My favorite recent web video detourning:
I was recently interviewed by Simon Mills for framed, his retrospective project of interviews contextualizing digital art and writing between 1998-2004. The interview took shape in the form of several email exchanges over a period of few months. I appreciate the opportunity that Simon gave me to contextualize my past and current projects, in addition to my thoughts on the current state of the field of electronic literature more generally.
I guest-edited a just-released issue of the Iowa Review Web focused on the ways that different forms of new media writing reconfigure concepts of place and space. Another way of looking at the issue, however, is as a Grand Text Auto takeover of Iowa’s finest web journal. The issue features Jeremy Douglass’ interview with Nick Montfort on his interactive fiction Book and Volume and Brenda Bakker Harger’s interview with Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern on their interactive drama Façade. I also interview Shelley Jackson on the various manifestations of the human body in her corpus of work, and interview Jane McGonigal on alternate reality gaming. A short introduction contextualizes the various approaches that authors of electronic literature have used to conceptualize space and place. I hope that you’ll visit, read, and enjoy. Thanks to the authors and contributors and to Iowa Review Web Associate Editor Benjamin Basan for helping to put the issue together.
May 302006
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.
Guest Speaker Torill Mortensen: From MUDs to WoW
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Apr 112006
Torill Mortensen, an expert on MUDS, MOOs, and online roleplaying games, will be visiting tomorrow to give lectures in my New Media Studies class (WQ224 — 9:55-11:10) and in my Art, Games and Narrative course (WQ224 — 2:10-3:25PM). Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend either lecture, and/or join us for lunch in the cafeteria from 11:30-12:30. She will be talking about the evolution of online social interaction and gaming. Torill is an associate professor at Volda College in Norway, and blogs at Thinking with My Fingers.
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 very pleased 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.
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.”
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Dec 042005
I really enjoyed the ELINOR reading Friday night at the Copenhagen LiteraturHaus. I get so used to seeing the same crowd of folks presenting work in electronic literature, that it’s always a wonderful and pleasant shock to see people from other parts of the world than the one I’m accustomed to exploring ways of working with literary texts in digital environments in their own ways, in their own language. Performing artists included poet Christian Yde Frostholm from Denmark, Johannes Helden from Sweden, Marko Niemi from Finland & Noah Wardrip-Fruin from Norther California and elsewhere. Helden read his poem to an accompanying digital animation and soundtrack. Frosthelm’s work was a fascinating version of what from the perspective of a non-Swedish-speaker seemed to be a Beckettian story adapted in Flash making use of patterns and repetitions, words clumping and clustering and rearranging themselves on the screen. Of the Scandanavian authors I was most impressed with Marko Niemi‘s work, a variety of simple but distinctive and thoughtfully language experiments in flash and html. Niemi writes both in Finnish and English, and presented English language work at the reading. Jill Walker was the emcee, and the host of the Litteraturhaus kept the bar open late, as the DAC attendees clustered round tables with old friends and new. Noah’s reading of Talking Cure and video demo of Screen were also highlights of the evening. Torill posted a great photo of Noah’s reading from the portable Talking Cure intallation on Flirckr. Jill also posted several photos of the reading.
Matt Kirschenbaum just sent out an exciting announcement about a new journal that will serve as a forum for scholarly and creative work in electronic media. Digital Humanities Quarterly will publish scholarly articles, editorials, experiments in interactive media, and reviews of books, web sites, new media art, and digital humanities systems. Importantly, this will be a free, open-access journal, and both critical and creative work will go through a peer review process.
Call for Submissions
Digital Humanities Quarterly
Submissions are invited for Digital Humanities Quarterly, a new open-access peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Submissions may be mailed to submissions@digitalhumanities.org. A web submission form will also be available soon.
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Aug 162005
Every night for 1001 nights, Barbara Campbell is performing a short text-based work via web video. Her project 1001 Nights Cast is structured around the frame of tale of Scheherazade and 1001 nights. Participants contribute stories through the following procedure: each morning Campbell wakes and scans the headlines for a short phrase to use as a prompt. She then creates a watercolor image of the text of the prompt, which she posts to the site. Reader participants then respond to the prompt, writing story 1001 words or less in length. Each night Campbell reviews the day’s submissions and adapts one for performance, or, if she’s received no suitable submissions, generates a text by other means, such as a Google search. The stories are preserved in on the site as a text archive, though the video performance occurs only live, at a scheduled time published on the site. As of August 15th, fifty-seven nights into the project, it seems to be going well. Thirty-four different authors have contributed stories. The stories don’t seem to be interwoven into each other outside of the frame tale, so each story stands on it own. Although the editing process is expedited, the 1001 word length, longer than a short short but shorter than a typical short story, is conducive to concise stories with a well-honed sense of economy.
