Category: Uncategorized

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E-Lit Platforms at the MLA

Dene Grigar, vice president of the Electronic Literature Organization and one of the organizers of the excellent e-lit gallery and reading here at the MLA Convention, just gave a great presentation about the importance of platform in the development and reception of electronic literature. I was pleased initially to see that there was not only this presentation with “Platform” in the title, then very interested to hear about her work in a lab with original older computer hardware and her discussion of platform differences and changes through the years.

Even more surprising is that Ian Bogost and I have managed to advance part of our diabolical plan to have people use five long, colored rectangles stacked on top of each other:

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Silence: Lectures and Writings

Radical Books of 2011, 7/10

John Cage, Silence

Silence: Lectures and Writings, John Cage, 50th anniversary edition, Wesleyan University Press, 9780819571762

Stefan Helmreich and I were at dinner with a group and started talking about John Cage. The anechoic chamber Cage visited at Harvard is no longer there. MIT doesn’t have one, either. The best you can do (as a visiting sound artist found out) is arrange to visit Bose headquarters in Framingham, where they have a scruffy, industrial room – completely unlike the pure, science-fictional, sound-proof capsule a visitor would no doubt imagine. The point of Cage’s anechoic chamber story is that he heard a low-frequency and a high-frequency sound when he was in it; this was the circulation of his blood and the sound of his nervous system. This experience suggests we cannot truly hear silence, since we always produce sounds. Stefan suggested that perhaps profoundly deaf people can hear silence. I said that since the deaf can’t hear sounds, and since silence only exists as the complement of sound, perhaps they couldn’t really hear silence. Later, I realized that this would only be true of those who were deaf from birth.

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Galerie de Difformité

Radical Books of 2011, 6/10

Galerie de Difformité, Gretchen E. Henderson, &NOW Books, 9780982315637

Cross the form of a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book with fragmented, cut-up, torn-up, stretched, and unconventionally printed text. Skip the “of” of an English title and give it a French name, using the “de” form. Bend book into blog. Deformity here includes transgressing the boundaries of authorship and inviting “user-generated” fascicles. Work the book’s text into something despicable or respectable: Fill out the form. Click to put Ye Ugly Face on Facebook. The story’s play of conspiracies and resurrections resonate with the transformations of the reading process that book and reader enact. Further, the exercises in textual topology – and lettered exhibits calling for further deformation – show that remixing is not just for one-note works such as Dramatic Chipmunk. The book, and indeed this thoughtfully developed artist’s book, can also serve as seed for elaborate transformation and convolution.

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Holocaust Museum

Radical Books of 2011, 5/10

Robert Fitterman, Holocaust Museum

Holocaust Museum, Robert Fitterman, Veer Books, 9781907088346

Here is an extraordinary list, a simple and straightforwardly organized book of metadata (in this case, photo captions) that gives a very detached view of the 20th Century’s most unthinkable occurrence. What is fascinating is that while the book comments on some of the tropes of memorials, Holocaust museums, and records of trauma in general – enumeration, detachment, clear identification and humanization of individuals – it nevertheless becomes an effective testimony of the Holocaust and of how it was inextricably involved with ordinary life and events and histories, beyond the horrors that were ordered and organized:

> A German-Jewish family poses outdoors for a family portrait with their dog. [Photograph #69297]

The book is conceptual, but seems to be as far from a conceptual joke as is possible. Unlike much conceptual writing that begins with appropriation, it demands to be read entire. This is in many ways a simple book, and in many ways an extremely complex engagement with history, memory, and writing.

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Found Poems

Radical Books of 2011, 4/10

Bern Porter, Found Poems

Found Poems, Bern Porter, new edition of a 1972 Something Else Press book, 9780982264591

Perhaps this exquisite collection of punctuation, numbers, and occasional letters recalls to the modern reader the idea of “uncreative writing” as described by Kenneth Goldsmith. I see it more as an example of subtractive writing: Creating new texts by erasure, or by cutting out text from advertisements, tables of technical information, and other ordinary but rich veins that can be mined for fragments of language. Each page can also be seen as a degenerate collage, a single clipping of text juxtaposed with nothing else (except what’s on the facing page). Porter, who was a publisher of radical writing and hoarded paper, never owned a phone or a computer. The book is, one might say, a real find, worth re-reading by anyone who seriously turns to contemporary poetry and conceptual writing, or indeed anyone fascinated with ordinary words locked in ads, fliers, and other everyday texts. At least do check out the fine related resources on UbuWeb’s Bern Porter page.

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Motes

Radical Books of 2011, 3/10

Motes, Craig Dworkin, Roof Books, 9781931824446

Short titles (or none) followed by hardly longer texts – the form is due to Bob Grenier’s A Day at the Beach and his materially innovative Sentences. Dworkin does something new, showing this is no one-trick pony and has use beyond a single poet. Zak Smith was the first to do a picture for every page of a novel (Gravity’s Rainbow) only to be followed by Matt Kish’s 2011 demonstration that the conceit had legs. Similarly, Dworkin innovates in Motes by being the second to try his hand at an unusual way of writing, and to show that it can amplify his different voice:

>BRICK
>
>Buick

Or:

>MARGIN
>
>explanation of butter on the counter overnight

While playing on Grenier’s everyday experiences, Dworkin’s motes take another turn, entering language and ordinary experience more deeply at times, as in the oddly compelling:

>FOR THE WIDER GOOD
>
>I am tiger woods
>
>I am tiger woods

Alas.

