Nick Montfort
Crazy idea? Of course. And yet Zach Whalen has been doing it, quite successfully, on Tumblr. For instance, here’s his brand-aware version of Brion Gysin’s permutation poem:
And his speedrun of Lexia to Perplexia:
Not to mention the excellent staticy CRTs, captured from films and TV, not to mention the exquisite and worth-the-trip Zen for GIF.
Martin Schemitsch (a.k.a. Martinland) has compiled and released a disk to accompany our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, one that’s full of BASIC and assembly programs. These include the programs in the book and the later, more compact versions of our demo thread. The disk was just released at Commodore-Treffen Graz $14, and of course the disk image is available for download. It’s a nice companion to the 10 PRINT book and a Commodore 64 emulator, although, as you can see, it also works perfectly well on a vintage Commodore 64.
Following up the excellent ELO conference, Mark Sample offers a post on “Closed Bots and Green Bots” which divides bots in a very compelling, interesting, and productive way.
My new book of programs/poems, #! (pronounced “Shebang”), has just been published by Counterpath.
Read all about it on the press’s page for #!.
The book consists of poetic programs and their outputs. The programs in the book are all free software, and in case you don’t want to type them in, the longer ones are all available in my “code” directory.
I hope you’ll get a copy at your local independent bookseller.
A special issue of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG) is now out — I mention it because I was one of the editors, and the issue deals with computational narrative and games.
Here’s the link to the computational narrative and games issue. It was edited by Ian Horswill, Nick Montfort and Michael Young. And here’s what is in it:
Guest Editorial
Horswill, I.D; Montfort, N; Young, R.M
p 92-96
Social Story Worlds With Comme il Faut
McCoy, J. ; Treanor, M. ; Samuel, B. ; Reed, A.A. ; Mateas, M. ; Wardrip-Fruin, N.
p 97-112
Versu—A Simulationist Storytelling System
Evans, R. ; Short, E.
p 113-130
A Computational Model of Narrative Generation for Surprise Arousal
Bae, B.-C. ; Young, R.M.
p 131-143
Automated Story Selection for Color Commentary in Sports
Lee, G. ; Bulitko, V. ; Ludvig, E.A.
p 144-155
Skald: Minstrel Reconstructed
Tearse, B. ; Mawhorter, P. ; Mateas, M. ; Wardrip-Fruin, N.
p 156-165
Designing User-Character Dialog in Interactive Narratives: An Exploratory Experiment
Endrass, B. ; Klimmt, C. ; Mehlmann, G. ; Andre, E. ; Roth, C.
p 166-173
Personalized Interactive Narratives via Sequential Recommendation of Plot Points
Yu, H. ; Riedl, M.O.
p 174-187
Lessons on Using Computationally Generated Influence for Shaping Narrative Experiences
Roberts, D.L. ; Isbell, C.L.
p 188-202
A Supervised Learning Framework for Modeling Director Agent Strategies in Educational Interactive Narrative
Lee, S.Y. ; Rowe, J.P. ; Mott, B.W. ; Lester, J.C.
p 203-214
Shall I Compare Thee to Another Story?—An Empirical Study of Analogy-Based Story Generation
Zhu, J. ; Ontanon, S.
p 216-227
Analysis of ReGEN as a Graph-Rewriting System for Quest Generation
Kybartas, B. ; Verbrugge, C.
p 228 – 241
(These pertain to Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7, and specifically today’s presentations. Perhaps, if you’re here, you will laugh. If you aren’t here, my regrets.)
codewiz and I (nom de nom) showed a wild demo at @party yesterday (June 14) at MIT.
It was “Waves 3 Ways (Topsy’s Revenge).” Indeed, there’s video.
The concept is based on one-line C programs to generate music, the earliest of which were by viznut. I (nom de nom) wrote a C expression in this style to generate a waveform that could be output as sound but
also consisted of all printable ASCII characters. The source is about 1kb, without much effort at compression. And the sound, in addition to driving speakers, can be (and was) connected to a Tesla coil.
To connect the oneTesla coil he built, codewiz modified the firmware and the control box to allow the audio output to be read by the potentiometer input. He also wrote dsptee.c to improve the way the text scrolls.
Topsy was the elephant electrocuted by Thomas Edison in 1903 to help prove that AC electricity (advocated by Tesla) was unsafe.
My main disappointment was that the projector, which I thought would be HD and thus the same as my display, showed only the left-hand side of the video. I should have checked it more thoroughly before we got started.
We were very pleased to get second place behind a nice oscilloscope demo.
The final section of the demo is based on the bpNichol poem “Island,” part of his Apple IIe collection First Screening. This poem, in turn, refers to a concrete poem by Ian Hamilton Finlay. I’ve put a video/screencast of the end of the production online.
