Electronic Literature Authoring Software

A resource for teachers and students of new media writing, who are exploring what authoring tools to use, for new media writers and poets, who are interested in how their colleagues approach their work, and for readers, who want to understand how new media writers and poets create their work, the Authoring Software project is an ongoing collection of statements about authoring tools and software. It also looks at the relationship between interface and content in new media writing and at how the innovative use of authoring tools and the creation of new authoring tools have expanded digital writing/hypertext writing/net narrative practice in this vibrant contemporary creative writing field.

May, 2013

Social networking environments, where artists and writers come together in the discussion, creation, and sharing of art and literature, encompass conferencing systems, email, Twitter and Second Life, among many others. Ideally, on software-mediated social media platforms there is an energy that reflects and catalyzes the artmaking process, fostering a creative bonding -- not only for writers and artists working in new media art and literature but also for many other communities of interest as a whole and for contemporary culture as a whole, including artists in the fields of music, dance, and theater, among many others.
Social Media Community, an Authoring Software resource in progress, looks at both historic and contemporary social media platforms in terms of their historical and contemporary roles in the creation of cultural community on the Internet.
This first build focuses on historic social media communities. Visit the new Authoring Software resource on Social Media Community to find out more.

April, 2013

Center of Games and Playable Media at UC Santa Cruz to Host
Inventing the Future of Games: Interactive Storytelling Symposium 2013
at the Computer History Museum
On May 10, 2013, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the Center of Games and Playable Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) will host creators, thinkers, researchers, and industry representatives at an event that will, in their words. "delve deeply into the technologies and designs of games that enable new ways to craft and deliver narratives". With a focus on exploring storytelling in game environments, Inventing the Future of Games: Interactive Storytelling Symposium 2013 will address play, techno-creativity, authoring systems, and the future of interactive storytelling in a day of talks, discussions, game-making community, and refreshment.
In an opening presentation, Michael Mateas, Associate Professor of Computer Science at UCSC and creator (with Andrew Stern) of the interactive narrative/drama Façade, will ask the question: "Why Interactive Storytelling?".
Game designer Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Epic Mickey) will deliver the keynote, and Brenda Romero, (Wizardry 8, Train) game designer in residence, at U.C. Santa Cruz, will close the Symposium with "He Wouldn't Walk Away: Stories from Train"
Three panels will focus on core issues at the intersection of contemporary games and interactive narrative. They are:

Session One: Storytelling Current Practice
With Clint Hocking, Kevin Bruner, and Richard Rouse
Moderator: Michael Mateas

Session Two: Tools and Authorship for Next-Generation Narratives
With Emily Short, Asa Kalama, and Stéphane Bura
Moderator: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Session Three: Immersive Transmedia Storyworlds
With Matt MacLaurin, Susan Bonds, and Tawny Schlieski
Moderator: Brenda Laurel

A complete schedule, a registration form, and more information about Inventing the Future of Games: Interactive Storytelling Symposium 2013 are available at http://ifogevents.com
Twitter: @playableUCSC
hashtag: #IFOG2013

April 2013 Featured Work:
Fox Harrell: The GRIOT System

Recently named in the Artforum Top 10, researcher, writer and artist, Fox Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT, joint in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies Program, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has also been an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer. His work focuses on the development of computer-media-narrative and authoring software that uses elements of interactivity, social critique, cross-cultural narrative; cognitive semantics; gaming; and the social aspects of user-interface design. His seminal GRIOT System (named for West African storytellers who often incorporate improvisation in their performances) uses code to create/generate interactive and significant "polymorphic" poems. Visit Fox Harrell's statement on the Griot System to find out more.

April Recollection:

Judy Malloy, "Thoughts on the Publication of Pairing of Polarities: The Life and Art of Sonya Rapoport,, edited by Terri Cohn. "...The way our different but tangential work converged and diverged but had certain sometimes intangible things in common...."

April 2013 Featured Link: Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort
Accompanied by Electronic Literature Community Homage-Interventions
In January 2009, during a visit to Taroko Gorge National Park in Taiwan, MIT Professor and electronic poet Nick Montfort created a work of generative poetry using Python. He finished Taroko Gorge on the journey home and then ported it to JavaScript and made it accessible on the World Wide Web.
It wasn't too long afterwards that Scott Rettberg appropriated Nick's authoring system and created the urban intervention "Tokyo Garage". Scott was followed by J.R. Carpenter, whose "Whisper Wire" transported the landscape to the age of technology.
And an electronic literature community tradition had begun.
There were subsequently a series of works that in response, Nick lined through. (although they were still visible) They included, among others: Mark Sample's homage to George Takei, Andrew Plotkin's duet between the code and the text, Kathi Inman Berens kitchen-situated Tournedo Gorge, and Leonardo Flores' homage to Gary Snyder's mountain poetry.
Offering the potential for student exploration of the uses of an elegant authoring system, Taroko Gorge -- rooted in landscape description, constantly changing -- succeeds because Montfort carefully planned the flow of the work and created meaningful data sets (allowing, for instance, for transitive verbs and imperfect verbs) and in the process created a resonant, contemporary poetry array that inspired collaborative response.
The resultant eliterature community works have been reviewed by Leonardo Flores at http://academic.uprm.edu/flores/transmogrify.html, accompanied by his own remix of the poets and the process.
And/or, visit Taroko Gorge by Nick Montfort et. al.

March, 2013

New Authoring Software Statement:
J.R. Carpenter: The Broadside of a Yarn
Software: QR code, JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, HTML, Photoshop, Gimp
Detail from J.R. Carpenter: The Broadside of a Yarn

J. R. Carpenter is a Canadian artist, performer, poet, novelist, new media writer and researcher, based in South Devon, England. She began using the Internet as a medium for the creation and dissemination of non-linear narratives in 1993.
Since that time, her work has been presented in journals, festivals, and museums around the world, including the Electronic Literature Collection, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum; The Art Gallery, Tasmania; The University of Maryland; Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland; Palazzo delle arti Napoli in Naples, Kipp Gallery, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; E-Poetry, Barcelona, Spain; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, England; and The Banff Centre, Canada.
J. R. Carpenter is currently a member of faculty for In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge, a ground-breaking new residency program at The Banff Centre, in Canada, and she is a practice-led PhD Researcher, working in the emerging and converging fields of performance writing, digital literature, locative narrative, media archaeology and networked art practices at University College Falmouth, in England.
Commissioned by ELMCIP for the 2012 Remediating the Social exhibition in Edinburgh, The Broadside of a Yarn is a richly detailed 21st century locative broadside, in which a series of computer-generated narrative dialogues are accessed via QR codes.
One generator "is composed entirely of dialogue from Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer. Another contains lines of dialogue from Shakespeare's The Tempest," she explains in her Authoring Software statement. "Details from many a high sea story have been netted by this net-worked work. The combinatorial powers of computer-generated narrative conflate and confabulate characters, facts, and forms of narrative accounts of fantastical islands, impossible pilots, and voyages into the unknown undertaken over the past 2340 years."
Existing not only as a series of gallery mounted "map squares" of images found and/or created, in Edinburgh but also as a live many-voiced performance, The Broadside of a Yarn was/is in her words "a pervasive performative wander through a sea of sailors' yarns".
Visit J. R. Carpenter's Authoring Software statement on The Broadside of a Yarn to find out more.

March Featured Work:
Mark Amerika: FILMTEXT 2.0

Mark Amerika: detail from the Introduction to FILMTEXT 2.0
M ark Amerika's work -- that includes the seminal net art trilogy GRAMMATRON, PHON:E:ME, and FILMTEXT, as well as experimental artists books, cult novels, video and films -- has been published and/or exhibited widely, including the Whitney Biennial of American Art; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the Walker Art Center; the Denver Art Museum; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, where he had a retrospective in the fall of 2009. He is a Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and his books include remixthebook. (University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
For Authoring Software, he writes about the creation of his visually interesting, textually surprising, and complexly created FILMTEXT 2.0 -- in his words:
"an elaborate work of net art that investigates emerging forms of electronic literature in relation to interactive cinema, live A/V performance, games, and remix culture."
Visit Mark Amerika's' Authoring Software statement to find out more.

Authoring Software is working on a new resource page on blogs -- with focuses on blogs as a narrative art form and on blogs as vehicles for electronic literature documentation and criticism. The resource will also explore authoring software for the creation of blogs, provide sources on the role of blogs in the World Wide Web and social media landscape, and host reviews of books about blogs and blogging.
Suggestions are welcome and can be sent to Judy Malloy at jmalloy@well.com

February, 2013

February Featured Work:
Chris Funkhouser: MIDIPoetry Songs

Chris Funkhouser performing with MIDIPoet at Grant Recital Hall, Brown University.
photo: Amy Hufnagel

Chris Funkhouser is a new media poet and scholar whose work has explored digital poetry, hypertext, Moos, and digital performance, among other computer-mediated literary forms.
His evocative digital poetry and authoring software-mediated songs have been performed and/or exhibited internationally including at the Banff Center, E-Poetry 2009, Interrupt, Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, NY, and the 4th International Conference & Festival of the Electronic Literature Organization. He has been a Digital Poet-in-Residence at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City, and in 2006 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to work at the Multimedia University in Cyberjaya, Malaysia.
Chris Funkhouser is an Associate Professor in Humanities and Director of the Communication and Media Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His books include New Directions in Digital Poetry (NY: Continuum, 2012) and Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995. (University of Alabama Press, 2007)
In his statement for Authoring Software, he describes how his sound and projection "songs" were created from vast databases of related words and phrases -- using Eugenio Tisselli's MIDIPoet software for the real-time composition and performance of interactive visual poetry. Visit Chris Funkhouser's Authoring Software statement to find out more.

