I’ve put up a few “work” pages which gather information about some of my art/writing projects. So far I’ve got pages for The Impermanence Agent, Screen, Regime Change & News Reader, Talking Cure, and Gray Matters.

I’ve contributed thoughts to a couple of Clark Boyd’s stories this month on The World (distributed by Public Radio International). On September 10th I spoke about the growing uses digital media, especially of the game and simulation varieties, in a story on newsgaming (wma) which focused primarily on Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th. Then, on September 20th, I spoke a bit about the limitations of purely online political action in a story about a group of hacktivists in Milan. The first of these stories has now been picked up (in text form) by the BBC World Service: “Games blur news and entertainment.”

There’s an interview with me in the new issue of Dichtung Digital. It came out of a great, wide-ranging conversation with DD editor Roberto Simanowski. We talked about projects I’ve discussed before (The Impermanence Agent, Screen, and Talking Cure) but not in a way that let me repeat what I’ve said before. Roberto pushed me to consider things from new angles, and I’m happy with the results.

Next week I’ll be at ACM Hypertext 2004, and it’s going to be quite a busy week!

First, on Tuesday the 10th, Matt Webb and I are doing a full-day tutorial on blogging. I’m looking forward to it — we come at the topic with approaches and backgrounds that nicely compliment each other, and we have Mark Bernstein lined up to guest speak (about Tinderbox and his Tips on Writing the Living Web). We’ll talk technology, we’ll talk ideas, and we’ll get hands-on with a few different kinds of software.

Next, on Wednesday the 11th at 2pm, I’ll be presenting Screen as part of a program of Hypertext Readings that includes long-time heavyweights Judy Malloy, Robert Kendall, and Bob Arellano.

Then, on Thursday the 12th I’m on the program twice. At 10:45, in a session called “Foundations,” I’m giving a paper that I imagine will raise a few eyebrows. It’s titled “What Hypertext Is” (final pdf) and it was revised extensively after a productive discussion over at GTxA. Finally, at 3:45 I’m on a plenary panel titled “Scholarly Hypertext: The HT’04 Experiment and Beyond.” The experiment referred to in the title is the move, by this year’s Hypertext committee, to accept submissions of hypertexts to the peer-reviewed program. Two were accepted. I’m deeply honored to be on this panel with Doug Engelbart.

More great stuff will happen on Friday, but I’ll have to sneak out partway through to make my plane to Helsinki for ISEA.

Screen is a collaborative project developed over the last couple years in Brown University’s virtual reality Cave. It creates new reading experiences by bringing text into direct relation with the reader’s body, and it explores memory as a virtual experience. I worked on it with Josh Carroll, Robert Coover, Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain.

Last summer Thom Swiss invited me to be a featured artist at The Iowa Review Web, I was happy to accept, and we decided to focus on the Screen project. In the dead of winter Jill Walker and my fellow GTxAer Scott Rettberg interviewed me and two of my Screen collaborators — Josh and Bob. Then, over the last few months, Josh worked with Michelle Higa to shoot new footage of Screen, which Michelle edited into what I think is a quite compelling video of the project. Now the interview and the Screen video, along with an explanatory video, are live at The Iowa Review Web.

My NMR co-conspirator, Nick Montfort, and I are pleased to announce the publication of a new pamphlet we’ve written: Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature. AFB is the first publication of the Electronic Literature Organization’s Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination (PAD) project. While we wrote most of the text of the pamphlet, Nick and I are very much building on the work of the last couple of years by the participants in PAD.

Acid-Free Bits is aimed at authors of electronic literary works. As its subtitle indicates, it identifies a set of practical steps that authors can take now to make it more likely that their work can be made available to readers in the future, even as the technological environment continues to shift under our feet. The web version is available at the link above, and the ELO is also printing up a paper version — which will be made available for the first time at this summer’s Incubation (the 3rd trAce International Symposium on Writing and the Internet).

If you’re in the right area of California, there’s a First Person event in Santa Cruz this evening — 5:30pm, at the Literary Guillotine, 204 Locust St. I’ll talk a little about the genesis and structure of the project, and Warren Sack will talk about his experience with the response structure (especially his exchange with Jill Walker).

Speaking of First Person, since I last posted the FP thread has gone live on ebr.

In other news since my last post, I gave a talk to an interesting group at NYU on May 20th (who mean something else when they say “the Simms”). I’ve been involved in an active thread on GTxA, spawned by a draft of my paper “What Hypertext Is.” Also (as already mentioned at GTxA, Water Cooler Games and ludology.org) Wired News published an article titled “Playing Games with a Conscience” (local archive). Here’s the part I’m most surprised they included:

To Wardrip-Fruin, it’s just as important to look at how a game is built as it is to look at a game’s message.

