Archive for October, 2005



At Siggraph 2005 in Los Angeles, one set of skirts stole the e-tech show. The line of techno-couture, exhale: breath between bodies by the whisper(s) research group, takes embodiment seriously in ways that our purely electronic (ARGs and biowriting aside) approach to digital character art often does not. What we see here is not just the exercise of novelty or experiments in electronic composition, but a collective of theoreticians whose hands are busy at the work of stitching communal interaction.

What do the skirts do? They allow your body to communicate through passive (autonomic, if you will) and active means. The ensembles (for they are more than just skirts), using breath bands and vibrators, translate your breath and heart rate into digital signals and transmit this information, only to have it be decoded as sound or vibration. In essence, your breath and heart rate become a language. Your body signifies in its biological semantics. With respect to WRT, the digital character of this art resides beneath the exhale.

IF and the Subtitle

You can learn a lot about an interactive fiction from the subtitle.
The subtitle has been with IF since almost the beginning, starting with Infocom’s decision to split Crowther and Wood’s “Adventure” into three parts with corresponding episode names: “Zork I: The Great Underground Empire,” “Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz,” and “Zork III: The Dungeon […]

Towards Tag Poetry

In the world of tag metadata - folksonomies, fauxonomies, etc. - there are a few high-profile services and a million up-and-coming. Flickr photos, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Technorati blog posts all use tags to turbo-charge their useful output, increase community involvement, and simplify third party APIs. Many pieces of digital text art in the last two […]

The EGBG Telemarketing Counterscript is a conversational diagram (or script) for use by a person receiving a telemarketing call. It neatly turns the process of anonymous information collection around on the telemarketer, and in so doing performs a parody of the practice of scripting telephone market surveys.
EGBG is a ???research office??? founded by Martijn Englebregt […]

The Chatbot Survey ends October 31 (update). The survey seeks all those who have made or used chatbots. Come and contribute your insights.