Grand Text Auto

Last month UCSD hosted SoftWhere 2008 — the first software studies workshop in North America. It was a great experience compressed into a short time period, with one afternoon for an overview of the broad variety of work being done by participants and one morning for a set of focused discussions on the state of the field and possible future projects.

Now there are online videos available for a number of the presentations, each in a punchy “Pecha Kucha” style (under 7 minutes). They can be downloaded in QuickTime form at the workshop page and are becoming available on YouTube and in other forms.

Remember the Codework workshop at WVU – the one about the relationship between creative writing and programming? Maybe not, but my posts on on Emmett Williams’s IBM Poem and programs Ted Nelson likes were from there. Nineteen short position papers from the workshop are now available online in PDF. Although the index is somewhat uninformative, listing only the participants’ names, there is a good store of material for those interested in investigating what transpired at the workshop. I’m not up to playing favorites right now and suggesting any reading, and I’m certainly not up to writing a summary of all nineteen papers, but please drop a note on here if you find something particularly interesting in this pile. I’ll try to do the same as I revisit these in the future. I know from participating in the workshop that there are a lot of interesting arguments and discussions in there.

• Brown is raising Interrput 2008, an electronic literature festival that will run October 17-19.
• Henry Lowood’s article about the Machinima Archive explains some of the value of preserving records of player perfomance. Thanks to Matt Kirschenbaum for the link.
• A growing list of teaching projects that use Inform 7 appears now on Emily Short’s site. Short has been quite busy of late; she has a new biweekly column at Game Set Watch and continues to kick out the reviews for Play This Thing. Her game Metamorphoses has also been translated to Russian.

As part of his recent research, Edgar Huang of the Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis School of Informatics has posted a list of (currently) 170 new media programs in the US that offer a bachelor’s degree or higher. Any program that appeared to declare itself as a new media program was included. For whatever reason, I see that there are some interesting omissions, such as MIT’s Media Lab / Media Arts and Sciences Program and Brown’s Literary Arts program, with its fellowship each year for an electronic writer. (Additionally, in the MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, we have a digital media option for our undergraduate writing degree, which I suspect makes us a new media program, since a “BFA in Art with a Digital Art Concentration” warrants inclusion on the list.) But aside from the issue of omissions, which are inevitable in any large-scale attempt like this, it’s very interesting to see the range of programs represented, from those focusing on commercial multimedia production to performance-based programs and those growing from the visual arts. Even the term “computer science” makes appearances (two) on the list. Interestingly, given that Noah has spoken about this issue in years past, I can find only two program names on this list that refer to writing or the literary: Virginia Commonwealth University’s Media Art and Text Ph.D. Program, brought to you by VCU’s Department of English, and the Ph.D. in Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media from North Carolina State University.

On Wednesday June 4th, our Values at Play advisory board met to discuss year two of the VAP project:
Tracy Fullerton (USC, Co-founder and director of the EA Game Innovation Lab), Celia Pearce (Georgia Tech, Director of the Experimental Game Lab), Katie Salen (Parsons, Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play), and Jesper Juul (video game researcher at GAMBIT, MIT), together with myself and Helen Nissenbaum (NYU) and students at the Tiltfactor lab. We discussed

A Review of Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
The MIT Press
2008
316 pp.
$35.00

Matt Kirschenbaum’s Mechanisms is an extraordinary investigation into the surfaces the computer writes upon – not screens and paper, but the surfaces inside itself, chief among them the whirling, capacious, and surprisingly robust hard drive. Mechanisms explains how we can see through the myths of digital transience and ephemerality, and through layers of software and hardware abstraction, to understand how bits in digital storage systems can be durable, highly descriptive of writing activity, and shaped by material and formal factors as well as the cultural and economic circumstances of their creation. While other storage technologies (RAM, floppies) and other material aspects of the computer (screen and teletype, data and program) are discussed in the book, the hard disk, pictured on the cover and discussed in historical detail chapter 2, serves as the omphalos of the argument, which continues to sweep across the floppy-disk-based works of digital writing Mystery House, Afternoon: A Story, and Agrippa and to enlighten us about how digital writing is written to disk and read into culture.