O riginally begun as a multi-user "adventure" program by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex in England, MUDs (Multi-user Dungeons) and the subsequent MOOs (MUD's object oriented) are text-based, programmable virtual communities that connect many users to the same place at the same time. In addition to creative social interaction, LambdaMoo, created by Pavel Curtis at Xerox PARC, also fostered virtual world building and allowed for a variety of narrative structures.
MOOS have been used as meeting places, for distance learning, to create text for performative works, and to create hypertextual and/or interactive fiction narratives and/or locative virtual narratives that many readers can simultaneously explore.
Participants who "enter" MOO environments are usually textually "visible" to each other, and they share a database of "objects" such as "rooms" and "exits". In MOOs where users have created detailed environments -- including, for instance, living rooms, kitchens, gardens, and libraries, tables, chairs, books, and flowers -- MOOs are highly "immersive", creating the feel of meeting in a real place.
Antoinette LaFarge: "A diagram showing the communication flow among the various performers in Demotic 2006. The black area at left represents the telematic performers, while the white area is the stage and the gray is the audience."
New in February 2013 on this Authoring Software page on MOOs and MUDS are links to archives of the Electronic Literature Organization chats hosted by Deena Larsen on Lingua MOO; to Judith Donath's thesis on "Inhabiting the Virtual City: The Design of Social Environments for Electronic Communities and to John Unsworth's paper on "Living Inside the (Operating) System: Community in Virtual Reality", as well as new insets and/or images for Pavel Curtis, Dene Grigar and John Barber, Antoinette LaFarge, and much more.

January, 2013

From Critical Theory and the Digital by David Berry to Speaking Code, Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, to the paperback edition of Mary Flanagan's Critical Play: Radical Game Design, new and forthcoming books of interest to the electronic literature community address issues of code; game and interactive media design; social media; and literature in a digital humanities era.
Complete Story

January Featured Work:
Regina Pinto: AlphaAlpha

Born in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, digital artist, writer and curator Regina Pinto has been creating innovative work on the Web since 1997. In her recent project, AlphaAlpha, she uses a variety of software applications to create a dynamic work of visual poetry that -- in this screen-viewed medium where text can be encountered in a visual manner -- focuses attention on the representation of the first letter of the alphabet, resulting in a work of collaborative art that, with its evocative connotations of "first letter", also imagines and illustrates how words and text can be represented on the Internet.
Regina Pinto believes that one of the good characteristics of globalization is that it allows the exchange of national and international artistic experiences. She "lives, loves and believes" in net art, and her work as artist or curator is primarily done for the Web. Much of her work uses humor, unusual juxtapositions and interesting ideas to look at global trends, for instance, The Snowmen Congress in Rio in which conceptions of snowmen were solicited from all over the world, exhibited on the Internet, and presented in lectures and performances on a stage on Ipanema Beach -- with an emphasis on Global warming and its impact on the fate of snowmen.
The AlphaAlpha project is a classic collaborative work in that participants were invited to create within the context of an interesting idea, and the producer incorporated their work in a framework that in this case includes texts and visual implementations of the letter "A". The project both alludes to the vibrant South American tradition of visual poetry and calls attention to how text can be represented on the World Wide Web. Participants were from all over the world including Brazil, USA, Canada, Chile, France, UK, Argentina, Finland, Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Uruguay, Spain, and Mexico. Visit Regina Pinto's Authoring Software statement to find out more.

With a Theme of "Avenues of Access", MLA2013 to Include an Exhibition of Electronic Literature and over 60 Digital Humanities Panels

Held in Boston from January 3-6, 2013, the 128th Modern Language Association (MLA) Annual Convention will present over 700 panels. Set by current MLA President Michael Bérubé, the Presidential Theme, "Avenues of Access", encompasses student access to higher education; tenure-track jobs for PhDs; disability studies for the humanities; and open access and the future of scholarly communication. "The four topics I have in mind are bound by the multivalence of the term access -- that is to say, by the multiple desires and aspirations we attach to it," Bérubé notes in his statement.
The over 60 MLA2013 panels on the Digital Humanities range from Digital Diasporas, chaired by Shelley Fisher Fishkin; (Stanford University) to Networked Chicanas/os, chaired by Domino Renee Perez; (University of Texas, Austin) to Social Media and Scholarship: The State of Middle-State Publishing; (chaired by Alexander Reid, University at Buffalo, State University of New York) to Games for Teaching Language, Literature, and Writing. (chaired by Brian Croxall, Emory University)
Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse, the creators of Between Page and Screen, demonstrate the work's convergence of print and electronic media. Between Page and Screen is included in the MLA2013 exhibition of electronic literature, Avenues of Access.
Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New 'Born Digital' Literature
In the field of Electronic literature, a highlight of the MLA2013 Convention will begin at noon on January 3 with the opening of Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New 'Born Digital' Literature curated by Dene Grigar and Kathi Inman Berens. Featuring multimodal narrative, multimodal poetry, literary games, e-essays, and mobile/locative works, Avenues of Access will take place at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center and run through January 5, 2013.
"Avenues of Access: An Exhibit and Online Archive of New Born Digital Literature marks the second exhibit that my co-curator Kathi Inman Berens and I have mounted for the Modern Language Association," Dene Grigar notes in her curatorial statement. Grigar, who is Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver, explains that "This year's show builds on last year's exhibit, which resulted in numerous scholarly references in Digital Humanities Now, Kairos, Authoring Software, and HASTAC, as well as visits to the show by over 600 MLA participants and over 3500 viewers to the online archive -- and it does so by introducing many new authors and newly created works of electronic literature. As such, Avenues of Access aims to show that because of its close connection to digital technologies, electronic literature is as an art form both vibrant and evolving, one that has found a comfortable home among the Digital Humanities."
Emphasizing the importance of live exhibitions of electronic literature, co-curator Kathi Inman Berens, who is a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication and a Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab, observes in her statement that "One is much more likely to encounter difference, make spontaneous and serendipitous associations, at a live event". As an example, she relates one of her favorite moments from MLA2012 "when Renaissance scholar Janelle Jenstaad and Invisible Seattle artist Rob Wittig mashed up London 1560 and Seattle mid-1980s. Janelle unscrolled her gigantic London map and she and Rob poured over it talking narrative, urbanism, and who knows what else. Experiences like that don't happen when you read e-lit alone. Convergence".
Image from Megan Heyward's of day, of night (2002; Eastgate 2005) "an experimental new media work that is part narrative, part game, part memory and dream".
of day, of night is included in the MLA2013 exhibition, Avenues of Access.
In a curatorial response to the MLA2013 Theme, Avenues of Access, the exhibition presents a selection of contemporary media art and electronic literature that highlights diverse approaches to digital textuality, such as the use of commented code to enhance literary experience and contingently, the relationship of interface to narrative content; such as the influence of concrete poetry, artists books, and conceptual text art on contemporary electronic literature; such as how in certain works, migration to a new platform results in an elegantly translated narrative environment; and such as the continuing innovative use of graphic images, video, sound, and found information in literary contexts.
For instance, in JR Carpenter's Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, a voyage narrative is navigated with Wikipedia pages that are linked into the text at places where information is important to the understanding of this imagined journey.
To describe Opacity, his short interactive story in four parts, Serge Bouchardon writes: "We live in an age of obsession with transparency especially in politics and business. But in our personal relationships, what is the point of being transparent to oneself and to others? The following interactive narrative commends a kind of opacity which is meant as an in-between. It is the story of a journey from a dream of transparency to a desire for opacity."
In The P.o.E.M.M. cycle: What They Speak When They Speak to Me, Jason Edward Lewis -- who is Assistant Professor of Digital Image/Sound and the Fine Arts at Concordia University, as well as founding director of the OBX Laboratory for Experimental Media and co-director of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace -- creates You've Got No Choice About the Terminology?, an evocative touch-poem of dense continuously flowing text on which the viewer interactively superimposes visual text and graphic imagery redolent of native culture.
The theme of translating/migrating works of electronic literature is illustrated in the exhibition by the journey -- from other platforms to IPad app -- of works by Steve Tomasula, Jody Zellen, and Judy Malloy. (the Eastgate iPad edition of Malloy's its name was Penelope, previously published by Eastgate on disk and CD) Contingently, in The Quaker Oat Box - Infinite Regress, M.D. Coverley explores changes in the look and feel of electronic literature, and in the process, she looks at issues of aesthetics and evolving hardware and software.
On Friday, January 4, 2013, at Emerson College's Bordy Theatre in Boston, the curators are hosting an evening of performances by artists featured in the exhibition, including Alan Bigelow, Bill Bly, Amaranth Borsuk, Caitlin Fisher, Mark Marino, Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Laura Zaylea, and some of the 10 authors of the collaboratively authored MIT Press book 10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5+RND (1)); : GOTO 10.
From Alchemies of Old and New Media to Video Games: Digital Humanities Sessions at MLA2013
As electronic literature has become a more integral part of digital humanities and of the literature and language curriculum, this inclusion has been mirrored in contemporary MLA programs. Although, from the point of view of this writer/editor, the inclusion of electronic literature in dedicated panels is a continuing need, it is also important that electronic literature is integrated into MLA sessions, as it is this year in sessions such as Crossed Codes: Print's Dream of the Digital Age, Digital's Memory of the Age of Print; (chaired by Marta L. Werner, D'Youville College) and such as Convergent Histories of the Book: From Manuscript to Digital, a session, chaired by Alex Mueller, University of Massachusetts, Boston, which will bring together scholars of manuscripts, print, and digital media to discuss "how contemporary forms of textuality intersect with, duplicate, extend, or draw on manuscript technologies."
Additionally, many of this year's presentations -- for example, Digital Pedagogy: An Unconference Workshop, chaired by Brian Croxall, Emory University and Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey -- are of interest to teachers and students of electronic literature and digital textuality. ......complete story

December, 2012

December Featured Work:
Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between

A core addition to the exploration of how language in code can create a greater understanding of the work and at the same time have literary qualities, Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland's statement on Authoring Software is the commented code for the JavaScript program that implements their collaboratively created Sea and Spar Between, which was first published on Dear Navigator.
New media writer and scholar Nick Montfort is the author, co-author, or co-editor of the MIT Press books Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction; Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System; (with Ian Bogost) The New Media Reader; (with Noah Wardrip-Fruin) and 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. (with many others) Montfort is Associate Professor of Digital Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he currently serves as the President of the Electronic Literature Organization. His recent work includes the community-inspirational generative poem Taroko Gorge.
Stephanie Strickland is a print and new media poet, whose work has both advanced the creation of born digital poetry and creatively explored the intersections between print and digital. She is the author of V, which was one of the first works of literature to appear simultaneously both in print and on the Web. Her cyberpoem True North was published in print by the University of Notre Dame Press and as a work of literature on disk by Eastgate. True North was awarded the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Salt Hill hypertext prize.
In general, commented code incorporates statements in the program that are not executable, i.e. they do not contribute to the computer's running of the program but rather explain or describe the intentions of the programmer. The idea of "literate" programming -- which incorporates textual, sometimes poetic narrative in order to contribute both to code understanding and literary analysis -- has been of recent interest in the digital humanities community. In Sea and Spar Between the commented code serves as a statement that not only documents the artists' intentions and but also invites the reader to understand how they were implemented by the program.
Using the poetry of Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) and Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville (1819-1891) to analyze congruences of language and style in approximately the same era, Sea and Spar Between is a cyberliterary approach to 19th century American literature, as well as, in its unexpected, yet at times evocative combination of their works, a look at different 19th century approaches to nature and the relationship of humans to nature. .....complete commented code for Sea and Spar Between