“It’s important to think about the structure of the game,” he says, “not just from these hate sites, but from mainstream publishers, if we’re going to understand these issues.”

He thinks that hate groups are doing no more than exploiting a style of game — for example, first-person shooters — for their own purposes.

“If you think about what these people are doing on these hate sites, they’re taking a set of well-understood game mechanics that are about hating someone — about hating the Germans during World War II — and finding them and killing them,” Wardrip-Fruin explains. “So it’s very easy to just slap (on) the image of the group you hate. I would argue the message is the same: Find the group you hate and go and kill them.”

[...]

Wardrip-Fruin concurs [with Gonzalo Frasca's statement that "there are countless games that promote neither hate nor violence"], and says open-ended simulation games like The Sims do a very good job of encouraging constructive thought in game players.

“It’s very hard to imagine one that is about hating some ethnic or religious other,” he says. “I’d say that the fundamental thing about a computer game is the structure of what you do as a participant, and the structure of something like SimCity or The Sims is about understanding a system, and trying to make it grow in the way you want it to grow.”

Apparently this touched a few nerves (1, 2). If anyone wants to take up the conversation, come tonight if you can.

I’m visiting the Transcriptions project at UC Santa Barbara today and tomorrow. I’m giving a reading/talk in their colloquium series today at 2:30. Tomorrow their reading group will be considering the first two sections of First Person and I’ll give a short presentation leading up to the discussion.

Wednesday I drive down to LA in preparation for the N@rrative: Digital Storytelling conference at the UCLA Hammer Museum (April 22-23). Nick and I are giving talks on Thursday evening, and then on Friday there’s a panel that we’ll be on with Kate Hayles and Rita Raley.

Finally, on April 28th I’ll be stopping at one more UC campus — to give a lunchtime talk at the Berkeley law school sponsored by the Boalt.org student group. Earlier this month I gave a talk I neglected to pre-blog at the Film and Digital Media program of UC Santa Cruz. The students had good questions, the atmosphere was friendly, and it made me look forward to visiting the other three campuses on this month’s agenda. The UCs, so far, seem to have it together for digital/new/computational media.

With “Call Me E-Mail: The Novel Unfolds Digitally” The New York Times has today published a long story on electronic literature, following closely on the heels of a story on game studies. Remarkable!

The article even gives a few paragraphs over to yours truly. To whit:

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a 31-year-old traveling scholar at Brown University and visiting researcher at the University of California at Santa Cruz, said texts that take the form of fictional digital artifacts like e-mail or blogs held promise for a generation that grew up with computers. “I read more on the screen than I do on paper,” he said, “and I’m pleased to see people take imaginative writing and put it into the spaces where we do our living.”

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin compared “Intimacies” to an epistolary story by one of his students that consisted of e-mail messages with attached photos and diary entries and that was published through a Yahoo e-mail account. He said that such projects, as well as some narrative and life-simulation video games, qualified as literature worthy of attention.

“These are forms of e-writing as surely as experimental hypertext poetry,” he said. “We just have to understand that like traditional literature, e-literature has a range of styles, including popular ones.”

What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. “Think of the textual analogue to video games,” he said. “You can’t really capture the way a video game works by printing it out; that’s what will have to happen with electronic literature for it to become popular.”

While I was interviewed by the Guardian last year, it’s still novel to see my musings end up in the paper. I remember leaning against the counter, with the redwoods out the window, and saying that the direction for future e-lit that interests me most is work that is so interactive and procedural that it might be considered “the textual analogue to video games.” (I don’t remember tying this to the issue of popularity, but I imagine these quotes are from a recording of our conversation.) Given that I have the opportunity here, I’d like to develop this notion a step further. Just as the images in computer games function with a certain logic of images (think of collision detection) so the e-lit I’m interested in exploring operates with a certain logic of language (think of textual instruments). That’s the type of interaction, those are the types of procedures, that I think hold the most promise for our future experimentation.

Just in case the Times archive is having trouble, I’ve put a copy of the article’s text here. There’s also a thread on GTxA, where people can leave comments.

Jill and I are members of the Program Committee for WWW @ 10 — an “interdisciplinary conference on the visions, technologies, and directions that characterized the Web’s first decade.” WWW @ 10 abstracts are due April 15th. Scheduled speakers include Ted Nelson and Cory Doctorow.