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Jun 142005
After much deliberation, we are pleased to announce the winner of the 60 Second Story Competition.
The judges selected “Charles” by Steve Himmer as the winner of the first 60 Second Story Competition, citing its humor, clarity, and completeness as a story. Steve will be receiving a one-minute supply of chocolate, and a one inch by one inch edition of his story will be printed by Spineless Books. Steve Himmer teaches writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston. He is the author of an unpublished novel about a bear, and also writes at onepotmeal.com.
The runners-up included “Faith” by Ed Falco in second place, a tie between “The Golden Age” by Roderick Coover and “Pillow, Pillow” by Jason Nelson for third, and “Florence” by Christine Wilks in fourth.
The judges each submitted a list of their top ten choices in ranked order, and the lists were then compiled, generating these results:
1. “Charles” by Steve Himmer
2. “Faith” by Ed Falco
3. “The Golden Age” by Roderick Coover and “Pillow, Pillow” by Jason Nelson
4. “Florence” by Christine Wilks
5. “Part of the Plot” by Matthew Kirschenbaum
6. “Mondegreens” by Kari Kraus
7. “m.f.” by Ian Matheson
8. “Another Day” by Fortunato Caragliano
9. “Prom Night” by Leia Park
10. “Dear John” by Tim McMahon
11. “Dominoe” by Alan Levine
12. “Talking About Life at Ace Hardware” by Jim Kalmbach
13. “Crap” by Matthias Lohmann and Thorsten Offer
All entries submitted in the 60 Second Story Competition will be featured in “The 15 Minutes of Fame,” a web shrine to the 60 second story to be located at 60secondstory.com. The new site will also welcome new 60 Second Story submissions, and will host another competition this fall. Stay tuned for details. Thanks to everyone who took part in the first competition. The breadth and variety of the entries really demonstrate how versatile the 60 second form can be.
Jun 122005
TRAINS: www.catherinejamieson.com/trains
This is a cool project derived from group activity from flickr. One flickr photographer, Catherine Jamieson, put out a call for train pictures, and then organized a nicely curated online exhibition, categorizing different types of shots. An excellent example of the kind of collective artistic activity that could only take place online.
Jun 102005
An interesting variant on the Nigerian scam spam, I got this message in my inbox today, the participation in which, I think, would technically constitute bank fraud and treason as well as foolishness. Maybe they’re trying to enlist the pigeons in crimes to keep them from squaking:
ASSALAM ALLAIKUM,
GREETINGS TO YOU. I AM MR MUHAMAD HAMEED OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAQ AND ONE OF THE PALACE FREEWORKER OF PRESIDENT SADDAM HUSSEIN IN BAGHDAD. I GOT YOUR CONTACT FROM OUR CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRIES OF IRAQ WHEN I WAS SEARCHING FOR AN INTERNATIONAL PARTNER WHO CAN HELP ME INVEST MY INHERITANCE MONEY IN A LUCREATIVE BUSINESS IN YOUR COUNTRY OR ABROAD. I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION THE SUM OF 25 MILLIONS OF DOLLARS US IN CASH, WHICH MY LATE FATHER REMOVED FROM ONE OF THE STRONG ROOM OF THE PALACE TWO YEARS AGO BEFORE THE AMERICAN MARINES TOOK OVER BAGHDAD. MY LATE AND I IMMEDIATELY TOOK THE FUNDS OUT OF IRAQ IN 2 MENTAL BOXES FOR SAFE KEEPING THROUGH A DIPLOMATIC MEANS TO ABIDJAN COTE D’IVOIRE, AND HAVE IT DEPOSITED IN A SECURITY COMPANY HERE IN ABIDJAN WITH MY NAME AS THE NEXT OF KIN AND HAD THEM INFORM THAT WE WILL COME FORWARD WITH OUR FORIGEN PARTNER FOR THE CLAIMS. MY PRIMARY AIM OF CONTACTING YOU IS TO SEEK FOR YOUR URGENT HELP TO ASSIST ME CLAIM THE CONSIGNMENT FROM THE SECURITY COMPANY HERE AS MY LATE FATHERS PARTNER SINCE THE WAR HAVE TOOK AWAY THE LIFE OF MY FATHER AND ALL THE DEPOSITARY DOCUMENTS ARE STILL WITH ME,HERE IN ABIDJAN WERE I HAD TO RUN TO SINCE IT IS WERE MY LIFE LIES.