The Authoring Software resource on Computer-Mediated Collaborative Writing focuses on participatory narrative in which computer-mediation is an integral part of creating the work, such as a work of literature or text that begins with a computer program which accepts input from audience/reader participants and then shapes this input to create the final work. It also includes examples of works of literature of text which are collaboratively created by a group of writers working together on an authoring platform that to a certain extent mediates the work; as well as duets where computer-mediated collaborative interaction between the participants is integral to the work.
This month, Computer-Mediated Collaborative Writing has been updated to include Mark Amerika, remixthebook.com; Anne Balsamo, Dale MacDonald, Jon Winet, Mark NeuCollins, Andy van Dam, Alex Hills, Donald Brinkman and others, Digital AIDS Memorial Quilt; Margaret Crane and Jon Winet, Democracy: The Last Campaign; Juan L. Gomez-Perales, The Electronic Mural Project; Ian Hatcher, Opening Sources; Chris Joseph, Christine Wilks, Randy Adams and others, R3/\/\1X\/\/0RX; (remixworx) Mimi Li and Wei Zhu, "Patterns of computer-mediated interaction in small writing groups using wikis", and Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10.
.......Complete Computer-Mediated Collaborative Writing Resource

New from MIT Press: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter

On November 28, MIT Press released 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, a wiki-written book that uses an elegant line of code as a springboard to discuss the cultural, historic, and exploratory uses of code.
Written in BASIC for the Commodore 64, the one-line program 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 was originally published in the historic Commodore 64 User's Guide. It utilizes characters -- 205 \ and 206 / -- from the Commodore-specific character set, PETSCII in order to generate a (possibly) endless array of screen-based maze-like pattern.

Incubated in the 2010 Critical Code Studies Working Group, the book's close study of 1980's PC culture and programming was created by 10 writers: Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter.
Emphasizing the project's value as a seminal "intensive reading of code, its contexts, and its relationship to culture", 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 lead author Nick Montfort, Associate Profes sor of Digital Media at MIT and the co-author of Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, (MIT Press, 2009) explains that the book is "specifically a look at a line of BASIC for the Commodore 64, opening up a new consideration of how hobbyist programming, recreational computing, and popular access to programming were influential in the early 1980s and remain desirable today."
"The book was written collaboratively in a single voice by a fairly large group of authors -- ten of us -- showing that there is a new mode in which we can do scholarly work," Montfort emphasizes. "This should be of interest to all sorts of researchers and scholars, even if they are not in the digital media field specifically. It is a new and radically different sort of book that ten people wrote together in a single voice, using a mailing list, a wiki, and other means."
"10 PRINT is the first book-length work of scholarship emerging out of Critical Code Studies, specifically the 2010 Critical Code Studies Working Group," observes co-author Mark Marino, Associate Professor and director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at the University of Southern California. "What began as a discussion in one of the 'code critique' threads became a collaborative interdisciplinary analysis taking up each token of an extremely concise little program. 10 PRINT stands as a powerful sign of the multitude of fascinating paths scholars can pursue when they take the source code as their avenue into a digital object or into computational culture more broadly."
Co-author Jeremy Douglass, a postdoctoral researcher in software studies at the University of California, San Diego, adds that "Our author group considered the program and its cultural milieu in a wide variety of different contexts, including relationships to computer science, psychology, art, design, mythology, and religion among many others. We also examined the program in many incarnations and at many levels of operation: as it circulated in print journals, as at appeared in pixels on a cathode ray tube, as code executing on the physical hardware, and so forth."
Topics of discussion in the MIT Press title 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 include the use of emulators, such as the Commodore 64 emulator VICE; the history of the BASIC language and its origins at Dartmouth; randomness; the Commodore 64 computer; and the significance and uses of mazes -- from ancient mythology, to early computer science; (such as Claude Shannon's Theseus Maze) to contemporary translations of the program. .....complete story

November, 2012

November Featured Link:
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling,
Essays and reviews on narrative in games and new media
November Featured Work:
Andrew Plotkin's Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home

Writer/programmer Andrew Plotkin is the author of several award-winning works of interactive fiction, including Shade, Spider and Web, and The Dreamhold. An integral member of the IF community, he also helps support the software tools that underlie modern IF. He has worked on game design and game tools his entire life, though mostly outside of the game industry and academic worlds. Currently creating Hadean Lands, an interactive fiction for the iPhone, he is pursuing in his words "a (perhaps chimerical) career as a creator of narrative interaction on mobile platforms.".
On Authoring Software he writes about his IF Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home. (2010) Created with Inform 7, Heliopause, winner of the 2010 XYZZY Awards for Best Writing, presents the reader, as do most IFs, with narrative descriptions and prompts. The process is continually interactive; the reader navigates the story by entering text phrases at the prompts; the story responds:

>
>hoist sail
The sails begin to unfurl. They catch sunlight. The Horizon of Night shifts gladly around her keel, and slides into interstellar space.

The Outer Marches
The bright worlds fade behind you. Nebulae drift past.
"Heliopause," Plotkins notes in his statement, "is primarily concerned with tone. Its language is drawn from the lyrical science fiction of the early 1970s (which was itself concerned with evoking high fantasy and fable into the science-fictional mode). I obliquely reference Jack Williamson and George R. R. Martin; Vance and Zelazny lurk inescapably behind them."
Visit Andre Plotkin's Authoring Software Statement on Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home to find out more.

ELMCIP Invites Scholars and Artists to Remediating the Social, Edinburgh, November 1-3, 2012

Detail: Phillipe Bootz, "l'e-rabot poète" ("th'e-plane poet")
continuing at the Remediating the Social Exhibition, Inspace thorugh November 1-25
Hosted by Edinburgh College of Art, in collaboration with New Media Scotland and University College Falmouth, and within the framework of the Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice research project, (ELMCIP) the Remediating the Social conference and exhibition will take place at Inspace in Edinburgh, Scotland from November 1-3, 2012.
ELMCIP Project Leader, Scott Rettberg observes that Remediating the Social is the last event of this HERA-funded project and is the seventh conference in a series focused on electronic literature communities, publishing venues, pedagogy, and e-lit in the context of new media art, digital poetics, and performance.
Rettberg, who is also a writer of electronic literature and an Associate Professor of digital culture in the Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway, notes that "the conference in Edinburgh returns us to our more essential research question, which is what we can learn about contemporary network-mediated creative communities through the example of electronic literature. We are going to hear from a wide variety of critics, theorists, and artists addressing this topic in different ways."
The Conference, he emphasizes, " is very important for the field of electronic literature and particularly for electronic literature in the European context."
In keeping of the Conference theme, the conference will be e-cast on Bambuser at the channel: http://bambuser.com/channel/ELMCIP, and remote attendees will be able to monitor events and put questions to the conference.
Keynote and Plenary Session Speakers are Nick Montfort (MIT) - "Programming for Fun, Together", with Rita Raley, (UC Santa Barbara, NYU) as respondent; Roberto Simanowski, (University of Basel) - "The Compelling Charm of Numbers", with Friedrich Block (Kassel) as respondent; and James Leach, (University of Aberdeen) Plenary Session: "Creativity as a Social Relation".
Detail: Donna Leishman: Borderline
continuing at the Remediating the Social Exhibition, Inspace thorugh November 1-25
Among many others, artists, writers, and critics who will present at this conference are Mark Amerika; (USA) Phillippe Bootz; (France) Andy Campbell (UK) and Kate Pullinger; (Canada/UK) JR Carpenter; (Canada) John Cayley (US) and Daniel Howe; (UK) Shu Lea Cheang; (France) Natalia Fedorova; (Russia/US) Leonardo Flores; (Puerto Rico/Norway) Loss Pequeño Glazier; (US) Chris Joseph; (UK) Donna Leishman; (Scotland) Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery; (US) Søren Bro Pold; (Denmark) Eugenio Tisselli; (Spain) and Christine Wilks. (UK).... complete story

October, 2012

October 2012 Featured Interview: Stuart Moulthrop

One of the first creators of new media literature and a distinguished new media writer, digital artist, and scholar, Baltimore, Maryland native Stuart Moulthrop is the author of the seminal hyperfiction Victory Garden, (Eastgate, 1991) a work that Robert Coover included in the "golden age" of electronic literature.
Moulthrop has served as a Professor in the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore where he was the Director of the undergraduate Simulation and Digital Entertainment program. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His works -- including Hegirascope, Reagan Library, Pax, Under Language, and Deep Surface -- have been exhibited and or published internationally, and two of his works have won prizes in the Ciutat de Vinaros international competition.
In this literate and cyber-literate interview, where, as in the reading of poetry, the reader must occasionally interpret the allusions to other works -- from contemporary literature to philosophy to computer manuals -- Moulthrop recounts the founding of TINAC, the writing of Victory Garden, the founding (with Nancy Kaplan) of a department of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore, and the creation with Flash ActionScript of his textual instrument Under Language. And he looks to the future of electronic literature. Visit the Interview with Stuart Moulthrop to find out more.

