[Purple-Blurb] Noah Wardrip-Fruin TODAY 6pm 14E-310

[Nick Montfort]

Dear Purple Blurbers,

The Fall 2009 Purple Blurb series begins today:

Noah Wardrip-Fruin
on his new book Expressive Processing
Today (Monday, September 14)
6pm
MIT, 14E-310

The room is where both summer talks were held, and is one flight up from 
the previous Purple Blurb location, in building 14:

http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=14;selectlayer=Buildings

Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital writer (a creator of literary art in 
digital media), an editor, a frequent collaborator, and assistant 
professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz. His projects of different 
sorts include The Impermanence Agent, Screen, The New Media Reader (which 
I co-edited), three edited collections with Pat Harrigan (First Person, 
Second Person, and Third Person), and the group blog Grand Text Auto.

His book Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and 
Software Studies is just out from MIT Press and is the first in the 
new Software Studies series. He writes of it:

   I argue that the fictions in today’s computer games tend to be shallow
   and brittle because of a basic imbalance in their implementations —
   while one can occupy many positions in the spatial world of the game,
   there are very few possible positions in the fictional world. Expressive
   Processing then examines 40 years of artificial intelligence research
   projects that provide an important series of lessons, and possible
   inspirations, as we move forward.

   More broadly, the book speaks to digital media and electronic literature
   communities about a vein of important work — performed in research labs
   — which previous books have usually mentioned in passing, rather than
   engaged in its richness. Focusing on this work suggests a history and
   future for authors in crafting computational models of ideas important
   to the fiction, opening up spaces of interaction at levels ranging from
   deep interpersonal dynamics to the surface play of language.

Noah has been deeply engaged in the digital art as well as the gaming, 
electronic literature and AI communities. I hope you will be able to take 
this opportunity to hear him present and discuss his new work with us 
today.

A representative from the MIT Press Bookstore will be at the talk and will 
have copies of Expressive Processing and other of Noah's books available 
for sale.

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307