Grand Text Auto

About 12 hours ago I was reading a text by Ulises Carrión, one that I’d read before but which I hadn’t fully considered and engaged with. As I thought about Carrión’s writing, I felt compelled to put together a short piece on the Web. That took the form of a Web page containing a rapidly-moving concrete poem. The work I devised is called “Una página de Babel.”

I collaborate with Flourish Klink on two very specific Tumblr blogs, which are both open for submissons.

streetcrts.tumblr.com features photos of CRT televisions (or monitors) that have been placed on the street to allow others to take them away, or to allow them to be removed as trash.

xavierpauchard.tumblr.com chronicles, in photos, the legacy of industrial/furniture designer Xavier Pauchard, who, without formal training, designed steel furniture early in the 20th century that seems to be in about 1/5 of all New York restaurants, bars, and coffeehouses, and in many, many other places worldwide. Pauchard does not, as of this writing, even have an English-language Wikipedia entry.

A recent production of mine, Running All Night, was shown at Babycastles in New York recently during the Playdate, July 23-August 7, 2015.

The piece is a 128-byte Commodore 64 program that functions as a clock or timer. It was executing during the whole show and presented a different image every moment of the day. Here’s once glance as what it looked like as it ran on a TV turned to face the window.

There was also a TV inside and a single page (dot-matrix printed) of the assembly source code.

This month I published a zine in the form of a bookmark. It’s available by asking me for a copy, asking a contributor for a copy, or going to my local radical bookstore, Bluestockings, at 172 Allen Street, New York, NY. If you wish to find Remarker there you must, alas, look under the register among the freebies (and advertisements), not among the “grown up” zines. The upside is that Remarker is free.

My first PuzzleScript game is a concrete poem that, after a few levels, taunts you, the player, with a metapuzzle.

It’s “The Great Vowel Shift.”

I just put a new poetry generator up. This one was released in inchoate form at @party, the Boston area demoparty. I’ve finished it, now, writing an HTML page of 2kb that employs JavaScript to generate nonsense poems that I, at least, find rather amusing.

‘More Tongue’ is available in an expanded version (functioning the same but with uncompressed code and more meaningful variable and function names) which I suggest for just about everyone, since I encourage everyone to study and modify the code, for fun, for art, and so on. If you want to see the 2k version working, that’s there too.

Interested in working on innovative games, with passionate people, in an academic position in Silicon Valley?

We’re seeking a leader for the UC Santa Cruz professional MS in Games and Playable Media. The MS is offered through our Silicon Valley campus, now expanding into a new building (with about 5000 sq ft dedicated to the program) and in active planning to shift to a two year program.

The position will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program. The degree is focused on expanding the possibilities for games — and on helping students build the skills and connections they need for what they want to do next.

Video game playing is plagued by amnesia. One reason is that there are no good tools for finding related video games across time. Everything is focused on the present or future. Yet if you are fascinated by a certain game, the best next games to investigate are not necessarily the other ones featured in Amazon’s “bought together” display.

I had five productions (one of them a collaboration) this time around at @Party, the Boston-area demoparty.

Browser demo: “More Tongue.” This was, well, not really a standard demo, even for a browser demo, that generates nonsense poems with compact code. Like everything at demoparties, it’s been released, but I’m going to work on a post-party version, so I’m leaving the party version out of this list.

Wild: “Shortcat.”

Shortcat is a very simple encoding scheme to make bytes (thus computer programs) into pleasing Unicode tweets, IMs, etc. #demoscene

Encoder: cat x.prg | perl -pe ‘binmode STDOUT,”:utf8″;tr/x00-xff/x{2500}-x{25ff}/;’ > x.txt #demoscene

Shebang Bash is a two-part event at Babycastles (137 West 14th Street, Floor 2, New York City) on Thursday, July 2.

It’ll be sort of like this reading in Saint Petersburg, but with projectors and a workshop beforehand.

The workshop (beginning at 6pm) provides an opportunity for anyone to begin developing computational poetry by modifying existing programs. Those without programming experience are particularly encouraged to attend. Workshop participants will develop, share, and discuss their work. Participants must register in advance and bring their own notebook computer running Linux, Mac OS, or Windows. (A tablet or phone will not suffice; computers are not available at the gallery.) Those who wish to can show and/or read from their work during the second part of Shebang Bash, although presenting during the reading isn’t a requirement.

Erik Stayton’s 12-minute video “Apple II vs. Commodore 64″ is now up on YouTube. It’s shot in the Trope Tank with him in conversation with me there. We discuss several of the things you’d experience in emulation, but also make reference to material specifics of these systems and the two specific computers and controllers that were used.

Erik played three quite different games that we had on hand, on disk, for both systems: Skyfox, World Karate Championship, and Hacker. Besides discussing graphics and sound quality, we also talk about the playability of these games with the controllers we have and issues such as loading times.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact: Amy D. Olson | Amy.D.Olson@dartmouth.edu | 603-646-3274

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Launches Games to Improve Access to Biodiversity Heritage Library Content

Smorball and Beanstalk Allow Players to Transcribe Texts through Play

HANOVER, N.H. – June 9, 2015 – Today, Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor, an interdisciplinary studio that designs and studies games for social impact, announced the launch of two new crowdsourcing games, Smorball (smorballgame.org) and Beanstalk (beanstalkgame.org). The games have been created to improve access to books and journals online in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) collection by verifying the accuracy of text previously encoded by optical character recognition software.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media contact: Amy D. Olson | Amy.D.Olson@dartmouth.edu | 603-646-3274

Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Launches Games to Improve Access to Biodiversity Heritage Library Content

Smorball and Beanstalk Allow Players to Transcribe Texts through Play

HANOVER, N.H. – June 9, 2015 – Today, Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor, an interdisciplinary studio that designs and studies games for social impact, announced the launch of two new crowdsourcing games, Smorball (smorballgame.org) and Beanstalk (beanstalkgame.org). The games have been created to improve access to books and journals online in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) collection by verifying the accuracy of text previously encoded by optical character recognition software.

