The book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (and the program) have been discussed as “cool” on Fark. (I was hoping for a Photoshop contest with the program’s output, but this is nice, too…)
One of my co-authors, Casey Reas, has issued a 10 PRINT design challenge to the Processing community. There’s already been one program written in reply.
Slashdot is on the case of 10 PRINT, too, with the usual diagonal PETSCII lines as well as slashes and backslashes. The Slate review and the code are the main topics of discussion so far, but perhaps some are also beginning to dig into the book or PDF.
There’s lively discussion of the 10 PRINT book and the 10 PRINT program, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, (via the Slate review) over at Reddit. The Enterprise Java port of the program, contributed early on, is truly classic.
Geeta Dayal reviewed 10 PRINT in Slate. As far as I know, this is the first published review of the book, and I greatly appreciate how it traces the discussion of mazes and other topics, pointing out the many cultural and well as technical touchstones.
Over at Stack Overflow they have a nice thread going with several shell scripts that implement 10 PRINT.
Daniel Haehn has written a 3D version of the 10 PRINT program in WebGL.
And my lab’s server is back up after a power outage here in Cambridge, MA, so the PDF of the book that was hosted there is once more available.
Our event at the Boston Cyberarts Gallery (with me – Nick Montfort – Patsy Baudoin and Noah Vawter) went very well, with the gallery full for the salon and people willing up after the discussion to come program on the two Commodore 64s that we brought. There were some fascinating variants developed, too. Thanks to George for setting this up for us and to Dan and Bill for getting the space set so that the C64s could be powered up and connected to a projector.
Lev Manovich, one of the editors of the Software Studies series in which our book appears, writes of it:
10 PRINT was “coded” by 10 writers. However, rather than producing yet another academic anthology made up by independent parts, they made a coherent single “intellectual software” which executes beautifully.
We have a site for the book now at http://10print.org – you can download the entire contents, Creative Commons licensed, from the site there in a 50MB PDF. We’re happy to follow up on how the original program was shared in the 1980s by sharing our book in this way.
Finally, Casey Reas, our co-author and the designer of the book, has posted a set of photos of the 10 PRINT book. These are very effective in showing the care that Casey took in putting together the book, and how well it communicates the insights we reached together – and why you may enjoy reading the physical, printed 10 PRINT.
As seen on Bruce Sterling’s blog, we have an 10 PRINT (or, to be precise, a 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10) event tomorrow, Wednesday, here in Boston. The Boston Cyberarts Gallery (formerly AXIOM) is located in the Green Street T station on the Orange Line; the event’s at 7:30pm.
An evening to celebrate the publication by MIT Press of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. This book takes a single line of code-the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title-and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The ten authors of this collaboratively written book, treat code not as merely functional but as a text-in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources-that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more.
They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.
Nick Montfort will start off the evening leading a discussion among co-authors and the audience about this celebrated piece of software. And there will be a short hackathon.
ATNE Salons are informal discussions on art/technology topics. At each event, we start the discussion with a presentation by an expert in the field who’ll provide context and raise provocative questions. Next, with the help of a moderator, we turn the debate over to you. Share your ideas, discover new ones and participate in analytical discourse and artistic cross-pollination.
About Art Technology New England
ATNE is a member-run organization whose purpose is to foster existing and new collaborations in the New England art and technology communities, including non-profit, academic & corporate entities, as well as individuals.
When: Wednesday, November 28th, 7:30pm
Where: Boston Cyberarts Gallery,
141 Green St.,
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130Free event!
RSVP to info [at] atne.org
www.atne.org
Boston-Area IF group The People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction (PR-IF) is set to meet at 6:30pm today in my lab, The Trope Tank (MIT’s room 14N-233). We’ll check out some of the winners of the 2012 Interactive Fiction Competition, the 18th annual Comp, which recently concluded. Congratulations to Marco Innocenti for his 1st-place Andromeda Apocalypse, to the anonymous author of Eurydice (which took 2nd), and to Jim Munroe, for Guilded Youth, which was 3rd – and to all of the other winners!
The deadline for E-Poetry 2013 (to take place in London, at Kingston University) is almost here – sumissions are due December 1. The festival will take place June 17-20.
Sometimes I encounter language that sounds like it was computer-generated, or that sounds like it would be even better if it was. Hence, the slapdash “Lede,” which is based on the first sentence (no, not the whole first paragraph) of a news story that was brought to my attention on ifMUD.
This very simple system does incorporate one minor innovation, the function “fresh(),” which picks from all but the first element of an array and swaps the selection out so that it ends up at the beginning of the array. This means that it doesn’t ever pick the same selection twice in a row.
Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow Americans.
A great story on the Living Computer Museum in Seattle, where they have computers … that work!
Mark Saltveit, palindromist and comedian, delivers a compelling “CHAD” talk on the e-levels of palindromes and his new approaches of Palindromics and its natural cultish extension, Scinegenics. In his talk, he covers some palindrome history and the development of weaponized palindromes. Although Mark is a letterist, he mentions a classic word-unit palindrome from the book of Exodus, “AHYH ASHR AHYH,” or “ehyeh asher ehyeh,” or, to rend it into a Popeye-esque English, “yam whaddaye yam!”
