MITH’s (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanites) first Digital Dialogue of the spring 2006 semester will be a discussion of William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003), on Tuesday, Feb. 7th at 12:30 P.M. in the MITH seminar room.
Pattern Recognition has been widely received as Gibson’s most significant and prescient work since he coined the term “cyberspace” in Neuromancer in 1984.
Our discussion will be the basis for three additional Digital Dialogues, to be held at intervals throughout the semester, each of which will explore the general theme of “pattern recognition,” a heuristic for much of MITH’s current research, in varied contexts.
MITH is located in McKelden Library on the campus of the University of Maryland, College Park. Click here for map and directions.
“Beautiful Portrait” is featured in a recent issue of Born Magazine. In keeping with the mission of the magazine to combine designers and writers, the poem itself is written by Thom Swiss and the Flash animation is the creation of Motomichi Nakamura. Although there is no written text, the Flash sequence is accompanied by a synthetic voice that delivers the poem as the reader explores a grid pattern of accented silhouettes. The action of the reader escalates the tone and imagery of the piece, bringing about a surprising finish. Thom Swiss, well known in critical and scholarly literature, has written new media poetry for several years — his works include “The Dream Life,” “Hey Now” (also with Motomichi Nakamura), “Shy Boy,” and “City of Bits.”
“Fibonacci’s Daughter” by M.D. Coverley (a pen name for Marjorie C. Luesebrink), published originally in New River in 2000, is a narrative and architectural puzzle. The main character, Annabelle Thompson, is the daughter of gamblers and a new-age opportunist. She sets up shop in California’s Huntington Beach Mall, where she uses numerology and Fibonacci numbers to peddle insurance policies to high school cheerleaders and football players — insurance against failure, that is. But probability is always chance, and the mystery that lurks here can be resolved in several ways. This piece is part of a larger collection, 
James Meehan’s Tale-Spin, created as part of his 1976 dissertation, The Metanovel: Writing Stories by Computer, was the first major project in the area of story generation. Like one of Calvino’s invisible cities, it creates an alternate landscape in which the inhabits live in a manner evocatively different from our own — with all actions the result of plans, the locations of items only learned by convincing someone to tell you, and no one feeling an emotion without knowing it. Like Aesop’s fables, Tale-Spin‘s view of human nature was communicated through the interactions of iconic animals. But unlike the worlds of Calvino or Aesop, Meehan’s world wasn’t simply described — it was made to operate. In fact, its operation, rather than its description, was Meehan’s primary work. (The text describing the world was produced by a bare-bones language generation program, called Mumble, designed primarily to fit in the small amount of memory left on the Yale AI lab’s computer system when Tale-Spin was already running.)
Jordan Mechner is the writer and designer of groundbreaking cinematic games such as Karateka (1984), Prince of Persia (1989), and The Last Express (1997). His most recent, in collaboration with a small team within Ubisoft’s Montreal studio led by producer Yannis Mallat, is Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The gameplay is based on acrobatics, spatial puzzle solving, the manipulation of time, and swordplay. This gameplay connects to the story of the Prince through the Dagger of Time, which Mechner characterizes as “at once a weapon, a receptacle, and a MacGuffin.” The story is told in past tense narration — perhaps for the first time in a video game — with a noir flavor. As one progresses through the game the situation of the narrator’s telling is slowly revealed, pointing to influences such as Thief of Baghdad and, further back, to the traditional frame tale of 1001 Nights.
Laurence Sterne’s