I direct a lab at MIT called The Trope Tank. This is a lab for research, teaching, and creative production, located in building 14 (where the Hayden Library is also housed), in room 14N-233. Its mission is to develop new poetic practices and new understandings of digital media by focusing on the material, formal, and historical aspects of computation and language.
The lab’s website has just been updated with some new information about our two major creative/research projects, Slant and Renderings. Earlier this academic year, a hardware and software catalog of Trope Tank resources was developed by Erik Stayton with contributions from Sylvia Tomayko-Peters.
As usual, the Trope Tanks hosts the monthly meetings of the local interactive fiction club, the People’s Republic of Interactive Fiction. Also, the Trope Tank’s series of digital writing presentations, Purple Blurb, continued this year; I was on leave in Fall 2013, but the series was back and hosted four excellent presentations in Spring 2014. See those sites for more information about PR-IF and Purple Blurb.
Here’s what we’ve been up to since our last annual report in May 2013:
New Works: Creative projects released.
Trope Reports: We have issued two technical reports.
Exhibit & Museum Event:
Presentations:
Translations: Andrew Campana translated “The Two” by Nick Montfort into Japanese. Piotr Marecki translated Montfort’s “Lede,” “The Two,” and World Clock (via translation of the novel-generating program) into Polish, and, with Aleksandra Małecka, translated “Between Page and Screen” by Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse into Polish. These will be placed online when revisions are complete.
Teaching:
Upcoming: In Milwaukee this month Trope Tank researchers will present at (int)7 (Intelligent Narrative Technologies 7) and the Electronic Literature Organization Conference. The presentation will be “Expressing the Narrator’s Expectations” by Montfort and Stayton at (int)7, and at ELO in the conference paper sessions “The Formation of the Field of Electronic Literature in Poland” by Marecki, “Computational Editions, Ports, and Remakes of ‘First Screening’ and ‘Karateka'” by Stayton and Montfort, and “New Novel Machines: Nanowatt and World Clock” by Montfort. The ELO Media Arts show will include “The Postulate to Hyperdescribe the World” by Marecki and Aleksandra Małecka and “Round” by Montfort. Andrew Campana’s work will be part of the Gallery of E-Lit 1st Encounters.
Many papers and even some books developed with Trope Tank support are forthcoming, but instead of trying to enumerate those, I’ll list them next year, when they have appeared.
I persist in my quest to develop extremely simple, easily modifiable programs that produce compelling textual output.
My latest project is Modern Perverbs. In a world where nothing is as it seems … two phrases … combine … to make a perverb. That’s about all there is to it. If phrase N is picked from the first list, some phrase that isn’t number N will be picked from the second, to ensure maximum perverbiality. The first phrase also carries the punctuation mark that will be used at the very end. This one is a good bit simpler than even my very simple “exploded sentence” project, Lede.
(I learned of perverbs and their power, I should note, thanks to Selected Declarations of Dependence by Harry Mathews.)
In case, for some reason, you fear the legal repercussions of ripping off my HTML and JavaScript and editing it, Modern Perverbs is explicitly licensed as free software. Save the page on your desktop as plain HTML (not “complete”), open it in an editor, and have a field day.
Check out “Wandering through Taroko Gorge,” a participatory, audio-enabled remix.
As James T. Burling stated on the “projects” page of MAD THEORY:
>In this combination of presentation and poetry reading, I’ll present a remix of Nick Monfort’s javascript poetry generator, “Taroko Gorge.” My remix added a musical component using a computers oscilloscope function, and more importantly allows participant-observers to type in answers to prompts which are then added to the poem in real-time. The poem will be available throughout the day, gradually adding all inputs to its total sum. I’ll discuss the process of decoding html and javascript as a non-coder, describe some of my theories on participatory performance using computer interfaces, and raise questions about agency in performance and how a digital artifact can function as a poetic event.
There’s a major new release of Inform 7, build 6L02, the first new release of the interactive fiction system in three years.
MIT, room 14E-310
Monday 5/5, 5:30pm
Free and open to the public, no reservation required
This Monday (2014-05-05) the Purple Blurb series of Spring 2014 presentations will conclude with a talk by Jill Walker Rettberg on a pervasive but still not well-understood phenomenon, the types of digital writing, tracking, photography, and media production of other sorts that people do about themselves. Her examples will be drawn from her own work as well as from photobooths, older self-portraits, and entries from others’ diaries.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. Her research centers on how we tell stories online, and she has published on electronic literature, digital art, blogging, games and selfies. She has written a research blog, jilltxt.net, since October 2000, and co-wrote the first academic paper on blogs in 2002. Her book _Blogging_ was published in a second edition in 2014. In 2008 she co-edited an anthology of scholarly articles on _World of Warcraft._ Jill is currently writing a book on technologically mediated self-representations, from blogs and selfies to automated diaries and visualisations of data from wearable devices.