First Person has arrived! See my post over at grandtextauto.org, where it’s possible for folks to reply.

I’ll be heading down to Southern California in a few days, then coming back in time for the Game Developer’s Conference. On the 18th I’ll be talking at my alma matter, the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands. On the 19th I’ll be giving a reading at the Hammer Museum at UCLA as part of the HyperText series co-sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization. At the Hammer I’ll be previewing Regime Change — a collaboration with Brion Moss, David Durand, and Elaine Froehlich commissioned by Turbulence. (The 19th is the anniversary of the start of the bombing of Baghdad.) On the 20th I’ll be heading down to San Diego for a friend’s wedding celebration. When I get back I’ll be helping out with the Facade booth at GDC and hanging out with Andrew, Michael, and some other First Person contributors. Rumor has it that I’ll finally get my first copy of First Person on Monday. I see someone at an Amazon zShop already has one for sale.

I’ve had Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Travelin’” drifting in and out of mind for the last week. I don’t think I’d ever heard it before the 35th Reunion of The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies at the University of Redlands, which I attended over the long presidential weekend. Johnston’s a small alternative school (originally separately accredited as Johnston College) and reunions happen every five years for all graduates (not just those from certain years). It’s great meeting people who attended Johnston years before or after me. I was reminded, over the weekend, that I still find the Johnston model of education inspiring — and I had the opportunity to publicly thank Prof. Bill McDonald, who taught me the method of organizing class discussion around a student-created agenda that I’ve used in almost all my teaching. The weekend also saw one of my more unusual publications. I made two contributions to Hard Travelin’ and Still Havin’ a Good Time: Innovative learning and living at the Johnston Center, 1979-2004, the just-released followup to the history of Johnston College. (By the way, if you know anyone who is smart and creative and looking for an undergraduate institution, I’d be happy to correspond about why I’m happy to have chosen Johnston.)

Now I’m in Providence, where I participated in the very successful E-Fest 2004 organized by Talan Memmott and Bob Coover. Unfortunately, I started feeling sick on the plane ride out here — and now I’m hearing “Hard Travelin’” in a different way, lying in bed and trying to recover from bronchitis. I hate the feeling of my lungs bubbling as I draw each breath. It’s worse than the coughing.

Assuming I recover, I’ll be down in NYC this Friday, briefly, where NYU’s ITP program will be throwing a book party for First Person and Alex Galloway’s new book, Protocol.

Come celebrate the release of two new books on new media:

“Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization” by Alexander R. Galloway

“First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game” edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan

when: Friday, Feb. 27, 6:00pm where: Japanese Room, ITP, 721 Broadway, 4th floor, New York City.

refreshments, book signing, Q&A w/ the authors, the works!

Sponsored by the NYU Department of Culture and Communication, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and The MIT Press.

Now back to sleep…

My mom’s heart stopped last month. It was an accident. They were testing to see if a pacemaker would help her. She says being dead is nothing. Just nothing.

They shocked her with paddles. They gave her a double dose of adrenalin. She says it felt like they were bringing her out of a warm, bright, peaceful place. Like a beach in Hawaii. Something was happening there. A woman’s voice was saying, “Wake up Carolyn. You’re alright. Wake up.”

This doesn’t appear to have yet reached the online catalogs. So I thought I’d post it here.

My brother emailed me this image instead of an article. I’ve left it big so the text is legible:

Josh Carroll recently put together this image of Screen:

Happy New Year! I haven’t been posting here much — mostly over at Grand Text Auto — leaving this a space for personal announcements. I might formalize that, change it, or continue to ignore it in 2004.

Today, however, I have a personal announcement — which is that my NMR co-editor Nick Montfort and I will be guests this month on empyre. Here’s the announcement:

January on -empyre- :

Nova Media Storia: Histories and Characters

With Jill Scott, Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Is new media a field? Does it have a history? What history? And, how does it matter?

The new year brings us the pleasure of hosting three lively minds from the interdisciplinary worlds of new media science, art and humanities. Noah Wardrip-Fruin (US) and Nick Montfort (US) will explore the genesis and critical issues that have lead to the publication of “The New Media Reader” (MIT Press 2003), a compendium of intertextually annotated readings from the last century. To the double helix of art and computation in new media, Nick and Noah hope to interweave empyrean comments in the coming month. With Noah and Nick, we are honored to share time and thoughts with a distinguished new media artist, Jill Scott, whose new book, “Coded Characters” (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2003), explores the mediation and role of the audience, as well as the mythical representation of the human body on both stage and screen, are constantly questioned. Jill’s nomadic hegira, from the Bay Area to Australia and to Europe, bears witness to a consistent development of new media art as a series of cyberphysical metaphors–analog figures, digital beings, and mediated nomads.