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It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers

Radical Books of 2011, 2/10

It Is Almost That: A Collection of Image+Text Work by Women Artists & Writers, Lisa Pearson, Siglio Press, 9780979956263

The writing here ranges from conceptual and all-text (as in Fiona Banner’s The Nam, composed of impassively typed descriptions of everything that happens in six famous Vietnam War films) to the highly visual (as in Suzanne Treister’s transformation of daily newspaper headlines into alchemical diagrams). One of Hannah Weiner’s journals in excerpted in manuscript; another selection is of small pages with brief, seemingly quotidian image-and-phrase pairings: from Docking Competitions by Erica van Horn & Laurie Clark. Some selections are entire works; others are excerpted well. A particularly nice selection is from the early computer poem A House of Dust by Alison Knowles and James Tenney, which shows the material nature of late-1960s computer output along with the formal possibilities the computer holds for recombining language. The twenty-six selections cover considerable visual, verbal, and conceptual terrain and produce excellent combinations of word and image that provoke and compel.

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Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page

Radical Books of 2011, 1/10

Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page, Matt Kish, Tin House Books, 9781935639138

Combining his lack of formal artistic training, found paper from a used book store, and a 552-page paperback edition of Melville’s classic, Matt Kish – with the charm of an outsider artist but without the institutionalization or insanity – produces an utterly compelling visual journey through Ishmael’s adventures. There are striking colors and textures, odd forms – sometimes cranial, sometimes robotic. Unrolled image-by-image on Kish’s blog, the book-based drawings now make for a whale of a book; the original art is also, now, for sale (or sold). Unlike Tom Philips’s A Humament, the project doesn’t occlude text with image, rewriting a novel. Yet it is a forceful engagement with the page, with particular quotations, and with a encyclopedic story of obsession. The drawings are spare, powerful, and varied, in a flat illustrative style that doesn’t explain but does document one lengthy encounter with Moby-Dick.

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Your Conference Can Have Women!

I recently had the chance to revisit the Gendered Conference Campaign, which is not new (it’s more than two years old) but is (unfortunately) still relevant. Without fixing blame on conference organizers, this page lists several “all-male” academic conferences (those where all the invited speakers are men) and offers useful, concrete suggestions for including women in your own conference.

I’ve gone to quite a variety of conferences and symposia, in writing, literary studies, game studies, digital media, and several flavors of computing. The gender balance has varied widely, from “looks like America” in some humanities conferences to “sausage fest” in some computing conferences. I’m pretty sure I’ve been to at least one small conference that was truly all-male – not just with all male invited speakers, but where everyone was male – and I’ve certainly been to a five-person symposium where all the participants were all men. Well, I bemoan it, and I point to those useful suggestions for allowing more women to participate. These are most useful to read before conference planning even begins, so if you are thinking of planning an event at some point in the future, give them a read.

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More from New River

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.

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HypeDyn Hypertext Authoring System Released

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.

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Samantha Gorman at MIT in Purple Blurb

In the Boston area? Please join us today for the last Purple Blurb event of the semester:

Penumbra: Rich Media & Gestural Text

Samantha Gorman

Creator of Penumbra, Books of Kells, Canticle

Instructor in Performance Studies & Digital Literature, RISD
M.F.A. Brown University

Monday, December 5, 5:30 pm

MIT’s 6-120

Samantha Gorman is a writer and media artist who composes for the intersection of text, dance, performance, and digital culture. She holds an MFA and BA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where she studied poetry and writing for digital media. Penumbra, a hybrid art/literature app for the iPad created with Danny Cannizzaro, challenges the notion of a static “ebook” by carefully integrating short film, rich animation, illustration and fiction.

Sponsored by the Angus N. MacDonald Fund

As always, this Purple Blurb event is free and open to the public.

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Emergency! Please Help!

I really hope this gets to you in time! During a trip to Brookline,
Massachusetts I was robbed — robbed of all poetic impulse. All of the
brilliance of language was stolen from me. My poetic license was taken as
well. I need your help encountering English once again.

I know the unusual diction of this note, the unusual nature of this
request, the fact that I am using more than one exclamation point per
email, and the fact that it is being sent to everyone in my address book
must make it seem like my account was hacked, but I assure you, that’s
not the case!

I’ve made contact with my library but the best they could do was to send
me a poem the mail which will take 3-5 working days to arrive here. I need
you to lend me some words to sort my self out of this predicament.

It would be a great help if you’d just quickly reply (you can use that
“comment” mechanism, below) with a single memorable phrase, or some sort
of short litany or list, or the current contents of your copy and paste
buffer, or a Google search result, or a paragraph, joke, riddle, or even
haiku.

I’ll pay you back as soon as I can!

Thanks,

-Nick

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Brian Moriarty to Speak at MIT

In the Boston area? Please join us for a talk by

 

Brian Moriarty

Creator of Wishbringer, Trinity, Loom, and other interactive fiction and graphic adventure titles

and professor of practice, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

“Beyond Zork: Games & Interactive Fiction”

Monday, November 28, 5:30 pm

MIT’s room 6-120

 

Brian Moriarty built his first computer in the fifth grade. He began
publishing games in the early 1980s and in 1984 joined legendary text
adventure company Infocom, where he authored three award-winning interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer (1985), Trinity (1986) and Beyond Zork (1987). His first graphic adventure game, Loom, was published in 1990 by Lucasfilm Games to wide critical acclaim.

Sponsored by the Angus N. MacDonald Fund

As always, this Purple Blurb event is free and open to the public.