Cybraphon is a project from Edinburgh-based artist collective FOUND (Ziggy Campbell, Simon Kirby and Tommy Perman). Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon, Cybraphon is an interactive version of a mechanical band in a box. Consisting of a series of robotic instruments housed in a large display case, Cybraphon behaves like a real band. Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day.
I recently made a contribution to TAGallery, a project of cont3xt.net. The project is an experiment in using del.icio.us to collaboratively tag interesting sites related to new media art and literature. Each curator/participant is contributing a short “exhibition” of ten links on a theme. Predictably, I suppose, I contributed a collection of electronic literature links.
First of all, let me point in brief to networked_performance for Simon Biggs’ very good report on the E-poetry 2007 Festival in Paris. I agreed with him that Robert Simanowski’s close reading of “Listening Post” was probably the best of the academic papers presented during the conference. I was also a fan of Jim Carpenter’s presentation, in which he talked in a clear and pragmatic way about best practices for writing good code for epoetry, including distributing source code so that others can learn from it. Carpenter recently released a new version of his poetry engine, which will write some pretty good poems for you. There were many other papers and panel discussions as well, though this festival was primarily about the poetry. For four nights in a row, there were three to four hours of poetry readings. The E-Poetry scene is much more performance-oriented than other venues for electronic writing, and some of the performances were much more video art or performance (for example one work allegedly about the objectification of women included the performer disrobing on stage — providing the Festival with an early controversy, which all such gatherings require) than they were electronic writing as it is usually understood. That was fine with me. Overall, I appreciated my first experience of this very vibrant scene that exists between visual, conceptual, performance, computer, and writing. I also enjoyed the opportunity to meet many writers I have worked with and communicated with extensively online in person, in addition to spending time with old friends in one of the world’s great cities. Rather than a more formal report, I offer you this cellphone video extravaganza — short clips of 30 seconds to a minute of many readings from the festival. Forgive the quality — it was my phone used in dark crowded rooms filled with poets drinking in the poetry, after all.
A Brazilian epoet setting fire to her poems onstage, a la Jimi Hendrix. Read more…
Eyebeam passes along word of The Creative Act, a collaborative project which has declared February “Create-a-Thing-a-Day Month. Participants in the project will make something creative each day during the month of February, choosing a different theme for each week. The project has some interesting constraints, such as that thing should take no less than 20 minutes and no more than 1 hour to make. Participants then post text, or a photo, or some other documentation to the group blog.
I did a short interview with Franz Thalmair about the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One, that has just been published by the Austrian webzine CONT3XT.NET. It will also be published next week by the UK-based new media collective furtherfield.org.
The frAme: Online Journal of Culture & Technology which published new media writing, art, interviews and essays from 1995-2004, has stopped actively publishing new work, but it’s going out with a bang rather than a whimper. Simon Mills is editing a project, framed including retrospective interviews with many of the writers and artists whose works were published in frAme. The first installment of framed includes provacative interviews with Mark Amerika, Matthew Fuller, Christy Sheffield Sanford, and Alan Sondheim. More interviews are coming soon.
Last week I was in Norway, where I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Bergen to Jill Walker and Elin Sjursen’s students in the Web Design and Aesthetics course. Talan Memmott was also there to give a talk. Talan showed some interesting new e-lit work I hadn’t seen before, including some work that is not yet on the web. Memmott showed work from two different streams of his creative practice, “network phenomonology” works such as his well-known Lexia to Perplexia, and a different “history of art” stream that includes new media interpretations of the lives and works of artists such as René Magritte. Talan’s been working in particular lately in a combinatory vein, and many of his works include both combinatory text and music. Of the newer work he showed, my favorite was “The Hugo Ball,” a recombination of a nonsense poem of 78 unique words by the Dadaist poet. As you mouse over the face of the Hugo Ball, it recombines and speaks the 78 words to you as they flash on the screen and the face “speaks” the words in layers of visemes. It’s a fun, and vaguely creepy, piece. While he was there, Talan was also interviewed for Bergen Student Television. The interview is available online for your viewing pleasure.
Also new from Norway, by way of New York City, is Hanna-Lovise Skartveit’s Take the F-Train, a fun and innovative online documentary about the F-Train in NYC, and by extension, about the population of the great melting pot itself. The piece includes a mixture of drawn characters, video of the train’s interior, and interviews with riders of the F-Train, many of whom are immigrants living in New York. The documentary captures the cosmopolitan nature of America’s largest city. The project is part of a larger Digital Storytelling project funded by Norwegian Radio/TV NRK.
They approach the podium. The screen goes dark, then blue. There is some struggling with cords and configurations. Fingers and bodies struggle with the oppressive apparatus, and conquer it. Their title and names appear on the screen. Then we begin.
