Grand Text Auto

The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is pleased to announce two new additions to its series of publications. N. Katherine Hayles’s primer, “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” and Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” are now available on the Electronic Literature Organization’s website.

N. Katherine Hayles’s “Electronic Literature: What Is It?” establishes a foundation for understanding e-lit in its various forms and differentiates creative e-lit from other types of digital materials. This primer serves the twin purposes of reaching general readers and serving students and institutional audiences by providing descriptions of major characteristics of electronic literature and reflections on the nature of the field. This piece will also appear as the introductory chapter of Hayles’s book Electronic Literature: Playing, Interpreting, and Teaching (coming from Notre Dame Press in fall 2007). The book will also include the CD-ROM of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One — a compendium of 60 digital works of poetry and prose, published by the ELO in October 2006.

Joseph Tabbi’s “Setting a Direction for the Directory: Toward a Semantic Literary Web” outlines and analyzes the critical issues relating to the description and classification of e-lit. Tabbi describes an approach that will allow the ELO Directory and other digital resources to be more useful, maintainable, transparent, and integrated with evolving technologies. The work organizes the terms of the problem into a call for an overall strategy of editorial and community-driven discourse about e-lit that will also be dependent on metadata solutions that are convergent with those described and implemented in other ELO publications.

Wow! Ian and crew at Persuasive Games (and sister blog Water Cooler Games) have landed the first of a new series of their games on the op-ed pages of the New York Times website!!

Read all about it at WCG, and check out today’s NYTimes opinion page. Their first new newsgame, Food Import Folly, apparently made within this last week, addresses the FDA’s limited ability to inspect imported food. (You need to be a registered TimesSelect reader to access the game, which I already happened to be; I think you just need to fill out a one-time registration form.)

This post, like the previous one asking “what do non-gamers want?”, is a spinoff from a recent discussion about natural language interfaces for games.

I find the topic of transparency in behavior and interface for NPCs particularly interesting, because it is actually a big problem for interactive drama.

With our efforts to build interactive drama and comedy, we want to reach a large audience — both as a business opportunity, so we can make our work self-sustaining, and as artists, hoping to reach out and communicate to many. We’re particularly excited about making entertainment that appeals to all those who don’t consider today’s videogames much fun. Let’s call them “non-gamers”. I think non-gamers outnumber gamers, perhaps greatly. For entertainment media, non-gamers enjoy TV, movies, books, even a bit of web, blog and YouTube surfing. We want to add interactive drama and comedy to their list. Reaching them would also have the nice side effect of expanding the expressiveness of videogames as an art/entertainment form.

What would non-gamers theoretically enjoy from videogames? I’ll speculate on this from my “it takes one to know one” perspective. Yes, I’m a non-gamer.

Mature viewers with minds akimbo may appreciate the unusual photographs, suited to the premade captions, in the series 13 Months in the Year of the Dog. Thanks, inky.

I’m excited to announce an opening for a Postdoctoral Researcher to work at UCSD with Lev Manovich and yours truly. We’re developing a number of research and field-building projects in the area of software studies. The position is available immediately — and application details are below.

POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH POSITION
University of California, San Diego (UCSD)

We are currently recruiting for a Postdoctoral Researcher to join a new Software Studies initiative at UCSD. The researcher will work with Dr. Lev Manovich (Professor, Visual Arts) and Dr. Noah Wardrip-Fruin (Assistant Professor, Communication), playing a key role in all projects and field-building activities.

The goals of Software Studies initiative at UCSD are:

* to foster research and develop models and tools for the study of software from the perspectives of cultural criticism, the humanities, and the social sciences;
* to help establish the new field of “software studies” that will complement existing research in cyberculture and new media;
* to develop projects that will demonstrate how next generation cyberinfrastructure can be used by humanists, social scientists, and cultural practitioners.

After a late night of epoetry readings in a smokefilled theater in Montmartre (more on that later) and the excess you’d expect, after getting lost in St. Denis (I think I wandered into one of the neighborhoods where they set cars on fire during the riots), I finally found my way to Auditorium X and have witnessed a few panels here at Paris 8. Just a quick note: Pedro Reis (of Fernando Pessoa University) gave a presentation on an upcoming publication, a collection of epoetry in Portuguese which will be published both online and on CD-ROM, the Po-Ex project.

