What … exactly … is … the … deal?
Another attack — NOT
An analyst assesses Alphabetical Africa and another authorial account about antithesis and absence.
Luis Bury does not pull punches in reviewing Doug Nufer’s Negativeland and Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa in ebr.
Bill Gates at MIT
Bill Gates spoke at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium today as the chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, advocating for the brightest minds to work on the most important problems of the world – such as reducing childhood deaths through health, sanitation, and development programs. The talk was part of a tour that also includes Stanford, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. There were only a few seats free in Kresge. Among other things, Gates suggested separating the accreditation function of higher education to allow for non-place-based learning. He softened the blow by praising MIT’s Open Courseware and listing several of the OCW courses that he himself had taken.
Since I didn’t see Richard Stallman in line, I didn’t stay for all of the Q&A.
There wasn’t a torrent of new information in Gates’s talk, but it was fascinating to hear in relation to Gates’s 1976 “An Open Letter to Hobbyists.” There are actually some similarities in tone: In both the letter and the talk, Gates expressed dismay at the current system not working very well. But in the letter, he declares that computer hobbyists should stop stealing software, says that people who have been re-selling his product without authorization should be kicked out of the club, and invites members to write him and pay up. This, he hopes, will advance him toward his dream, in which he can “hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.” Today, he’s the world’s wealthiest man, actively seeking more effective ways to benefit society by giving his money away.
On the one hand, one wonders if we might have done just as well if we had kept our money in the first place.
On the other hand, Gates becoming a full-time philanthropist and speaking to our technical institute here from that perspective makes for quite a development. It reminds me that his rival and fellow college drop-out, Steve Jobs, got his start selling blue boxes with Steve Wozniak to allow his customers in the Berkeley dorms to resist the man and make free long-distance calls. Now, Jobs, the man, has a worldwide telephony empire of his own via the iPhone and its thought-crushing App Store.
It’s too bad you can’t tell who the good guys are going to be – say, by looking for a “don’t be evil” button.
Two Profs on Boing Boing
Two of my friends and fellow investigators of digital media have recently been featured on Boing Boing:
- “Reducing the World’s Suck with Henry Jenkins” is an article that deals with Henry’s perspectives on fandom and the still-prevalent myths of videogame violence and addiction.
“Chimerical Avatars and Other Identity Experiments from Prof. Fox Harrell” details Fox’s ongoing work on better representing identity in videogames and other computing systems.
The article on Fox Harrell was reblogged on Kotaku, too: “Making Avatars That Aren’t White Dudes Is Hard.” While the title is catchy, I have to point out that Fox’s work is about richer and more multidimensional ways of representing oneself digitally, beyond the one idea of skin color or race. So, we should anticipate that this work is likely to benefit “whitey” as well – and anyone who wants more than a Monopoly token as an in-game or online representation.
Video of the Get Lamp PAX Panel
Jason Scott, the filmmaker behind the soon-to-be-released interactive fiction documentary, has posted video of the Get Lamp panel at PAX-East. He’s also put up an MP3 with just the audio. The panelists are Dave Lebling, Don Woods, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, your very own Nick Montfort, Steve Meretzky, and Jason Scott.
H. Edward Roberts, Inventor of the Personal Computer
The inventor of the MITS Altair 8800, the inexpensive kit computer that is widely considered to be the first personal computer, has died at age 68.
Rilke and Prejudice and Robots
In Robot Rilke, you can find the selected poems of Rainer Maria Rilke translated by robots. “With a special biographical introduction cut-and-pasted from Wikipedia.”
If you love it, you may want to sing Robot Love, I Love You. (Video by Ignatz Topolino, audio by Echelon and Jane Dowe, a.k.a. Oh Astro.)
Today’s CMS Masters Presentations
Today we heard final thesis presentations from the 2010 masters students in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program.
