Category: Other News

This month’s issue of Ygdrasil, A Journal of the Poetic Arts features new poems by Michael Collings and Jack R. Wesdorp.

Edward Picot has plans to set up a Hyperliterature Exchange. Anyone publishing hyperliterature in a tangible format, such as on a CD, and would be interested in a listing on the Exchange may contact him for full details. Click here to see how the Exchange would function. To qualify for the Exchange, each work must have an ISBN, be registered with Book Data, and the publisher must be registered for UK rights.

Electronic Book Review takes a look at New Media Studies in our changing times. Writings include Scott Rettberg’s introduction, New Media Studies, and the following reviews: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum on Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Montfort’s The New Media Reader, Raine Koskimaa on N. Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines, Chris Funkhouser on Stephanie Strickland’s V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, Scott Rettberg on David Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, and Rob Wittig on Justin Hall’s links.net.

Katherine Hayles’ Writing Machines has won the Susanne E. Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Symbolic Form. The award will be presented by the Media Ecology Association at its annual meeting in June.

Friday February 21st is the 100th birthday of Raymond Queneau, cofounder of the writing circle Oulipo and author of “One Hundred Thousand Billion Sonnets” and “A Story as You Like It,” arguably two of the earliest multicursal (hyper)texts. In his honor, Spineless Books presents the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award for the Best Book Length Work of Constrained English Literatur. Submissions accepted for works designed for electronic environments or print, as well as computer-assisted writing (whether explicitly labeled as such or not).

The Alt-X Online Network, “where the digerati meet the literati,” announces the release of “Solarcon-6,” an ebook collection of stories by Wiley Wiggins. Wiggins’ “Solarcon-6” is the ninth ebook in the Alt-X Press series which features other titles by artists including Eugene Thacker, Mark Amerika, Adrienne Eisen, and Alan Sondheim.

Bill Seaman, ELO Board Member, has been chosen as the recipient of the 2002 Leonardo Award for Excellence for his article, “OULIPO / VS / Recombinant Poetics” (Leonardo 34:5, 2001, Digital Salon Special Issue). In his article, Bill Seaman explores alternative avenues of creativity and redefines them through visual and sonic digital media. OULIPO, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop for Potential Literature), encourages writers to explore challenging ways of mixing words and letters in their work.

Bill Seaman is head of the Graduate Digital Media Program at Rhode Island School of Design, and is exploring issues related to the continuum between physical and virtual/media space.

The Impermanence Agent (by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Adam Chapman, Brion Moss, Duane Whitehurst) began in 1998 as a storytelling Web agent that customized its texts and images based on monitoring of each reader’s Web browsing. Five years later, the project is turning inside out — rather than showing each individual a story customized for them, it now shows all visitors the stories altered by a few “featured browsers.” During the month of February 2003, the Agent’s story will be progressively altered for these browsers, with the results continually viewable, and at the end of the month, the final version will be archived on the Whitney Museum’s server. With this, the project’s weight shifts between individual experience and collective, between long-term customization and short-term surveillance, between impermanence and archiving. Most users now will never see the original story, but only the results of many browser-driven alterations.

“Le Musee di-visioniste,”an online museum based on a philosophical idea, and corporative member of New Media Art Project Network, launches new online showcase of net-based art works. Works by Daniel Young (USA), Patrick Simons/Kate Southworth (UK), jimpunk (France), Dan Norton, Scotland, and Nicolas Clauss (France).

Rich Gold of Menlo Park died in his sleep on January 9, 2003. Rich Gold was a digital artist, inventor, cartoonist, composer, lecturer and inter-disciplinary researcher who in the 1970s co-founded the League of Automatic Music Composers, the first network computer band. As an internationally known artist he invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism. In the 1980s he was director of the sound and music department of Sega. From 1985 to 1990 he headed an electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of the development of several interactive toys, including the Mattel PowerGlove. After working as a consultant in VirtualReality he joined Xerox PARC in 1991, where he was a scientific researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. In 1993 he founded the influential PARC Artist-In-Residence program (PAIR),in which fine artists and scientists collaborated using shared technologies. Later that year, he created the multi-disciplinary Laboratory RED (Research in Experimental Documents) which studied the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering and then creating exemplars of those genres.