The Electronic Literature Collection UK Launch event I attended Thursday night in Leicester, England went very well. About 40 people turned up for the salon, including many of trAce regulars, interested local people, and people who took the train up from London. I gave a short introduction to the Collection, and Kate Pullinger, Jon Ingold, and Chris Joseph, read from the work. In his introduction, John Cayley discussed the context of electronic literature with the traditional literary world and the art world, showed a bit of Translation, and asked us to think about whether this form of literary art was literature or something else entirely. Jon Ingold gave what was possibly the best short introduction I have yet heard interactive fiction, in particular the brutality of the constraints involved in writing IF, before guiding the audience through a short reading of All Roads. In her presentation of her work with Chris Joseph on Inanimate Alice and other projects, Kate Pullinger raised questions about the economic models for electronic writing, and discussed how Inanimate Alice is in part an experiment in developing a commercial model for e-lit. She also discussed iStories, a project she is working on with Chris to develop a commercial toolset of electronic literature applications that would enable authors with little design or programming experience to more easily develop works in Flash. Donna Leishman also sent in a prepared text which a De Montfort Ph.D. student, Jess Laccetti, read to the crowd while Chris demonstrated a bit of Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. We had a short but spirited panel discussion afterwards, discussing the differences between teaching elit as creative writing and teaching it as literature, economic models for electronic lit, and other things. One of the encouraging things about this event was that a number of readers who had never before encountered e-lit were in the audience, were clearly actively interested in what they saw and heard. I also met a Polish Ph.D. student, Mariusz Pisarski, who is currently living in London and writing his dissertation about e-lit, and overheard a couple of people from London say that they heard about the event at Grand Text Auto ; ). It was a very good evening, and I’m grateful to the Institute of Creative Technologies, particularly Chris Joseph for putting it together. Jess has also blogged the event, and posted short videos of Kate Pullinger’s and Jon Ingold’s readings.

In this post I’ll make a case for natural language understanding interfaces in interactive drama and comedy. This is Part 3 of what’s becoming an intermittent developer-diary series about design and technology issues in play as we develop a new commercial interactive drama/comedy project.

The previous Part 2 post from last December asked and briefly answered several questions: how to achieve content richness for non-linear, real-time interactive stories; how to create satisfying agency; and briefly, how to find funding for this kind of work. Most of the discussion in the comments focused on business plans and funding, which impact the design and technology issues, because resources and time in the production schedule are needed to achieve the design and technology goals.

In this post the primary questions I’d like to address are:
What are the pros and cons of having an open-ended natural language interface for an interactive drama/comedy game?
Is natural language the right choice right now?

Related questions left over from the previous post include,
How well did the natural language interface work in Façade?
Can the failures of the natural language interface in Façade be overcome?

We are four. We can now speak. And yet we still have no idea what phentermine actually is, or what it does. Sure, we can Google it, but we stop ourselves, and we do not research, and we do not buy it. I feel guilty because, I’ll be the phirst to admit, phentermine is my greatest phan. Phentermine has left comments on posts I wrote several years ago that even I have never read. Phentermine is thine. Phentermine has mine in it. I feel that I somehow own it, and yes, I miss you too, phentermine. And yet. At the same time I feel a certain distance from you phentermine. I have heard though I am not sure that it is true that you cause syphilis in monkeys and that you are related to anorexia in children. I don’t believe it about the monkeys but I believe it about the kids. I know that just by naming you you will clog up my filters, but please say something phentermine. Please explain. Or let’s just break it off here. Let’s start phresh. I’ll be honest, your name creeps me out, it makes me think of graveyards and comic book heroes and long lost loves and valentines I never sent. I don’t know what I can’t do without you so I will go on, phentermine.

Today was the fourth birthday of Grand Text Auto! yay!

The Electronic Literature Organization’s Future of Electronic Literature Symposium last week at MITH at the University of Maryland, College Park, was a great event, bringing together e-lit writers, scholars, and an interested public together for an open mouse/open mic, a daylong symposium, and an ELO board meeting. Highlights included Katherine Hayle’s keynote (nicely summarized at jilltxt), considering the idea of “literary” vs. “literature” and providing very intelligent close readings of a variety of works of electronic literature, readings from new works by Stephanie Strickland, Rob Kendall, Nick Montfort, Deena Larsen, and others, as well as three very good panel discussions. The process-intensive panel (also very GTxA-intensive) looked at the idea of process from several different angles ranging from process-intensive collaboration, to natural language interface processing, to story generation. The international panel featured demonstrations of electronic literature from around the world, including works in Spanish, French, Catalan, and Nordic languages, and also highlighted the fact that electronic literature is a global movement — ELO isn’t the only organization concerned with this work, but has shared interests and opportunities for collaboration with organizations including nt2, Elinor, Hermeneia, and others. The Future of Electronic Literature panel was also an engaging discussion of how new technologies might effect electronic literature, and how new ways of organizing material and collaborating might effect the way that we shape the field. I hope my compatriots will fill in some of the details here. In the meantime, enjoy some photos of the goingson: flickr sets posted by me, Jason deVinney, and Laura Borras.

Currency, a series of four one-minute videos, designed for looping, has been exhibited in a Philadelphia gallery and screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival. The four pieces are now available on YouTube. They are collaborations between Roderick Coover and Nick Montfort. We iteratively developed the video and text of each of the pieces under various textual, shooting, and collaboration constraints.

Three Lions
Fillip a Guinea
JS
Marianne

fyi, the submission deadline for the AAAI 2007 Fall Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies has been extended to May 15.

There were many more great presentations today at Media in Transition 5. The conference actually includes more than 250 presentations over three days. Fortunately, this abundance is matched with good documentation – all the abstracts and many full papers are online, with more coming. Here is a brief mention of a few of today’s sessions:

“Disruptive Practices.” James Cypher showed several of his video mash-ups, which he shows on public access TV; these included one that conflated music from The Pixes (“Where is My Mind?”) and Dylan (“Blowing in the Wind”). Jay Critchley spoke about his prolific and hilarious art projects, one of which was founding and running the Old Glory Condom Company. Benjamin Mako Hill and Elizabeth Stark told us about the copyright perspectives of an often neglected group – pirates, who are concerned with the rights of media users and consumers.

