Jena Osman’s “The Periodic Table As Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist” was mentioned recently on the ELO site as a work in need of renovation; Osman was seeking a programmer to help restore the work. It is now back online and accessible to the public, thanks to David Ayre.
ELO board member, Robert Kendall, is currently working on an exciting new project that seeks “to disrupt the conventional role of words in their day-to-day life.” Keep your eyes open for Logozoa living near you, and to learn how you can participate in this project, read the full description below.
Logozoa
Logozoa.com is a collaborative Web site intended to disrupt the conventional role of words in day-to-day life. It disseminates aphoristic texts as downloadable stickers and showcases photos of these stickers in unusual contexts from all over the world.
We put labels and signs on things to tame them — identify, categorize, explain, instruct, proclaim ownership. What if instead the labels could liberate the everyday world from the literal, proclaim rather than cover up the mysteries? What if they could become Logozoa — textual organisms that infest the literal with metaphor and give impetuous life and breath to meaning?
Logozoa (textual organisms, or word animals) take the form of aphorisms, anti-aphorisms, maxims, minims, neokoans, sayings, left-unsaids, proverbialisms, poemlets, microtales, instant fables, and other varieties of conceptual riffs. More than 375 of these creatures reside at Logozoa.com where visitors can download them in PDF format for printing onto standard label sheets.
The Logozoo at Logozoa.com provides a natural-habitat preserve and showcase for photographs of Logozoa stickers. Currently the Zoo holds over 475 photos contributed by numerous photographers from around the world.
And there’s more. An E-Dopt-a-Zoa feature allows you to paste an ever-changing virtual sticker onto your own Web site, and a pair of oracles provide Logozoa in response to your questions.
ELO member Barbara Campbell recently passed the one year benchmark in her performance/writing project 1001 nights cast. Campbell’s first webcast was performed from Paris on June 21st, 2005 and continues for 1001 nights.
“In 1001 nights cast, Barbara Campbell performs a short text-based work for 1001 consecutive nights. The performance is relayed as a live webcast to anyone, anywhere, who is logged onto to http://1001.net.au at the appointed time, that is, sunset at the artist’s location.”
Reinterpreting and expanding the story of Scheherazade, the daily process of 1001 nights cast begins each morning when Campbell reads news coming out of the Middle East; she selects a phrase from her reading that “generates potential.” Campbell then renders the selected phrase in watercolor and posts the painted image of the phrase on the website. Visitors who choose to participate in the project are “invited to write a story using that day’s prompt in a submission of up to 1001 words. The writing deadline expires three hours before that night’s performance.”
To explore and/or participate in the project, visit http://1001.net.au
Erica T. Carter (the Electronic Text Composition project) now has a home page. Users can generate poetry with the system Jim Carpenter has presented at the Slought Foundation, as part of the ELO and the Kelly Writers House’s MACHINE reading series, and at Brown University’s E-FEST 2006.
As announced on Usenet, three pieces of interactive fiction have just been released. All are written in Inform 7, the soon-to-be-released IF development system from the creator of the original, widely-used Inform.
Leading IF author Emily Short has released two new Inform 7 games, and Graham Nelson, the author who is behind Inform and Inform 7, has provided a new work of interactive fiction, too. Graham Nelson’s piece is entitled The Reliques of Tolti-Aph. Emily Short’s are Damnatio Memoriae (set in the Savoir-Faire universe) and Bronze (a “fractured fairy tale” based on the legend of beauty and the beast). They come with lavish virtual “feelies” - supplementary items - such as illustrated PDF manuals, a map, and a even a walkthrough in one case. Among these materials can be found Emily Short’s very useful introductory text IF Instruction Manual; there are similar instructions in the Bronze manual, too.
A new container format, zblorb, encapsulates the zcode file along with cover art and metadata. Because of this, Mac users who use Zoom as their interpreter will need the very latest version, Zoom 1.0.5 alpha 1.
Adam Cadre’s “23,040 Bridges” provides a combinatoric explosion of different stories, asking the reader to rank how culpable each of five characters is in the death of the main character. Read and rank the characters; Cadre is collecting statistics now on how people assign guilt in the many different versions of the story. The statistics from readers’ judgments will be made available soon.
