[Purple-Blurb] Spring 2010 events (March 1, 8, 29; April 28)

[Nick Montfort]

I'm delighted to announce our Spring 2010 Purple Blurb events:

Roderick Coover & Nitin Sawhney  * VIDEO
Monday, March 1
5:30pm-7pm

Stephanie Strickland  * POETRY
Monday, March 8
5:30pm-7pm

Jeremy Freese & Emily Short  * INTERACTIVE FICTION
Monday, March 29
5:30pm-7pm

John Cayley & Daniel C. Howe  * POETRY
Wednesday, April 28
7:30pm-9pm

All events are in MIT's 14E-310.

Note that the first three events begin earlier (5:30pm) than in semesters 
past, while the final event this semester begins later (7:30pm).

Please also note (or recall) that 14E is the east wing of Building 14, the 
building which also houses the Hayden Library. This is *not* building E14, 
the new Media Lab building.

MARCH 1

RODERICK COOVER

Canyonlands (www.unknownterritories.org) is a film and interactive 
documentary about the works of the novelist and essayist, Edward Abbey 
(1927-1989). Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger and forest lookout in 
Western parks and forest-lands, wrote in praise of wilderness, and called 
attention to the destruction of the desert landscape. His descriptions of 
eco-sabotage in his novel The Monkey Gang were an inspiration for the 
formation of the environmentalist organizations such as EarthFirst! 
Canyonlands takes users into a virtual representation of the Colorado 
River and Utah canyonlands. There, users will follow Abbey's road and 
fascinating side routes as they weave their way through history.

Roderick Coover makes panoramic interactive environments, collaborative 
streaming visual poems, and multimedia documentary projects about 
histories, narratives, and the sense of place. Some titles include Unknown 
Territories (Unknownterritories.org), Cultures in Webs (Eastgate Systems), 
>From Verite to Virtual (D.E.R), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank), 
The Language of Wine (RLCP), and Something That Happened Only Once (RLCP) 
among others. An associate professor of film and media arts at Temple 
University, Roderick Coover has received awards from USIS-Fulbight, a LEF 
Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. URL: 
http://www.roderickcoover.com

NITIN SAWHNEY

Strawberries, Roosters and the Chocolate Seas is an upcoming 
feature-length documentary. It is a personal journey into the heart of 
Gaza using a satirical and poetic rendering of everyday life and the 
extraordinary events witnessed by the filmmaker, during his visit there 
one year after the devastating 22-day siege in January 2009. The film, 
shot during two intense weeks in January 2010, includes interviews with 
fishermen, farmers, physicians, teachers, and working professionals, 
interspersed with footage that captures dramatic events like the large 
convoys of aid arriving in Gaza despite the blockade, tunnels used to 
smuggle goods, hip hop bands striving for creative expression, and the 
floods that turned Gaza's seashore from deep blue to chocolate. 

Nitin Sawhney is a research fellow in the Program in Art, Culture and 
Technology in the Department of Architecture at MIT. He co-founded the 
Voices Beyond Walls initiative for digital storytelling in Palestinian 
refugee camps. The program was founded in 2006, when pilot digital media 
and storytelling workshops were first conducted in the Balata and Jenin 
refugee camps in the West Bank. Since then local and international 
volunteers have conducted nearly a dozen workshops in six different 
refugee camps. See: http://www.voicesbeyondwalls.org Sawhney was selected 
as a Visionary Fellow with the Jerusalem 2050 Program: 
http://envisioningpeace.org/visions/media-barrios He has recently returned 
from a trip to Gaza and is sharing footage from a documentary he is 
co-producing: http://www.GazaRoosterFilms.com

MARCH 8

STEPHANIE STRICKLAND

Strickland will read from four collaborative digital poems created over 
the past twelve years, each of which uses the screen differently: V: 
Vniverse, Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, Errand Upon Which We Came, and 
slippingglimpse.

Stephanie Strickland is a print and hypermedia poet who, in addition to 
having written the digital poems mentioned above, has published five 
books: Zone : Zero, V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L'una, True North, The Red 
Virgin: A Poem Of Simone Weil, and Give the Body Back.

MARCH 29

JEREMY FREESE

Violet is an interactive short story about romance and procrastination in 
which the main character is struggling to complete his dissertation. The 
things that happen in the simulated graduate student office are narrated 
to the player by the (imaginary) voice of the main character's Australian 
girlfriend. Violet won several XYZZY awards in 2008, including the award 
for Best Game, and was the winner of the 2008 Interactive Fiction 
Competition.

Jeremy Freese is a professor in the Department of Sociology, School of 
Communication, and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern 
University.

EMILY SHORT

Alabaster is a fractured fairy tale by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, 
Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, 
Emily Short, Adam Thornton, and Ziv Wities, illustrated by Daniel 
Allington-Krzysztofiak. This interactive fiction is an experiment in open 
authorship. The introduction to the story was written and released by 
Short in 2008. The game is implemented in Inform 7 using a conversation 
system, developed by Short, that will be released for general use by 
Inform 7 developers. There are eighteen possible endings to Alabaster.

Emily Short is author of or collaborator on more than two dozen 
interactive fictions, including Galatea (winner of Best of Show in the 
2000 IF Art Show) and Savoir Faire (XYZZY Award for Best Game and in other 
categories, 2002) and Floatpoint (winner of the 2006 IF Competition) along 
with other XYZZY award-winning games: Metamorphoses (2000), Pytho's Mask 
(2001), City of Secrets (2003), and Mystery House Possessed (2005). Short, 
who is a classicist and a scholar of attic drama, has worked on the 
development of Inform 7, has reviewed dozens of games, and writes the 
column "Homer in Silicon" for GameSetWatch.

APRIL 28

The Readers Project is a collection of distributed, performative, 
quasi-autonomous poetic 'Readers' — active, procedural entities with 
distinct reading behaviors and strategies. We release these Readers onto 
inscribed surfaces that may be explicitly or implicitly, visibly or 
invisibly, constituted by their texts. Over time, the Readers will address 
themselves to a wide range of material — from conventional found texts, 
through poetic reconfigurations of appropriated (fairly-used) sources, to 
original compositions by the project's collaborators, and so on.

Designed to support the creation of novel works of digital literature, 
Howe's RiTa library, in which The Readers Project is implemented, provides 
a unique set of tools for artists and writers working in programmable 
media. Combining features of natural language processing, computational 
stylistics, and generative systems, RiTa enables a range of tasks, from 
statistical methods, to grammar-based generation, to linguistic database 
access (e.g., WordNet), to text-mining, to text-to-speech, to image, 
audio, & animation, all in real-time. RiTa is free and open-source and 
integrates with the popular Processing environment for digital arts 
programming.

JOHN CAYLEY

John Cayley writes digital media, particularly in the domain of poetry and 
poetics. Recent and ongoing projects include The Readers 
Project with Daniel Howe, imposition with Giles Perring, riverIsland, 
and what we will. Information on these and other works may be consulted 
at http://programmatology.shadoof.net. Cayley is a visiting professor at 
Brown University, Literary Arts Program.

DANIEL C. HOWE

Daniel C. Howe is a digital artist and researcher whose work explores the 
intersections of literature, computation, and procedural art practice. He 
recently received his PhD (on generative literary systems) from the Media 
Research Lab at NYU and was awarded a ‘Computing Innovations’ fellowship 
from the National Science Foundation for 2010. He currently resides in 
Providence, RI where he teaches at Brown and RISD, and is a resident 
artist at AS220. His site: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/

-- 
-   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