Grand Text Auto

Some enterprising folks in my hometown of Portland, Oregon are organizing a free, one-day games festival on Saturday June 3rd, called the Northwest Games Festival. Register on-line to come show off your game, attend sessions, awards, etc. Everyone is invited, including all you up in Seattle and Vancouver, you out there in Boise, come on Eureka, hey you up in Anchorage…

I hope to do a session on getting into game programming, participate on a panel with local indie studio folks, and make Façade available to play.

Procedural Arts is proud to be a sponsor of the festival.

Check out a new interview I discovered at furtherfield.org with GTxA’s Mary Flanagan on net art, cyberfeminism and authorship.

Moby Games (wonder where they got that adjective?) is running Terrence Bosky’s story “Something about Interactive Fiction.”

There’s some of the standard article-about-IF fare there, yes, along with some nice touches such as quotes from Don Woods and a write-up of the Mystery House Taken Over project. Since the piece was written up on Slashdot, you can even read the rereshingly unselfconcious comments available there. Slashdot rule #1: All jokes about IF must begin with “>”.

While I appreciate the “rah-rah, boo-hoo, emotion in games!” cheerleading in this week’s The Escapist — I too am all for creating more affective interactive experiences — let’s get real about the status quo of gaming’s expressiveness, please?

I’m at UCI’s Massive gathering today, although I had to arrive a little late.

One of the more intriguing things I’ve heard so far is about some developments in Second Life. They’re building an API into the system. It sounds like it might just be for pulling live data out of Second Life for use elsewhere, but my hope is that it will be possible to structure and control elements of Second Life via external processes (e.g., characters controlled by AI running outside Second Life‘s scripting system). Similarly, they’re working toward an open source viewer that they imagine being customized by different communities. These might both open up interesting possibilities for researchers and artists.

Stuart Moulthrop, author of Victory Garden, Hegirascope, Reagan Library, and Pax, will discuss his more than 15 years of work in digital writing and will read from new work.

Wednesday – April 19, 2006 – 5:30pm

The reading and discussion will take place at the Kelly Writers House, on the University of Pennsylvania campus, 3805 Locust Walk.

The event is free and open to the public, and is part of the MACHINE series at the Kelly Writers House, which is co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization.

Jim Carpenter and his prosthetic imagination now have a blog. Jim’s Electronic Text Composition project website just went up less than a month ago, as we announced here. At this rate we’ll have the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.poetry.etc before the end of May.

• I thought Tadhg Kelly’s particleblog ended in July 2004, shortly after his interesting insyn proposal. I didn’t realize he was back to blogging, as of last summer; he’s been working at Lionhead as a scene designer on The Movies (although apparently is leaving Lionhead along with many others in the recent re-shuffle). Anyhow, he’s got two new essays I enjoyed, one on moving beyond fun in videogames, and a response to Warren Spector’s Escapist article series. Also check out this Next Gen article he wrote on using human-captured motion/imagery in games, although I found it problematic.

Robert Kendall has just launched the site for his new generator-backed, photo-enabled sticker literature project, Logozoa. Photos provide the logozoo – more exhibits are sought from contributors – while texts are downloadable and sticker-printable from the adopt-a-zoa section of the site. This project is aphoristic rather than novelistic or completely open and blank. It’s is based on Rob’s earlier Soothcircuit system, emplying some of the sayings that system can diagram.

Some of this, some of this, and even a touch of this to help you get fully iPoemd up during our noble country’s National Poetry Month. It’s the cruelest month, and sometimes it snows in April; but celebrate it or oppose it, it is indeed here.

• “If Someone Touches You,” by People Like Us, The Jet Black Hair People and Wobbly (more by PLU)
• “The Jezebel Spirit,” Brian Eno and David Byrne (last.fm) (info)
• “Mayakovsky,” The Four Horsemen
• “Rocked by Rape,” Evolution Control Committee (more by ECC)
• “PoetryMix” (Christian Bök + Caroline Bergvall), DJ Disaffected (special to GTxA!)

Quickly on the heels of my previous personal announcement, I have another one. This summer will be my last summer at Georgia Tech. Starting this fall I will be joining UC Santa Cruz, where I will help in building up their new, technically-focused undergraduate degree program in computer game design (here are some working papers describing the degree program), as well as help in building up a new game research lab. The last few years at Georgia Tech have been good ones; I will certainly miss my friends and colleagues here, though I’m sure we’ll continue to actively collaborate and will see each other on a regular basis.

I was delighted to see that someone at my alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin – to wit, Jeffrey Lamar Howard – wrote a dissertation engaging interactive fiction and contemporary literature, and ways that IF can inform the teaching of postmodern writing. Jeffrey Howard’s dissertation is “Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy.” Update, May 9: It’s now online.

I will just quote a few passages from it and mention one point that it makes. This won’t provide anything like a summary of Howard’s work, of course, but hopefully it will show something about the very novel approach to interactive fiction and postmodern literature that he has taken.

Literary pedagogy can be thought of as a form of game design, in which the teacher transforms a printed text into an interactive fiction by locating and devising “puzzles” in the form of interpretative challenges for the student to solve. By applying the principles of game design while teaching postmodern novels, instructors can draw upon the theories and examples of interactivity already associated with interactive fiction to enhance their own pedagogical imaginations.

