a blog and podcast dedicated to discussing text arts forms
August 28th is the deadline for abstracts for DAC (Digital Arts and Culture) 2007–the premiere international electronic arts conference– held this year in Perth, Austrailia. The conference has been around since 1998 and has established itself as an important annual nexus of researchers and artists of digital works.
Jeremy went last year to represent WRT to present our paper on “Benchmark Fiction.” This year Jeremy and Mark are on the advisory panel. We encourage all of our readers to submit.
Also worth mentioning: This coming year DAC will occur in conjunction with BEAP, the Biennale of Electronic Arts, Perth:
The conference’s four day schedule will include the opportunity to experience all of the BEAP exhibitions, and maximise discussion/networking time. perthDAC delegates will be prioritised for bookings for those “immersive” artworks that have limited number of visitors.
Here’s a link to previous DACs.
I have to confess I’m moonlighting in another world. I’ve started working in the virtual world Second Life as an “embedded journalist”. SLATE Magazine (Second Life Arts & Total Entertainment Magazine) is a new Second Life magazine that covers the arts in SL. There are 14 authors in the collective so far and we’re a mixed bunch of artists, academics, writers, business people and designers. At present there isn’t much analysis of SL out there as most blogs provide essential but simple reportage on events with little reflection. We’re taking a different tack and hoping to provide not only interesting information about things to do for SL residents, but analysis on what we think is going on. And, in true SL style we have a virtual office building with desks (I don’t get that, but it is funny). Here is a pic of our boardroom created by the talented Dell and Anya:
Some electronic literature is detritus. Residue. Trails of conversations that have become destinations in themselves. Debris that has taken on a kind of historic importance. No doubt the same has been true throughout literary history, like the Person from Porlock who knocked at Coleridge’s door in such an untimely fashion….What follows is a recap of a discussion that can be found on the discussion blog of that singluar futurist Ray Kurzweil’s KurzweilAI.net. It took place 2/10/2003-2/10/2004. The thread also stretches across the Ai-forum.org (2/13/2003-3/28/2003). Call it reality Internet, call it Internet history, call it eavesdropping, but what I see is a piece of collaborative internet writing that proves to have powerful reverberations with the tension between the myths of AI and authenticity on the internet. What results is a curious chapter (or unit) in the development of chatbots. (I recommend reading the conversation on your own, but I will recount as I go.)
In 2003, ELDRAS shot himself. You can read about here. Jennifer Grizzle announced as much on the Kurzweil A.I. site:
subject: ELDRAS shot himself
posted on 02/10/2003 9:56 AM by jennifer grizzle
I read it on a philosophy post site.
he left a note saying he believe he would be resurrected in less than one minute’s subjective time in the future by human A.I.
RIP
The post comes out of nowhere. It appears in the Mind Exchange (MindX) Forum, “an open forum with a focus on emerging trends in technology and related fields.”
The latest Iowa Review Web issue out this July is “Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing.”
In it I interiew Nick Montfort on his interactive fiction work Book and Volume. In addition to discussing tropes and themes in the work we also talk about aspects of craft including goals, timed events, atmospheric descriptions, and orienting new readers to the genre.
The issue has a lot to offer readers with an interest in digital text art, and the framing introduction by Scott Rhettberg does a great job of providing diverse historical examples. In addition to my modest contribution, the issue also features three other interviews, all with figures who should be familiar to WRT readers:
If you haven’t read TIRW (including their back-catalog), check it out.
We’ve discussed the various possible forms of constrained writing many times here, so why not ‘constrained clicking’? I was referred to a blog collective, TruthBeauty, from a out-of-the-ways town in Australia, Wagga Wagga, and discovered a post by ‘casey’ about a great wikipedia game. Here is the post reblogged here:
over the school holidays my dear son Zach discovered the joys of wikipedia (thanks in no small part to my new laptop). he sent me an email today outlining his new wikipedia game: from the wikipedia main page click on random article - from there follow links till you get to the wagga wagga article.i made it the first time in five pages: Mohammed Bin Hammam - Australia National Football (Soccer) Team - Australia - New South Wales - Wagga Wagga.
too easy, hey? my next random article is On Golden Pond and proving to be a little trickier.
how many pages can you make it in?
There are a few comments in the post, as everyone compares the routes they’ve taken through wikipedia in search of THE WAGGA WAGGA PAGE. This reminded me not only of constrained writing (and so I called it constrained clicking) but also of games I used to play (with myself) as a kid. I used to pick an object, like a parrot, and another, like tomato sauce, and give myself a number, like 5, which represented the amount of sentences I should take to get from object a to object b with a story that makes sense. Anyone have any examples of such games they played or even other examples of ‘constrained clicking’?