I’ve taught in CMS, which has an undergraduate and masters program, since I came to MIT three years ago. It’s a diverse program that has included digital media research and has brought contemporary computational work, among other types of media production and reception, into juxtaposition and under consideration. Here are the titles of this semester’s masters presentations:
- M. Flourish Klink: “Laugh Out Loud in Real Life: Twilight, Women’s Humor, and Fan Identity”
- Sheila Seles: “Audience Research for Fun and Profit: Rediscovering the value of television audiences”
- Florence Gallez: “Open Park Online News Production: A Proposal for a Code of Ethics for Collaborative Journalism in the Digital Age”
- Audubon Dougherty: “New Medium, New Practice: Civic production in live-streaming mobile video”
- Nick Seaver: “A Brief History of Re-performance”
- Madeleine Elish: “The Evolution of the Companion Species: Creating Realms of Possibility for the Personal Computer”
- Jason Begy “Interpreting Abstract Games: The Metaphorical Potential of Formal Game Elements”
- Elliot Pinkus: “The Physicality of Floating Numbers”
- Hillary Kolos: “Not in it just to win it: Inclusive gaming in an MIT dorm”
- Michelle Moon Lee: “Designing Game Ethics: A Pervasive Game Adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo”
I’m not advising any CMS masters students this year, but this program does allow for research into my area of interest (computational art and media) and should accommodate more research in these areas in the future. (The program has had some great thesis on computational media in the past, too: Brett Camper’s work on the Game Boy Advance homebrew programming community is an example.) In 2010-2011, because the program is in transition to new co-directors, we won’t have any graduate students around, but we will be running admissions for a class of masters students that will join us in 2011. If you’re interested in working with me or my colleagues here at MIT on a masters degree, let me know.
Two to Read on ebr
That’s electronic book review, which does indeed host electronic reviews of good old books, but also offers up scholarly articles on digital literature, as it has been doing for a while. Two recent articles, in particular, are not to be missed by those interested e-lit.
First, Daniel Punday’s piece on how computer games could break the homogeneity of e-books, in which he describes the uniformity implicit in the e-book concept, in the idea of a modular library, and the disappointing implications of such restricted formats for digital, bookish innovation. Punday is more optimistic than I am about the possibility that gaming might lead us out of e-book thralldom, but whether or not he’s right about this potential solution, he points out an important and overlooked aspect of the e-book situation that we need to attend to – at least, for instance, by being willing to build e-books as individual iPhone apps when we want to do more than the standard formats can accomodate.
And, Maire-Laure Ryan’s discussion of how digital art engages with dysfunctionality extends the conversation beyond the playful forms of programming that Michael Mateas and I have discussed to broadly consider political, ludic, programmatic, and even inadvertent types of digital malfunctioning, or breakdown – or should we call it “dysfunctionality”? (Thank goodness that my creative work wasn’t cited in the section about that last category of brokenness, although I’ll admit that it could have been…) Ryan argues that the digital medium has proven better at producing anti-books than books (or, I suppose, e-books) and that creative dysfunction helps to make us “aware of the codes and processes (technological, linguistic, cultural and cognitive) that regulate our social and mental life.”
PAX Blurb
This weekend was a great time, both at the official PAX-East, where we saw the premiere of Get Lamp, and in the alternate but connected universe of the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction Hospitality Suite, where Andrew Plotkin’s organizational acumen and contributions allowed us to hear panels, write and play Speed IF games, and snack and converse. The 2010 IF Summit at PAX-East was a great success. There and at the main expo, I got to speak with people from the contemporary IF community and many old-school IF luminaries from Infocom and before – and even got to be on a panel with several of them.
Dave Lebling, Don Woods, Brian Moriarty, Andrew Plotkin, Nick Montfort, Steve Meretzky, Jason Scott (standing, in absurd outfit). It is April Fool’s Day. Am I Photoshopped into this panel? Photo CC by Eric Havir.
And, I got to play on the proto-Ms. Pac Man board – the one Crazy Otto board that is known to still exist.
After PAX, I hosted a great reading of interactive fiction by Emily Short (who read from Alabaster) and Jeremy Freese (Violet), with interacting done by Kevin Jackson-Mead and Jenni Poladni. The event was at MIT (as with all Purple Blurb presentations), had standing room only, and prompted a great deal of good conversation afterwards.
There is much more that could be said, and many more PAX-East IF people that I could mention – a few of those, beyond the PR-IF regulars, are: Sam Kabo Ashwell, Liza Daly, Brendan Desilets, Stephen Granade, Juhana Leinonen, Jacqueline Lott, Jesse McGrew, Carl Muckenhoupt, Aaron Reed, Dan Schmidt, Robb Sherwin, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short, and Rob Wheeler. (My apologies to those whose names I’m overlooking or don’t have on hand.) Some of these are locals I rarely see; others are people I have known for years, had numerous extensive discussions with, and in one case, collaborated with, and yet PAX-East was my first chance to meet them in person.
Based on last weekend and last Monday, the outlook for IF is extremely bright: We can share games and discuss important questions about IF in person as well as online, we have plenty of ideas that we’re making progress on but can certainly discuss further, and we have a documentary film coming on DVD that will please IF diehards and help to introduce students and other sympathetic viewers to the pleasures of the text adventure.