On the October 2012 Authoring Software Twitter Page, new listings of Twitter works and performative documentation include Dan Sinker's The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel; Nick Montfort's palindromic constraint-based phrases; (as covered by Harriet) Judy Malloy's Recreating the BASIC Uncle Roger; and Mark Sample's Twitter-inspired Postcard for Artisanal Tweeting. New listings of papers and books include Ryan Cordell, "Creating an Online Scholarly Presence"; Adeline Koh, "Twitter in a Higher Education Classroom: An Assessment"; Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age; and Tim O'Reilly and Sarah Milstein, The Twitter Book. To find out more, visit the October 2012 Authoring Software Twitter Page

September, 2012

September Featured Link: Electronic Literature & the Nonhuman

T he Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) website presents Electronic Literature & the Nonhuman, an evening of electronic literature readings and performances to be held at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts 2012 Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on September 29, 2012. The program, selected by Sandy Baldwin, Davin Heckman, and Jessica Pressman, includes an Alternate Reality Game, multimodal fiction, digital poetry, computational, concrete poems, hypertext, audiovisual performance, mashups, and more.
On the program are M.D. Coverley: The Beauty of Loulan; Jeremy Douglass: in cells so even; Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux: Speculation: An Alternate Reality Game; Clarissa Lee: Quantum Genesis; Amy Letter: Life in Pink (The Singing Ape); Mark C. Marino: Living Will; Eric Meyer: The Obsolete Book in a Post-Obsolete World; Nick Montfort: One-line Programs; and Stuart Moulthrop: Was That R Us: oR, the staRt of paRcriture.
The evening will be hosted by Mark C. Marino and Stuart Moulthrop.
For detailed information about the writers and works, visit Electronic Literature & the Nonhuman, presented by the Electronic Literature Organization.

New Authoring Software Statement:
Megan Heyward: of day, of night
Software: Director, Photoshop, After Effects, Pro Tools

Megan Heyward is a digital media artist who works at the intersection of narrative and new technologies. Her electronic literature projects -- I Am A Singer and of day, of night of day, of night -- have been widely exhibited in Australia and internationally, including MILIA New Talent Pavilion; (France) ISEA02; (Japan) Festival of Cinema and New Media; (Canada) Electrofringe; (Australia) Contact Zones; (USA) Videobrasil; (Brazil) Viper; (Switzerland), Stuttgarter Filmwinter; (Germany) and ELO2012. (USA) Of day, of night was published by Eastgate Systems in 2005.
A Senior Lecturer in Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, Megan Heyward is currently working with narrative and locative technologies, as well as early stage development of a new electronic literature project for tablet devices.
For Authoring Software she describes the creation of her evocative new media narrative of day, of night.
"Conceived as an experimental digital narrative, of day, of night interweaves video, text, graphic and audio elements in a hybrid storytelling environment that moves between literary, cinematic and game-like approaches," she writes to begin her statement.
And she notes that "The work sought to be an enveloping, responsive, multimodal narrative -- one which responded to touch, made sounds, one where text would shimmer and undulate; as well as a work that made space, from a narrative perspective, for ideas of uncertainty, indecision, wandering and chance."
Visit Megan Heyward's statement on of day, of night to find out more.

Fall 2012: New and Forthcoming Books

From How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis by N. Katherine Hayles to the 4th edition of Game Coding Complete, new and forthcoming books of interest to the electronic literature community address issues in new media and the Digital Humanitites. ...more

September Featured Work:

Mark C. Marino
Marginalia in the Library of Babel
Software: Diigo
a show of hands
Software: Literatronica

Mark C. Marino is a new media writer whose work has appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, volume 2 of the Electronic Literature Collection, The Iowa Review Web, Hypperhiz, The New River Journal, and SpringGun Press. A noted collaborative scholar in the digital humanities, he teaches writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab, including the Critical Code Studies Working Groups. Additionally, in 2011, he taught Game Studies and Critical Code Studies as a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Bergen. He is also Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization.
Marino contributes two commentaries to Authoring Software. The first is Marginalia in the Library of Babel, which uses Diigo to create a fascinating work of literary information art. "It starts with Borges. It always starts with Borges, the god of our hyperlinked souls," Marginalia begins. "I fight the solitude of the vertigo he has imagined for me, and yet I may have finally found a way out of the labyrinth."
The second is a show of hands, a work of electronic literature that Marino has also adapted into a stage production. a show of hands is written with the adaptive hypertext system Literatronica, (aka Literatronic) created by Juan B. Guiterrez. In Marino's words, a show of hands "takes advantage of the system by offering the re-shuffleable lives of a Mexican American family, with storylines chopped up telenovela-style. Yet, their fates pull them inevitably toward the May 1 Immigration Reform marches.". Visit Mark Marino's new Authoring Software page to find out more.

August, 2012

L iterature generators use a variety of computer-mediated composition systems to create algorithmic poetry or narrative. For instance, they may generate words or phrases according to a rule-based system. They may remix, recontextualize, or analyze classic texts. In various ways, they may generate words or phrases written by a contemporary poet who is utilizing the generator. They may invite users to input text that is systematically recontextualized. And in some cases the literature generator software itself is a work of art. Visit the updated Poetry Generators page to find out more.

New Authoring Software Statement:
Bill Bly: We Descend

Bill Bly is the author of the ongoing hyperfiction We Descend. Volume 1 of We Descend was published by Eastgate in 1997. Volume 2 is being finalized and will be exhibited at the Convention of the Modern Language Association in January 2013. His works also include Wyrmes Mete, a hypertext chapbook of poems, and, with John McDaid, he was awarded the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology for their music CD, Media Ecology Unplugged.
As a teacher, a founding member of the Hypertext Writers Workshop, and the recorder for the legendary Cybermountain Colloquium, Bill Bly has also been active in working with colleagues and students in the creation of electronic literature. He taught dramatic literature and theatre history at New York University (NYU) for 20 years, until he became interested in hypertext, which he taught both at NYU and at Fordham University. He also ran the writing program at Wagner College in Staten Island. Currently, he teaches Speech Communication at Northampton Community College in Pennsylvania.
In an Authoring Software statement about his densely layered hyperfiction We Descend, he sets forth the struggles and pleasures of creating hypertext. Beginning with reading Robert Coover's seminal article in New York Times Book Review, he describes how he ordered every title published by Eastgate; his Eureka moment with Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden while participating in Robert Kendall's online Hypertext Poetry & Fiction class at the New School; the creation of We Descend in Storyspace; and the creation of We Descend Volume 2 in Tinderbox.
"What started out in the early 1990s as a simple node-link hypertext has somehow turned into my life's work," Bly observes.
Visit Bill Bly's statement on We Descend to find out more.

C. T. Funkhouser: New Directions in Digital Poetry

New Directions in Digital Poetry by C.T. Funkhouser (NY: Continuum, 2012) is the first book in Continuum's new book series, International Tests in Critical Media Aesthetics. With an introduction by series founding editor Francisco J. Ricardo, New Directions in Digital Poetry focuses on computer-mediated poetry, with an emphasis on works with elements of concrete poetry, visual poetry, fluxus influence, visual typography, fragmented composition, words in motion, and words interactively revealed. The book looks also at the role of sound and image in digital poetics, for instance Jason Nelson's use of sound in I made this, you play this. we are enemies.. "Digital poetry appeals to me," Funkhouser notes, "because it offers forms of artistry inviting (and uniting) processed interconnections between sound, image and language." ...more

August Featured Work:

"Committed", in her words, "to using and abusing new technologies", Adriene Jenik is an award-winning media artist, filmmaker, and educator. Currently Professor and Director of the School of Art at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, part of Arizona State University, she has also been an active member of the Paper Tiger TV collective and Deep Dish TV.
She brings to her work -- which has been at the forefront of exploratory media and new media narrative and of public art using community-based wireless networks -- a knowledge of technology; an interest in creating new forms of literature, cinema, and performance; and a narrative sensibility that is sometimes community-based, sometimes addresses issues of gender and sexuality, and sometimes looks at the human connection in a technology-mediated world.
Adriene Jenik's narrative of the creation of MAUVE DESERT: A CD-ROM Translation, based on Nicole Brossard's le Désert Mauve, is a classic look at the process of creating a new media narrative. And -- as she continues to update the work, recently releasing a DVD documentation -- is also an example of how writers and artists work to keep their projects current in the face of changing platforms and applications.
"The beauty of words, the power of the desert, and the fears and fantasies of human evolution with technology are all still real -- and present and prescient in the work," she observes in her statement on Authoring Software. ....more

July, 2012

July Featured Link:
I ♥ E-Poetry Archive

Leonardo Flores, Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean of Assessment and Educational Technologies at University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez, is the 2012-13 Fulbright Scholar in the Digital Culture program at the University of Bergen in Norway. His creative reviews of electronic poetry are published in a superheroic one-every-day series -- updated continuously on I ♥ E-Poetry and visually archived on the I ♥ E-Poetry Archive.

New Authoring Software Statement:
Dene Grigar: Reflecting on Fallow Field: An Artist's Paper

Dene Grigar, who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera, is a Director and Associate Professor of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. She is the editor (with John Barber) of New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments, (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001) and she serves as Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Created with compelling narrative constructs that poetically address place, community, and community issues, her works explore telematic storytelling, collaboration, and performance, using multimedia and/or social media.
In her Authoring Software statement on Fallow Field, (The Iowa Web Review, September, 2004; software: Flash) Grigar documents the scholar's journey that led to an evocative narrative -- where the archetypal Texas Gulf Coast landscape is implied in text, image and sound.
Cornfields and farm earth shape the disintegration of a relationship; text is slowly revealed in brief, numbered lexias; images compliment words with artists book clarity. Resonant of Greek tragedy, with mythic characters and situation, Fallow Field leads the reader into a relentless, immersive drama. Visit Dene Grigar's statement on Fallow Field to find out more.

Summer 2012 Books From MIT Press

New and forthcoming MIT Press books of interest to the Authoring Software community include Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman, with a foreword by Matthew Fuller and including chapters by Jay David Bolter, Mark Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lev Manovich; Digital_Humanities by Peter Lunenfeld; 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 with chapters by Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C. Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample and Noah Vawter; and A Cultural History of Children's Software by Mizuko Ito. more information

Cynthia-Beth Rubin: visuals, narrative
Bob Gluck: music, programming
Layered Histories: The Wandering Bible of Marseilles
installation, Jewish Museum in Prague
Photo by Dana Cabanova, from the collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive

July Featured Resource: The Electronic Manuscript

W ith their visual impact and their surprisingly beautiful emphasis on words, medieval manuscripts, are a cogent field of study and inspiration for the creation of electronic text. Focusing on manuscript-like uses of dense and/or visual text and on the creation of electronic manuscripts to be read aloud, installed in community settings, or web-situated in online community settings, an exhibition of selected different approaches is presented in an Authoring Software feature on The Electronic Manuscript.