[reas’ process-ed work “Path 14”]

Some observations drawn from Friday’s keynote lecture at the 2006 iDMAa + IMS Conference- HumanSystems | DigitalBodies follows!
For the last two years, Casey Reas has been writing software utilizing the principles of emergence and simple machines and ‘vehicles’ which develop neural systems. His work is created these days primarily using Processing (surely blogged about before on gtxa)…

It must be national poetry month. In addition to Nick Montfort’s foray into deforestation this morning my email included note of two other strange poetic projects. William Gillespie at Spineless Books announced that to celebrate Charles Fourier’s 234th birthday and the first birthday of Joshua Corey’s Fourier Series, the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award For Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literature (2005), there has been an update to the Fourier Series web suite to include recordings of the author reading (recorded in the offices of Burning Deck Press), a PDF excerpt of the book’s inventive layout, and Fourier Electronique, a ten-minute MP3 poetry remix. The MP3 is haunting, western, and linguistically interesting, well worth a listen. Ken Tompkins also passed along a link to The Fib, a poetic form based on the Fibonacci sequence: a 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8. Although others, including Paul Braffort, have experiemented with the famous pattern before, this seems like a fun form to try on a plane, shortly before bed, or to inflict on one’s students in an Art, Games and Narrative course.

I write a lot of things intended for the computer. I decided, for a change, to write a poem that was fit for print and paper. Here are a few notes about the project:

1. Ream is a 500 page poem.
2. The writing of Ream was entirely imagined and executed on one day: April 5, 2006.
3. On each page of Ream a single, one-syllable word appears, centered, in ordinary, 14-point type.
4. Page numbers do not appear on any of the pages and are unnecessary, since the words are in alphabetical order.
5. Pages 1-51 recapitulate Poe’s “The Raven.”

I haven’t had a chance to read Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (I need to get past a couple looming deadlines first). But I was just looking at the website, which is definitely one of the more interesting book-related sites I’ve ever seen. For starters, there’s an End-User License Agreement, a simulated packet sniffer and webcams, and some rather suggestive imagery. In terms of the book itself, if her ISEA keynote (pdf) is any indicator, it’s going to be a very thought provoking read.

As easily predicted Darwinia swept the GDC’s Independent Games Festival, and also predictably there is a bit of controversy over whether Darwinia deserved to compete, since it’s now distributed by Steam and has had some moderate commercial success. I think the answer is an obvious “yes” — Darwinia was created in true indie style, and just because the game is now moderately successful, by no means disqualifies it as indie.

On April 20th UC Irvine will host “Massive” — a one-day event about the present and future of MMO games. There’s an early registration discount, but the deadline is tomorrow (April 6th). From the site: MASSIVE will engage 25 speakers and approximately 80 registrants from industry and academia in a dialog about the future design, technical and cultural challenges presented by massively multiplayer games, current and future research agendas from both industry and academia, and case studies and future models for industry academia collaboration.

Happy 01:02:03 04/05/06! Although if you’re on a 24-hour clock in this time zone, you may have missed your last chance to celebrate this rare alignment of the digits, 12 hours ago…

Jill Walker reports that there is a Ph.D. fellowship opportunity at the University of Bergen’s Department of Humanistic Informatics. The Faculty of Arts has seven fellowships available, and proposals are competitive among all the departments concerned. This year, UiB is advertising in English as well as Norsk, and is encouraging international applications. I’ll be teaching at UiB next year and perhaps longer. I would love to see some applicants for the position who are writing about electronic literature or some other aspect of new media in the context of the humanities. Ph.D. fellowships in Norway are richly funded, with a decent salary for four years and additional research funds for books and conference travel. Applicants must have completed an M.A. in a related subject and must prepare a short dissertation proposal. See more details in Jill’s post and in the advertisement.

• A Bob Ross “Joy of Painting” videogame. Oh dear, I hope we don’t have to shoot at happy little clouds and bushes…
• Awesome — Game Music Radio. (Ah, we’ve got to submit our Façade soundtrack files to the station, especially the rare bizarre Noh-drama tracks that only occur 10% of the time you play Façade…)



• Irascible blog commenters out there, you should like this new freeware game… Flamewar!
• Intel Game Demo Contest — win $30K or more!



• Opening April 13 at IIT in Chicago, ben f. laposky: the 1953 electronic abstractions exhibition: restaged and remixed

This week the International Digital Media and Arts Association will have its annual conference, code> humanSystems/digitalBodies. CEB Reas and I are keynoters among many interesting presenters and topics – check out the schedule, and I hope to see some GTXxters there!

Mark Tribe and Reena Jana’s new book, New Media Art is due out this month from Taschen.

This semester, students in my New Media Studies course produced podcasts. Their assignment was to create a story on some aspect of their interaction with new media and contemporary communication technologies. The resulting podcasts are available on the Digital Life website. I’m pretty pleased with the results. Students covered topics ranging from music downloading, to creating an online radio show, to instant messaging, to MySpace, to World of Warcraft, to online poker, to Deviant Art, and other online manifestations of Indy Culture. In preparing for the assignment, we listened both to popular podcasts and more importantly, to well-produced NPR shows such as This American Life. Some of the better-produced podcasts borrow techniques, such as using appropriate sound effects, editing together choice bits of several interviews, creating an overall narrative arc, and integrating musical interludes, from those NPR-style talk shows. Overall I’m satisfied with their work, and with the assignment. It has both enabled them to see the relative ease with which some kinds of new media artifacts can be produced, and offers a format that really allows their individual (Jersey) personalities to shine through.

Thursday March 30th I gave a presentation positioning “radical computing” amidst gaming and computer science at the Columbia University Women in Computer Science (WICS) group.

I met some wonderful students and faculty, including a few folks from Teacher’s College and of course the Computer Science department. Dr. Julia Hirschberg is one of the WICS mentors at Columbia and does fascinating work in spoken language processing. Most campuses have WICS groups — if one does not, I encourage folks to start one!

Best would be to do nothing. If not that, at least read nothing relevant to what you should be working on. If not that, at least don’t shoot the puppy.