Sentences
By Charles O. Hartman and Hugh Kenner
Sun and Moon Press
New American Poetry Series: 18
1995
84 p.

Sentences begins.

money must
Sentences
Parsing
Sentences
Sentences
Sentences for love forsaken.

To write Sentences, Hartman and Kenner took 457 19th-century “Sentences for Analysis and Parsing, Thayer Street Grammar School” and providentially generated an intermediate text, using Claude Shannon’s Markov chain technique as implemented in TRAVESTY by Hugh Kenner and Joseph O’Rourke. The resulting text was corrected and used as input to Hartman’s program DIASTEXT, which carried out diastic selection as developed by Jackson Mac Low. The output carries odd traces of its devising: “Sentences listened listened the the / The owner owner pines.” Sentences is a fascinating read as well as a classic computer-generated literary text. The uncanny and interesting source text fits the project well. Beyond that, there’s the remarkable combination of a generative technique that was more scientifically inspired by the properties of language with a selective one that is purely aesthetic.

After a last-minute gift? I’m looking forward to receiving a copy of Ted Nelson’s brand-new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the computer world got this way.

To my knowledge, this is the first new volume in years from the author of the original personal computer book (Computer Lib / Dream Machines) and developer of key concepts in digital media (most famously, hypertext), who remains one of the field’s consistently engaging thinkers.

In this new book, as outlined in the online chapter summaries, Nelson argues: “The system of conventions called ‘Computer Literacy’ make little sense and can only be understood historically.” He stars with ancient beginnings like hierarchy, alphabets, and punctuation — and ends up with Google, mobile devices, and Web 2.0. Grab your copy while they’re fresh!

Oddly enough, there’s Rara Racer. (Thanks, Jaroslav.)

An elusive 3.5″ diskette of William Gibson’s Agrippa has finally been located, and video of a 1992-era Mac computer running it under System 7 is now available (along with the bit-for-bit image of the disk itself) on The Agrippa Files. The site is part of Alan Liu’s Transcriptions Project at UCSB, with this emulation prepared by Matt Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside of Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities with help from several others, including Robert Maxwell at the University of Maryland’s Digital Forensics Lab. New bootleg video footage of the Agrippa launch event - an hour’s worth - is also now online. Many, many details of the process of recovering and presenting this important piece of imaginative, poetic software are available in the article “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

Blogging
By Jill Walker Rettberg
Digital Media and Society Series
Polity
2008
184 pp.

Blogging suits two sorts of readers perfectly: traditional writers (and instructors) looking to understanding more about writing in digital media, and the tech-savvy (including today’s students) seeking to reflect on blogging and understand the practice more deeply, as something that is potentially social, narrative, literary, and political. While elegantly written, the book delves into the history of hypertext, the nature of social networks, and oral and print cultures in addition to covering Web history through the 2.0 days, corporate blogging, hoaxes, and the relationship of blogging to journalism. For students who are to learn about writing and the Web through blogging, this book is a must. Accessible to undergraduates, it goes beyond how-tos and chronicling to inquire about where blogging has been, is now, and will go. Finally, there’s coverage of so many aspects of blogging that only an uber-blogger would know it all already. Even new media scholars and bloggers will benefit from Blogging.

The students in my Comparative Media Studies Workshop have just shared their Web edition of the first anthology of Imagist poetry, edited by Ezra Pound and published in 1914. Des Imagistes was not (as far as I could determine) previously available online, isn’t in print, and is not even very easily found in libraries. We don’t have a copy of it here at MIT, for instance.

The Web unit in our workshop is, I think, very necessary, but is probably the most 1.0 and boring of the things we do, which include writing creative programs in Processing and making music videos. At its best, though, it can be the opportunity to learn about general issues and methods in editorial and production as well as the specifics of Internet and Web technologies. I think this group certainly made the best of it.

Jason Nelson’s new game is called “i made this. you play this. we are enemies.”

The game deals with the difficult issue of his current residence in Australia. It is an investigation of the link, and of corporations and communities on the Web. There are video snippets with unusual stories or story-like discourses (about potatoes, a jar of hands, and so on) embedded within the game. There are screenshots and things to read - or not read, which might be more typical of the Web experience. Figure and ground are constantly at play, unless you are better than I am at discerning what parts of the image are background and what parts are the platforms and walls and such. And it looks pretty much like this:

To all appearances, Jason Nelson did actually make this. He is not, however, actually your enemy. This is merely a conceit that allows him to devise a clever, fun game which you can then play. As to whether or not you do play - that, my friend, is up to you.