This year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, the 11th annual “comp,” was won by Jason Devlin’s Vespers. There was a tie for second place between Beyond, a game by Italian authors Roberto Grassi, Paolo Lucchesi and Alessandro Peretti, and A New Life by Alexandre Owen Muñiz. Voting in the competition was open to the public; more than 100 people downloaded the competition entries, interacted with at least five, and voted. The full results have been posted; all the pieces entered remain available for free download.
The IF Comp was covered in The Wall Street Journal this year in an article by Vauhini Vara.
ELO Vice President Nick Montfort has just released a large-scale interactive fiction, his first original work of interactive fiction in more than five years and the first since he wrote the book Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press, 2003).
Book and Volume simulates a curious near-future city, one that is headquarters to the media division of a large computer company. The main character, a system administrator, can uncover unusual things about this place while attending to tasks and getting ready for a mind-bending demo. Book and Volume is all-text and was written in Inform. It is free, and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and a wide variety of other platforms. Completing Book and Volume should take between six and ten hours.
Download, preview, and read more about Book and Volume: http://nickm.com/if/book_and_volume.html
Born, the online journal of new media collaborations between artists and writers, features four new works in its Autumn 2005 issue: “A Few Days from Yellowknife,” by James Grinwis and Oscar Asmoarp; “Origami,” by Courtney Queeney and Sara Lu Davila; “Birding by Ear,” by Greg Delisle and Katya Moorman; and “First Water,” by Shirley Stephenson and Don O’Connell. In Born’s Birthing Room, which features experiments exploring interactivity, narrative design, and other storytelling techniques, you’ll find “Beautiful Portrait,” a collaboration between the ELO’s Thom Swiss and Motomichi Nakamura.
November 2005’s issue of tirw: The Iowa Review Web features new media work by Lance Olsen and Tim Guthrie; Jason Nelson; Juliet Davis, and Millie Niss and Martha Deed.
tirw is a journal of New Media and experimental writing and art, published at the University of Iowa with support from the Graduate College and the Department of English, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota.
Matthew Kirschenbaum is looking for poets and fiction writers willing to participate in a project to archive versions of texts in progress. An electronic document repository (known as a Concurrent Versions System, or CVS) will be used to track revisions and changes to original fiction and poetry contributed by participating writers who will work by checking their drafts in and out of the repository system. The goal is to provide access to a work at each and every state of its composition and conceptual evolution - thereby capturing the text as a living, dynamic object-in-the-making rather than a finished end-product. A reader will be able to watch the composition process unfold as though s/he were looking over the writer’s shoulder.
Participating writers must agree to:
* Work with your text exclusively within the confines of the CVS, checking it in and out each and every time you wish to edit or compose.
* Give their consent to make all archived versions of the work publicly accessible.
The result will be a Web-accessible archive, with the full text of each and every version of a writer’s text available for reading and relations between the versions expressed by means of maps and visualizations.
To participate, please contact Kirschenbaum at mgk =at= umd =dot= edu . Please indicate your willingness to abide by the above constraints.
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Assistant Professor of English
Acting Associate Director,
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH)
301-405-8927 or 301-314-7111 (fax)
http://www.mith.umd.edu/
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/
[Note: At this point Kirschenbaum is recruiting interested writers. He is not sure when the project will actually get off the ground - hopefully this winter.]
After more than six years of work, Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern have released their long-awaited one-act interactive drama Façade for free download. The system features a 3D environment and voice-acted, AI-driven characters, and has been a testbed for research in and development of natural language processing, drama management, and control of character behaviors. Research that went into the system has been documented in more than a dozen academic publications by Michael and Andrew, as well as in Michael’s Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. dissertation. A pre-release version of Façade made the finals in the 2004 Independent Games Festival, and one was also exhibited at ISEA 2004. The New York Times has called the system “the future of video games.”
More information and discussion about the release can be found at Grand Text Auto. Mateas and Stern’s press release about the system has more information. The initial version runs on Windows computers with processors of at least 1.6 GHz, and is available on CDs (sold at cost) or via BitTorrent download.
