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Robot Jams

I heard Ensemble Robot last night at AXIOM. It was a suitably outrageous performance and a nice final event for the 2009 Boston Cyberarts Festival, which officially ends today. Ensemble Robot has robot musicians who play alone and with human performers. Two of them, a robot glockenspiel and a one-string robot instrument/performer, were at AXIOM last night. They played several pieces, including Belle Labs. The final number involved using one of the robots as an instrument, controlled by a MIDI guitar. It was a nice finale that sounded fittingly extreme, but I have to admit that “slaving” this former silicon-based collaborator to a person in this way disturbed me a bit. I also wish that there had been time for questions and discussion, so that I would have a better idea of how autonomous the robots were, if they were listening to the other performers, and so on. In any case, if you have a chance to hear this unusual group, I highly recommend it.

The performance, which included people playing on hacked-together non-electronic instruments, reminded me of the amazing sort of things that used to happen at MITRES, the MIT Electronics Research Society, back when they had their open mic/show and tell nights. I noticed that Ensemble Robot artistic director Christine Southworth is an MIT and Brown alumnus; perhaps the coincidence runs deeper.

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Mario and the N64 Platform

Jason Scott speaks about Super Mario 64 and the N64 at Notacon.
Jason Scott speaks about Super Mario 64 and the N64 at Notacon.

Jason Scott, an archivist and documentary-maker who deals with creative computing, gave quite an interesting talk about Super Mario 64 at Notacon 6 in Cleveland on April 17. I believe it’s the first platform studies talk I’ve heard by someone other than Ian Bogost or me. Jason goes into the concept behind platform studies, pimps our book, Racing the Beam (special thanks for that one), and discusses how the substantial achievements and particular design of Super Mario 64 related to the corporate context of the time, the expectations of players, and the Nintendo 64 hardware. This was at an event that is a hacker conference, not an academic one – I hope we academics can keep up in terms of bringing technology and culture together. The talk is almost an hour long, with some questions at the end, and is well worth the bandwith and the time.

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Newton and the Counterfeiter

My colleague Tom Levenson (also a fellow blogger) has a new book coming out in a few days, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist. If you hop over to the Barnes & Noble page for the book, you can see the video that he went to shoot in London not too long ago. This should make it clear that Tom is not only a science writer who uncovers intriguing episodes from the lives of famous scientists (Einstein in Berlin) but also an Emmy-award-winning filmmaker who has done a slew of NOVA documentaries. The video (and the book) delves into how Newton worked in his seldom-discussed role as warden of the mint, inviting us to read about how a great scientific mind turned to police work. I hope that when I need to promote future books, I’ll be able to get away with writing computer programs or doing something else that’s easy.

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Parade Lap

Welcome to Post Position. This website is what we call a “computer blog.”

More specifically, this is where I will post things, including my positions on interactive narrative, imaginative and poetic digital writing, the material history of computational media, and video and computer games. The subject matter will range from platform studies to minimalist poetry generation, and there will almost certainly be posts with critical takes on electronic literature, discussion of my own work on developing interactive fiction and an interactive fiction system, reflections on teaching this kind of thing at MIT, and many other types of wackiness. I might even write about plain old books that aren’t very directly connected to digital media matters. I might discuss non-computational academic matters, or offer materials from “old school” writing projects that I’m working on.

As many who wander here may know, I’ve been blogging for the past six years at Grand Text Auto. In posting and discussing things on this blog, I’ll certainly be influenced by that collaborative venture. Post Position won’t have the energy of that entire group, of course, the same broad community of readers, the same special projects, or the general job listings and announcements of other people’s events. But some things that flourished in that context should be found here are well: links to things online worth reading and playing, 1k (and longer) reviews of books (and probably other things), April Fools hoaxes and other pranks, discussion of my computational writing practice, and pieces of critical and polemical writing that wouldn’t easily fit elsewhere.

I’ll try to keep this space open for the sort of conversation, discussion, and even vigorous argument that Grand Text Auto has hosted. I’ll do whatever I can to make this an inviting space for those who want to comment. Unless the spammers end up winning, for instance, you will not need to register or take an elaborate test to have your comment appear, even if the moderation queue catches it for a short time.

I’ll say more soon, but for now, welcome.