More about Purple Blurb …
Slice of MIT, an MIT alumni publication, has an article on my work with poetry and computation. It’s by Kate Hoagland, was written for National Poetry Month, and is an excellent short discussion of several recent projects and some themes in my work and that of my lab, The Trope Tank.
Dartmouth is celebrating the 50th anniversary of BASIC tomorrow with several events, including the premiere of a documentary on BASIC that I hope to see soon. I teach two classes tomorrow; those and my other meetings will make it impossible for me to stop by, even though Dartmouth is not very far away.
There’s also a celebratory Time article about BASIC, one that is packed with nice photos, scans, and GIFs showing how programs were listed and how they ran. The GIFs include a sped-up one of 10 PRINT running in an emulator, and there’s a link to 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10, our book (by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter).
I do genuinely appreciate the link and the article overall – there’s excellent discussion of popular programming, recollections of personally writing BASIC, BASIC in books and magazines, and even David Brin’s 2006 Salon article – but it’s too bad our book is (twice) referred to as “a book of essays” when it is actually a single book-length academic study of the title program; quite in distinction to a book of essays, it was written by the ten of us in a single voice. The book, which among other things provides the major academic study of BASIC this century, is also available for free online and anyone can download/open it in seconds to check it out. And if such a glance entices a reader, he or she may, like the popular BASIC programmer of the late 1970s and 1980s, dive further in and learn about formal, material, cultural, historical, and other aspects of the title program, the Commodore 64, BASIC, and more.
The AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) offers you eleven options on their Web form for indicating your gender. But these are listed in a drop-down box, so you can’t choose more than one.
To give a specific example, you can’t choose “male” and “cisgender.”
OPPRESSION!
MIT, room 14E-310
Monday 4/28, 5:30pm
Free and open to the public, no reservation required
This Monday (2014-04-28) Purple Blurb is proud to host a screening and discussion of narrative video art work done in collaboration with Roderick Coover, including _The Last Volcano, Cats and Rats, Three Rails Live,_ and _Toxicity._ (The last two are combinatory pieces; _Three Rails Live_ is a collaboration between Coover, Rettberg, and Nick Montfort.) These pieces deal with personal and global catastrophes and are written across languages, with one of the voices in _Cats and Rats_ in (subtitled) Norwegian. They continue Rettberg’s work on novel-length electronic literature projects and his frequent collaboration with others.
Scott Rettberg is Professor of Digital Culture in the department of Linguistic, Literary, and Aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Rettberg is the project leader of ELMCIP (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice), a HERA-funded collaborative research project, and a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of novel-length works of electronic literature, combinatory poetry, and films including _The Unknown, Kind of Blue, Implementation, Frequency, Three Rails Live,_ and _Toxicity._ His creative work has been exhibited online and at art venues including the Chemical Heritage Foundation Museum, Palazzo dell Arti Napoli, Beall Center, the Slought Foundation, and The Krannert Art Museum.
More about Purple Blurb …
The Electronic Literature Organization is delighted to announce two awards to be given this summer; nominations are open now.
>The ELO is proud to announce the ”The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of
>Electronic Literature” and “The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic
>Literature.” Below is information including guidelines for submissions for each.
>
>http://eliterature.org/2014/04/announcing-elo-prizes-for-best-literary-and-critical-works/
>
>“The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature”
>
>“The N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature” is an
>award given for the best work of criticism, of any length, on the topic of
>electronic literature. Bestowed by the Electronic Literature Organization and
>funded through a generous donation from N. Katherine Hayles and others, this
>$1000 annual prize aims to recognize excellence in the field. The prize comes
>with a plaque showing the name of the winner and an acknowledgement of the
>achievement, and a one-year membership in the Electronic Literature Organization
>at the Associate Level.
>
>We invite critical works of any length. Submissions must follow these
>guidelines:
>
>1. This is an open submission. Self nominations and nominations are both
>welcome. Membership in the Electronic Literature Organization is not required.
>
>2. There is no cost involved in nominations. This is a free and open award aimed
>at rewarding excellence.
>
>3. ELO Board Members serving their term of office on the Board are ineligible
>for nomination for the award. Members of the Jury are also not allowed to be
>nominated for the award.
>
>4. Three finalists for the award will be selected by a jury of specialists in
>electronic literature; N. Katherine Hayles will choose the winner from among the
>finalists.