July Featured Work:

Aaron Reed: Blue Lacuna

Aaron A. Reed is the author of award-winning works of interactive fiction, (IF) including Whom the Telling Changed (2005) and Blue Lacuna, (2009) an IndieCade finalist. His work has been exhibited/published at the 2010 Electronic Literature Organization Conference at Brown University; the (dis)junctions Media Festival at UC Riverside; the UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts Research Center, and the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume I, among others. He is the author of Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. (Course Technology PTR, 2010)
In his work, Aaron Reed continues to experiment with new forms of electronic literature and participatory storytelling, creating a series of new works that include his recent a full length IF novel Blue Lacuna. In his statement for Authoring Software, he describes the creation of Blue Lacuna, focusing particularly on levels of interaction and how they enhance the user experience.
"All of these levels of flexibility hopefully allow the story to be about different things to different people;" he writes, "readers should feel more complicit in the outcome of the narrative through realizing that they had a hand in shaping how things turned out. My hope is that work like this actively engages the audience in acts of self-reflection, creating stories that don't just talk at their readers, but listen, too." For more about how Blue Lacuna was created, visit Aaron Reed's page on Authoring Software.

June, 2012

Milwaukee, June 25-28: 2012 ACM Hypertext and Social Media Conference to Focus on Dimensions of Links in Hypertextual Systems
Leonardo Electronic Almanac Calls for
Papers on "Generative & Algorithmic Art"

Johannes Auer and AND-OR (René Bauer, Beat Suter, and Mirjam Weder)
Searchsonata 181
Detail of a work included in the ELO2012 Media Arts Show
2012 Conference for the Electronic Literature Organization to be Held at West Virginia University from June 20-23; Media Art Exhibition Will Feature Work by 55 Artists
"Electrifying Literature: Affordances and Constraints", the 2012 Conference for the Electronic Literature Organization, (ELO2012) will be held at West Virginia University in Morgantown from June 20-23. The Conference will feature panels and presentations, workshops, readings, gallery exhibitions, and performances.
From pre-conference workshops on documenting, archiving, and authoring electronic literature, to a series of panels on E-Lit Around the World: Cultures of Electronic Literature, ELO2012 will address core issues in the past, present, and future of electronic literature. Presenters include Sandy Baldwin, Kathi Inman Berens, Philippe Bootz, Astrid Ensslin, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Dene Grigar, Fox Harrell, Carolyn Guertin, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Mark Marino, Stacey Mason, Maria Mencia, Mez, Nick Montfort, Stuart Moulthrop, Andrew Plotkin, Aaron Reed, Scott Rettberg, Giovanna di Rosario, Jessica Pressman, Alexandra Saemmer, Stephanie Strickland, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Jichen Zhu, and Rob Wittig, among many others.
The keynote will be given by media theorist, researcher, and early web creator Florian Cramer.
"The conference subtitle 'affordances and constraints' was meant to invoke the diverse approaches to the field, as well as our sense that scholars and practitioners are increasingly aware of the technology they work with," explains Conference Chair Sandy Baldwin, who is Associate Professor in the West Virginia University Department of English and Director of the West Virginia Center for Literary Computing. He observes that with this always existing yet renewed awareness, the field is more cognisant of the "constraints, or better the contexts" with which and in which electronic literature is created.
Curated by Dene Grigar, Associate Professor and Director of the Creative Media & Digital Culture Program, Washington State University Vancouver, and Sandy Baldwin, the ELO2012 Media Art Show will feature the work of 55 artists from Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Korea, Norway, Switzerland, the US, and the UK. Held across the conference site in venues including the Monongalia Arts Center, the Arts Monongahela Gallery, WVU Downtown Library, WVU's Colson Hall, and the Hazel Ruby McQuain Amphitheater, the 2012 Media Art Show will also host retrospectives of the work of five artists: Alan Bigelow, J. R. Carpenter, M.D. Coverley, Judy Malloy, and Jason Nelson, as well as a commissioned geo-locative work by Jeff Knowlton.
Complete Story including program and registration information and links

How New Media Narrative is Created

Commentary created during the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference; during the 2008 Seminar on Electronic Literature in Europe; for the Computers and Writing 2009 Online Sessions, hosted by the University of California at Davis; and currently by invitation.

Mark Amerika
FILMTEXT 2.0
http://www.markamerika.com/filmtext
Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator,
Pro Tools, Live, Audio Gulch, Final Cut Pro,
iMovie, QuickTime

Mark Amerika's work -- that includes the seminal net art trilogy GRAMMATRON, PHON:E:ME, and FILMTEXT, as well as experimental artists books, cult novels, video and films-- has been published and/or exhibited widely including the Whitney Biennial of American Art; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Black Ice Books; the Walker Art Center; the FILMWINTER Festival, Stuttgart; transmediale, Berlin; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, where he had a retrospective in the fall of 2009.
Amerika is a Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the founder and publisher of Alt-X and the electronic book review.
More information about his work is available at http://www.markamerika.com
FILMTEXT 2.0
FILMTEXT 2.0 is an elaborate work of net art that investigates emerging forms of electronic literature in relation to interactive cinema, live A/V performance, games, and remix culture. It remediates formal experiments from older media like film, video art, and the visual/metafiction novel. This is partly why we decided to use technology that enabled us to a) build a serious library of audio/visual assets for the "reader"/interactive participant to remix as part of their own journey through the site and b) create a customized interface for reader-triggered narrative performance.
As with much of the metafiction published in the 60s and 70s, the work self-consciously refers to its various technological adhesions and the prosthetic aesthetics that are often at play in the construction of electronic literature. There are even self-contained "text readers" that deploy some of the early instances of the "codework" writing style that suggest how authors "tell target" their source material for emotional manipulation. In FT 2.0, this is generally achieved by defamiliarizing the early action scripting language that enabled early versions of Flash to create unique animation effects and behaviors.

Stefan Müller Arisona
Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable
Soundium, Ableton Live, Modul 8

Swiss new media artist/researcher Stefan Müller Arisona works with real-time multimedia systems and live multimedia composition and performance software. His audio-visual performance narratives have been shown and performed internationally. Currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair for Information Architecture of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, his research includes the development of the Soundium multimedia performance platform; (with Steve Gibson) as well as mathematical modeling for the performance of musical gestures and interactive software systems for urban design and simulation. He is co-editor, with Randy Adams and Steve Gibson, of Transdisciplinary Digital Art - Sound, Vision and the New Screen
The work he performed at the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Vancouver, WA is a 21st Century reenactment of The Exploding Plastic Inevitable a seminal multimedia work that was originally created and performed by Andy Warhol with Lou Reed's The Velvet Underground and Nico in the 1960's.
More information: San Francisco Performance of Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable at Swissnex
Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable
Since Steve Gibson and I are going to present the Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable show (also accompanied by a live audio and visuals workshop) during the conference, it might be best to give some background for the software used there.
Authoring tools we're using

audio: Ableton Live
visuals (Steve): Modul 8
visuals (Stefan): Soundium, see below.

Steve may have to add a few things, he did a lot of custom stuff for for other projects, such as Virtual DJ.
At this point I can give more information about the custom software Soundium:

Soundium is a research multimedia authoring and processing framework. It has been used for many live visuals performances and several digital art installations. However, it is not really an "end user product" and requires a quite a bit of multimedia processing knowledge in order to use it.
written in java and c++, and based on open source software: linux, gcc, x11, ffmpeg, etc.
available for free download
further infos are at: http://www.corebounce.org/wiki/Soundium/Front

a publication list is available at: http://www.corebounce.org/wiki/Main/Publications

Alan Bigelow
What They Said
http://www.webyarns.com/WhatTheySaid.html
Flash, Sound Studio, Photoshop

Alan Bigelow combines images, text, audio and video to create interactive web-based digital fictions that address contemporary issues including philosophy, religion and the uses of mass media.
His work has been published and/or exhibited at Turbulence.org; Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts; Freewaves; Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center; The New River; and E-Poetry 2007.
A Professor in the Humanities Department at Medaille College in upstate NY, he was recently a visiting online lecturer in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, UK
What They Said
Work Description:
What They Said (2008) is an online work which is a commentary on mass media and its use of authoritarian messages, both outright and subliminal, to influence culture and political will. The work is created in Flash and uses a synthesized combination of text, images, video, and audio; its interface is a hybrid of television and radio visual elements intended to enhance the user experience and require their participation in the viewing of the work.
What They Said is meant not just as a commentary on mass media, and how it is used, both intentionally and by media programmers' blind acquiescence to current political paradigms, to distort meaning and manipulate citizens worldwide. It also suggests our own culpability, as the ones who turn on the media devices and listen to the messages. We bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of these messages, and we are the ones, if we have the will, to turn them off.
To progress through What They Said, the viewer must first turn on the media "device." They then use a slider, reminiscent of an old-style radio channel indicator, to "read" the various messages. These messages--instructions for work, family life, cultural beliefs, and aesthetics--are archetypal in nature and use a linguistic double-speak favored by many governments, present and past. The viewer's choice of messages is random, snatched, using the slider, from the static ether visually (and auditorially) presented in the piece. When the last message is read, the piece automatically generates a short closing visual followed by a subtitle. Total viewing time is approximately five minutes.
Media:
This work, like all my other work, was created in Flash, with imported files that were edited in Sound Studio and Photoshop. Flash is a very resilient and robust application that is relatively easy to learn and remarkably obedient to the unusual demands of digital storytelling.
Right now, the most interesting challenge to me (other than creating new work!) is how to move online Flash works into the mainstream of gallery shows. In the United States, at least, it appears that many galleries are not used to considering online works as representative material for exhibitions; when asked, though, many are intrigued and ask to see the work, even when it is not within their usual call for submissions.
Part of their reluctance to accept web works/Net Art is the difficulty of pricing such work for sale. Rhizome.org has a revealing interview with Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects on this topic
( Interview with Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects)