I’m at a panel about an interesting group — Share Global is a a network of groups with an open source/fluxus ethic to new media performance, who get together on a weekly basis and have audio and video mixing jam sessions, along with featured sets. Share started in New York, and has modes in Montreal, Weisbaden, San Diego, Los Angeles, Melbourne, St. Petersburg, and Geneva. Anyone who wants to can participate. The Share groups build their own infrastructure, mixing boxes, etc. and collaborate in these face to face meetings and also network with other nodes on the network. Pretty cool — if you live in one of the node cities, you might drop in and plugin your laptop if you choose.

Yesterday I attended a talk on authorship including a presentation by net artist and theorist Alok Nandi, who was one of the developers of the web version of the French-language graphic novel Les Cites Obsures, developed in the 1990s, which looks like a very beautiful and compelling hypertext narrative/art project. A community developed around the project, with many readers contributing original artwork, drawings and animations.

Here are a few brief snippets from Media in Transition 5 today. My fellow panelist Jill Walker blogged about the introduction, so, on to the first session…

In “Folk Cultures and Digital Cultures,” Thomas Pettitt, Lewis Hyde, and S. Craig Watkins took us from the appropriative practices of Shakespeare, through the (potential) piracy and refusal to patent of Benjamin Franklin, and the plundering and reworking of musical history done by DJ Kool Herc and others.

McKenzie Wark, author of A Hacker Manifesto, Dispositions and web version 1.1 of GAM3R 7H30RY (1 2) online at the Institute for the Future of the Book, has revised a version of the latter called Gamer Theory 2.0, published from Harvard University Press.

…McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field–where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Here’s a promising blog launched last month: http://virtualcultures.typepad.com

Ron Meiners & Celia Pearce present Virtual Cultures, a blog and online discussion on the design, management and study of community and culture in online games and virtual worlds. Please join us and our guest authors for a lively and in-depth in “applied cybersociology,” exploring philosophical, sociological and practical issues of social dynamics and emergent behavior in online virtual spaces. Our initial posts talk about our intentions and perspectives regarding the blog, which will focus on the emerging understanding of online social behavior. We also report on the recent IMGDC 2007 Indie MMO conference, which we both attended.

Recently, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) hosted the “Emerging Terrain in Games and Simulation” symposium, 13-14 April 2007, to inaugerate Rensselaer’s new Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Major, a new B.S. degree with enrollment beginning in Fall 2007. The program is among a growing number of such programs in the country and is designed to educate students for the game industry. After a tour, which included Katherine Isbister’s cool game lab, attendees played games at an open house style game night on Friday the 13th. Katie Salen began the symposium Saturday (pic by Jason Della Rocca)

The Electronic Literature Collection, volume one is the topic of Katie Haegele’s column in the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. She writes

But wouldn’t it be nice to get our arms around this thing, to get a sense of the full breadth and scope of what’s called digital literature?

The 60 works in the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection (ELC) (http://collection.eliterature.org) – edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg and Stephanie Strickland – show the wide range of forms that exist within the genre.

and describes the keyword index and four of the pieces included in volume one of the Collection in detail.

The Boston Cyberarts Festival has just kicked off, and will run until May 6. Suggestions of what to see each day are posted at Big RED & Shiny, and you can check the full Event Selector. This festival is put on every two years and is the major series of new media events in the Boston area, “encompassing visual arts, dance, music, electronic literature, web art, and public art.” Many artists and organizations participate; Turbulence, for instance, has commisioned two works for the festival (“Handheld Histories as Hyper-Monuments” and “Pulse Pool”) and is sponsoring two events (OurFloatingPoints: The Art of Living a Second Life and an Upgrade! Boston event). MIT’s participation includes the first Cambridge Science Festival, a one-day festival with the MIT Museum as its main sponsor; usual artistic suspects CAVS and the List Visual Arts Center are venues for Cyberarts events, too. If you’re in the area for some of the festival and catch an interesting event, or a show that others should know about, drop us a comment.

On Thursday, May 17th, at the Institute for Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, in Leicester, a UK Launch of the Electronic Literature Collection will be held. I’ll be introducing the ELC at the at the event, and John Cayley, Jon Ingold, Chris Joseph, and Kate Pullinger will be reading from their work. The first 50 attendees will receive a free copy of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 on CD-ROM.

The ELC was also recently reviewed briefly in El Pais by Stefano Caldano and at greater length by Tim Wright in Realtime Arts.

I mean that in the best way. Conrad Barski, M.D., has a site called Lisperati with all kinds of fun illustrated tutorials on topics such as Building, Programming and Hosting Your Own Debian Linux Server; Emacs Tagging; Lisp; and my favorite, How to Tell Stuff to a Computer: The Enigmatic Art of Knowledge Representation.