Psy-Geo Provflux 2005 is looking for people to propose, plan, and/or participate in a weekend of interventions, lectures, shows, and events that encourage others to reinvent their social spaces May 27-29 in Providence, Rhode Island. Looks like it will be a weekend of happenings. Submissions are due April 15th.
ISEA 2006: Interactive City
From the call for proposals for one of 4 themes of the next ISEA, in San Jose:
The Interactive City seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone else’s shoes to geocaches of urban lore to hybrid games with a global audience, projects for the Interactive City should transform the “new” technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and locative media into experiences that matter. … Interactive City proposals should embrace aspects of the city of San José and/or the surrounding metropolitan San Francisco Bay Area specifically. We are seeking projects that are large in scale, require advanced or special planning and/or permissions.
Early proposals are due April 22.
2004 XYZZY Awards
The big event, interactive fiction’s Oscars, was held Sunday March 20th at 4pm EST (9pm GMT), on ifMUD. Now ifwiki has the list of 2004 XYZZY winners.
Mystery House Taken Over
The MHTO Occupation Force is pleased to announce the launch of Mystery House Taken Over.
The Mystery House Advance Team — including ELO board member Nick Montfort, working with Dan Shiovitz and Emily Short — has reverse engineered Mystery House, the first text-and-graphics adventure game. Members of the Advance Team have reimplemented it in a modern, cross-platform, free language for interactive fiction development, and have fashioned a kit to allow others to easily modify this early game. Read more Mystery House Taken Over
ELit at GDC
A number of events at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference have connections to electronic literature, including the panel discussion Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories and presentations of computer game concepts based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson (by Clint Hocking, Peter Molyneux, and Will Wright).
The Institute for the Future of the Book
Bob Stein, the founder of the late 80s/early 90s CD-ROM publisher Voyager, has moved from Nightkitchen (the e-book development platform his team developed from the mid 90s until earlier in this decade) to The Institute for the Future of the Book, which was founded last year. It looks like many aspects of Nightkitchen will be preserved within the Institute, but moved from a for-profit to a not-for-profit framework. The Institute for the Future of Book has secured generous funding from the Mellon Foundation (a $1.3 million grant), the MacArthur Foundation, and its colocated host institutions, The Annnenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California and Columbia University. Read more The Institute for the Future of the Book