Jay Bushman
The Loose-Fish Project
Twitter

Exploring transmedia public narratives that move between Twitter, Blog, and paperback, Jay Bushman creates multiple pathways to retold narrative in his Loose-Fish Project that was featured at the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Vancouver, Washington.
Bushman is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker/new media story-teller whose work also includes the short film Orson Welles Sells His Soul to the Devil , which was screened at Film Fest New Haven and the Berlin Film Festival, among other venues.
The Loose-Fish Project
The goal of the Loose-Fish Project is to use various web-based media -- ideally free or low-cost -- as a platform for telling stories adapted from classic and public domain works. Ideally, the fictional story content becomes embedded in the non-fictive world of the wider web. One way of describing it is like an Alternate Reality Game, without the Game portion. The media for each story is chosen to mirror or augment
some aspect of the story.
Loose-Fish #1: "The Good Captain"
http://www.goodcaptain.com
"The Good Captain" is a science-fiction adaptation of the Herman Melville novella "Benito Cereno." Since the story relies heavily on the realtime, flawed POV of its main character, the medium I chose to use was the web service Twitter. Twitter limits its users to updates of 140 characters of text.
In writing the story, I relied on an adaptation method that I use regularly -- I downloaded a public domain e-text version of the original story, and pasted it into Microsoft Word, increasing the font to 16 point and the line spacing to Double, then printing out the story on three-holed punch paper and putting into a binder. The large text and double-spacing allowed me to focus on the line-by-line, beat-by-beat of the original, and the facing blank page is where I wrote the adaptation of. That text was then entered into a specially formatted Word document, using a monospaced font and tweaked margins so that 140 characters of text took up exactly 2 lines of text. When the full story was written, this text was transferred to an Excel spreadsheet, where each grid equaled one story update. Once the story began, I would copy a spreadsheet cell into the Twitter interface and update the main page http://twitter.com/goodcaptain anywhere from 8 to 15 times per day. The full story took four months to unfold.
Users of Twitter have many ways of getting their content. The best -- for purposes of this story - are desktop-based clients that display a feed of the user's friends. Embedded in between these updates, they would get a chunk of story. Other users can get their Twitter messages on their phones via text messages or via IM. This was less successful for the story, as these users tended to mute their Twitter responses while asleep or while doing other activities, and not go back through their cache.
One thing that using Twitter for a storytelling mechanism required was a more frequent restating of the given circumstances of what was going on. When giving the full text to a couple of friends for comment, they read the whole story in one sitting, and commented that there was a lot of redundancy. But what might look like half a page of text on a page would actually dribble out to readers in the course of two weeks.
Another interesting thing that I encountered was that many readers apologized to me because they were unsure if they were "reading it correctly," which I took to be a by-product of expanding storytelling to an unfamiliar format. For these readers, I put together a paperback book version of the story --
( http://www.lulu.com/content/2322661 ),
a downloadable PDF, and a version for the Amazon Kindle.

J. R. Carpenter
Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR (2006)
Python scripts adapted from story generators by Nick Montfort

Born on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, J. R. Carpenter, long time resident of Montréal, now based in South West England, makes innovative web-based works that combine graphic images, information and words to create narratives of life, adventure, and community.
Her work has been published in the Electronic Literature Collection v.1 and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum; The Art Gallery, Tasmania; The University of Maryland; Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland; Kipp Gallery, Indiana University of Pennsylvania; E-Poetry, Barcelona, Spain; the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol, England; and The Banff Centre, Canada.
Her print novel Words the Dog Knows was published by Conundrum Press in 2008, and her hybrid code-narrative print book GENERATION[S] is forthcoming from Traumawien, 2010.
J.R. Carpenter's work is interesting and entertaining, creatively using software and narrative to take the reader on explorations of community, animal companions, and the lives of writers and artists. In her 2008 statement for Authoring Software, she describes the creation of Entre Ville, which uses an interactive graphic as an opening interface to a poem about a Montréal neighborhood. In her 2010 statement, she adapts a story generator, written in Python by Nick Montfort, to tell a story of hermit-crab human interactions. Story generators use a variety of computer-mediated composition systems to create poetry or narrative. For instance, they may generate plot or characters, or they may ask users to input text that is the systematically recontextualized, creating, as in Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR, a software-mediated story.
More information about J. R. Carpenter can be found on her homepage at http://luckysoap.com
J.R. Carpenter: Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR
Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie and JR is one of a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two different 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort and documented at
http://grandtextauto.org/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/
The other stories in this series (so far) are: I've Died and Gone to Devon and Auto-Autobiography. For more information of those, visit:
http://luckysoap.com/statements/storygenerations.html
Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR documents my adventures with Ingrid Bachmann's hermit crab Pookie, also known as Pookie 14, during June of 2009. Pookie is a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann's imagination. Pookie already has a website. And I've already written about past collaborations between Bachmann and Pookie: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web. But I'd never spent any time alone with a hermit crab before. I started chronicling my adventures with Pookie as sentences written on a blackboard and then started feeding those sentences into one of Nick's story generators written in Python. The generator uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed, and the remaining text is presented as the story.
To read Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, download this file to your desktop: http://luckysoap.com/stories/PookieAndJR.zip. Unzip the file and then follow the instructions below. On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a terminal Window, typing "cd Desktop", and typing "python story2.py". The generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6/.
Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press Return, a new version of the story will appear. Here are a few examples:
Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Previously, Pookie and JR had only ever met at parties.
Pookie hides in his cup when JR is in her cups.
JR is patient; Pookie has to crawl before he can walk.
Pookie is actually pretty social, for a hermit crab.
Every three days or so, JR waters the ferns.
Live and let live, Pookie's nonchalant attitude seems to suggest.
When Pookie digs in the night, he makes quite a racket.
Late one night, Pookie and JR listen to a chained dog's howls.
JR hasn't been sleeping much lately.
To be continued.
Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
JR has a friend over for drinks and forgets to introduce Pookie.
Pookie only plays in his water dish when he has an audience.
JR changes Pookie's water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
Pookie has turned JR off of shellfish for life.
The cafe across the street is only noisy until eleven or so.
Do you hear that? JR asks Pookie.
JR hasn't been sleeping much lately.
JR is in hiding.
To be continued.
Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Pookie slowly comes out of his shell, so to speak.
Pookie has many shells to choose from.
JR changes Pookie's water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
JR crumbles Pookie's hermit crab food pellets into bite-sized bits.
When Pookie digs in the night, he makes quite a racket.
Pookie keeps his thoughts to himself.
To be continued.
Of Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, Nick Montfort writes:
" J. R. Carpenter, author of Words the Dog Knows, Entre Ville, The Cape, and other fine works of e-lit, print, and xerography, has delightfully re-purposed one of my 1k story generators to have it tell stories involving her and a hermit crab named Pookie. The program has grown to about 2k, but it uses the same simple (and surprisingly effective) method as my first generator does: It simply removes all but 5-9 sentences from a sequence, eliding some of what's been written. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is."
Nick Montfort -- "Story Generation with Pookie and JR"
In July 2009, NYC-based artist/programmer Ravi Rajakumar ported the Python script into Javascript to create this web browser friendly version of Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR
In October 2010, Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, along with three other generators I've adapted from scripts by Nick Montfort, will appear in print in a hybrid code narrative book called GENERATION[S] published by Vienna-based Traumawien. There was only one rule in creating GENERATION[S]: No new texts. All the texts in this book were previously published in some way. The texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators' source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. Most of the sentences in the fiction generators started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some led to comments that led to responses that led to new texts. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION[S]

J. R. Carpenter
Entre Ville (2006)
HTML, DHTML, javascript, Quicktime
http://luckysoap.com/entreville

Born on a farm in rural Nova Scotia, J. R. Carpenter, a Canadian writer and artist now based in the UK, creates innovative web-based works that combine graphic images, information and words to create narratives of life, adventure, and community.
Her work has been published in the Electronic Literature Collection v.1 and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art; Montréal Museum of Fine Arts; Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum; The Art Gallery, Tasmania; The University of Maryland; and Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland.
Her print novel Words the Dog Knows was published by Conundrum Press in 2008, and her hybrid code-narrative print book GENERATION[S] is forthcoming from Traumawien, 2010.
Entre Ville
The most important authoring tool used in the creation of Entre Ville is the pen.The main interface was drawn with a pen in a notebook in 1992 while I was apartment-hunting in the Mile End neighbourhood of Montreal, the neighbourhood Entre Ville is set in. I saved the physical notebook because I liked the drawing, though I had no idea what if anything I'd ever do with it.
I also used a pen to write the poem, "Saint-Urbain Street Heat," which Entre Ville is based on. I almost always write with a pen first, before editing on the computer. In particular, a Japan Sailor fountain pen. "Saint-Urbain Street Heat" was written in 2004 during a record-breaking heat wave in Montreal. I went down to Vermont to escape and wrote and rewrote many drafts with the Japan Sailor in a hammock with no computer access. Although I did eventually edit the poem slightly in Microsoft Word, I think the poem retains a certain structure that might have been quite different if I'd been working on the computer all along.
The poem "Saint-Urbain Street Heat" was published in an online journal based in the UK called NthPosition in August 2005. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so I decided I wanted to do more with the text - expand it into an electronic literature project. I borrowed a video camera and started shooting footage in the network of back alleyways referred to in the text.
In the fall of 2005 I was commissioned by Oboro, an artist-run center and new media lab in Montreal, to create a new web based work for the 50th anniversary of the Conseil des Arts de Montreal. The commission included a month's worth of time in the Oboro New Media Lab, which is where I edited the 17 Quicktime Videos included in Entre Ville. I edited in FinalCut Pro and used Cleaner to export and crop the videos - approximately half are cropped to unconventional shapes.
As I was editing the videos I uncovered the old notebook with the line-drawing of Mile End apartment buildings that I'd drawn in 1992 when first moving into the neighborhood. I decided this would be the interface and planned all the rest of the content around it.
I used a now ancient version of Photoshop to splice the notebook drawing into small sections so that they could become roll-overs. I also used Photoshop to process all the other interface images. Some images were made from scanned objects, but most of the interface images were derived from digital photos taken expressly for this project, and/or video stills taken from the footage shot for this project.
For the web implementation I used Homesite, an old web authoring tool that has since been absorbed into the Dreamweaver codebase. I prefer the text only web authoring environment of Homesite and have been using it for so long I see no reason to change. When I first started making web-based work there were no WYSIWYG editors and I never got used to them. I spent a number of years working in the software industry and came to loathe the version release sales model. Since then I have been working entirely independently - I have no money to update software and do everything possible to avoid software solutions.
In Entre Ville I use a number of found, recycled and re-purposed DHTML and javascript scripts. I enjoy hunting down scripts, adapting them, and patching them together. This recycled and collaged sensibility is in keeping with the visual aesthetic of the work. It's also part of the do-it-yourself culture that first attracted me to the internet. I learned everything I know about coding from "View Source" and continue to enjoy figuring out new scripts by taking them apart and putting them back together again.
The text of the poem "Saint-Urbain Street Heat" appears in an < iframe > overlapping the notebook drawing. It scrolls with a DHTML script that I've used in other projects. The main interface component, the notebook drawing, uses a simple image rollover script to call up popup windows containing Quicktime videos and other subsections of the poem. Other small images float around the notebook drawings in relative position < div >. A number of these small images, as well as a few text areas (such as the description line under the main title) are nested in data arrays set to display randomly, so that whenever one views the page one sees a slightly different combination of images and texts. I intend this to mimic the way the neighbourhood always looks a little bit different every time one goes out into it.
I have been told over and over again that Entre Ville should have been made in Flash. I have no interest in Flash. For one thing, I like the idea that the internet is all made out of text. I'm a writer so I want my texts to be text in internet terms. I also like the vagaries of HTML, DHTML and javascript. I aim for cross-browser / cross-platform compatiblity, scaleablility and graceful fails. It seems important to keep in mind that everyone will see things slightly differently - because of their browsers and platforms and also because we are all human beings.