>
>5. Because of the nature of online publishing, it is not possible to conduct a
>blind review of the submissions; the jury will be responsible for fair
>assessment of the work.
>
>6. Those nominated may only have one work considered for the prize. In the event
>that several works are identified for a nominee, the nominee will choose the
>work that he or she wishes to be juried.
>
>7. All works must have already been published or made available to the public
>within 18 months, no earlier than December 2012.
>
>8. All print articles must be submitted in .pdf format. Books can be sent either
>in .pdf format or in print format. Online articles should be submitted as a link
>to an online site.
>
>9. Nominations by self or others must include a 250-word explanation of the
>work’s impact in the field. The winner selected for the prize must also include
>a professional bio and a headshot or avatar.
>
>10. All digital materials should be emailed to elo.hayles.award@gmail.com by May
>15, 2014; three copies of the book should be mailed to Dr. Dene Grigar, Creative
>Media & Digital Culture, Washington State University Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon
>Creek Ave., Vancouver, WA 98686 by May 15, 2014. Those making the nomination or
>the nominees themselves are responsible for mailing materials for jurying. Print
>materials will be returned via a self-addressed mailer.
>
>11. Nominees and the winner retain all rights to their works. If copyright
>allows, ELO will be given permission to share the work or portions of it on the
>award webpage. Journals and presses that have published the winning work will be
>acknowledged on the award webpage.
>
>12. The winner is not expected to attend the ELO conference banquet. The award
>will be mailed to the winner.
>
>Timeline
>
>Call for Nominations: April 15-May 10
>
>Jury Deliberations: May 15-June 10
>
>Award Announcement: ELO Conference Banquet
>
>For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, President, Electronic Literature
>Organization: “dgrigar” at mac.com.
>
>“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature”
>
>“The Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature” is an award given
>for the best work of electronic literature of any length or genre. Bestowed by
>the Electronic Literature Organization and funded through a generous donation
>from supporters and members of the ELO, this $1000 annual prize aims to
>recognize creative excellence. The prize comes with a plaque showing the name of
>the winner and an acknowledgement of the achievement, and a one-year membership
>in the Electronic Literature Organization at the Associate Level.
>
>We invite critical works of any length and genre. Submissions must follow these
>guidelines:
>
>1. This is an open submission. Self nominations and nominations are both
>welcome. Membership in the Electronic Literature Organization is not required.
>
>2. There is no cost involved in nominations. This is a free and open award aimed
>at rewarding excellence.
>
>3. ELO Board Members serving their term of office on the Board are ineligible
>for nomination for the award. Members of the Jury are also not allowed to be
>nominated for the award.
>
>4. Three finalists for the award will be selected by a jury of specialists in
>electronic literature; Robert Coover or a representative of his will choose the
>winner from among the finalists.
>
>5. Because of the nature of online publishing, it is not possible to conduct a
>blind review of the submissions; the jury will be responsible for fair
>assessment of the work.
>
>6. Those nominated may only have one work considered for the prize. In the event
>that several works are identified for a nominee, the nominee will choose the
>work that he or she wishes to be juried.
>
>7. All works must have already been published or made available to the public
>within 18 months, no earlier than December 2012.
>
>8. Works should be submitted either as a link to an online site or in the case
>of non-web work, available via Dropbox or sent as a CD/DVD or flash drive.
>
>9. Nominations by self or others must include a 250-word explanation of the
>work’s impact in the field. The winner selected for the prize must also include
>a professional bio and a headshot or avatar.
>
>10. Links to the digital materials or to Dropbox should be emailed to
>elo.coover.award@gmail.com by May 15, 2014; three copies of the CD/DVDs and
>flash drives should be mailed to Dr. Dene Grigar, Creative Media & Digital
>Culture, Washington State University Vancouver, 14204 NE Salmon Creek Ave.,
>Vancouver, WA 98686 by May 15, 2014. Those making the nomination or the nominees
>themselves are responsible for mailing materials for jurying. Physical materials
>will be returned via a self-addressed mailer.
>
>11. Nominees and the winner retain all rights to their works. If copyright
>allows, ELO will be given permission to share the work or portions of it on the
>award webpage. Journals and presses that have published the winning work will be
>acknowledged on the award webpage.
>
>12. The winner is not expected to attend the ELO conference banquet. The award
>will be mailed to the winner.
>
>Timeline
>
>Call for Nominations: April 19-May 10
>
>Jury Deliberations: May 15-June 10
>
>Award Announcement: ELO Conference Banquet
>
>For more information, contact Dr. Dene Grigar, President, Electronic Literature
>Organization: “dgrigar” at mac.com.