Welcome back to the Web’s major agglomeration of the avant-garde, Ubuweb.

(I don’t know that Ubu actually runs Ubuntu, but some statements are univocalically true regardless. And the site is back up, that’s for sure.)

I was extremely pleased to read Michael Leong’s discussion of Sea and Spar Between in At Length. Among other things, he considers in what way this could be considered a “long poem,” makes connections to Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” treats the interface and experience, and recounts a hilarious exchange between Toni Morrison and Oprah Winfrey. I really appreciated his discussion of different types of attention spans; these were issues that I (and I know Stephanie) have had in mind for quite a while.

At any rate, if you are interested in my & Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between, or if you’ve been wondering about this piece but can’t figure out what to make of it, please take a look at Michael Leong’s article.

As I wrote a few days ago, I made a statement about “Taroko Gorge,” and all of its vandals, at the ELO conference in Morgantown, WV.

Sepand Ansari created a Beckett-based “Taroko Gorge” remix at the ELO conference. And now I have the URL for this piece, “Waiting for Taroko Gorge.”

Kathi Inman Berens has created “Tournedo Gorge” “to mash the space of computation with the female, domestic, and tactile,” as she discusses in her blog post.

Un file de Machine Libertine:

Star Wars, Raw? Rats!

… is a videopoem by Natali Fedorova and Taras Mashtalir. The text is a palindrome by Nick Montfort that briefly retells “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope,” making Han Solo central. The soundtrack is a remix of Commodore 64 music by Sven Schlünzen & Jörg Rosenstiel made by Mashtalir.

The palindrome is a revised version of the one Montfort wrote in 75 minutes for the First World Palindrome Championship, held in Brooklyn on March 16, 2012:

Wow, sagas!
Solo’s deed, civic deed.
Eye dewed, a doom-mood.
A pop …
Sis sees redder rotator.
Radar eye sees racecar X.
Dad did rotor gig.
Level sees reviver!
Solo’s deified!
Solo’s reviver sees level …
Gig rotor did dad!
X, racecar, sees eye.
Radar rotator, redder, sees sis …
Pop a doom-mood!
A dewed eye.
Deed, civic deed.
Solo’s sagas: wow.

Machine Libertine: http://machinelibertine.wordpress.com/

The big-screen premiere of Star Wars, Raw? Rats! will be at MIT in room 32-155 on Monday, April 30, 2012. The screening, which includes a set of films made by members of the MIT community, will begin at 6pm.

My word-palindrome writing project (being undertaken as @nickmofo) has been boosted by Christian proselytizing, by Bök’s page. I am delighted to be featured in Christian Bök’s post on Harriet as an instance of conceptual writing on Twitter – named, in fact, right after @Horse_ebooks.

This makes it particularly apt that Christian describes my writing as potential poetic “fodder.” Why not treat this feed of texts as the gift horse that keeps on giving? Please, feel free to make the tweets of @nickmofo into your chew toy.

The organizer of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction, Kevin Jackson-Mead, has organized and co-written a tribute to the 1992 They Might Be Giants Album, Apollo 18. At the PR-IF site, you can play and download 38 short games corresponding to every song (including the “Fingertips” songs) on the album. With its retro cachet, it may be today’s version of Dial-a-Song:

Apollo 18+20.

I was recently notified that “The Purpling” was no longer online at its original published location, on a host named “research-intermedia.art.uiowa.edu” which held The Iowa Review Web site. In fact, it seems that The Iowa Review Web is missing entirely from that host.

My first reaction was put my 2008 hypertext poem online now on my site, nickm.com, at:

http://nickm.com/poems/the_purpling/

Fortunately, TIWR has not vanished from the Web. I found that things are still in place at:

http://iowareview.uiowa.edu/TIRW/

And “The Purpling” is also up there. Maybe I was using a non-canonical link to begin with? Or maybe things moved around?

Leonardo Flores presents his “Taroko Gary,” a mash-up remix of Gary Snyder’s “Endless Streams and Mountains” and my “Taroko Gorge.” (Update: I changed the URL on February 28, 2012.)