M.D. Coverley
Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day
http://califia.us/avegypt.htm
Toolbook, Director

California native Marjorie C. Luesebrink, who writes under the name of M. D. Coverley, has been creating electronic literature since 1995. Her work has been published by Eastgate; The Iowa Review Web; New River; Salt Hill; The Salt River Review; Cauldron & Net; Artifacts; and The Blue Moon Review. It has also been featured at the Guggenheim, the Digital Arts Center at UCLA, Brown University, and trAce, and she is one of the writers selected for a retrospective at the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference.
She is a Professor at School of Humanities and Languages, Irvine Valley College in Irvine, California, where she teaches creative writing.
Using words, images, animation, and audio to interface complex narratives of history, culture, and myth, M. D. Coverley has created a series of hypermedia novels that include Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day and Califia, a story of five generations of Californians. (published by Eastgate in 2000)
For her Authoring Software statement, The Making of Tin Towns and other Excel Fictions, she documents her new work, Tin Towns, an information-intensive narrative that explores loss/losses in a technological framework, from the role of tin shortages in the demise of the Bronze Age to the technologies of human and site care systems in the under-reported aftermath of the Fukushima disaster. Focusing on the complicated process of selecting authoring systems for new media in a changing software, platform and interface environment, in her statement she discusses the process of creating a work of electronic literature using the spreadsheet application Excel.
For more information about M.D. Coverley, visit her homepage at http://califia.us/

Egypt: The Book of Going Forth by Day - is a CD-ROM - based, extended narrative in hypermedia. Because of the complexity, it was conceived and written, from the beginning, with a variety of software programs. The most stubborn problem, all along, however, was trying to find an overall authoring program that would continue to be viable and supported. The following notes were written in fall, 2002. They account for several years of struggle - attempts to get Egypt written on some kind of secure platform. Since 2002, of course, Director has seen a couple of new versions and has been sold to Adobe, a company that is not keeping it current as they have another creative Suite (which does include Flash - but not Director). And so, despite significant effort, Egypt exists on a platform that will not be supported in the future.
Egypt is an extreme example, of course, because it uses text, sound,
image, flash panels, animations, elaborate architecture, and so forth.
But the search for semi-permanent platforms is endemic in Electronic
Literature. ...more
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Steve Ersinghaus
The Life of Geronimo Sandoval
http://www.steveersinghaus.com/SSP/Sandoval.html
Storyspace

Steve Ersinghaus is a digital artist, fiction writer, and poet. He is the author with of 100 Days: 100 drawings 100 poems; (with Carianne Mack) Stoning Field; The Life of Geronimo Sandoval; and the hypertext poem That Night. (Drunken Boat, Spring 2009)
Steve Ersinghaus earned his Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Texas-El Paso. He teaches writing, literature, and new media at Tunxis Community College in Farmington, Connecticut.
The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, a novel in hypertext, took approximately four years to complete. I had originally begun the work with a fairly conventional plan: to write a book-based novel. I began with an image, two people talking by a river in southern New Mexico, and quickly realized that the novel and its characters wanted a different form: the novel needed a form appropriate and implicit to the voice of its first person narrator/hero, Ham Sandoval.
I found the form with the help of Eastgate Systems' Storyspace. The initial image of The Life of Geronimo Sandoval became not merely a place to begin writing the novel but an episode within a larger narrative that could appear at any appropriate time given Ham Sandoval's method of storytelling. Storyspace because the appropriate tool to explore Ham Sandoval.
Storyspace is hypertext authoring software. I would also call it an authoring framework. It provides not just the requirements of a word processor or a means of reading and presenting hypertext, but an environment for creating, organizing, revising, visualizing, and distributing hyperlinked works. I could also write the previous sentence this way: Storyspace can be the proper tool for works of art that demand hypertext as an implicit form. What Storyspace provided for Sandoval was a means of finding the voice and logic of the narrative.
In Storyspace's work environment I could find sequences and sections swiftly and accurately and work with multiple writing spaces simultaneously. With Storyspace, the writer may employ a variety of link types to the text as well as control how links behave under certain conditions. Storyspace provides map, chart, and outline views that provide flexible means of examining narrative space. Keyword assignment, search facility, and the ability to import other digital media into the environment make Storyspace a powerful creative tool with ample aesthetic possibilities not just for the study of technology but of the human lifeworld.

Caitlin Fisher
Andromeda: augmented reality poem
Co-winner of the Vinaròs 4th International Digital Literature Award 2008
SnapDragon

Caitlin Fisher holds a Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture in the Department of Film at York University, Toronto. A co-founder of York's Future Cinema Lab, her research investigates the future of narrative through explorations of interactive storytelling and interactive cinema in Augmented Reality environments.
Her work is poetic, exploratory, interesting, and innovative, currently combining the development of authoring software with evocative literary constructs. She completed one of Canada's first born-digital hypertextual dissertations in 2000, and her hypermedia novella, These Waves of Girls, won the International Electronic Literature Award for Fiction in 2001. Most recently, her augmented reality poem, Andromeda, was co-awarded the 2008 International Cuidad de Vinaròs Prize for Electronic Literature in the digital poetry category.
In her statement, Caitlin Fisher talks about the development of the Snapdragon authoring environment in her AR Lab at York University, the creation of Andromeda with Snapdragon, and the creation of the subsequent performative version, Andromeda2.
More information can be found in her homepage at http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/
Andromeda
Andromeda is an augmented reality journey poem about stars, loss and women named Isabel, enabled by a unique software solution and a custom marker library. Augmented reality overlays digital imagery on physical objects, and, in this piece, the power of robust, multiple, simultaneous fiducial recognition has been made easy to work with through the development of a new expressive tool for the creation of simple, 2D augmented reality pieces: SnapDragonAR software, created in my AR Lab at York University, Toronto. SnapDragon is a unique authoring environment and a wonderful medium for poetic expression.
Andromeda uses a found pop-up book, overlaid with augmented reality markers and the poem is brought to life when a reader, using a camera attached to a computer, unlocks the textual, video and audio elements associated with the markers -- the basic idea being that the camera "sees" these symbols being explored and overlays digital content. The resulting poem can be viewed on the computer screen or through a head-mounted display (probably the coolest way to see it; there is something uncanny about holding paper in our hands and watching it come to life when the piece is mediated via a computer screen where we are used to seeing visual trickery, the effect isn't quite as magical. But I digress.)
Andromeda is the first fully realized poem written using the software, but is part of a larger suite of poems, tabletop theatre, web-viewable and immersive augmented reality fictions I'm building, and software development is proceeding iteratively with the creation of these new pieces as we troubleshoot and new features appear on the wish list. In the case of Andromeda, when it came time to submit the Vinaròs Digital Literature contest, I hadn't quite worked out some kinks with the audio; multiple marker recognition was working perfectly, but once the sound associated with a particular marker started to play, it would loop endlessly, making it more like a choral poem. I did have a work-around in mind: making the video clips longer and soundless at the end so they would keep playing but there would be no sound to drown out the sound associated with subsequent markers detected by the camera. But when I compared the two versions of Andromeda that resulted, I actually found that I had grown to like the layered audio effect and I kept it in. Still, you can only have so many pieces like that, so the first new feature added after Andromeda was finished was sound activated through proximity detection; in the current version of SnapDragon, the closer the marker is to the camera, the louder the sound. Markers detected further away are silent or whisper.
Andromeda2
A subsequent version of the poem involved performance and took advantage of the flexibility of fiducials (they can be printed on a regular printer at any size) to explode the first version of the poem outside the confines of the pop-up book. Markers were printed on large sheets of paper that could be shuffled, held, played with and combined and recombined to create new poetic possibilities. There were 41 lexias that made up the content of the poem (each with a granularity of roughly a stanza, 30 seconds of video or spoken word etc.). I held up some markers and taped others to the floor and walls and then walked "through" the poem with an industrial point-grey camera and projected the resulting poem, inhabited in a unique way, on the wall for the audience to experience. In this sense Andromeda2 was a magic mirror AR installation; the audience saw me interacting with the paper symbols and, at the same time, they saw me, via projector, interacting with the same pieces of paper, only on screen they were able to see me alongside still and moving images at multiple scales, stars and fish and roadside diners, and see scrolling textual elements, too:
and he takes her to the room at the top of those inn stairs
amidst stares
all in one breath it's late, dark outside
they undress, get in bed
and finally she's quiet, through with shouldering the weeping
and they are near that
tentative, anxiety-washed pinprick of sleep
the bed cold, hard, the sheets worried,
in their heads already driving the car through to Wales
they've left the hotel, better yet, they've set all clocks back three days and the boat docks in England and his mother is alive, saved as a consequence of the joyful news of a marriage, or else she flies on the back of a bird and brings back presents from the dead. As They sleep.
How does it work?
Computer vision techniques provide a low cost solution for working with this medium. Black and white markers -- sometimes called fiducials -- are used to mark coordinates in a real scene. Think of the markers as a library of symbols that the camera can read. There are many marker systems available but SnapDragon uses the Mfd-5 marker library, a particularly robust tracking system that tracks well even in low light that was developed by our collaborator Dr. Mark Fiala. It is being used exclusively by our lab to create new tools for writers of electronic literature, artists and designers. The software itself was created by Andrew Roth and Andrei Rotenstein, under the direction of Caitlin Fisher and in collaboration Dr. Mark Fiala.
SnapDragon is a stand-alone application built as a plug-in to Max/MSP (but you don't need to have Max/MSP to run it). We can't offer you the Max code, but we create custom interfaces depending on the project or installation we're working on. SnapDragon has the most popular of these features. The full feature version allows you to scale the video in real time, move the video right off the marker or pull video from online sources - enabling you to contextualize your elit with current weather reports or news headlines. If you would like to make an augmented reality poem of your own, SnapDragonAR is available for free trial and purchase here: www.futurestories.ca/snapdragon (don't ask why it's not just open source - I wish it could be, but it's a long story. We do have other AR software that is open source). Want to learn more about the software and see some documentation? try here:
http://www.yorku.ca/caitlin/futurestories/snapdragon

