This photo, of part of a subway ad for a Japanese magazine, has the word “blog” highlighted. I’m told that a rough translation might be, “Become famous on the Internet with a ‘blog.’”

When I checked out, this morning in Melbourne, the clerk said, “You’re Dutch, yes?” The man — from Calcutta — who sat next to me on the plane to Christchurch said he would have guessed I was “anything but American.”

In the airport, at security, this scene: My clothing line is being confiscated. Possible weapon. Helpful security woman explains. “We even take plastic toothpicks.” My eyebrows raise. She says, “Straight in the jugular” and makes a short, expressive jerk with her hand toward her throat. Says, “You’re from the States. You should understand.” I say, “I’m from New York, and I don’t understand.”

A friend in England just sent me a scan of the paper version of the Guardian interview. It has a picture!

On a related note, I didn’t mention it at the time, but I was glad that the CD for The New Media Reader got slashdotted a couple months back.

I recently had a nice, long conversation with Hamish Mackintosh, who writes for The Guardian — one of my favorite newspapers. I’m pleased to say that today the resulting interview piece is online. In half a dozen paragraphs we manage to touch on The New Media Reader; the Electronic Literature Organization; the blogs of Jill, Gonzalo, and Tom Tomorrow; as well as things like Hunt the Wumpus and my dad’s Osborne.

I’m in Melbourne, Australia, as a “Visiting Research Fellow” at the School of Applied Communication of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. I feel honored to have been preceded in this position by folks like Stuart Moulthrop, Mark Amerika, and Jill Walker. And it’s been nice not to have to jump back on the plane after DAC, but be able to stay, and get to know the city some, and channel some of the intellectual energy that a good conference can generate. (Speaking of the conference, my panel statement — which became a short paper in its presentation — is now available from a page with links to all the papers).

In Melbourne, traffic runs against my expectations, and when someone wants to turn right, across traffic, instead of waiting in the middle of the road they pull over to the left. When the other traffic has passed they drive all the way across the road. They call it a “hook turn.”

Half the interesting things in this city are down dark alleys. Doors open off alleys into courtyards with staircases, and you can start to hear the beat of music after you get a flight up, then the murmuring wall of people talking, then high tinks of glass or silverware, and then no longer hear the unsyncopated feet of those with you on the stair.

I’ve been working on a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality for Computers and the Humanities. I posted a version of it over at grandtextauto (where we’re using blog software that supports comments) and I’ve already had a response from the author herself!

I used Apple’s Keynote for my DAC slides — and liked it quite well — but then was surprised to find that there’s no option for exporting to html. So I’ve exported the slides as a PDF “From Instrumental Texts to Textual Instruments.”

DAC was great, by the way. That perfect combination of new ideas/stimulations from the presentations and plenty of informal conversation and brainstorming with really smart folk. There’s no DAC planned for next year, which is sad. But Mary Flanagan, Nick Montfort, and I are starting to toy with the idea of a one-day DAC-affiliated workshop/party in New York City next summer. Anyone with thoughts on that idea please email…

I’m going to be a ramblin’ man over the next few months. Next week I’m speaking at the Digital Arts and Culture conference in Melbourne, Australia — after which I’ll be in Australia and New Zealand for a few weeks. In late June I’ll be giving a couple lectures at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan (at the Mita and Fujisawa campuses) and visiting folks for about 10 days. In early July I’ll be talking at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia — and from there making my way into Europe to visit various people and places.

I hope to keep blogging here and at grandtextauto while I’m on the road — probably more personal stuff here, and the material that’s appropriate over there. And I’ll put up more specific talk dates as they become clear, just in case anyone wants to drop in…

The cat’s out of the bag. Gonzalo Frasca just posted a link to the nascent group blog I’m doing with Andrew Stern, Michael Mateas, Stuart Moulthrop, and Nick Montfort: grandtextauto.org.

Yesterday we had our first public showing of Screen (previous posts: 1, 2) as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival. Folks like Stephanie Strickland, Bill Seaman, Scott Rettberg, and William Gillespie came, and their reactions made me smile. We’ll be doing it again May 3rd (write to me if you want to come and the reservations are full).

Perhaps the biggest piece of news with Screen since my last post is that we have another collaborator for the interaction design and I have a new co-author for the text: Robert Coover. Bob is, of course, well-known as a professor and supporter of electronic writing — now he’s also, officially, a practitioner. The biggest change that’s come from working on the text with this new collaborator is that the project no longer tries to fit a many-layered metastory into five screenfuls of text. Instead, the underlying themes of that story are now the explicit focus — memory as a virtual experience, memory’s instabilities, and our relationship with these — though three “minitales” are still told.

Working with Bob on a piece of electronic writing also brings me a long way from where I began. My first piece of ewriting, in high school, generated text using starting material from (among other places) his story “The Gingerbread House.” Some interesting effects emerged from that borrowed text, but not nearly as good as the ones achieved working with the author directly.

Screen has also been accepted for a sketch presentation at SIGGRAPH 2003. One of my collaborators, Joshua J. Carroll, will be doing the presentation — hopefully joined by Shawn Greenlee and/or Andrew McClain. I’ll be in Europe and won’t make it back for the occasion. I posted an earlier version of the PDF before, but here’s a revised version.

Some people have asked me if Screen is related to the project discussed in Matt Mirapaul’s NYTimes article over the summer. Not only is it related, it’s the very one — he just didn’t mention its name (local mirror of article text). Screen also got a nice mention in Brandon’s blog a little while back.

Last week Jesper Juul — who’s visiting MIT from Copenhagen — gave a talk here called “About the Game.” It was very well received, impressing the audience members from Brown’s Graphics Group as well as those from German Studies.