Dear GTxA readers, come one, come all to the inaugural open house at the new Tiltfactor Laboratory at Dartmouth College!

Student researchers, lab staff, affiliated faculty, and I will be hosting our open house and holiday festival: TUESDAY the 2nd of December, 2008, from 3-7.
We will be showing games we’ve made (RAPUNSEL project’s PEEPS game, Profit Seed, Massively Multiplayer Soba, prototypes of Skoolin (codename) and Layoff) and games we like to study (too many to list here!). Hear the students talk about their projects, including a study being conducted in Aden Evens’ course on immersion with the game Warhammer, which I have heard will culminate in a performative game action on the college green this week.

We are also announcing our new lecture series, courses, and salon. The new lecture series, called the Digital Arts and Humanities Lecture Series 2009, will be underway as of January. Invited speakers include Celia Pearce, Tracy Fullerton, Jesper Juul, Nick Montfort, and more.

Stay tuned for the schedule and all in the area are invited to attend. There is regular transit from Hanover NH to Boston, for example.

We have also started the variable_d salon, which runs every Tuesday at 4pm at Tiltfactor, when no lecture is scheduled. Topics vary but include critical issues in software studies and game studies with a focus on ontological and epistemological issues, logic systems, and other conceptual concerns. In addition, we are now able to announce two new Dartmouth courses: Games + Playculture– a critical studies course exploring the historical considerations and anthropological and sociological importance of play and games (WINTER 2009) and the Media Design Laboratory: Game Design Studio– a theory+practice course exploring the process of making games while developing game ideas, prototyping, playtesting, and producing a game per week (SPRING 2009).

To follow up on the 1K story generator I posted ten days ago, here is a slightly revised version of that generator and two new ones.

• story1.py - Story generation by elision. This is a slightly modified version of the November 20 “original.” It uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed and the remaining text is presented as the story.
• story2.py - Story generation by segments. This chooses a beginning, middle, and end. A sentence is chosen from a pool of beginnings. A middle is generated by joining “He” or “She” to a verb or other middle section and concluding that with “he” or “she.” Then, an ending is chosen from a pool of endings. This was inspired by some of Nanette Wylde’s minimal and clever programs, such as Storyland and about so many things.
• story3.py - Story generation by elision & addition. This, like story1.py, uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-8 sentences are removed. These sentences were written by Beth Cardier. After each of these 5-8 sentences is printed, an “atmospheric” text is, with 50% probability, removed from an unordered pool and printed.

On a Mac or Linux system, you can run one of these, for instance, story2.py, by downloading it to the Desktop, opening a terminal Window, typing “cd Desktop”, and typing “python story2.py”. These run on Windows, too, but you will need to have Python installed, either by having already installed it or by installing it (e.g., version 2.6) yourself

e-mail trouble: love & addiction @ the matrix
By S. Paige Baty
University of Texas Press
1999
167 pp.

e-mail trouble, published after the author’s death from a heroin overdose in 1997, deals with email addiction in an autobiographical, feminist mode. The odd subtopic interested me - as if someone wrote a book about being strung out on Gopher or desperately seeking a USENET fix. This book does offer a testimony of what mid-1990s email correspondence was like, representing it in an already distant but revenant way. Baty’s intriguing and often amusing voice works through fragments and quotations from books, emails, and personals, unfolding a journey that ends in semi-apocalyptic New Orleans. Some email snippets remain familiar (why did the chicken cross the road?) while others ring true as student pleas or hit-and-miss correspondence. Many are as interesting as the “real” letters that Baty loved. The book really offers lasting commentary on the uprooted, isolated life of a junior faculty member. Email may have failed the author, but the real failure recounted here is that of the ivory tower of first life.

