decontextualize.com
The second summer session at ITP begins today! I’m teaching a new course called Digital Writing with Python. The course is very much akin to Programming from A to Z, but with a heavier focus on creative text composition. Oh, and it’s in Python (rather than Java).
Find the syllabus here, and check back here for notes as they’re posted.
Edit: 
These are the materials we’ll be using for the writing exercise in the first session. (The menus are there to be cut up. We’re not ordering lunch.)
This has been making the rounds lately, and it’s skillfully done: a small hypertext(-ish) fiction that expands as you click on words in the text. What I found interesting is the shift in the narrator’s voice as the text becomes more elaborate: at first almost off-putting in its terseness, then friendly in a boring way (try expanding everything except “made” from a fresh page load). By the time you’ve expanded everything, though, the narrator seems obsessive and neurotic—maybe mimicking the reader’s own obsessive action of clicking to fully expand the story.
Andrew Plotkin’s The Space Under the Window (1997) is another experimental narrative that uses a similar form, although you must type in words that occur in the text to expand it, instead of just clicking on them. Plotkin’s program has a temporal element as well—”expanding” the text can add new events, not just elaborate on what’s already been related. There are multiple endings in Space, as well: depending on how you choose to elaborate the text, different final texts emerge.
(more analysis and comparison after the cut)
Announced recently, a series of readings at the Bowery Poetry Club. Just so you know, this is where I’ll be sending my Saturday afternoons for the next few months. Highlights: Kenneth Goldsmith (Feb 7), Brian Kim Stefans (Feb 28), Charles Bernstein (Mar 14), Ron Silliman (Apr 4). The April 25th date (”Poetry and Architecture”) originally had Vito Acconci’s name attached to it… it’s sure to be interesting, Acconci or no.
ITP has brought me on as an adjunct instructor this semester in order to teach a version of Daniel Shiffman’s venerable course entitled Programming from A to Z. The course is designed to follow the introductory programming course at ITP, with the goal of familiarizing students with advanced data structures and string manipulation. The theoretical underpinning of the course concerns generative, procedural and appropriative poetics. My syllabus is here, and you can follow the tutorials and course notes as they’re published here.
Betraying the Protagonist, the latest Homer in Silicon column from Emily Short, discusses how fostering “the desire to precipitate a dramatic crisis” in a game is an effective way to get the player to take actions that go against the protagonist’s best interests. “Several things,” she says, “have to happen to create a context for such dramatic choices,” among them a “player/protagonist separation”:
The connection between protagonist and player has to be attenuated a little: I have to sympathize with my protagonist while at the same time not feeling that my fate is bound into his. My primary commitment has to be to the story, rather than to my avatar.
Short goes on to discuss one method for bringing about this kind of separation, specifically drawing examples from Treasures of a Slave Kingdom, which does so by “draw[ing] the protagonist as significantly less intelligent than the player”: “The text of the game frequently describes things in such terms that the player understands them better than the protagonist.”
I came away with two questions. First, this particular method—descriptions that the player gets, but the protagonist doesn’t—obviously works better with text, as Short points out. What other kinds of work can text do better than graphics in video games? The methods used in Treasures seems inescapably textual, and not easy to translate into graphical representation. Are there other game mechanics or dramatic tricks that absolutely require text?
Second, it strikes me that in most games, there is little or no coincidence between the player’s perception and the protagonist’s perception. (The exception would be first-person shooters, where an explicit attempt is made to conflate the two.) Take a typical 2D platformer, like Super Mario Bros. 2. What you see on the screen isn’t a representation (or even an approximation) of what Mario sees. Yet players still closely identify with the on-screen pixels they control: they say, “Whoops, I died!” not “Mario died, too bad.” Is it possible for “dramatic” actions to take place in this context?
One example I can think of, in Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA) specifically, is the level where the on-screen character under the player’s control (Mario, Luigi, Toad, or Peach), must take a flying leap down a chasm in order to access a secret area. (Another level offers a similar dilemma: a secret room is accessible only if the player lets their avatar sink deep into quicksand.) This action would normally lead to the character’s death, so it seems like this is an instance of the player “betraying” the protagonist—taking an action that would normally be against the protagonist’s interest. Yet the player takes this action in the context of trying to win the game. Is this an example of a “dramatic crisis”?
Shadows Never Sleep is a set of new pieces from Aya Karpinska, created as part of her master’s thesis at Brown. The culmination and centerpiece of the project is the (eponymous) Shadows Never Sleep which, along with From the Balcony, comprises a solid exploration of narrative forms afforded by the iPhone’s interface.
A bit more analysis behind the cut.
For our final 5-in-5 project, Anderson and I collaborated on an experiment concerning ESP. Inspired by Ganzfeld experiments and this recent interview with Matmos, we designed an experiment to answer the following questions: Can binary data be transmitted telepathically? If so, how accurately can it be transmitted? At what speed?
Here’s how the experiment works. The researcher (me) attempts to telepathically transmit eight bits of binary data (one byte) to the experiment subject. To help control for bias, the bits to be transmitted are generated at random at the beginning of each experiment, and the researcher and the subject are located in different rooms while the experiment takes place. The bits are communicated sequentially; a series of timed tones, under the control of the researcher, regulates data transmission (letting the subject know when to move on to the next byte).
Our experiment today incorporated eight subjects, each of which attempted to receive eight bits of information. The total amount of attempted information transmission was eight bytes.
Here I am, trying to visualize and communicate zeroes and ones
Our colleague Vikram tries his hardest to read my mind.
Check after the jump for the results. Also make sure to check out 5-in-5 Guest Star Andrew Schneider’s first-person documentation of being an experimental subject.
Tags: networking, parapsychology
I set up the Frotzophone at NYCResistor’s recent “Art of the Game” show. The above picture is from Bre Pettis‘ flickr photostream. Here’s the rest of the set (including a picture of me doing some Frotzophone housecleaning).
The “Art of the Game” party was a great venue for the Frotzophone. No fewer than five (five!) people sat down and played through the score from beginning to end. The other pieces in the show (all somehow related to gaming) were uniformly amazing. It was an honor to be exhibited next to (literally, right next to) Game, game, game, and again game.
Today I made a New Interface for Textual Expression, as part of a continuation of my master’s thesis research. Strokeweight is an interface that correlates gestures of drawing to gestures of text. Click below to view a demonstration video on Vimeo. Technical details can be found after the jump.
Strokeweight: Writing with fruit and Dunsany from Adam Parrish on Vimeo.
(The source text used in the demonstration video is Lord Dunsany’s Poltarnees, Beholder of Ocean, which has nothing to do with fruit. I don’t know why I drew fruit. I guess I drew fruit because it’s easy to draw, and also delicious.)
On Day 3 of 5-in-5, C. Anderson Miller and I decided to collaborate on a board game. We ended up with a game we call Subwoofer Tactics. It’s a turn-based game in which players compete to knock their opponent’s pieces off the game board by vibrating the board with a subwoofer. Read more about the game here (including the official rules for tournament play). Watch the video below to see the game in action.
Subwoofer Tactics from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.
Recent Comments