All the essays from First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game — edited by ELO board member Noah Wardrip-Fruin, working with Pat Harrigan — are now online at electronic book review, a journal edited by ELO board member Joe Tabbi. The final installment, “New Readings,” includes essays by board members N. Katherine Hayles and Nick Montfort. Now the First Person project is opening up the conversation through ebr‘s “riposte” system of responses, such as that recently written by board member Matt Kirschenbaum. Those with a contribution to make are encouraged to send them via email to ebr /at/ altx.com.
Literary VR at Brown
This weekend and next (April 30 & May 1 // May 7 & 8) there will be two different exhibitions of literary virtual reality at Brown University. The exhibitions will employ a room-sized immersive stereo display (Brown’s Cave) and a spatialized sound system (controlled by Max/MSP) to present 10 projects created by writers, musicians, visual artists, and computer scientists. Because shows will be small (6 people) and spread out at 45 minute increments over the course of the day (11am to 5pm), reservations are required. Reservations are made by calling Brown’s David Winton Bell Gallery at 401-863-2932. This show, “Works from the Cave II,” is the sequel to Brown’s Cave exhibition for the 2003 Boston Cyberarts Festival.
FILE Call for Proposals
FILE is one of the world’s most significant gatherings for consideration and exhibition of computational language. It has taken place in São Paulo, Brazil for each of the last five years, and currently entries are still open for 2005 (until May 1). Standing backward (in English) for “Electronic Language International Festival” or forward (in Portuguese) for “Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica,” FILE includes an exhibition of digital text art, a symposium with the same focus, a section specific to games, and a parallel electronic music festival. FILE will be in early October this year.
Psy-Geo Provflux 2005
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
Digital Arts and Culture 2005
The 6th Digital Arts and Culture Conference will take place at the IT University in Copenhagen on December 1-3, 2005. “Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice” is the tag line for this conference. Deadline: August 8. You can read about the history of DAC and the organization of the current conference; also, see the CFP.