New media artist Mark Amerika is giving a talk on convergence. Mark Amerika is among other achievements, the creator of an early interactive narrative work on the web: Grammatron. His bio reads:
Mark Amerika is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the founder and Publisher of the Alt-X Online Network (1993-ongoing), which has been described by Publishers Weekly as “the literary publishing model of the future.” He was named as a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator” as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century.
Mark is touring to here, Oz, and is delivering a talk this week in Melbourne. I cannot make that time 🙁 but recommend others who can to do so:
“The Future of Convergent Publishing”
Professor Mark Amerika will be presenting a seminar on the future of online and distributed publishing. The Internet established an entirely new mode of publication and distribution. Recent developments in Blogging and Podcasting have enhanced the potential of networked modes of distribution that continue to revolutionise the very concept of publishing.
The seminar will be held at Swinburne University (Hawthorn Campus) on Thursday 15th December in AR103, 1.00-2.00 pm.
I’ve been at the Australiasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment being held in Sydney this week. There is still one day to go but I feel compelled to *download* my impressions before the final blast of input and then distraction of catching-up on delayed duties. The attendees are computer science students working with game technologies, interactive narrative and game technologists and designers, iTV researchers, industry, media studies and cultural theorists. There is an impressive selection of international presenters, established local academics and emerging ones. Although an academic conference, the papers have an industry focus. I’m really enjoying this conference: a happy and eager bunch of theorists and practitioners who all share a passion for the area. We’re all keen to learn from each other and extend our own research with unusual linkups. There is alot I’d like to say about the this conference, but I’ll start with a blow by blow overview of the talks I attended:
The conference was opened by Professor Sue Rowley, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) of the University of Technology, Sydney. Rowley made some refreshingly critical comments about the phenomenon of cross-fertilised content (comics influencing films and so on). Much that is being produced, she said, is not cutting-edge, ‘banal’, ‘derivative’ and ‘ideological’. Although I keep a keen eye on the intermingling of genres, arts types and media affordances, it is great to hear that other people are finding the plethora mimic-art beyond cool.
Mark Pesce, famous for founding VRML but has done a stack since then, including being a fellow mentor at LAMP. Mark gave the keynote speech, The Telephone Repair Handbook, for the conference on mobile phones: their usability issues and potential social uses. In the style that Mark is renowned for, the presentation was delightful to the ear, so much so that I dubb mark a ‘suited cyber poet’ (also due to his talks being more inspirational rather than academic or industry). The podcast is online, as well as the pdf.
I went to see Jens F. Jensen’s talk, Interactive Television: New Genres, New Format, New Content, but he didn’t show for some reason. His paper is in the proceedings (we were given the full proceedings at the beginning of the conference, which ensures informed question times and means I can read up on who I want to chat to).
The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the main issues associated with interactive genres, formats and content in the context of interactive television (ITV). First, a set of new forms or categorizations of ITV will be presented. Second, the suite of interactive genres, formats and applications that currently constitutes ITV will be introduced and discussed. And third, some general conclusions concerning interactivity, television and the interactive user/viewer will be drawn.
Next, I was really looking forward to a talk by Lori Shyba: Opening Doors to Interactive Play Spaces: Fragmenting Story Structure into Games. Unfortunately, Lori spent more time describing her product than discussing how story is fragmented. her product is a theatre experience in which the audience interacts with actors who themselves interact with projections on walls and play specially designed screen games. She calls the form “integrated performance media” (which is developed from “integrated media”, an industry term in Canada and is related to “integrated marketing”).
Someone made a comment during one of the talks about franchises not being about art but about money. I keep forgetting that people see alot of cross-media not as an artform but as a marketing technique. Cross-media is often derided under this pretense. I couldn’t help thinking of an alternate perspective: the utilisation of multiple media for the delivery of a creative work has been the privilege of conglomerates, but with the ability to broadcast from personal media (a mobile phone or home computer rather than cinema) cross-media delivery is suddenly an option for everyone. Sure, many products are created with the sole intention of making money, but to claim that the employment of multiple media is the domain of commodification is to underestimate the democratisation of publication that the Internet has enabled.
Anyway, the final talk I saw on day one was by Robert Grigg. This is the exciting talk: it is about a particular sub-area of CME: episodic gaming. I’ll be giving a generous post about this very soon.
