Grand Text Auto

esteemed community: I herewith establish the first and last semi-public call for submissions to my book project.

I am looking for people with interesting, well informed ideas on computer code for a book.

I’m editing a collection called _re:CODE_, the third in the series of theory and fiction volumes (reload 2002, reskin 2006 FORTHCOMING!! both with H. A. Booth). Doris Cacoilo is the assistant to the project. Like it might sound, re:CODE is about the social and cultural signifance of coding. The table of contents is quite full of great works already selected… but I think this may be an area of interest of to a few GTxA-ers, so in order to make sure we catch emerging thinkers, I wanted to shout-out.

The Electronic Literature Collection 1 seeks submissions of readable digital media – literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Hypertext, interactive fiction, e-mail novels, cybertext poems, games with literary dimensions, visual and animated literary pieces, performance texts, and on and on.

The deadline looms just two weeks from this posting – January 31! We welcome submissions of work from years past, though. For this first Collection, N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland are the editorial collective. The Collection will be available on CD and online, and Creative Commons licensed so that students, teachers, and individuals can share and enjoy. See the call for works for details.

Turbulence-commissioned artist and Rhizome director of technology Francis Hwang seeks writers for collaborative, improvisational fiction online. Should be comfortable with ongoing light commitment, technology. Stipend offered! See blog post for contact information and further details.

After a flurry of activity last year, Game-Brains.com took a brief hiatus over the past few months, but is now back with an improvised review of Façade that, among other things, channels the perspective of the right-wing news media:

M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online, specifically, has returned with issues #1 and #2 available again and part of the 2006 issue up. The magazine, with print and online dimensions, deals provocatively with art and includes writing from poets and critics as well as artists. Of particular interest to us here on Grand Text Auto: the second issue, from 2003, on collaborations. (Interestingly, the Summer 1961 issue #2 of Locus Solus, edited by by John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler, was about collaborations, also.) Issue #2 of M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online includes, for instance, an article by Michael Mazur about his collaborations with Robert Pinsky and Robert Townsend. And lots of other collaboratively-written articles about the topic, too.

My friend eugene sent me a link to an artificial.dk interview with Marc Downie — whom you interactive character enthusiasts may know as the person responsible, among other things, for the excellent realtime charcoal rendering of the MIT Media Lab’s virtual wolves. A little research reveals that Marc recently defended his PhD dissertation, “Choreographing the Extended Agent: Performance Graphics for Dance Theater”, and is now part of a collaborative group of artists called OpenEnded Group. The interview describes How long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume…, a dance piece with live interactive imagery, pictured here. Cool stuff.

I recently acquired a Game Boy Micro, which I like a great deal. It’s pocket-sized, clear and ergonomic enough, rechargeable, and runs Game Boy Advance cartridges (from the stellar Wario Ware, Inc. to, via the magic of flash RAM, the homebrew games and demos that Brett Camper has discussed).

Modern-day gaming systems cause me to hesitate as I reach for my wallet, though, not only because of my retro tastes, but also because they’re so severely locked down. This is the case both from the “consumer” standpoint (as seen in region coding, which I believe Nintendo developed prior to the DVD) and of course from the developer’s standpoint.

I got word of a very interesting-sounding, Rashomon-inspired, Queneau-inspired, RFID-enabled piece going up at the Beall Center in Irvine, California on January 18. It’s by Brian House (of Yellow Arrow) and Sue Huang, and is called 5 ’til 12:

The Beall Center becomes the site of a nonlinear narrative with Knifeandfork’s immersive installation, 5 ’til 12. The visitor is invited to watch four characters, on four monitors, as they recount the tragic circumstances of the exhibition’s opening night. The experience is unique for each visitor, as each story has most likely never been heard before… and won’t ever be heard again.

I have only brief notes from one session of the Modern Language Association Convention this year – the December 29 one on new media editing, chaired by Neil Fraistat of the University of Maryland, in which I presented “Toward Scholarly, Critical, and Variorum Editions of Computer Programs.” This was as tedious a paper title as one can imagine (sure to drive both computer enthusiasts and those in textual studies into slumber), but the other two speakers more than made us for this, presenting new interfaces to motion pictures (Stephen Mamber, UCLA) and a compelling take on how to approach video games via bibliography (Steven Jones, Loyola U. Chicago).

