Today Jill sent me a brief billet-doux in the form of a Message Quest — a nicely designed little interactive graphic quest which, when solved, reveals a secret message. The project is designed by Alex Mayhew, whose other projects also look intriguing.
A Cool Way to Send a Love Letter
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Sep 162004
Information Graphics/Body Count
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Sep 122004
The New York Times marked the 1000th American military death in Iraq with this informative (and moving, an in information graphics kind of way) interactive graphic A Look at Those Who Died. A thousand gray boxes appear on the screen. As you mouse over each of the boxes, a picture of an American soldier killed in Iraq appears, along with the dead person's branch of service, date of death, hometown, home state, gender, age, and type of death. You can also sort the whole chart by these criteria. I think it brings home the cost of this war.
Speaking of the cost of this war, I was thinking the other day — the only real justification that the Bush adminstration has provided for the war that has held up to scrutiny (remember those WMD?) is that Saddam Hussein tried to kill Bush's dad. Considering that, in some ways we can consider the mission of the War in Iraq accomplished. But thinking further along those lines, if the real reason for the War in Iraq was to get revenge on Hussein, just how much has that cost? I can't find information on how much Saddam Hussein weighs (he looked pretty thin when he was captured), but let's be generous and say the man weighs 200 pounds. If that is the case, then we have sacrificed 5 American lives for every pound of Saddam's flesh. One man or woman per 1/5th of a pound of Saddam flesh. It gets even worse when we take into account the economic cost of the war. If the war has cost roughly $132 Billion to date, that means we have spent roughly $660,000,000 per pound of Saddam's flesh. $660 Million and 5 American lives per pound of Saddam's flesh. To speak momentarily like a Republican, that's a lousy return on investment.
Aug 312004
Thanks to the New Jersey Humanities Council, this fall, a maelstrom of electronic literature activity is descending on the Atlantic City area, with The Digital Arts and Electronic Literature Series at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. There will be three panel events in the next three months. On September 24th, two of the best-known authors of hypertext fiction Talan Memmott and William Gillespie will present their work and discuss electronic fiction. Both are or have been graduate fellows in creative writing at Brown University, and both have been recipients of the trAce/AltX award for new media writing. Each is also known for publishing activities in the electronic media. Memmott is the editor of the Beehive hypermedia journal, and Gillespie the publisher of Spineless Books. The second event will feature two of the best-known critics of new media. On October 15th, Grand Text Auto's own Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, the co-editors of The New Media Reader published by MIT Press, will give presentations on the history of new media. Montfort is the author of Twisty Little Passages, the first book-length study of interactive fiction, and Wardrip-Fruin is the editor of First Person a book about interactive drama. The final event, on November 19th, will feature Megan Sapnar and Ingrid Ankerson, the co-editors of the leading new media poetry journal Poems That Go. This fall the very full Stockton event calendar will also include visits from novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, poet Sharon Olds, and filmmaker Michael Moore. I'm psyched.
The Tallinn portion of the ISEA conference was focused on wearable computing. Although I didn’t attend many of the panel sessions on this topic, my general impression from the keynote, from the exhibition, and from the runway of the fashion show at Club Bon Bon in Estonia is that wearable computing has a long way to go. It seems that as a culture, we have not yet worked out how (or if) we want computers to function in our clothing. Another problem with wearable computing is that the majority of current funding for the technology comes from either a) the military-industrial complex or b) the fashion industry. This makes sense, but the sources of funding seem to constrict the imagination of designers in a variety of ways. The military wants wearable computing that will make for better soldiers, that will make for safer military service and better killing machines. The fashion industry is by its nature interested in disposable objects, in making things that serve an aesthetic purpose of limited duration.
