Author: Nick Montfort

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Ultraconcentrated and a Suit that Outdoes the Moon

I went to New York to attend the opening of Ultraconcentrated, Casey Reas’s solo show at bitforms. As a rather pure computationalist, one who always tries to maximize code and minimize data, I was a teensy bit wary of the data-driven nature of Casey’s work in this show, which is based, to some extent, on digital television. This idea of using data wasn’t completely offputting, though; Casey and collaborator Ben Fry have done a nice mural here at MIT, which I often walk by, called Signals and based on the interconnections of proteins.

The works in the show certainly didn’t display data in a straightforward or disappointing way. There were prints (Control Room (Forward Command Post)) that seemed studies of color. There were also two laser etched anodized aluminum pieces, each with two semicircular segments, which present television signals as if they were converted to a monochrome and very uncanny landscape or cityscape. The main screen that turned on — two screens, actually — was a diptych video that shifts very rarely into a somewhat figurative or identifiable image. The work (including that on the 6th floor) was all appealing and interesting. It certainly justified the packed house at the opening.

Overall, the trip was great, as we caught up with several friends in New York. The other art-related encounters were excellent, too. I met Ben Fino-Radin and others at the XFR STN exhibit and project at the New Museum, where video and born-digital materials were being recovered for artists.

Most oddly, as I was walking though Chelsea after seeing Casey’s show, I noticed an opening of collage art by someone who — however conventional, however absent from today’s avant-garde — has written a great amount of poetry that has pleased and provoked me over the years: Mark Strand. (Among other things, such as dozens of poetry books, he is the author of a very offbeat book of prose, Mr. and Mrs. Baby.) He was wearing a white suit, as I expected (see, for instance, the beginning of his book Dark Harbor). And while I couldn’t think of anything to say to him that would have merited interrupting the excellent time he seemed to be having talking with others, it was nice to see his collages and share the room with him for a bit.

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10 PRINT in enculturation

I don’t seem to have linked to this yet, but there’s a thorough review, by Chris Lindgren, of my and my nine co-authors’ book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 in the journal enculturation. Here are the final sentences of it:

>The book is a rich example of what a possible fusion of theory and techn? might look like in future academic scholarship. In the conclusion, the 10 argue that “reading this one-liner also demonstrates that programming is culturally situated just as computers are culturally situated, which means that the study of code should be no more ahistorical than the study of any cultural text” (262). Code is a text, but, as the 10 indicate, it also operates and “can be representational” of cultural ideals, people, and things. “10 PRINT,” they conclude, “is not just a line of code; it defines a space of possible variations” (266). This insight is perhaps the most useful, since the 10 themselves produced this “assemblage of readings” from a cast of diverse scholars and scholarship. For me, as a rhetorician who is interested in literacy and the fostering of computing cultures, this assemblage also serves as a potential baseline blueprint for the means, processes, and types of cross-disciplinary relationships necessary to build an infrastructure in which Kemeny and Kurtz’s BASIC vision can come to fruition.

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Is ppg256 Green?

I recently answered a series of interesting questions about ppg256, questions that pertained to digital preservation among other issues.

I just wanted to share the one that I thought about the longest. Although I care deeply about properly addressing issues of energy use, recycling, and ethical sourcing of computer components, I think that there are some problems with putting a great deal of weight on these when one is specifically in digital art and digital poetry contexts. I was asked:

> What effect does the environment, both location and ecology, have on the
> work?  Does it have long term implications such as power usage, recycling,
> etc?  Are those addressed in the work itself?

And I replied:

> Centrally, my project is to show that computer programs can be poetic. The
> ppg256 programs can be run on any computer; they do not require a museum,
> gallery, proprietary operating system or Apple Store. So, practically anyone
> with access to computing can run them at any location. The development and
> running of computational poetry, to be honest, is not killing our
> environment. The mindset that computers are for business, war, and science
> but cannot be used to make poems and art does risk — to be honest —
> killing our future.

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Books O’ Poems

I’ve read a few books of poetry recently that I found particularly interesting, so why not mention them here?

Man Years by Sandra Doller. Beautifully damaged utteraces that are highly unusual, resonant with known ways of speaking, and allusive. E.g., in the poem “Eggphrasis,” which begins “eggs / eggs / baby”.