June 30th is the proposal deadline for “The Future of Writing” — to be held November 6th and 7th at UC Irvine. Proposals are sought for digital art works and electronic literature (there will be an exhibit), individual presentations / demonstrations (15 min), and panels (70 min). The organizers’ interests are broad — as the CFP makes clear:

“The Future of Writing” is a mini-conference (November 6-7, 2008) designed to bring together scholars across the UC system and a cadre of nationally recognized experts to explore how the new communications technologies, particularly the Internet, are challenging previous conceptions of what “writing” is.

2nd ACM Workshop on Story Representation, Mechanism and Context – SRMC08

October 31, 2008, in conjunction with ACM MM 2008 Vancouver, BC, Canada

… In the workshop we will investigate the application and practice of story to multimedia story creation, artificial intelligence and social networks. This workshop would be of interest to those investigating traditional multimedia research involving search and retrieval, content analysis, media summarization and semantics, as well as those researchers developing new forms of story expression, narrative based interface design and user-generated story-sharing platforms. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, knowledge representations, social networks, and technologies for interactive systems point to a reemergence of story models as useful tools for multimedia research. Mechanisms for navigating these representations and constructing and sharing stories from them provide new directions for multimedia, networks and human interface design. Building story systems that are aware of narrative contexts, social dynamics and cultural relevance offers the potential for computer assisted generation, sharing and understanding of stories that are purposefully connected to the lives and experiences of an active audience …

Paul Chan’s 1st Light (video from artreview.com) (video from YouTube) is now running on the floor at the ICA in Boston. The work was also shown at the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

I’m pleased to announce that soon, for the first time, two of GTxA’s bloggers will be at the same institution. This summer I’ll be joining Michael in the Computer Science department at UC Santa Cruz!

Like Michael, I was recruited by a search committee headed by regular GTxA commenter Jim Whitehead — who was also the mastermind behind the UC system’s first computer game degree. As UCSC grows in this area, we’re looking forward to developing research relationships with other labs, groups, and companies, both in the SF Bay Area and beyond.

As Variety and The Hollywood Reporter relate, Paramount has just reached for its wallet after hearing a pitch for the movie Atari by writers Brian Hecker and Craig Sherman. Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way will produce the film, which is to star DiCaprio as Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell. Gamers and others from the Internet comment on Kotaku and Digg.

Ian Bogost and I will be glad to help whip potential moviegoers into a frenzy with our book Video Computer System: The Atari 2600 Platform, which will be out by the beginning of 2009.

By Nick Montfort and Andrew Stern

(This is the text of the talk we gave at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference just now. Mark Marino already has a reply online.)

Introduction

In the 1960s, Eliza, and specifically that system running the famous Doctor script to impersonate a psychotherapist, prompted conversations and controversies about anthropomorphic concepts of the computer, artificial intelligence and natural language understanding, user interfaces, and even psychotherapy. Decades later, Janet Murray hailed the system as the first electronic literature work, saying it was at that point still the most important one. All this was the result of a rather small amount of code that lacked multimedia elements, contained very little pre-written text, and was developed by a single person, Joseph Weizenbaum.

At the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference, I just heard the ReVisioning Electronic Literature: Origins and Influences panel – featuring a dynamic trio straight out of Southern California.

Jessica Pressman presented her work on Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries’s Dakota as digital modernism. She showed us the beginning of Pound’s first canto alongside a transcription of the beginning of Dakota. She compares this text machine with Bob Brown’s proposed machine “The Readies” (1930) to speed up and automate reading, keeping up with the technology of “the talkie.” A 1931 collection (out of print) was assembled to be read on the Readies machine. Pressman showed a Flash presentation of William Carlos Williams’s poem from the collection, hypothesizing that it might have appeared like that when read with the machine.