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The Intruder by Natalie Bookchin, Xiao, Xiao
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Aug 242004
While doing a little research and deciding what creative works to teach in my intro to new media studies course, I decided to catch up on some work that I hadn't caught before due either to laziness or the lack of a high-speed connection. At the Progressive Dinner Party that Marjorie Luesebrink and Carolyn Guertin put together a couple years back for Riding the Meridian, I ran across The Intruder, a work in director/shockwave that retells a Jorge-Luis Borges story of the same name in ten games. Using cheesy 80s-style video-games as an interactivity device, Bookchin engages the reader in delivering the (linear) text of the Borges story, which is told in voice-over. In her commentary on the collection, N. Katherine Hayles writes: “In one of Bookchin’s games, the object is to bounce a female figure back and forth between two paddles, thus making the user complicit in the story’s plot. Another darkly funny game presents the user with two buttock-like circles with a hole between them, from which fall objects associated with the woman, which the user tries to catch by moving a virtual bucket. Because the games compel the user to enter dynamically into the production of text, they serve to connect the user in surprisingly powerful ways to the narrative; I found myself more engaged with Bookchin’s deliberately kitschy games than with Borges’s satirical tale, which is dark enough to make most readers feel emotionally distanced from its brutal plot.” Bookchin actively positions the reader of the story as the intruder, not as the “intruder” Juliana betwixt the bonding males, but as the intruder in the telling of the story itself. In order to get the text to proceed forward, you need to “win” or “lose” games ranging from pong to a quickdraw shootemup to asteroids. My favorite aspect of this work is the subtle irony of Bookchin's selected “games” and the way that they relate to the story — as the two brothers fight over a woman, you shoot at another shooter. As the story of the brothers' execution of the woman is told, you are targeting an icon of a woman from above, in a helicopter. The games echo the irony of the story and also call into question the kind of objectification that many of the popular early (and current) videogames inscribe. So the games-as-story become a kind of meta-narrative of the iconic violence of the games we casually play (and often enjoy).
Ken Tompkins also recently passed on another fun/ironic piece in flash — The Xiao Xiao Stickman Series by Zhu Zhq are essentially full-feature kungfu films, boiled down to their essence. The hero and villians are stickmen. The flash movies are nearly as, or more, engaging than many like films. They are all action, no characters, no costumes, line drawn setting, no dialogue. Which makes me wonder — what do we actually come to these films for? What call are they answering? I think they also say something about the effective use of flash. Depending on what the author/animator/creator is trying to achieve, fewer bells and whistles and iconic rather than realistic imagery may be more effective than the everything-and-the-kitchen sink approach.
FILE 2004
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Jul 182004
Implementation has been selected for inclusion in FILE 2004. FILE is a cool annual festival of electronic literature and network art held in Brazil. This year the event will be held in November and December at SESI Gallery, an art museum in Sao Paulo. FILE has shown some fascinating work over the last four years. Their archives are worth a visit.
Jan 052004
I just ran across Sent, which is being billed as “the first major exhibition of phonecam art in the United States.” The exhibition will include contributions both by amateurs and by invited professional artists and celebs, including Weird Al Yankovic.
This post was originally published on Grand Text Auto.
net.art.bolg
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Dec 182003
This thing is kind of cool — a net art blog that is not about net art but which is net art collaged together in a blog. (Link from Brandon, who's one of the netartists involved).
Narrative in Habboworld
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Dec 142003
Brandon writes that that narratives are scurrying around like stainless steel rats in avatar worlds such as the Habbo Hotel, in which he is a “hobba”: “there are grassroots efforts to create art-like events and objects, including museums, poetry slams, and theatrical productions.”
Virtual Worlds
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Dec 042003
Over at GTA, Andrew found this link to Virtual Worlds Review, a review of the crop of virtual environments/avatar games that are becoming increasingly popular. I'm still noodling on how I might craft a virtual worlds writing assignment for the Internet Writing & Society class I'm teaching next term. I poked around a couple of the virtual worlds that actually work on Mac this afternoon, “Coke Music“, “Faketown” and “Habbo Hotel.” None of these three seemed to be among the “most cool” of the bunch (although it was fun popping into Faketown's virtual arcade to play Space Invaders), and all seemed pretty crassly commercial. I'm still wondering about the potential for narrative in such virtual environments. I think I still lean towards the viewpoint put forth by Richard Powers in his essay “Being and Seeming” — that is that even if we could develop virtual worlds as realistic and limitless as Real Life, we'd still need old-fashioned narrative to limit it, to bring order, coherence and poetry to lived experience.
Hypercomics
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Nov 112003
I followed a link from Scott McCloud's site to Externality, a web comic featuring an amazing “infinite canvas” interface. The piece is part of Hypercomics, a site I'm looking forward to exploring in more depth, and perhaps using in my hypertext class next semester.
