Lovely fan-created video for Grandaddy's "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)," found via if:book.
the if:book post details the video better than I can at the moment, except to say that Grandaddy kept me going through several late nights during graduate school, and that this is wonderful example of constrained writing/animation (see the creator's statement below).
Just came across something lovely. Video for "Jed's Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)" by the now disbanded Grandaddy from their great album The Sophtware Slump (2000). Jed is a character who weaves in and out of the album, a forlorn humanoid robot made of junk parts who eventually dies, leaving behind a few mournful poems.Creator Stewart Smith: "I programmed this entirely in Applesoft BASIC on a vintage 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM -- a computer so old it has no hard drive, mouse up/down arrow keys, and only types in capitals. First open-source music video, code available on website. Cinematography by Jeff Bernier." A nice detail of the story is that this was originally a fan vid but was eventually adopted as the "official" video for the song.
Reading Digital Literature: American-German Conference organized by Roberto Simanowski and the Department of German Studies, Brown University
Exhibition in List Art Center, opening: Oct 4, 8 PM
Conference Opening: Oct 5, 4:30 PM
Sessions: Oct. 5, 5:00-6:30 and Oct. 6, 9:30 AM - 6:30 PM
Performances of Digital Literature: Oct. 5, 7:00-8:00 PM and Oct 6,
8:30-10:00 PM
Sessions and Performances in Smith-Buonanno 106Details: http://www.interfictions.org/readingdigitalliterature
* Katherine Hayles: The Literary as Distributed Cognition in
Strickland and Jaramillo's slippingglimpse
* Rita Raley: List(en)ing Post
* Jörgen Schäfer: Looking Behind the Facade: Playing and Performing
an Interactive Drama
* Fotis Jannidis: Understanding S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or the hermeneutics of
popular digital art
* Peter Gendolla: The Art of Poetry Machines
* Chris Funkhouser: Kissing the steak: The Poetry of Text Generators
* Thomas Swiss: Reading "Wrong": Flash Work by Motomichi Nakamura,
Nils Muhlenbruch, and Yoshi Sodeoka
* Karin Wenz: The Demon Machine or 79 Ways to Face a Demon
* George P. Landow: Symbolic (but unreadable) Texts in Digital Culture
* Mark Tribe: Reading Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries: An
Ornithology of Digital ArtA curtain of tiny screens with live quotations from Internet chat;
stories generated by computer programs; narratives generated by their
readers; words that disappear or reveal themselves depending on their
readers position, texts that peels off the wall and require the
'reader' to push it back. How shall we read such moving letters? How
do we catch their meanings? How might they make us feel? The
conference brings together ten specialists from the USA and Germany
to search for answers through in-depth analyses.
On our way over to Scott's talk today, Marc was telling me about his VIAO, which came with (correct me if I'm wrong Marc) a TV tuner card and some software that allowed him to play his GameCube on his screen. The software also allowed him to record his play sessions. My understanding had always been that there was significant lag with a setup like this, making console game play all but impossible on such a rig. This is why I've avoided buying another video card, and why the Adaptec GameBridge was potentially a big deal (and, at under $100, still seems like a possible solution). Marc says, not so - it works just fine (Marc, have you tried it with the PS2?).
I'm curious about other's experiences - how do you "do" game scholarship? What tools do you use? What tools do we need? Do you record play sessions or, like me, just have a LOT of notes and a LOT of saved game files?
This is at least indirectly related to Scott's talk, in which he gave a nice overview of the ELO, its history and purpose, some of its future goals, and the challenges implicit in the study of new media objects that question, resist, or even outright defy genre. Scott shared several examples from the forthcoming Electronic Literature Collection and generated some nice discussion about genre and the "literature question" (as in, "Is this even literature?"), as well as about general e-lit teaching strategies and preservation and archiving challenges. Though I've followed Scott's blogging (both his personal one and Grand Text Auto), I was pleased to hear about his work in person, which was intriguing enough to run the program well past its normal stopping time.
If you are in the DC area, MITH's Digital Dialogues has a great line-up this semester, including scholars like Scott (today), Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker (March 14) and Alan Liu (April 28) as well as writer Shelley Jackson, author of Patchwork Girl, Skin, Doll Diaries (April 17) and comic guru Scott McCloud of _Understanding Comics_ fame (May 2). There are many others, so look at the full schedule here (PDF).
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) is brought to life in The Agrippa Files, an online preservation site dedicated to this 1992 collaborative work. Matt K has the full press release.
I started an account for the BBC IF/game Jamie Kane. "Jess" (a character) emailed me and invited me to the message boards. While I've only read a little bit, one thing that strikes me as somewhat odd is the diachronic nature of the board. The timestamps are only a few minutes apart, and yet the conversation flows in a normal pattern, with characters carefully responding to the previous post. Most of the message boards I've participated on usually developed a different pattern, with some comments completely ignored, while others generating several synchronic responses. Not this linear give-and-take.
Maybe it's just me though...
UPDATE: the chat session you have with Jess is the same way. You can't keep typing when she is typing (your window is covered by an animation that indicates she is writing a message).
In the attempt to "keep e-lit alive," Alan Liu and other members of the ELO's Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) initiative have released Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature. Happy reading!
[via GTA]