The latest panel at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference featured fascinating talks about metafiction and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and one about interactive fiction: Jimmy Maher’s talk “A New Approach to the Storygame: Blending the Crossword with the Narrative,” based on his paper “Toward Games that Matter: The Promise and Problems of the Storygame.” The concept of “storygame” as Maher discusses it is broader than “interactive fiction,” in that it includes computer games that have narrative aspects, but computational simulation of some sort is required for a storygame. Maher distinguishes “three-dimensional” works that present a world (you can get lost in a good book) with the “two-dimensional” work in which the qualities of the text are foregrounded; related to Burgess’s type 1 and type 2 authors. Genre literature is often the previous; literary fiction the latter – but great literature can do both. The idea can be extended to games: Chess is two-dimensional, in that we don’t imagine battlefields and everything happens on its surface. War games through D&D and Adventure are three-dimensional.

I just heard some great talks here at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference.

David Benin presented a collaboration he and Chris Calabro did at UCSD: Hors Catégorie, an experiment in affective, embodied interactive fiction. The piece deals with the Tour de France doping controversy, among other things. (Because the UCSD computer science server doesn’t have MIME types set correctly, clicking on the “story file” link may net you a browserful of special characters. Just save the result and you should have a z5 file.) Benin took some of my discussion in Twisty Little Passages as a point of departure, seeking to distinguish the possible from the potential and characterizing IF as offering possible narratives and a gift of open-ended engagement that provokes thought.

Sue Thomas spoke this morning at the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference about the concept of transliteracy that she and others have put forth. Online resources about this idea can be found at Transliteracy.com and in the First Monday article “Transliteracy: Crossing Divides.”

The First Monday article defines this concept, an enlarged idea of literacy, as “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social network.”

I’m sitting in a cafe in Vancouver, Washington, trying to cut down my presentation for the ELO conference to a manageable size. Since I’ll only present about half the paper at the conference, I thought I would post the paper here for people who are interested in reading it. My paper is not about any particular work of e-lit an attempt to take a kind of “long view” of the field of electronic literature as it currently stands, about nine years after we started the ELO. Forgive the lack of formatting. I’ll also post a pdf version on my website later this week.

Communitizing Electronic Literature

I have been involved in what you might loosely call “the field” of electronic literature for ten years, as a writer of digital fiction and poetry, as a community organizer through my work with the Electronic Literature Organization , and as a scholar and teacher. In 1998, after writing the collaborative hypertext novel The Unknown with my collaborators Dirk Stratton and William Gillespie, I fell down a rabbit hole from which I have yet to emerge. After The Unknown won the trAce/AltX prize for hyperfiction , I found myself immersed in the fascinating world of computer literature. At a conference in 1999 hosted by Robert Coover at Brown University titled “Technology Platforms for Twenty-First Century Literature,” I encountered a small but robust community of authors who had chosen the computer as a platform for their literary endeavors, a motley and innovative crew of literary experimentalists who were energized by the potentialities of the networked computer as a medium: by the new ease with which multimedia elements could be integrated into literary texts, by the programmable nature of digital literary artifacts, by the distributive capabilities of the emerging global network, by the new registers of semantic representation opening up to authors who made this network their home.

I just learned from Alice Robison that at the next Thomas R. Watson Conference there will be a special workshop on digital storytelling – as the announcement says,

We are also very excited to announce that in the spirit of this year’s Watson Conference theme, “The New Work of Composing,” we will host a three day digital storytelling workshop on the University of Louisville’s campus October 13-15, 2008. Workshop instruction will be provided by the Center for Digital Storytelling. Their website, www.storycenter.org, offers dozens of playable stories, a history of their organization, and links to valuable resources. Daniel Weinshenker, Director of the Center’s Denver office, will be teaching the Watson Conference Workshop. …

Sure, this may be a little off-topic for Grand Text Auto, but I can’t help mentioning how continually amazed I am by the intelligence of those sea-dwelling, eight-legged invertebrates. Here’s an incredible picture of an octopus solving a maze, for instance. (Thanks to Philip Tan for news of this.)