The Container Store by Joe Hall and Chad Hardy. Urban space is explored, and its commercial division and compartmentalization. The typography is compelling, with black blocks often occluding the text like the blind eyes of office buildings.

Meditations 1-52 by Matthew Klane. Also quite engaged politically, also quite well-done typographically, but in another interesting mode. Includes a list of things Vannevar Bush did not invent.

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Round and Duels — Duets Published

I have two new digital pieces (one a collaboration) that have just been published by James O’Sullivan’s New Binary Press:

Round is a computational poem that is non-interactive, deterministic, and infinite (boundless), since it simply substitutes text fragments for the digits 0-9 and presents a representation of the digits of pi. See the note for further information, and if the concept intrigues you at all, please, run the piece for a while.

Duels — Duets, by Stephanie Strickland and Nick Montfort, was developed after Stephanie suggested we write something about collaboration based on our experience developing Sea and Spar Between. We co-created a combinatorial poem based formally on A House of Dust by Alison Knowles and James Tenney, producing about the amount of text that was requested of us for print publication.

New Binary Press has a news item about the publication of these two pieces, too.

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How to Read a Page of the Worl

If you visit this page on the Worl, you may wonder how to read it.

Now, if you just click on that link, you’ll be taken to that page on the Web. To get to the Worl page, you’ll need to install The Deletionist bookmarklet and, once you get to the Web page, click on it. If the page is exactly the same as when I viewed it (it may change, as it’s a wiki front page) you can be sure that your Worl page looks the same as mine did — we’re both looking into the same Worl.

So, you may wonder how to read it.

I read it like this:

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Learn Brogramming

Sigh. Your introductory tutorial was going so well, but given the massive gender imbalance among programmers and computer scientist, I don’t think this is the best way to be inclusive…

The facts of life in a Ruby tutorial.

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Neural has the Nerve for 10 PRINT

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 has been reviewed in Neural, an excellent long-running magazine, print and online that covers creative computing from digital art and music through hacktivism. The reviews in Neural (which is published in Italy, in Italian and English) are short and to the point; I’m pleased to see that they neuronally grasped the concept of 10 PRINT and appreciated the work that my collaborators and I did on it.

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Media Archaeology Lab’s New Media

Lori Emerson has been running an excellent facility at the University of Colorado at Boulder that is a kindred lab, and an inspiration, to my Trope Tank here at MIT.

This is the Media Archaeology Lab, which has recently launched a new site (with blog) and has also begun (as a lab) to tweet.

The Colorado lab, like the Trope Tank, offers working systems from decades past to support research, teaching, and artistic/literary work. The MAL is ahead of us in several ways, for instance by providing extensive information about its holdings in the form of an inventory. They even have a NeXT cube, like we do – although I think the retail price estimate on that page is missing a digit. The Trope Tank only has such information on placards placed on the hardware itself, as discussed in our technical report on the setup of the lab, but perhaps we’ll look to better publish what we’ve gathered here in months to come. I hope the MAL’s progress continues and that I’ll get to visit before too long.

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Doug Engelbart, 88, Inventor of …

… the mouse; the chording keyboard for use with the mouse; the demo; videoconferencing; real-time online collaboration and collaborative editing; the first practical, working hypertext system, which was also a hypermedia system; word processing; dynamic file linking; version control; computer augmentation of human intelligence; and the bootstrapping of human intellectual processes.

Engelbart died on July 2. (Los Angeles Times obituary.)

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An Occasional Digital Poem

After releasing The Deletionist, a project that three collaborators started two years ago, I thought it would be nice to do something smaller-scale – an occasional poem (in HTML and JavaScript) that took me 30 minutes to write during a conference/festival session this morning, and referring to some of the discussion in it: “I Heart E-Poetry.” It’s meant to be read alound, so I suggest at least imagining doing so.

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The Deletionist

The Deletionist I’m pleased to announce the release of a project that I’ve been working on with Amaranth Borsuk and Jesper Juul for the past two years: The Deletionist. This is a bookmarklet (easily added to the bookmark bar in one’s browser) that automatically creates erasure poetry from any page on the World Wide Web, revealing an alterate mesh of texts called the Worl. Amaranth and I presented The Deletionist for the first time today at E-Poetry in London, at Kingston University.