Over on her site Authoring Software, longtime e-lit author and BASIC programmer Judy Malloy has written a news story about the release of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. I’m quoted, along with co-authors Mark Marino and Jeremy Douglass.
Also, the book has made its way further out into the world – both the Harvard Book Store and the The MIT Press Book store now have it in stock.
Ben Grosser created Facebook Demetricator, a tool that removes counts from Facebook, so that instead of displaying “14,836 people like this” your interface will simply say “people like this.”
I love the concept. I haven’t seen it in action myself, because of my use of a manually-implemented “DeFacebookizer” that, rather than enmeshing me in the most direct possible corporate system of social control and structure, leaves me with only the heterogeneous, diverse, and open communications from people on the World Wide Web. The Web is not a pure wonderland, though. These sorts of communications are, of course, also continually subject to statistical analysis and displays of counts – how many comments on a blog post, for instance. To intervene in the count-obsession of digital media, it makes sense to go to where it is most prominent.
Grosser discusses his deaugmentation of Facebook in an interview with Matthew Fuller.
The Electronic Literature Organization’s 2013 conference will be in Paris:
The Electronic Literature Organization (http://eliterature.org), the leading organization devoted to electronic literature, announces its 2013 conference to be held in Paris, France, September 24-27, 2013, in collaboration with Université Paris 8. Proposals are welcome on topics within electronic literature, including but not limited to:
- Digital culture
- Code and software studies
- Digital art
- Translation of electronic literature
- E-literature and the body
- Digital poetics
- Digital storytelling
- Mobile/locative media
The website is being prepared now, but a call for proposals (with further information) is already out. The deadline is December 31, 2012.
Our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 has been printed and bound and is making its way to bookstores now. It’s featured in a current exhibit at Hampshire College, and three of us ten co-authors did a reading to celebrate the release at the Harvard Book Store yesterday, where the first copies were available.
Our reading at the Harvard Book Store drew a sizable crowd, including MIT colleagues from Comparative Media Studies / Writing and Humanistic Studies and the Literature section; comrades in the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, librarians, and local free software folks and hackers, among others. The three of us read some short excerpts from the book and discussed the project, first with each other and then in response to questions from the audience. Several people assumed that the book was a collection of individually-authored articles, which is not a surprise, since that’s usually how a book like this is done. So we spent some time explaining the process of collaborative authorship that we used. The photos here are of me (Nick Montfort) on the left, then of Patsy Baudoin and Noah Vawter.
Meanwhile, back in Western Massachusetts … and specifically at Hampshire College, the exhibit “Pulp to Pixels: Artist’s Books in the Digital Age” is on until November 16. The exhibit is curated by Andrea Dezsö, Steven Daiber, and Meredith Brober, is part of the “Non-Visible and Intangible” series, and is located at the Harold F. Johnson Library. There’s a news item about the exhibit and site with curatorial descriptions and documentation.
Below are photos of John Slepian, who offered his Commodore 64 for the exhibit and set it up, and a gallery visitor enjoying a 10 PRINT variant.
By the weekend, 10 PRINT should be available in fine online and brick-and-mortar bookstores, including my other main bookstore in Cambridge, the MIT Press Bookstore. We hope readers will enjoy the project, and that it will also be an invitation to think about collaborative research and scholarship in the humanities in a new way.
Illya Szilak interviews Nick Montfort in the article “The Death of the Novel: How E-Lit Revolutionizes Fiction,” the first of a series of posts on electronic literature.
Tried of thinking about well-defined regions of red and blue?
… start thinking about PURPLE BLURB, the digital writing series at MIT.
We’ll have our next event with TRACY FULLERTON, an experimental game designer, professor and director of the Game Innovation Lab at the USC School of Cinematic Arts where she holds the Electronic Arts Endowed Chair in Interactive Entertainment. The Game Innovation Lab is a design research center that has produced several influential independent games, including Cloud, flOw, Darfur is Dying, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and The Night Journey – a collaboration with media artist Bill Viola. Tracy is also the author of Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide.
Fullerton’s talk “Finer Fruits: Experiment in Life and Play at Walden” will take place:
November 8
5:30pm
In MIT’s 32-155 (Stata Center)
This is a joint event with the CMS Colloquium, and supported by the Angus N. MacDonald fund.
Walden, a game, is an experiment in play being made about an experiment in living. The game simulates Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in living a simplified existence as articulated in his book Walden. It puts Thoreau’s ideas about the essentials of life into a playable form, in which players can take on the role of Thoreau, attending to the “meaner” tasks of life at the Pond – providing themselves with food, fuel, shelter and clothing – while trying not to lose sight of their relationship to nature, where the Thoreau found the true rewards of his experiment, his “finer fruits” of life. The game is a work in progress, and this talk will look closely at the design of the underlying system and the cycles of thought that have gone into developing it. It will also detail the creation of the game world, which is based on close readings of Thoreau’s work, and the projected path forward for the team as we continue our sojourn in experimental in play.
We have also *added* a Purple Blurb event this semester. Prof. Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania Kelly Writers House will join us for a conversation with Nick Montfort on December 10 at 5:30pm in 6-120. He’ll discuss his experience teaching modern poetry to 34,000 students online. More about this as the time nears …
For now, I hope to see you this Thursday for Tracy Fullerton’s presentation about Walden, a game.