Montfort, looking dapper in a trademark wrinkle-free button down blue shirt, black pants, black shoes and wearing a multiplicity of university-issued rings, began the presentation by invoking Donald Knuth’s discussion of reading the program SOAP as like “hearing a symphony.” Montfort then discussed the idea of code as having an aesthetic for human readers. He cited the observation from Maurice Black’s dissertation that while terms like “elegant” and “beautiful” flow freely in discussions of code in computer science, they have been exiled from the vocabulary of literary and cultural theory. This idea of an established notion of coding aesthetic provides a context for the discussion of the “dark side to coding,” obfuscated code, which is “contrived to foil human legibility rather than enhance it.” Read more…
PiPs did an excellent job with the Implementation display, including a wall of photos and a DVD running on a monitor in the storefront, at the Cube2 Gallery in Providence as part of Provflux 2005. It was a real pleasure to see Implementation among like-minded projects, and I really enjoyed watching people wander up to study the pictures and take home sticker sheets of their own.
I should be clear about a couple of things. One is that while the 60 second story competition is an entry in the Contagious Media Showdown, the project doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning any of the prizes, and that’s ok. I entered the 60 second story site in the Contagious Media thing in the hopes that we’ll draw some traffic away from farting flying saucers, slurpee brain freeze videos, stock trader soft porn, and the like, to get some people listening to stories instead, and hopefully to inspire some people to write, record, and submit 60 second stories of their own. Have you yet?
I wrote, recorded, and published my first 60 second story in about the space of an hour. I’m hoping that enough writers will find this a fun activity, and one that’s not too time consuming, that we can create an archive of quality moments of story on the web. I’m sick of the sight gags and utterly sophmoric humor that typify web video. It’s time for the stainless steel rat of story to crawl its way into the cesspool of contagious content.
The other thing I should make clear is that I don’t think all of the entries in the Contagious Media Showdown are complete shit. For stupid video projects, both Crying While Eating and Ring Tone Dancer are good for a few minutes of amusement, and Delivr.net is actually a useful web application for sending Creative Commonsflickr photo postcards. Sadly however the collection of entries includes almost no content of even half-serious literary or artistic merit. Maybe art and literature are simply not contagious.
We need more stories in our lives, yet we don’t have much time for them. Most digital cameras and webcams allow you to take one minute of video and audio at resolutions suitable for the web. The solution: 60 second stories, of course.
We are pleased to announce the 60 second story competition. 60 second stories are works of fiction recorded by their authors as digital videos, less than one minute in duration. Files size must be 5MB, and work must be submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license. Entries are being accepted from now until June 8th, 2005.
There will one grand-prize winner, who will recieve a one-minute supply of exotic chocolate, a one inch by one inch book of the winning work published by Spineless Books, and other one minute pleasures. The winner and fourteen runners-up will be published in the “Fifteen Minutes of Fame,” a permanent web shrine to the 60 second story form. The judges of the competition include internet writers William Gillespie, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Dirk Stratton, Jill Walker and Rob Wittig.
A new memorymap group has formed at Flickr. People are annotating satellite maps from Google Maps of places that are important to them. I can see a lot of narrative potential in the form.
Tomorrow night, I finish a report. Monday, I grade a stack of papers. Today, I go see the ArtBots in Harlem. Maybe they'll have one of them paper-grading bots . . .
Scott Rettberg (CV) is a Chicago native who now lives in Norway. He writes, and writes about new media and electronic literature. Rettberg is the cofounder of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is an associate professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen, and is the proud father of Jessica Ann Rettberg.
Kind of Blue, a serial novel for email. Frame Journal of Technology and Culture (August 2003).
Implementation, a novel on stickers. With Nick Montfort. 2005.
The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One. N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, eds. An edited CD-ROM and online anthology of selected works of electronic literature. College Park, MD: The Electronic Literature Organization, 2006.
Tokyo Garage. A remix of Nick Montfort's Taroko Garage poetry generator, for the imaginary city. 2009.
“Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing,” “Written on the Body: An Interview with Shelley Jackson,” and “Avant-Gaming: An Interview with Jane McGonigal.” (Complied PDF) The Iowa Review Web (July 2006).
“Corporate Ideology in World of Warcraft.” Book chapter in World(s) of Warcraft, a Critical Anthology of World of Warcraft Studies. Hilde Corneliussen and Jill Walker, eds. Cambridge: MIT Press, forthcoming 2008.
The Unknown, An Anthology: an anthology of fiction and poetry by William Gillespie, Scott Rettberg, and Dirk Stratton, published in 2002 by Spineless Books. PDF free for the clicking, buy the book from Spineless Books.
Piercing Through, a play I wrote back in 1997 about a group of college students studying existentialism together during the first Gulf War (more fun than it sounds), which was selected by the Cincinnati Playwrights Initiative and performed as a staged reading at the Aranoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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