ALL I NEED FROM YOU IS SINCEREITY AND ASSITANCE IN HAVING THIS FUND INVEST IN A VERY GOOD RELIABLE PROJECT IN YOUR COUNTRY. A LOT OF IRAQIS HAD LOOTED MILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND RAN OUT OF IRAQ INCLUDING TOP OFFICIALS OF EMBATTLED PRESIDENT SADDAM, MANY OF US SUCCEDED WHY MANY DIED IN THE PROCESS, I THANK ALLAH THAT I AM ALIVE AND I WANT TO HAVE AN INVESTMENT BASE IN YOUR COUNTRY, WHEREBY AS SOON AS YOU TAKE CUSTODY OF THE FUNDS AND LODGE IT INTO YOUR ACCOUNT, THEN I CAN LEAVE BACK TO YOUR CHOICE DESTINATION FOR THE FUTHER INVESTMENT.
PLEASE IF YOU ARE READY TO ASSIST ME, REPLY ME URGENTLY VIA MY E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR DETAILS. THIS PROJECT IS RISK FREE BUT HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL PLEASE TREAT AS URGENT.
YOU CAN REACH ME
ON PHONE WITH THE ABOVE NUMBER: 0022507438151
MY E-MAIL: muhamadhameed@yahoo.com
REGARDS,
MR MUHAMAD HAMEED
Jun 052005
Today’s New York Times offers an article that investigates the origins of the joystick and credits it as one of the most overlooked acheivements of the last century.
Thursday night Jill and I attended the launch party for the Contagious Media Showdown and produced this report on the event.
Download/Play 4.1MB Quicktime
Download/Play 0.8MB Quicktime
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 Commons flickr 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.
See 60secondstory.contagiousmedia.org for the details, to watch some 60 second stories, and to submit your own.
May 122005
Drew Davidson passes along word of the recent fourth Media in Transition conference at MIT. From the list of abstracts and papers, it looks like the conference was indeed an interesting gathering, including quite a bit of work on nonlinearity in movies (e.g. “Run, Lola, Run: Film as a Narrative Database by Jim Bizzocchi), narrative in computer games (e.g. “Test-Driving Avatars: Max Payne, Ergodic Texts, and the Character-Vehicle” by Robert Buerkle), emergence in nonfiction film (e.g. “The Narratives of Nonfiction in New Media and the Concept of Emergence” by Rod Coover) and topics in hypertext literature (e.g. “Construction of Spatial Narratives in M.D. Coverley’s Califia” by Burcu S. Bakioglu). The abstracts suggest some interesting interdisciplinary fusions, and many of the abstracts are also linked to full papers.
Apr 292005
Got a “ridiculous and pointlesss” idea along the lines of The Dancing Baby, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, or The Star Wars Kid? Eyebeam is looking for such projects for their Contagious Media Showdown. Large cash prizes are involved: $2,000 for the project with the most page views, $1,000 for the first site with an Alexa rating higher than 20,000, $1000 for the site with the most links from blogs, and $1,000 for the most popular site under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. Act now, web slackers are hanging out waiting for the next stupid but delightful silly thing to email to their list of friends: to participate, you need to reserve a slot by April 30th, and the project needs to be online by May 19th. There will also be a workshop May 7th in NYC by the creators of BPLU, Rejection Line, FundRace, How to Dance Properly, Nike Sweatshop Email, Dog Island, del.icio.us, Blogdex , and Pizza Party. Special guests from The Yes Men and the EFF.
Apr 252005
Yes you are!
“You Are Beautiful” is a meme-type sticker and installation art project, centered in Chicago but distributed around the world. The most cool thing about this project is how its creators taken a simple idea, a phrase that many people like to hear, and distributed it across multiple media, and then created a well-designed network photo archive of its many manifestations; a kinder, more affirming version of the “Andre Has a Posse/OBEY” idea. I was also pleased and waxed nostalgiac when I saw that most of the installations have occurred in my old neighborhood in Chicago. Spread the words.
Apr 062005
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.
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