A great programming language, which I happen to have used very productively for computational experimentation, art, and teaching, has just finally been released after many years of development and (very functional) beta versions. It’s Processing 1.0, now ready for download. Congratulations to Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and the others who have participated in the project, and yay for us. Here’s the blurb on Processing 1.0:

Today, on November 24, 2008, we launch the 1.0 version of the Processing software. Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

Processing is a free, open source alternative to proprietary software tools with expensive licenses, making it accessible to schools and individual students. Its open source status encourages the community participation and collaboration that is vital to Processing’s growth. Contributors share programs, contribute code, answer questions in the discussion forum, and build libraries to extend the possibilities of the software. The Processing community has written over seventy libraries to facilitate computer vision, data visualization, music, networking, and electronics.

Students at hundreds of schools around the world use Processing for classes ranging from middle school math education to undergraduate programming courses to graduate fine arts studios.

+ At New York University’s graduate ITP program, Processing is taught alongside its sister project Arduino and PHP as part of the foundation course for 100 incoming students each year.

+ At UCLA, undergraduates in the Design | Media Arts program use Processing to learn the concepts and skills needed to imagine the next generation of web sites and video games.

+ At Lincoln Public Schools in Nebraska and the Phoenix Country Day School in Arizona, middle school teachers are experimenting with Processing to supplement traditional algebra and geometry classes.

Tens of thousands of companies, artists, designers, architects, and researchers use Processing to create an incredibly diverse range of projects.

+ Design firms such as Motion Theory provide motion graphics created with Processing for the TV commercials of companies like Nike, Budweiser, and Hewlett-Packard. + Bands such as R.E.M., Radiohead, and Modest Mouse have featured animation created with Processing in their music videos.

+ Publications such as the journal Nature, the New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM have commissioned information graphics created with Processing.

+ The artist group HeHe used Processing to produce their award-winning Nuage Vert installation, a large-scale public visualization of pollution levels in Helsinki.

+ The University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab used Processing to create a visualization of a coastal marine ecosystem as a part of the NSF RISE project.

+ The Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies at Miami University uses Processing to build visualization tools and analyze text for digital humanities research.

The Processing software runs on the Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux platforms. With the click of a button, it exports applets for the Web or standalone applications for Mac, Windows, and GNU/Linux. Graphics from Processing programs may also be exported as PDF, DXF, or TIFF files and many other file formats. Future Processing releases will focus on faster 3D graphics, better video playback and capture, and enhancing the development environment. Some experimental versions of Processing have been adapted to other languages such as JavaScript, ActionScript, Ruby, Python, and Scala; other adaptations bring Processing to platforms like the OpenMoko, iPhone, and OLPC XO-1.

Processing was founded by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001 while both were John Maeda’s students at the MIT Media Lab. Further development has taken place at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Carnegie Mellon University, and the UCLA, where Reas is chair of the Department of Design | Media Arts. Miami University, Oblong Industries, and the Rockefeller Foundation have generously contributed funding to the project.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (a Smithsonian Institution) included Processing in its National Design Triennial. Works created with Processing were featured prominently in the Design and the Elastic Mind show at the Museum of Modern Art. Numerous design magazines, including Print, Eye, and Creativity, have highlighted the software.

For their work on Processing, Fry and Reas received the 2008 Muriel Cooper Prize from the Design Management Institute. The Processing community was awarded the 2005 Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica award and the 2005 Interactive Design Prize from the Tokyo Type Director’s Club.

The Processing website (www.processing.org) includes tutorials, exhibitions, interviews, a complete reference, and hundreds of software examples. The Discourse forum hosts continuous community discussions and dialog with the developers.

The 2009 Foundations of Digital Games conference is now accepting applications for two student-oriented programs. For PhD students there is a Doctoral Consortium, chaired by Ian Horswill, with applications due December 19th. For advanced undergraduate and Masters students there is a Student Scholarships program, chaired by yours truly, with a deadline of December 20th. Both provide ways for students to attend FDG free of charge, get additional feedback about their work, and make valuable connections. Please encourage students you know to apply!

Sam Deese is working to foster student digital scholarship projects at Boston University. He asked me about good free software for editing video and for producing slideshows with voice-overs. I didn’t know the answer - do you?

As reported earlier this fall by the San Jose Mercury News and others, UC Santa Cruz recently received more than $450,000 from Sony Computer Entertainment America (as part of a class-action settlement) to fund undergraduate scholarships.

I’m happy to announce that application information is now online. The first scholarships will be available to students applying this year — each will provide $10,000 to students entering the B.S. Computer Science: Computer Game Design degree.