I feel fortunate that so many electronic literature practitioners will be converging tomorrow through Sunday in Vancouver, Washington, only minutes from my home city of Portland, Oregon. It’s the ELO Visionary Landscapes conference, featuring several who are regularly discussed on and/or contribute to this blog, including Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Fox Harrell, Rita Raley, Jason Nelson, Jimmy Maher, Stuart Moulthrop, Rob Wittig, Talan Memmott, and GTxA’s own Scott, Noah, Nick, and me.

Scott “Daddy-O” Rettberg is traveling all the way from Norway to present “The Communitization of Electronic Literature”, in the Electronic Literature Revisioned session. In Machine Dreams, Noah is presenting “Eliza Revisited”. Rounding out the Elizaphile contingent, as part of Code, Programs, and Interactive Environments, Nick and I will be co-presenting “Provocation by Program: Imagining a Next-Revolution Eliza” — Nick and my first joint work, besides this blog. Abstracts follow after the jump.

I hope to lure some adventurous souls to explore a bit of Portland’s nightlife as well; a drink at the Low Brow Lounge seems somehow apropos. Please join us!

Adam Parrish, who left a poetry machine in a comment here on Grand Text Auto, has recently completed a hardware device that does (at a high level) the same sort of thing: Autonomous Parapoetic Device (APxD mkII). This resulted from his work at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where he wrote the thesis “New Interfaces for Textual Expression.” Other text machines of his include the rubbery, non-computational but nevertheless combinatorial Poem Sphere, a Markov generator that looks suitable for installation in the Exploratorium, and a keyboard that enforces lipogrammatic writing. Check it out – even if you don’t enjoy watching as sausages are made, you’ll like reading about his several projects that extrude the Oulipian ideals into meatspace, by mechanical, electrical, and elastic means.

Noah just spoke at HASTAC II (Irvine, CA) about the process of reviewing Expressive Processing here on Grand Text Auto. Noah has of course written about this review process here on the blog. I don’t intend to thoroughly blog HASTAC II; anyway, it would make little sense to recapitulate Noah’s presentation here, since we know about the process first-hand and via his writing about it on here. But here’s a quick paraphrase of the Q&A:

Q: How did the press react? Do they think this will work in other fields? What will happen with this model?
A: Acknowledgment that it was a good investment of time for me, but only those who are really interested will do it in the future.

I just gave a talk at the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD – Michael is here, too, and Mary just showed up, and Noah is actually an organizer of the gathering. My talk was “My Generation about Talking,” now posted on nickm.com along with the program that I ran to accompany the talk, a suite of 15 tiny text generators.

Speaking of responses to World of Warcraft, I’ve just played my first few minutes of Robert Nideffer and Alex Szeto’s new indie/art game, WTF?! I’ve noticed that the characters are decidedly aware of certain genre conventions (my first quest is to “start killing shit”). And I’m very much looking forward to my encounters with the characters who await deeper in the game, from Karl Marx to Mary Daly (you can guess which one argues that “the game naturalizes a Western militaristic heterosexist hypersexualized patriarchal capitalism, played out in relation to a spiritually infused race war — kinda”).

You’ve played the game, now read the book. This month Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: a World of Warcraft Reader was published by the MIT Press and is now available for purchase on Amazon. My colleagues at the University of Bergen, Hilde G. Corneliussen and Jill Walker Rettberg, edited this volume, which is the first book-length anthology to carefully read the culture of the world’s most popular massively multiplayer online game. The anthology is the product of a unique collaboration. The volume’s contributors all played the game together for a year in a guild of academics known as “The Truants” before writing their chapters, each of which examines the game from a different theoretical/analytical bent. There are thirteen chapters in the book. The chapter I wrote, “Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft,” examines both the economic model of MMOGS and the economies within the game, with the thesis that the reason why so many players are willing to spend so much of their lives playing the game is that the game is in fact a form of play that itself is enough a form of work to appeal to the protestant work ethic which has plagued America since its foundations. In her chapter “Never Such Innocence Again,” Esther MacCallum-Stewart examines the tropes of war and histories in the game.