I’ve participated in three conferences on digital and literary and poetic topics recently – and haven’t participated, unfortunately, in a barbecue.

The Critical Code Studies (CCS) Working Group 2012 is an online discussion – or, I suppose, several discussions – that started on January 30 and runs until February 20. It’s organized by Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino.

At In Media Res, a project of MediaCommons, I was part of the digital literature discussion last week. This was organized by Eric LeMay.

And in meatspace (to be precise, at Brown University), I took part in Interrupt 2, a sort of semi-un-conference with performances from JODI, Vanessa Place, and my collaborator Stephanie Strickland. This one was put on by John “CPU” Cayley and many students.

“Fire in the Library” is an article in the new Technology Review about digital archivist, documentary filmmaker, and cat impersonator Jason Scott.

“The Curse of Cow Clicker” is an article in the new Wired about game developer, ontologist, and cowpocalyptic force Ian Bogost.

Enjoy your holiday season with these fine profiles.

The journal New River has a new issue, very nicely designed and with a diverse selection of work. Editors Brianna P. Stout and Christopher Linforth have five different sorts of collaborative works, by Andy Campbell and Lynda Williams; Chris Funkhouser and Amy Hufnagel; Nick Montfort and Natalia Fedorova (who translated my “Concrete Perl,” “The Two,” and “Through the Park” into Russian); Jason Nelson and several Virginia Tech collaborators; and Alan Bigelow with those readers who respond. Here’s the link to my three poems, which are short computational works that operate on the level of the letter, word or phrase, and sentence.

Here’s an announcement about a new, free hypertext authoring system from my collaborator Alex Mitchell:

We are pleased to announce the first public release of the HypeDyn hypertext fiction authoring tool: http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn

HypeDyn is a procedural hypertext fiction authoring tool for non-programmers who want to create text-based interactive stories that adapt to reader choice. HypeDyn is free to download and open source, and runs on Linux, MacOS and Windows. You can download HypeDyn from http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn/download.html

HypeDyn was written in Kawa Scheme, http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/

As part of our ongoing research, we are interested in how people use HypeDyn. Please let us know at hypedyn@partechgroup.org if you are using HypeDyn and would like to tell us about your experiences, in particular if you have made any changes to the code.

We are also interested in having authors take part in a more detailed study. If you are interested in helping with this study, please read the details at http://www.partechgroup.org/hypedyn/study.html

Note that downloading/using HypeDyn does not require participation in the study.

*uck. After five years of activity at the dawning of the Web, after about fifteen years of keeping the site online, it seems that they are gone.

Call for Proposals…

ELO 2012

Electrifying Literature
Affordances and Constraints

June 20-23, 2012 Morgantown, WV

Conference Planning Committee

• Sandy Baldwin, West Virginia University (Chair)
• Philippe Bootz, University of Paris 8
• Dene Grigar, Washington State University Vancouver
• Margie Luesebrink, Irvine Valley College
• Mark Marino, University of Southern California
• Stuart Moulthrop, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
• Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois, Chicago

We invite titles and proposals of no more than 500 words, including a brief description of the content and format of the presentation, and contact information for the presenter(s). Send proposals to elit2012 [at] gmail.com, using plain text format in the email, or attached as Word or PDF. All proposals will receive peer-to-peer review by the ELO and will be considered on their own terms. Non-traditional and traditional formats will be subject to the same peer-to-peer review process.

Submission deadline for proposals: November 30, 2011

Notification of acceptance: December 30, 2011

Electronic Literature: Where is It?*

The 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference will be held June 20-23, 2012 in Morgantown, WV, the site of West Virginia University. In conjunction with the three-day conference, there will be a juried Media Arts Show open to the public at the Monongalia Arts Center in Morgantown and running from June 18-30, 2012. An accompanying online exhibit will bring works from the ELO Conference to a wider audience.

