New writing for Brown’s immersive 3D virtual environment. Cave Writing Spring’08 will be giving a number of presentations from the workshop on the evenings of May 14, 15, and 16, at the CCV (Center for Computation and Visualization) CAVE, 180 George Street (NE corner at Brook), 6:30 to 8:30 pm.

Showings must be strictly limited to six people per session, so we ask that you get back to us at this email address — cayley at shadoof dot net –with your first and second choice of a preferred session. These spaces will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis and we apologize in advance if we are unable to accommodate you. Continue reading

Missed Connections — by Cristobal Mendoza — is a 2-channel Internet-aware software piece that continuously fetches the latest posts in the “missed connections” section of Craigslist.org. Each post is presented one at a time, and is filtered by looking for so-called stopwords. Computer Scientists define stopwords as those words that do not convey the meaning of a message. In essence, they are considered signal noise in the stream of potential information. Continue reading

TBT [Time Based Text]: an experiment(al) (in) writing - Interview with Jaromil by Annet Dekker: Time Based Text can be considered software art, but above all it is a new form of digital poetics. Time Based Text offers a creative, experimental, joyful and critical way of handling digital text by implementing interactivity, new software and network communications. Time Based Text is a type-performance that illustrates feelings.

The emphasis of the software is on the process of writing / typing. TBT is a tool for time-based recording and playback of the process of typing a message, with the accuracy of milliseconds. The basic interface for typing records all typing and plays it back exactly the way the text was typed the first time, including all hesitations and misspellings. Continue reading

SURVIVALL, ‘Sur-viv-all’, is a word which reflects the 3 languages used during the project, which formed part of Andre Lemos’ sabbatical research at University of Alberta - English, French and Portuguese. The joint interest of the artists was to reflect on the relationship between the virtual territories of cyberspace, abstract representations of our worlds and the material conditions of life. In this case, the videos collected along the way show not only suburbia in winter snow but the blanket of private wifi signals, both closed and open which were detected at the beginning and end of each ‘letter’. Continue reading

“[…] The idea of this work more than its execution is the compelling element. Anyone who has clipped articles out of a newspaper, saved snippets of poetry or edited together their own home videos has experienced the process that is re-created in “Dolls”. But (Kate) Armstrong cleverly nurtures a circumstance of wry tension that illustrates the fraying tether between traditional literary and neo-digital expression. The same page never appears twice but the user can capture and save a favorite page. This is an intriguing re-enactment of the experience of reading a narrative book where particular passages haunt the imagination and are saved to our cognitive hard drive. Continue reading

For a sickening moment he tried to retain his old up-and-down orientation, his body attempting to right itself, searching for the gravity that wasn’t there. Then he forced himself to change his view. He was hurtling toward a wall. That was down. And at once he had control of himself. – Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

How do we read a text that removes the stabilizing spatial coordinates of the page and no longer maintains a top-centric and left-centric orientation? How do we read texts that do not simply simulate dimension but in fact materialize and operate on the z-axis? Here, Ender’s Game is suggestive: what Ender Wiggin has to learn about the null-gravity Battle Room is that it requires a fundamental reorientation of spatial perspective. Continue reading

The Iowa Review-Web [TIR-W] Volume 9 no. 1: Multi-Modal Coding: Jason Nelson, Donna Leishman, and Electronic Writing :: Guest edited by Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink.

“Literary hypertext and hypermedia have been made for 15 years with a wide variety of development systems. When the ELO curated its first Electronic Literature Collection in 2006, in an open call for works, the 60 selected were made in some 10 different development systems, from HTML to VRML. Who is in this game, and how do we draw in new readers and players? Our featured artists answer this question in our interviews. Continue reading

[Image: J.R. Carpenter] Out of the Box: Adventures in Electronic Literature - a panel discussion with J. R. Carpenter, Jason E. Lewis, Jeff Parker and Alice Van Der Klei :: May 3, 2008; 7:00 pm :: Regence A., Delta Centre-ville Hotel, 777 University Street, Montreal (metro Square Victoria).

Since the computer was invented, writers have been using it to forge new literary forms. This year the Blue Metropolis Montreal International Literary Festival moves into the cutting-edge field of Electronic Literature. Join us for an exploration of topics ranging from the early days of hypertext fiction to the latest in narrative gaming with an all-star panel of authors who write beyond the book and way outside the box: Continue reading

Babelswarm — by Justin Clemens (Writer), Christopher Dodds (Artist/Designer), and Adam Nash (Musician/3-D Real-Time Artist) :: Opened April 11, 2008 :: Lismore Regional Gallery, 131 Molesworth Street, Lismore NSW 2480 + Second Life.

Socrates: What a lucky morning this is turning out to be! I was looking for one virtue and have found a whole swarm of them. — Plato, Meno

In September 2007, the Australia Council for the Arts announced the recipients of its $20,000 artists residency in the 3-D online virtual world of Second Life. Dodds, Nash, and Clemens were awarded the grant to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork which explores the possibilities of literary, music / sound art and real-time 3-D arts practices within the virtual world. Continue reading

Cantata Park 1 (2006) [Teleport to Mashup Park, Marni (206, 35, 23)] — by Metamatic (Christopher Dodds and Adam Nash) — is an interactive, spatialised sound sculpture built in the virtual world Second Life. The sculpture is made from 256 individual nodes in a 16 x 16 grid. Each node is embedded with a single word, triggered by a participant’s movement through the work. Each participant creates a random narrative, assembled on-the-fly, and in real-time.

Cantata Park explores the notion of a “cut-up narrative”. By disassembling and reassembling a passage of text, the participant is free to extract unseen meaning from an existing text. Continue reading