Please join Jill, Nick and Noah this coming month on -empyre- soft-skinned space.

Subscribe at:
http://www.subtle.net/empyre

I’ve been having a little trouble with subtle.net today, but an alternate subscription address is:
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/empyre

Next month’s empyre guests are Trebor Scholz and Geert Lovink (and past guests include Jill, who I was happy to see last month in Providence).

I’ll be speaking at the Jihui Salon in NYC this Friday at 7pm. Here are the details:

jihui - Digital Salon presents
Noah Wardrip-fruin
Friday, Nov 21, 2003 7 PM AT
Parsons Design Lab
55 West 13th Street, 9th Fl.
New York, NY 10011
Live Webcast AT (http://agent.netart-init.org) starts 7pm EST.

Fellow GTxAer Nick Montfort and yours truly are going to be speaking next month at “Copyright and the Networked Computer” (Nov 6-8, Washington DC). This is another conference organized by William Warner and the Digital Cultures Project of the University of California. In the spring this same group put together the very successful e(X)literature Conference, which was co-sponsored with the Electronic Literature Organization. If you can make it, I’d recommend the trip — Nick and I will have company ranging from Wendy Seltzer (the EFF) to Dawn Bridges (Warner Music), J. Hillis Miller (UC Irvine), and Mark Hosler (Negativland).

I got my copy of Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play in the mail yesterday (check out the table of contents link from that page). Hopefully this means the physical and online booksellers (e.g., Booksense) will have it in stock soon.

It’s impressive, even though I’ve been expecting it to be impressive. There’s a lot here — the pages the same oversize (almost square) dimensions used for The New Media Reader, and nearly 700 of them, many with double-column layout — it makes space for conceptual definitions, wide-ranging discussions, lots of examples, and playable games (including one that utilizes the gutters of the pages).

I’m a bit disappointed that the “mini-interviews” Eric and Katie conducted in 2001 appear to have ended up on the cutting room floor. They interviewed some sharp folks (and, yes, the occasional not-so-sharp character like myself). Maybe the interviews will find a home on the Rules of Play website or something. If there is a website — my Google-fu was not sufficient to find anything but the one at MITP.

I’m going to have to read the book before saying much more, but it strikes me as incredibly ambitious. It’s a theoretical argument, and a textbook in part based on that argument. It’s also a bit of a survey of the field, and it’s playful, and it’s playable. Is it too much? Will those who disagree with the argument not want to use the textbook? Will those who love the theory feel alienated by the textbook form? Or will these talented authors have managed the alchemical fusion, bringing the best of these different discourses together in print — as happens in discussions around the tables of the seminar rooms and design studios we most enjoy inhabiting?

My brother and I had an apartment we shared in New York until early Wednesday morning. It was at the corner of Greenwich St and 11th St, and from our window you could see the stretch of sidewalk where Dylan Thomas stumbled and died — the White Horse Tavern, from which he stumbled, reminds visitors of this event by putting his portrait on several of the walls. It was a nice neighborhood to walk in — though Bleeker St Books and Kim’s Video had been forced out recently, along with many of the other small business that made the neighborhood what it was. There are a lot of empty storefronts now, with landlords apparently hoping to land one of the designer clothing shops and cramped-looking day spas that have in the last few years replaced some of my favorite places in the Village (Moondog ice cream, we hardly knew ye).

We’d had the apartment seven years. We were harassed out by our landlord. We were completely within our legal rights, but we consulted with a lawyer who’d fought our landlord before and he told us it would take a year of court dates and $10,000 in legal fees to hold onto our home. He told us we’d probably get our court costs back in the end, because we’d certainly win the case, but there was always the possibility that a judge would decide not to award them to us.

This isn’t the most outrageous thing our landlord has done. Last summer this blog was silent for June and most of July — shortly after its initiation. One reason for this was that our landlord pulled in the roof of our apartment building with less than 2hrs notice — leaving me and my brother homeless for most of the summer while “emergency” work was performed (we learned later that he’d had a permit since February and simply not told his tenants).

Anyway, now, instead of splitting my time between New York and Providence, I’m just a New Englander. For those of you who had a permanent address for me that turned out not to be that permanent, here’s a mailing address you can use: Creative Writing, Box 1852, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912.