New research at the Tiltfactor Game Research Laboratory at Dartmouth College indicates that people’s thinking about public health policies and spending priorities can be shifted through a novel new game genre–role playing sports.

A key challenge in public health in the United States is lowering costs by focusing on health priorities. Often, these priorities are discovered by complex visualizations and in-depth workshops such as those sponsored by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality initiative. Research groups across the country have taken a variety of approaches to rethinking health spending, for example. ReThink Health, an initiative from The Rippel Foundation, offers a robust dynamic modeling system for testing and visualizing scenarios and changes to the whole US health system.

Tiltfactor is proud to announce the NEH and IMLS
Co-Funded event to discuss Future of Crowdsourcing at #crowdcon 

Hanover NH— This week, lead organizers Dartmouth College and the University of Maryland-College Park, announce “Engaging the Public: Best Practices in Crowdsourcing across the Disciplines,” a workshop to gather by invitation over 60 leaders from the humanities, sciences, and cultural heritage domains in order to move the national discussion about crowdsourcing forward.

How can people embedded in large, for-profit companies find a way to direct some of the present expertise and resources to make a positive difference? In this talk from the Media Systems gathering, Donald Brinkman describes how he has worked to do this within Microsoft. In particular, he describes Microsoft’s role in enabling the digital projects engaging the AIDS Memorial Quilt that were also discussed in Anne Balsamo’s talk.

In an emerging, interdisciplinary area, how can those getting started understand the possible paths forward? One way is through looking at the (often wending) paths taken by pioneers. In this week’s Media Systems talk from Pamela Jennings (recently-appointed director of the Center for Design Innovation) she provides insight into how she became a field leader, as well as into the work she has done to help the nascent field find its way. Jennings has been a key figure in much of the field development of recent decades, including recent successes such as the NSF’s CreativeIT program and the founding of the SEAD network. (Some related reflections can be found in the Media Systems talks of Brenda Laurel and Janet Murray.)

I am happy to announce that we are publishing the final four videos from the Media Systems gathering — and that the final report, “Envisioning the Future of Computational Media,” is now available through print-on-demand!

https://vine.co/v/eBFut17iE3b
Tiltfactor folks are busy making new Metadata Games! Fun!

“Isn’t it funny? You’re a woman in science researching about women in science. How about that?” These were some of the first words that my new supervisor, Mary Flanagan, said to me when she saw me working in the lab. On my first day at tiltfactor as a research assistant, a position set up through Dartmouth’s Women in Science Project, I was asked to build a tool to “mine Twitter” for the NSF REAL project. In the haze of my first day, I did not ask questions, just nodded and agreed. I knew Python, the language I used to build the tool, but I had no idea about Twitter development or research.

The 2015 Tiltfactor team is bigger and bolder than ever. Dr. Mary Flanagan and her team are currently gathering data in a “Study-Palooza,” our term for enthusiastic and dedicated data collection. This awesome team is focused on the Bioheritage Diversity Library, Metadata Games, Bystander Intervention, Climate Change, and equity in STEM learning, just to name a few themes! Meanwhile, MONARCH and games for Robert Wood Johnson (Gut Check, Bill of Health) are en route to the printers. . .

[Some excerpts.]

… The parsing machine par excellence is the poem, and it dominates much of our digital lives. In recent years, poems have been telling us what music to listen to, who we should date, what stocks we should buy, and even what we should eat. It comes as no surprise, then, that it should also tell us what art we should view. But what happens when the art we are looking at becomes the poem itself?

… Are poems art? What happens to the intellectual property at the point of sale? What is actually acquired when one purchases a poem? Who would even buy a poem?

If the Internet did exist, we’d have to uninvent it: “It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook.”

Those poor people in developing countries don’t know about the Internet, only Facebook.

Of course Babycastles, my main link to poetry & digital media in NYC, keeps a calendar of events only on Facebook, not on a plain Web page.

I’ve found it very difficult to find (open, public) poetry events in NYC because many are announced only on Facebook.

I’m at an LA poetry festival now. Didn’t know about my friends’ (public) offsite readings; they are Facebook-only.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HANOVER, N.H. – March 2, 2015 – Dartmouth College’s Tiltfactor, an interdisciplinary innovation studio, is excited to announce new work with collections from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. A living memorial to the Holocaust, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum inspires citizens and leaders worldwide to confront hatred, prevent genocide, and promote human dignity.

I’m glad to share the first Web edition of Des Imagistes, which is now back on the Web.

I assigned a class to collaborate on an editorial project back in 2008, one intended to provide practical experience with the Web and literary editing while also resulting in a useful contribution. I handed them a copy of the first US edition of Des Imagistes, the first Imagist anthology, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914.