Poet Jason Nelson visited Stockton last week to give a reading and to visit with my New Media Studies students. Nelson is the hyperkinetic wizard behind heliozoa.com and a future project that hovers around technology culture called Secret Technology. His work has appeared in a variety of print and online journals including Beehive (Brown University), Boomerang (UK), Epitome (Madrid), 3rdbed (NYC), Nowculture, Blue Moon Review and others. In addition his work has been featured in art galleries worldwide.
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Two Conferences (Three I Guess)
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Sep 232003
Okay, so next August, I intend to go to ISEA 2004, a three Baltic city (Helsinki, Tallinn, and Helsinki) and a boat conference with a bunch of digital artists and critics and probably lots of interesting happenings provided they accept one or both of the proposals I was part of submitting, a panel on Network Literature with William Gillespie and Joseph Tabbi, and the sticker novel / web art / mail art / situationist type project, Implementation, that Nick Montfort and I have been working on in recent months and will launch in January. Oh I don't know if I'll be able to afford it, but I'm betting I'll be on the boat. All those new media people packed onto a ferry should give new meaning to the phrase “don't want to sail on no ship of fools.” In other words, it rates high on the funometer. Plus Tabbi just bought a place in Latvia and is musing doing some kind of new media center or at the very least new media crashpad and it's really not too far from where Jill Walker lives, and she's the smartist Australian Norwegian blogger I know. Plus her accent makes my knees weak. The combination of those three things convinces me that I need to go to Scandinavia and the Baltics this summer to widen my horizons.
Not sure that I'll be able to shirk my teaching duties, but I'd sure like to go to Copyright and the Networked Computer: A Stakeholders' Congress in Washington D.C., November 6-8, 2003. Forget Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin and all the really great experts on copyrights and wrongs, this conference has Negativland. I'll probably try to make it into DC for at least a day or two of that.
And this year's standard institutional conference engagement will be the AWP in Chicago. It will be the AWP, so there will be lots of poets desperate for other poets to read their work (conferences with hundreds of writers sound like fun until you're a writer surrounded by hundreds of other writers at which point the whole thing starts to feel like an unwholesome undertaking — writers getting institutionalized together, sigh — last time I went to one of these it was in Albany, and it was like some kind of dystopia — a writers' conference in a town that had a law against having bookstores downtown). But, on the upside, it'll be in Chicago, so I'll see my friends and the pizza will be great. and it will be fun as always to discourse with other ELO people as we try to convince a bunch of print writers that we have no intention of eliminating books but want to coexist peacefully and drink wine at the same parties and bullshit about obscure Irish fiction and ancient Japanese poetry just like they do. That's March 24-27, 2004. Maybe I'll dance with some poets or score some free books or blow off most of the conference and catch a show or two at the Hideout or Empty Bottle instead or run into Curt White and talk politics.
Proud of my (new media) brother
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Jun 182003
I'm very proud of my youngest brother Eric, who recently graduated cum laude from Dartmouth.
Eric won the top prize in Literature at Dartmouth, the Perkins Prize for Literature (English), and additionally won the John G. Kemeny Innovative Software Design Prize from the Computer Science department (even though he wasn't a computer science student) for his senior project and thesis, a new media artwork/interpretation of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons called Tender Buttons/Tender Keys. The project, a Mac Flash projector file, can be downloaded from the above link. The paper that accompanied the project did an excellent job of contextualizing the artwork as a postmodernist interpretation of Stein, and shows that Eric has great potential as a new media/literature scholar. He'll be applying to PhD programs in the coming year. Although I've warned him of the obstacles he'll encounter while slogging through his twenties in grad school, he's decided to forget law school and join the professoriate, and I couldn't be prouder of him for choosing this path.
New Media Down Under
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Apr 012003
A new issue of Real Time, an Australian Arts pub that pays a lot of attention to New Media, is out in print and online.
The pub includes several reviews of books on new media and cyberculture:
Andrew Murphie & John Potts, Culture & Technology.
Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson & Alessio Cavallaro eds, Prefiguring Cyberculture. An Intellectual History.
Geert Lovink, Uncanny Networks. Dialogues with the Virtual Intelligentsia.