Even if nobody could define print literature, everyone knew where to look for it – in libraries and bookshops, at readings, in class, or on the Masterpiece channel. We have not yet created, however, a consensus about where to find electronic literature, or (for that matter) the location of the literary in an emerging digital aesthetic.

Though we do have, in digital media, works that identify themselves as “locative,” we don’t really know where to look for e-lit, how it should be tagged and distributed, and whether or how it should be taught. Is born digital writing likely to reside, for example, in conventional literature programs? in Rhetoric? Comp? Creative Writing? Can new media literature be remediated? How should its conditions of creation be described? Do those descriptions become our primary texts when the works themselves become unavailable through technological obsolescence?

To forward our thinking about the institutional and technological location of current literary writing, The Electronic Literature Organization and West Virginia University’s Center for Literary Computing invite submissions to the ELO 2012 Conference to be held from June 20-23, 2012, in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Bearing in mind the changing locations of new media literature and literary cultures, the conference organizers welcome unconventional presentations, whether in print or digital media. The point is not to reject the conventional conference ‘paper’ or bullet point presentation but to encourage thoughtful exploration and justification of any format employed. All elements of literary description and presentation are up for reconsideration. The modest mechanisms of course descriptions, syllabus construction, genre identification, and the composition of author bios, could well offer maps toward the location of the literary in digital media. So can an annotated bibliography of works falling under a given genre or within a certain technological context. We welcome surveys of the use of tags and keywords, and how these can be recognized (or not) by readers, libraries, or other necessary nodes in an emerging literary network Also of interest is the current proliferation of directories of electronic literature in multiple media, languages, and geographical locations.

The cost of the conference is $150; graduate students and non-affiliated artists pay only $100. The cost covers receptions, meals, and other conference events. All participants must be members of the Electronic Literature Organization. All events are within walking distance of the conference hotels. Morgantown is a classic college town, located in the scenic hills of north central West Virginia, about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, PA. Local hotel and travel information will be available on the conference website starting October 1, 2011.

Check http://el.eliterature.org and http://conference.eliterature.org for updates. For more information, email elit2012 [at] gmail.com.

*Note: this title derives from an essay by ELO Board Member Dene Grigar in electronic book review, where selected conference presentations will be published within a few months of the conference.

In January 2009, I wrote a very short (one page) Python poetry generator that creates a limitless nature poem each time it is run. I wrote this generator, “Taroko Gorge,” mostly at Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, finishing it on the plane afterwards. I later ported it to JavaScript so that it could be easily run in a Web browser.

It seems the gorge goes ever ever on. The code from “Taroko Gorge” and the form it defines have been appropriated a few times. Here are five poetry generators that use the code from that project and replace my text with different, and often much more extensive, language:

“Tokyo Garage” by Scott Rettberg, 2009. [Output from "Tokyo Garage" read aloud by a pedantic machinima clown.]

“Gorge” by J. R. Carpenter, 2010. [Announcement of "Gorge."] [Output appears in J. R. Carpenter's GENERATION[S], Traumawien: 2010.]

“Along the Briny Beach” by J. R. Carpenter, 2011. [Announcement of "Along the Briny Beach."]

“Toy Garbage” by Talan Memmott, 2011.

“Yoko Engorged” by Eric Snodgrass. 2011. [Announcement of "Yoko Engorged."]

I’ve made some hopefully superficial changes to the non-blog part of my website, nickm.com. Please let me know if you notice that I broke anything.

Thanks to Carlos León, there is now a Spanish version, “Los Dos,” of my simple but (I think) provocative story generator “The Two.” The system was previously translated into French as “Les Deux” by Serge Bouchardon.

Stop by and check them out; all three are available in JavaScript versions that run right away in a browser. For those who are interested, the original Klingon, er, Python, is also available for each of the three languages.

The reader who takes the time to try to actually understand the output and resolve the pronouns in it will see that often this task is complicated by ambiguity in gender, although syntax and power relations also work to suggest certain ways that pronouns can be resolved. The need to leave the gender of the characters indeterminate in the first line posed particular problems, and slightly different problems, for the French and Spanish translators, who each found a solution.