Michael’s here at MIT and just gave a great talk. While he was preparing for it, apropos of conversations I’ve had recently with him and Beth Cardier, I wrote something that I think is a story generator, and which is a self-contained 1K python program. Here it is: story1.py (Update: This is a slightly modified version of November 30, which uses the same algorithm but has a streamlined implementation and a few more sentences.)

Let me know if you think it’s a story generator, and, whether or not you think it is, if you think of anything interesting about stories and computation as a result of looking at the program and running it.

ISEA 2009 will be held from 23 AUGUST - 01 SEPTEMBER 2009 in Belfast, Colraine, Derry, and Dublin, Ireland. Proposals for papers and art projects are due this Friday, Nov. 21, by midnight. The Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies. Conference themes include Citizenship and Contested Spaces, Interactive Storytelling and Memory Building in Post-conflict society, Interactive Textiles, Positionings: Local and Global Transactions, Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices, Tracking Emotions, Posthumanisms: New Technologies & Creative Strategies, and Entertainment and Mobility.

New on Turbulence.org:

“Bronx Rhymes” by Claudia Bernett and Maria Ioveva. “Bronx Rhymes” illuminates the history and significance of Hip Hop in the Bronx by tagging important locations for Hip Hop (1520 Sedgwick, for example) with posters. Each poster describes the historical significance of that location in the form of a rhyme, and invites people walking by to join in a rhyming battle by txt-ing their own rhyme from their mobile phone. The website bronxrhymes.org displays the artists and locations along with all the submitted rhymes elevating the most recent submission.

“Reflection (hope and reconciliation)” by Michael Takeo Magruder. Pervasive mass-media in the information age offers us a continuous stream of mediated realities. Countless events of varying and often questionable significance emerge as scrolling columns of headline news and then quickly fade into the soon-forgotten annals of our time. Within this saturated datascape of history, there are singular defining moments that rise above the ubiquitous monotony of the everyday. These events shape the consciousness of individuals and nations alike by transcending their epoch, and are indelibly situated within greater historical overviews that inform the perceptions of both present and future generations. In an era of unjust wars and monumental acts of terror, some of these events have eroded our most precious institutions and sustained fear within all strata of society, while others have instilled within us hope and offered us a means to reconcile our past transgressions. “Reflection (hope and reconciliation)” re-mediates one such moment. Through the distillation of its aesthetic elements - images, words, voice, music - we experience the event with changed, but undiminished intensity.

I wanted to call everyone’s attention to an article by Chris Crawford about whether games are art, published this summer in Notes On Game Dev. The article offers many interesting observations, and I suggest that those interested in the question read it. My purpose in mentioning it, however, is not to repeat it, rephrase it, or respond to it, but to pose a different and related question.

Is game development an artistic practice? That is, is the making of a game like the making of an artistic work - visual, plastic, literary, performative, or otherwise? This is a different question. I am not one of those who believe that only those who identify themselves as artists can create art. It seems obvious to me that Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza, whether or not the rebel scientist envisioned himself as an artist, is worthy of consideration as a work of literary art. But it also seems reasonable to note that there are such things as artistic practices, distinct from other practices of craft and design and reasonable to discuss apart from those other practices.

Does it make sense to bring game creators together with artists to discuss their practices? If so, is that true of all game creators or only some?

Well, that’s my question.

Jarel presenta Venenarius Verborum (video):

Tras el misterioso fallecimiento del brujo propietario, el año pasado, sus herederos pusieron inmediatamente en venta la torre.
No faltan potenciales compradores para la finca, pero existe un grave problema, y es que la torre es indestructible, inquebrantable… o lo será mientras persistan en ella ciertos objetos que el brujo encantó: Los Siete Objetos. Objetos cargados de energía mágica.
En vistas de que no logran vender, ni desahuciar a los inquilinos y sirvientes del brujo que aún permanecen allí, los herederos han decidido contratar a un especialista en recoger objetos para limpiar la torre.
Basada en Ad Verbum, de Nick Montfort.

Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies are the top three games in the 2008 Interactive Fiction Competition, after a month and a half of play and voting by the public. Congratulations to Jeremy Freese, Eric Eve, Jim Munroe, and the authors of all the entries. You can still download all the games, of course. The full list of results is also up.