Jill Walker, the theorist behind ‘distributed narrative‘, has organised and participated in a panel on Viral and Distributed Narratives (as arranged by Jessica Henig). The panel is part of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts 19th Annual Conference held recently in Chicago. It is the first time that electronic literature has been included in the conference streams. But back to the panel:
Scott Rettberg, Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, “Implementation in Context: Viral, Locative, Situationist” Implementation by Nick Montfort and Scott Rettberg is a novel about psychological warfare, terror, identity, and the idea of place, a project that borrows from the traditions of net.art, mail art, sticker art, conceptual art, situationist theater, serial fiction, and guerilla viral marketing. Implementation was first published as a serial novel printed in fragments on stickers distributed in monthly installments. Readers then posted the stickers in public spaces around the world, photographed them, and returned those photographs to the project site, where they are archived by date and by location. This paper presents Implementation in three distinct relevant contexts: that of recent viral “meme-based” sticker art and street graffiti projects, that of recent locative media and mapping narrative projects, and finally in the context of situationism, a movement of an earlier era that advocated participatory “opposite of works of art” and demanded that “the inner city to be laid out as field of activity for artists.”
I’ve spoken about Implementation before, especially at talks I’ve given, but this talk is from the co-creator of the project. As I do, Rettberg situates the work within the paradigm of meme-art and locative arts, and then adds in situationism.
Jessica Henig, English, University of Maryland, “As Thin as Reality: Shelley Jackson’s “Skin”
In her short story “Skin,” hypertext author Shelley Jackson moves her canvas from the screen to the body. “Skin” is published only as tattoos on participants, each of whom becomes one word in the story. In addition to challenging our usual notions of reading and authorship, this raises critical questions about the location of the story: Is it on the participants? Is it the participants themselves, their own stories as they go about their daily lives? Does it exist only inaccessibly on Jackson’s computer, waiting to be distributed? In fact, “Skin” exists on all of these levels, but the strategies for approaching it differ depending on which story one wants to read. This paper examines “Skin” in the context of Espen Aarseth’s “indeterminate cybertext,” and looks at the ways in which it requires us to revise our algorithms for finding, reading, and understanding a story.
Henig has made her powerpoint available for download. She talks about ’emergence’ and systems, which is good. [If you haven’t already read it: I’m using polysystem theory to map CME.] Henig talks about John Holland’s Hidden Order and focuses on ‘aggregation’ and ‘flow’. It seems this is a taxonomical analysis, which I find immensely interesting as I’ve been battling with it for months. [See comments for details on the correct talk] Henig would be good to talk to, it seems, about the CME software I’m conceiving. Here is a nice quote from her presentation:
Recognizing the identity of these works as complex adaptive systems allows us to read them, but it also allows us to investigate, predict, and improve future emergent narratives.
Jill Walker, Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, Norway, “Pattern Recognition: Reading Distributed Narratives”
In earlier work, I have proposed the term distributed narrative to describe the increasing number of texts where elements of a story are distributed in time or space. By using the term narrative, rather than discussing the larger group of texts variously called “contagious media” or “crossmedia”, I wish to emphasize the ways in which our basic knowledge of narrative structures allows us to see connections between fragments that may have no explicit links. In this paper, I will look closely at fragments of a distributed narrative, examining how each segment signals to the reader that there is more to be found, and arguing that repetition and variation are prime tropes in distributed narrative. Comparing techniques used in weblogs and their surrounding co-texts to techniques used in Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, a novel written in 1962, printed on loose sheets of paper that the reader was asked to shuffle. The comparative reading will build on narratology, hypertext theory, and theories of emergence.
Okay, Jill is here distinguishing herself from “other” approaches (as I have done with her). The difference, she says, is that she is claiming distributed narratives work because of narrativisation. I have been thinking about this for a year or so and have been moving backwards and forwards between seeing what the audience member does in CME as narrative-based or something different. Currently I view what the audience does as narrative- AND play-based. I do see them as different and as both having a role. This is where I think ergodics is the unifiying concept of these areas. But back to her points, she cites two tropes: repetition and variation. This makes sense. As we’ve seen in countless simultaneous media usage studies, youth are using media in different ways.
The explanation for this behavior is the constant search for complementary information, different perspectives, and even emotional fulfillment. [Finanzen]
Indeed, what all three presenters cover is correct, valid and true. I’m excited that there are panels happening about the area, and that there is another couple of researchers. What I’m keen for, however, is an advanced discussion about CME. I know it is important and necessary to have the explanantions of the phenomenon, its antecendents and proof of existence, but I’m yearning for hardcore debates about its cogs.