Terry Flew, New Media: An Introduction.
Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions, Bodies & Machines at Speed.
Joanna Zylinska ed., The Cyborg Experiments: the Extensions of the body in the Machine Age.
Additionally, it includes reviews of several new media conferences and events around the Pacific and in Europe this year:
New media pleasure & pain: Anna Davis at DEAF03
The art of da Rimini and Tonkin
Melinda Rackham goes to Graphite2003
Plus news from ACMI, Jeffrey Shaw, Electrofringe 03
Tatiana Pentes on New Media Industry Awards
I thought the review of DEAF03 of interest. The festival featured “Erotogod,” a “futuristic media altar linking auto-erotic touching to stories of Creation; a sensory fusing of religions” as well as “Painstation,” which is “based on the early video game Pong, but in an interesting twist, if you miss the ball in PainStation you actually get hurt.” One of the exhibits at another Australian festival reviewed also featured physically immersive media — a cockfighting game in which the players don chicken heads, flap their wings, kick and peck at each other to control the movement of their onscreen avatars.
There's something disturbing about this insertion of the whole body into new media that I can't quite put my finger on, something that reminds me vaguely of reality television.
The Dream Project
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Mar 132003
This is a cool idea. The Dream Project is a collective of dreamers and animators. Folks send in narrratives of their dreams, which are then selected by animators, who do short quicktime or flash animations, which are posted to the Web.
Andre Karpov Flash
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Mar 092003
Recently, someone on Webartery sent out a link to Andre Karpov's Little Red Likelihood, a slick music/and/flash narrative piece. I spent a chunk of the morning looking at some of karpov's other pieces, particularly the animations. Lots of disturbing but beautiful imagery, obsessions with birth, rebirth, depression, self-destruction.
Karpov's site also includes a sketchbook of drawings and a gallery of paintings/photos/digital manipulations as well as a couple of “moving words” poems. I thought that romans and the red ants was the better of the two, makes nice use of a “substitute/stretchtext” kind of hypertext and nicely echoes many of the themes implicit in Karpov's imagery. The technique remined me a little of Judd Morrisey and Lori Talley's The Jew's Daughter.
No Lawsuit After All
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Feb 202003
Just a quick note to note that several people have emailed me to ask what lawsuit I was talking about when I posted that last post quickly while demonstrating to my New Media Students how to post.
After the Unknown collaboratively wrote this letter to Steve Bentz, proprietor of Pages for All Ages, who had more or less sent us a kind of halfassed cease and desist order for mentioning his store in the aging but exuberant hypertext novel, he responded politely, saying
> Dear Mr. Gillespie (and associates),
>
> Thanks much for your note. I never imagined that I'd actually receive a reply to my original email, much less one running to six pages in length. Honestly, I assumed that the posting in question was from an “orphaned” site–part of a prank created long ago and since forgotten by its author. Anyway, I gladly withdraw my (rather poorly worded, I'm afraid) request that the page be removed from the web. My concern was that it might confuse people wanting to access our website, but this, as you've so eloquently and exhaustively argued, is just our tough luck. I can say with absolute certainty that there was never any intention at Pages For All Ages of taking legal action over this thing.
So that's good. Anyway, just in case any more relatives or longlost pals email to ask about the litigation (people actually read this thing, I guess, so maybe I should write in it — or at least post recipes — coming soon) nothing going on there, nothing to worry about at least. The main reason we got our undies in such a bundle was that we've been waiting for years for Microsoft, Bertellsman, or Ted Turner to come after us . . . maybe that would have sold some books.
Nuff.
And nuff snow already I thought South Jersey was supposed to be balmy in comparison to Chicago. Flooding expected this weekend.
I vote against the war on Iraq and want the Bush adminstration to bring back the Work Programs Administration, specifically so that he can employ artists to make sculptures from snow in times of Northeastern emergency.
Oh hey, here's a link to a video of Joe Futrelle reading my poem You Are Dreaming of a Poem at the Newspoetry year-end Newspoetry RIP bash which I regretfully did not attend at the turn of the New Year. I'm grateful to Joe for his rendition. I think that's the first time I've been . . . er . . . published . . . in that fashion. How do I cite that on my vita?
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