A Review of The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken
MIT Press
2005
368 pp.
$50.00
http://www.idc.ac.il/tecs

The Elements of Computing Systems has a remarkable assemblage of virtues: it’s a book that covers systems at basically every level, it’s appropriately minimal and lines out just enough to study in each one, it’s clearly written and well-illustrated, there is a nice supply of accompanying cross-platform software available for free online, and the exercises are fun to do. Besides being a nice book about computer systems, it also brings a nice perspective on how we can learn about different abstracted levels in computer science and then put these pieces of understanding together. Really, I’m embarrassed that I like an undergraduate computer science textbook this much.

As you know, GTxA isn’t exactly a personal blog, but there are times to make an exception. :-)

My daughter Eva Vu Stern was born January 4, 2006, at 8:07 p.m., 6 lbs 11 oz. Mom, Baby and Dad are at home now, happy and healthy.

If you see any blog posts from me timestamped at 4 a.m., you’ll know why!

A French artist has just attacked Duchamp’s Fountain with a hammer, slightly chipping the prize-winning urinal. He “claimed the hammer attack was a work of performance art.” The police have not released the man’s name, but press accounts note that in 1993 he relieved himself into what would later be voted the greatest piece of modern art, when it was on loan to a museum in Nimes. In fact, the person who did that hammered Fountain back then, too. Pierre Pinoncelli, j’accuse.

• Did Pinoncelli purchase his hammer at a store or create it himself? Which would have been better?

Seth Thompson of Wigged Productions recently completed Outside the Box: New Cinematic Experiences, a half-hour documentary featuring interviews with Cory Arcangel, Toni Dove, Lev Manovich, Jud Yalkut, and, curiously, one interactive but less cinematic guy, me. (These are links to the bios on the Wigged site.) The DVD is available on the site and is being shown on various stations worldwide, for instance, here in Philadelphia on DUTV, cable channel 54, on January 10th, February 7, and March 7 (Tuesdays) at 10:30pm; Jan 13, Feb 10, March 10 (Fridays) at 11:30pm; and the weekends afterwards at 6:30pm and 1:30am.

If there’s an essay on machinima you’ve been burning to write, now’s your opportunity. Henry Lowood and Michael Nitsche are editing The Machinima Reader, the first collection of essays to critically review the phenomenon of machinima from a variety of prespectives. 500 word abstracts should be sent as RTF files to Michael Nitsche (michael.nitsche@lcc.gatech.edu) and Henry Lowood (lowood@stanford.edu) by April 3, 2006. If your abstract is accepted, final essays should be 5000-7000 words and will be due July 2006. Here’s the full CFP:

Years ago, early in the morning, I encountered a man in the Oslo train station who gave me a CD containing what might have been the sounds of a lake of robot jellyfish attaining a prolonged ecstasy, or perhaps plotting the overthrow of an oppressive regime [mp3, 971kb].

Wait, before we say goodbye to 2005, let me quickly throw out a few extra links that shouldn’t be forgotten:

Happy 2006, all! In the interests of being future-looking, I’ll start off the new year by looking right on ahead to 2007. In the fall of next year the incredible-sounding opera Death and the Powers will go on, with music by Tod Machover (of the MIT Media Lab; The Brain Opera, Resurrection), libretto by Robert Pinsky (Mindwheel, The Figured Wheel, Jersey Rain, The Favorite Poem Project), robotics engineering by Cynthia Breazael (MIT Media Lab), and production design by Alex McDowell (Minority Report, Fight Club, The Crow) – see the page for full credits and a link to a seven-page PDF description. The production will feature incredible-looking sets, autonomous robots, and hyperinstrumental music. The main character is Simon Powers, an aged inventor whose attempt at a seemingly extropian transformation is at the heart of the piece.

Chris Klimas, author of the interactive fictions Blue Chairs and Mercy, sends word of his TiddlyWiki-based site featuring nonlinear stories: Gimcrack’d. Chris is also accepting submissions of nonlinear stories for the site.