Speaking of mail, while I was traveling this summer some great things arrived in my mailbox. One I want to write about soon is Brian Kim Stefans’s Fashionable Noise. And I should probably mention that earlier today I got into some online writing on grandtextauto.org about computer media grappling with what it means to be alive.

I’m not posting much here right now, but I’m doing some network writing elsewhere. Over at Jill’s there’s been a little discussion of web subscription and micropayment. On grandtextauto there’s a hopping conversation about fiction and recombinant text. Meanwhile, apartment woes continue to develop…

Back in the States, I’m feeling an odd kind of culture shock. Not “reverse culture shock” of the usual kind — the U.S. seemed pretty strange to me before I left. Rather, I’m feeling a certain shock at my personal culture, at the way I was living before I left on the trip. I see myself starting to do something, and I realize it’s because I used to do it all the time (small things, like patterns of web surfing I haven’t been able to indulge while sporadically connected), and then that behavior is suddenly defamiliarized by my act of observation.

As I’ve written here before, I care about local independent bookstores and support linking to Booksense rather than Amazon. Booksense is where I want to direct potential book purchasers. But as a book editor, I keep going back to Amazon’s site. Why? Because they update their mysteriously-calculated “sales rank” much more regularly than any other source of information I have about the book’s readership. I can even get Junglescan to plot a graph (such as the one here). So I end up wishing that people would buy through Booksense, but feeling cheered every time the book’s Amazon sales rank goes up. Ambivalence indeed.

I’m in Norway, currently staying with Jill, sharing an office with Hanne-Lovise Skartveit, and soon to be staying with Torill — giving five talks in four days. Last week I was at ACM Hypertext, where highlights included reading with some great artists and being part of Ted Nelson’s Hyperstructure workshop, which also included presentation of some of the Nelson-inspired work underway at the Jyu Hyperstructure Group. The same week I officially accepted a place on the board of Electronic Literature Organization and had my first phone meeting with that very sharp group of people. When not at Hypertext I’ve been staying with John Cayley and Laura L. Sullivan in London. This has to be one of the most stimulating and varied set of conversations about elit I could imagine. I should be blogging away furiously, but I seem to have found I’m not good at blogging (or answering email) while I’m on the road. However, as it turns out, I have to head back to the States early (missing Ars Electronica, and delaying my trip to Denmark) because my NYC landlord is indulging in the type of bad behavior that creates stereotypes of NYC landlords. This could bode well, or poorly, for blogging here.

It’s my birthday tomorrow. I’ve been thinking about the things I used to want for my birthday — when I was at the end of my single-digit years, and increasingly interested in reading and writing, computers, and games — fiction books, rulebooks for pen-and-paper role playing games, Infocom games… I’d already passed through my Choose Your Own Adventure period.

A couple days ago, walking through the Russell Square tube station in London, I took a picture of this advertisement.

Okay, so my post from Linz was a bit of a false alarm. Instead of getting more posting done from Ars Electronica, I dropped into the office and Futurelab. I met up with Christopher Lindinger (the Futurelab’s Director of Development / Virtual Environments) and had a good talk about their Cave. I also ran into Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky) — we met up for lunch and then took a good long walk up to a castle overlooking the city. While there we connected with Gunther Schmidl, a friend of friends who works at the Digital Economy division of Ars. After a group dinner I caught the Orient Express (no kidding) toward Germany.

I disembarked in Karlsruhe — site of ZKM, the Center for Art and Media. There I met with Sabine Himmelsbach (their Exhibition Director) and surprise addition Peter Weibel (their overall Director). And, just as I met up with Paul by surprise in Linz, at ZKM I ran into Mark Amerika (who I’d last seen at DAC) and spent the rest of the day and evening with him and a group of students who are simultaneously studying algorithms and aesthetics. We toured through the museum, encountering such classics of interactive media as Lynn Hershman’s Lorna and Jeffrey Shaw’s Legible City.

Now I’m in Amsterdam, relaxing a bit with my mother and brother. We have a little apartment we’re renting that looks over a canal and sidewalk cafe. We spend much of our time snacking on aged cheese and looking out the window at the movements of people and trees and water. Musicians come and play beneath our window for the audience at the cafe — almost all of them play “Those Were the Days” at some point during their medley.

I’ve got my laptop online again, for the first time in quite a while, at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria. So there should be some posts here over the next couple days.

For starters, I’m happy to announce that Brion Moss, Chris Poultney, Rebecca Ross, and I have been awarded a commission by Turbulence.

There’s a review of The New Media Reader in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung today. I’m told the link will only work for a day. And I don’t read the language. Any offers of help appreciated…