful naïvite, of the sort that one hears in the occasional oracular pronunciation of a child, comes through at times. But these comics do not overlook death or other serious subjects. Holmberg, who writes and draws in Buenos Aires, has Eden and more available on his website, in Spanish. Odd that to learn about a Web comic, I had to go into my local comic store and buying a book, but it goes to show that book-based institutions have more than a retail function. And, it seems unlikely that Holmberg’s work would have appeared in translation without a publisher such as Drawn & Quarterly. Through such everyday efforts, we sometimes find the extraordinary.

This past week’s Virtual Cinema course at Dartmouth College proved that machinima works can go far beyond the tried and true. A mere handful of students explored lost love, gaming culture, poet-zombie attacks, and perhaps most importantly, the pensive and strange qualities of virtual life. Check out their playlist, and celebrate with Tilt.

Submission for the StarCraft AI Competition is now open. Complete details are provided at the submission site.

Two recent hit songs on the Web are the tribute “Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury” by Rachel Bloom and the non-tribute “Fuck You” by Cee-Lo. Perhaps after me and you – us, them, him, her, and it will be next?

The typographical treatment of “Fuck You” in the video is much more straightforward than in the well-linked “Say What Again” video by Jarratt Moody, which sets dialogue from Pulp Fiction to animated type. The words and letters in “Say What Again” aren’t demanding to be read as insistently, and they’re doing so much that it’s a joy to see them in motion. When there’s not as much happening, getting presented visually with the same words that are being sung to me seems a bit like having someone slap me repeatedly while saying “Slap! Slap! Slap!”

Dr. Cordelia Fine, with a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from University College London, notes in her summary of many gender studies in her book, Delusions of Gender, about gender and the brain a) several studies have found no difference in hemispheric size in neonates; b) the allegedly bigger female corpus (callosum) is in dispute and c) size vs function has not been proven: as Dr. Fine notes, “getting from brain to behavior has proved a challenge.” There may be biological difference in brain, but what do they show us about our thinking?

Ms. Blue pointed out a great Atari commercial that has been online for a while, but which is particularly appropriate to mention here: A TV ad for Pole Position. (The name of this blog does in fact refer to that game.) A few notes about this amazing TV spot:

• There’s an amusing jab at corporate executives, people who “stop exciting things from happening.” Even though the makers of the commercial may not have known or cared, this no doubt resonated among programmers at Atari.
• “Muffy, Buffy, Biff Junior, and I …” Nuff said.

After I presented poetry generators ppg256-1 through ppg256-5 at Banff in February, I shouted out, more or less spontaneously, “50 character reward to whoever gives us the best explanation of what ppg256 is!” Why did I say that? Childhood trauma, possibly, but the more immediate reason, as I mentioned earlier, is that the last of these, ppg256-5, is based on a section of Tristan Tzara’s February 1921 Dada Manifesto, one which ends with the phrase “50 francs reward to the person who finds the best way to explain DADA to us.”

In recent years, I’ve written a series of 1k (that is, exactly 1024 character) reviews on here. This ruse has helped me compose succinct (and possibly useful) notes about many things that I wouldn’t have otherwise written about. But some things that are worth reviewing, such as a documentary about interactive fiction, are really better treated in a bit more depth. Given my interest in the aesthetics of code, and in code that produces aesthetic output, a book entitled Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think is certainly one of those things.

In recent years, I’ve written a series of 1k (that is, exactly 1024 character) reviews on here. This ruse has helped me compose succinct (and possibly useful) notes about many things that I wouldn’t have otherwise written about. But some things that are worth reviewing, such as a documentary about interactive fiction, are really better treated in a bit more depth. Given my interest in the aesthetics of code, and in code that produces aesthetic output, a book entitled Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think is certainly one of those things.

Emerging Langauge Practices is a new journal based at SUNY Buffalo (poetic hotbed and host of the next E-Poetry) and founded by Loss Pequeño Glazier, Sarah JM Kolberg, and A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz. Issue one is a real accomplishment.

There are eye-catching creative projects by mIEKAL aND & Liaizon Wakest and by Lawrence Upton and John Levack Drever. There are also pieces by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Molleindustria. (We can only hope for further industrialization of this sort and more of these compelling productions in future issues.) The issue also includes a piece by Abraham Parangi, Giselle Beiguelman’s mobile tagging, Sandy Baldwin’s plaintive piece “** PLEASE REPLY MY BELOVED **,” and Jorge Luis Antonio’s wide-ranging article on digital poetry.