The Wikifiction proposal lists several other fiction-writing and fiction-oriented wikis. Where there are lightweight “personal” wikis such as TiddlyWiki and DidiWiki, the wiki has had widespread success as a tool for collaborative writing. So, I find some of the projects that play on this capability most interesting, at least as ideas, although I don’t know that there’s any novel or story-style wiki to match that already classic pre-wiki romp, The Unknown.

A bit of Book and Volume news: I just finished release 8, incorporating very few changes – not much more than a handful of additional synonyms. Hopefully the most pesky bugs have been squashed by now and the rough edges smoothed over.

Also, there are two new reviews: Josemanuel’s review in SPAC #43 (in Spanish). And there’s Jonathan Goodwin’s slightly spoilery article in The Value – A Literary Organ.

Here is an excerpt (just the nice bits, of course) from Josemanuel’s review, in his English translation:

Please note a few of the new games articles from the past week or so, such as “Pricey Games: Moms Don’t Play”, from the 21 December 2005 Washington Post, “The Year That Games Discovered Their Star Power” from 25 December 2005 New York Times, and “See Baby Touch a Screen, but Does Baby Get It?” from the 15 December 2005 NYTimes.

To keep up to date on the digital community for educators and activists, check out
The Digital Divide. The site offers a listserv and features blogs and projects that promote equity and access in both the use of and creation of new technologies.

We’re working on an improved version of the Façade parser, and could use more raw data of what players tend to type to Grace and Trip.

If you’ve played Façade, please do us a big favor and email us the stageplays you generated. Each time you’ve played, a trace of your dialog was automatically saved in c:\Facade\stageplays. (Even if you’ve uninstalled Façade already for some reason ;-) it will leave behind the stageplays folder.)

You can email your stageplay files to us as individual attachments, or ideally your entire stageplays folder as a single zipped-up file, to info -at- interactivestory -dot- net.

Yesterday I met up with MUD genealogist Martin Keegan and his fellow digital rights activist Julian Midgley, coordinator of the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. Martin was a wizard of Island, an early carved-out-of-C MUD, and he came to my talk last Tuesday, interested to hear about IF.

Adam Cadre has a new story, or set of stories, generated in PHP and with a twist. After reading one of the generated stories, you can vote on how five people rank in terms of culpability for a character’s death. Adam will post the statistics before too long, after harvesting some more votes. The project is called “23,040 Bridges,” no doubt because there are 192 of them for each of the (5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1) possible rankings of culpability.

Nicolas Szilas, friend of GTxA and fellow interactive drama researcher, has written up a summary of last month’s Int’l Conference on Virtual Storytelling in Strasbourg, France. (Also see his summary from 2003.) Thanks again, Nicolas!

In Nicolas’ summary I’ve inserted a link to Ernest Adams’ ICVS keynote presentation, “Letting the Audience onto the Stage”. Ernest tells us he’s lately been questioning some of his long-held assumptions about agency and interactive story, which is evident in his slides.

Nicolas writes:

This was third edition of ICVS, after Avignon in 2001 and Toulouse in 2003, a conference focused on digital/virtual storytelling. ICVS is a computer oriented conference with a flavour of Humanities and Art.

Regarding the core issue of Interactive Drama — no dramatic change! The topic was discussed, but I was expecting more concrete solutions. Ernest Adams reminded us that Narrative and Interactivity are hard to combine (pdf), and did not omit discussion of Façade as one of the most advanced approaches. Ken Perlin advocated for a procedural approach to Interactive Narative, but did not go beyond the stage of general advice and intuitive narratology. Sandy Louchart and Ruth Aylett presented an interesting comparison between Reality TV and emergent narrative, but how this will be effectively exploited in a computer system is yet to come.

The graph-based model is still largely in use, often (but not always) inspired by the Propp Model:

It’s getting weird when quotes from Will Wright are showing up in the NYTimes Book Review. Terra Nova’s Ed Castranova’s new mmorpg book Synthetic Worlds and Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby’s Smartbomb are reviewed. On NPR.org, this excerpt (chapter 1) from Smartbomb paints quite the enthralling picture of videogame designers.

Also, everybody’s favorite sexy zine Nerve has a new, extensive series of articles on sex, relationships and games, being doled out over time, including an amusing review of Façade and a series of questions posed to familiar game designer/researcher types. I like the visual juxtaposition of Grace’s and Aeon Flux’s faces in the column listing.