One of the impressive things about Jesper’s talk was a definition of games he offered that I think is essentially correct — though it creates a typology in which the kind of game I played most while growing up (pen and paper RPGs) is considered borderline. Here are the parts of the definition:

1. Rules
2. Variable & quantifiable outcome
3. Value assigned to outcomes
4. Player effort
5. Outcome associated with player
6. Optional consequences

What makes the RPGs I played border cases, as I understand it, is that there’s a Game Master who does active interpretation of the rules during play — in some sense RPGs lack fixed rules. Of course, the only games I’ve ever played where we didn’t actively interpret rules at some point were computer games, but I didn’t find this a problem with Jesper’s talk because (a) he recognizes that these phenomena are not binary (he calls RPGs border cases, rather than throwing them out of the category of games) and (b) his main goal, as I see it, is to construct a definition useful for computer games.

I don’t think Jesper’s game definition is online anywhere, but he also talked about some of his ideas of game innovation contained in “Just what is it that makes computer games so different, so appealing?”

Matt Kirshenbaum’s review of the NMR (mentioned previously) is now online at EBR. Meanwhile, Matt Webb has written a nice post about the project based on the website, and I’m looking forward to hearing what more he’ll have to say once he’s had a look at the book/CD.

I’m running a piece of software by Rebecca Ross called OkayNews. On a MacOS X machine, it brings up a Finder alert with a NYTimes headline every 20 minutes. You have to click “okay” to keep working with your computer. In a sense you have to approve the news — or at least acknowledge the official version of events — in order to go forward with whatever you’re doing. I like it conceptually, and in addition the currently news-obsessed part of me likes the mid-90s-retro “push media” aspect of the project.

Meanwhile, my electronic writing reading list has been expanding rapidly. Here are a couple things I’ve been meaning to blog for a month:

Michael Mateas’s thesis can now be found on his publications page. Michael’s doing some of the most important work happening in electronic writing (including the Facade collaboration with Andrew Stern that I’ve written about before). I’m looking forward to visiting Michael at Georgia Tech in the Fall and learning more about what he’s up to — and, of course, I’m looking forward to reading his dissertation before then.

How Latitudes Became Forms is a project from the Walker Art Center that includes several things I want to check out. For example, Translation Map by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks is interesting in itself, and may also call out to be used as the platform for an ewriting project. Big [B]Other, on the other hand, is an ewriting project itself — rather than a potential platform for one.

My grandfather died Sunday. The funeral will be at Arlington National Cemetery. He was a doctor in the U.S. Navy. He was up walking the deck, a few minutes before sick call, when the Japanese planes appeared over Pearl Harbor. And, afterward, he did triage — choosing who would die, who they would let die, because there weren’t enough doctors to save everyone who should have lived. That was the part it hurt him to talk about.

I’ve cried for him and my family. And I’ve also cried because it’s through his pain that I read that the U.S. keeps bombing the city of Baghdad. It’s like bombing San Francisco instead of Pearl Harbor. In Basra there’s not enough water to drink. Someone there is having to choose which kids, who should all have lived, will have to die.

This is the writing exercise I did with my electronic writing students at our Tuesday class meeting. The Dallas half is from a workshop I took with Chris Spain.

A. Write “Dallas” or “Baghdad” at the top of your paper.

B. If you wrote Dallas, write the JFK assassination from Jackie’s first-person point of view. If you wrote Baghdad, write the “shock and awe” bombing of the city from the perspective of a civilian in the city. Time: five minutes.

C. Next, if you wrote Dallas, write the JFK assassination from JFK’s second-person point of view. If you wrote Baghdad, write the bombing from President Hussein’s second-person point of view. Five min.

D. Finally, if you wrote Dallas, write the assassination from Oswald’s third-person point of view. If you wrote Baghdad, write the bombing from the third-person POV of a soldier on a US aircraft carrier.

Of course, I hadn’t expected to wake up this morning to read “War erupted Wednesday night as the United States launched Tomahawk cruise missiles and aimed 2000-pound bombs at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other ‘leadership targets’ in Baghdad.” They’re spinning the war as assassination. One of the few methods that’s worked for starting up a world war.

Now, over the next two weeks, the results of the writing exercises are being interconnected and edited on our class wiki. Who knows what those weeks will bring.

Jill expressed interest in yesterday’s post about Screen, so, in case anyone would like to know more, here’s another image and a link to a short PDF about the project. Some out there may recognize the particular constrained writing form used in the PDF (one page, two columns, alphabetical authors…).

What happens at the end. (Michelle Higa)

In other news, I’m talking about The New Media Reader tonight at NYU with Ken Perlin and Christiane Paul (Nick can’t make it). The event’s at 719 Broadway, 12th floor, 7pm (more details on all of these at the NMR website). I’m particularly looking forward to tonight’s talk, because it’s hosted by the NYU Center for Advanced Technology — which provided essential support for the NMR. (Also, a nice post about the project from Adrian.)

My Cave collaboration with Joshua J Carroll, Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain is coming along nicely. It’s called Screen. Words peel from the walls toward the reader, who can strike them back with her hand. Here’s an image:

(Michelle Higa)

Inspired by Scott Rettberg’s blogging of my talk at Temple, I’ve posted a section of my slides from that evening. These are the ones that address the questions “What is electronic writing?” and “What is hypertext?” (The folks at Temple asked me to give my talk a bit of a personal perspective, which explains the “What about me?” moments.)

I’d be interested to hear what folks think about these, though as my current blog software lacks both comments and trackback (this may change soon) it’ll have to be via email: noah@NOqueeg.SPAMcom (removing “NO” and “SPAM” from the machine name).