Archive for May, 2006



A year ago, we discussed the idea of QR Code and unreadable digital text - and this spring, we began work on a QR-based net.art project that uses the unreadability to retell a classic cryptographic mystery. Here is another aesthetic experiment in unreadable encoding - a poem often accused of illegibility, rendered in columns of […]

On Tuesday, May 9, UCLA and?the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored an afternoon conference entitled “Girls?’n’ Gaming,”?focussing on “where girls and women are in gamers and what they want.”? The conference followed a workshop: “Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender, Games and Computing.”? Below are notes from?the first?of the three panels.?
(Rough notes)
Of […]

What is a botmaster?
If you turned today to a simple Google search for “botmaster” you might find three answers:

A bot author or creator - someone who programs with AIML or on Pandorabots (results 1, 2)
An individual who is responsible for and/or maintains a bot - as per a computer jargon dictionary (result 3)
A computer criminal […]

Not CYOA, its PYOP now

Inspired by radio plays and CYOA, Jim Munroe, a prolific artist of many media, has created?a “pick-your-own-podventure”. Episode 1 of “The Letter” is available for download at his site and through iTunes. You can only traverse the episodes with the mp3 downloads, or through your iPod. The mystery/fictionality play alot of fun, and once again […]

When a digital artwork, game, or story exists in many forms across many hardware and software systems, what is the ‘real’ work, and do we experience it differently?
Right now I’m thinking about that ur-interactive fiction, Adventure (a.k.a. ADVENT, Colossal Cave Adventure, etc.) - which through its complex history has been both massively cross-platform and massively […]