Chris Funkhouser
MIDIPoetry Songs
Software: MIDIPoet

Chris Funkhouser performing with MIDIPoet at Grant Recital Hall,
Brown University, June 4, 2010
photo: Amy Hufnagel Chris Funkhouser: Making MIDIPoetry

Chris Funkhouser is a new media poet and scholar whose work has explored hypertext, Moos, and digital performance, among other computer-mediated literary forms. His evocative electronic poetry has been performed and/or exhibited Internationally, and he has been a Digital Poet-in-Residence at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. An Associate Professor in Humanities and Director of the Communication and Media Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Funkhouser is the author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995.
In his statement for Authoring Software, he describes how his recent sound and projection "songs" were created from vast databases of related words and phrases -- using Eugenio Tisselli's MIDIPoet software. About a series of works he performed at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn, he observes in his statement that "Variation, particularly in these four works, is lively and effective since the appearance of each word is directly connected to the musical rhythm, making perhaps the synchronization between even more recognizable and more powerful in effect -- as the sound moves, the words moves." Visit Chris Funkhouser's statement on Making MIDIPoetry to find out more.

Susan M. Gibb
Paths
Flash, Tinderbox, Storyspace

Susan M. Gibb holds an A.S. degree in English from Tunxis Community College and is currently supplementing with courses based in Creative Writing, and New Media. She is a writer of fiction as well as non fiction and poetry, has served as editor of otto, the Tunxis literary journal, and has produced and edited a traditional archery magazine sold in the U.S. and abroad. Her workshop session on "The Hypertext Effect: The Transfiguration of Writing and The Writer" was presented at Hypertext 2008 in Pittsburgh, PA.
She is always working on hypertext projects using Storyspace and Tinderbox software and exporting for presentation online, has published some work on her website, Hypercompendia, and is currently participating in 100 Days: Summer 2009, a collaboration of individual artists producing a work each day for 100 days. Susan Gibb also writes online on her websites dedicated to Literature, Writing, Hypertext, New Media forms, and life's "story moments."
My introduction to hypertext was in a contemporary fiction course and there was a bit of resistance to what appeared to be a jungle of story. However, it intrigued me enough as a writer to want to master not only the reading but the writing of narrative into the hypertext environment.
With the Storyspace program offered by Eastgate Systems in mind, I prepared by planning out what I felt was the perfect story to be told in hypertext. Paths is a story of a couple who fell in love in college and who may or may not have ended up together. What other medium could so entwine the coulda's, woulda's, and shoulda's of such a basic choice in life?
Once I got the Storyspace software, it was a matter of transferring what were basically four paths of stories into the format. Very, very easy to do. Even though the manual is one of the best I'd ever encountered in its pointed instructions and illustrations, the software was so well arranged that it wasn't necessary to consult except for specific maneuvers.
I soon realized that the structure I had envisioned for the story was not using Storyspace to its optimum performance capabilities with its opportunities for exploration into time and character. The excellent Map View was the best to work into as it enabled the placement of the parts within the whole. All the originally planned links were severed and I let the stories flow into each other from more natural intersecting points. Past and present have no certainty in this narrative and the interplay of memory and perspective opened a playground for true character development. 75 writing spaces -- or text boxes -- stretched into 300, all because the event of hypertext invites the author to tarry in an area of the mind that might otherwise be kept from the reader.
I am working on more in the Storyspace software and find that as with the first effort, the format focuses on what is vital to a very small portion of story without hindering the creative flow. Particularly in editing, I've found that the writing improves as it seeks the most concise yet imaginative manner of telling a tale; each box of words being self-contained and asking the writer, as much as the reader, to linger a bit, just as does the form of a poem.
The full journey of writing in Storyspace has been documented in my Hypercompendia weblog and can be read at
Storyspace Index

Dene Grigar: "On the Art of Producing a Phenomenally Short Fiction Collection over the Net using Twitter:
The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project"

Dene Grigar, who works in the area of electronic literature, emergent technology and cognition, and ephemera, is an Associate Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver. Created with compelling narrative constructs that poetically address place, community, and community issues, her works -- including Fallow Field: A Story in Two Parts and When Ghosts Will Die, (with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson) -- explore telematic storytelling, collaboration, and performance, using multimedia and/or social media. She is the editor (with John Barber) of New Words: Exploring Pathways for Writing about and in Electronic Environments,(Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2001) and she serves as Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and Vice President of the Electronic Literature Organization.

In her essay for Authoring Software, Grigar describes the creation of The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project, a performative collaborative work for which she edited her stories about living in Dallas, Texas into twitter-sized literary texts and posted one every hour for 24 hours -- inviting others to contribute. "The project resulted in what can be considered an international anthology of micro-fiction comprised of over 85 stories and submitted by over 25 participants from five countries." she notes.

As a central part of her discussion of the project, Dene Grigar looks at the place of micro-fiction in literary and new media culture, raising questions, which, although they may be approached differently by other new media writers -- it is a complex and diverse field -- serve to invoke a much needed larger discussion of approaches to electronic literature. Visit her Authoring Software page on The 24-Hr. Micro-Elit Project" to find out more.

Fox Harrell
The GRIOT System

Researcher, writer and artist, Fox Harrell is Associate Professor of Digital Media at MIT, joint in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Comparative Media Studies Program, and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has also been an Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the department of Literature, Communication, and Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and worked as an interactive television producer and as a game designer.
Fox Harrell's work focuses on the development of computer-media-narrative and authoring software that uses elements of interactivity, social critique, cross-cultural narrative; cognitive semantics; gaming; and the social aspects of user-interface design. His seminal GRIOT System uses code to create/generate interactive and significant "polymorphic" poems -- such as The Girl with Skin of Haints and Seraphs and Walking Blues Changes Undersea. GRIOT (named for West African storytellers who often incorporate improvisation in their performances) uses a combination of knowledge engineering, interactivity, cultural identity, and Joseph Goguen's mathematical approach to meaning representation called algebraic semiotics. Harrell has also worked with Kenny Chow to create a "new form of concrete polymorphic poetry inspired by Japanese renku poetry, iconicity of Chinese character forms, and generative models from contemporary art." [1]
His work provides a basis for interactive and generative multimedia systems. In his book chapter for Second Person [2] Harrell has stated that his "longer-term project involves using this technical and theoretical framework as a basis for creating further computational narrative artworks where in addition to textual input, users can interact with graphical or gamelike interfaces. This user interaction will still drive the generation of new metaphors and concepts, but along with text will also result in blends of graphical and/or audio media." Indeed, his recent projects such as the in-progress Living Liberia Fabric, an interactive narrative peace memorial affiliated with the Truth and Reconciliation of Liberia, have fulfilled this early objective.
Fox Harrell's work has been published, performed and exhibited internationally, including the University of Toronto Press, MIT Press, Elsevier, Springer-Verlag, CTheory, The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, The Fibreculture Journal, and the Electronic Literature Organization, and he is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." He is currently completing Phantasmal Media: An Approach to Imagination, Computation, and Expression, a book for MIT Press.
_______
1. D. Fox Harrell and Kenny K. N. Chow
"Generative Visual Renku: Poetic Multimedia Semantics with the GRIOT System"
HYPERRHIZ.06, Special Issue: Visionary Landscapes, Summer 2008
2. D. Fox Harrell, GRIOT's Tales of Haints and Seraphs, A Computational Narrative Generation System" in Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, eds., Second Person Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, MIT Press, 2010
Fox Harrell: The GRIOT System
The GRIOT system was invented by Fox Harrell, and it comprises technical support for implementing narrative and other forms of computational discourse with the following characteristics: generative content, semantics-based interaction, reconfigurable discourse structure, and strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding. Strong cognitive and socio-cultural grounding here implies that meaning is considered to be contextual, dynamic, and embodied. The formalizations used derive from cognitive linguistics theories with such notions of meaning. Furthermore, the notion of narrative here is not biased toward one particular cultural model. Using semantically based media elements as a foundation, an author can implement a range of culturally specific or experimental narrative structures.

Figure 1: The GRIOT System Architecture
The GRIOT Architecture
The following describes the GRIOT architecture as used in initial text-based experiments with narratively structured poetry. User input, in the form of keywords, is used to select the conceptual space network from a set of ontologies, called "theme domains," that each contain sets of axioms about a particular theme. These axioms consist of binary relations between sorted constants. This conceptual space network, called an "input diagram," consists of a generic space, two input spaces, and mappings from the generic space to each of the input spaces. The input diagram is passed as input to the ALLOY conceptual blending algorithm. ALLOY is the core component of GRIOT that is responsible for generating new content. An "output diagram," consisting of a blended conceptual space and morphisms from the input spaces to the blended space, is output by ALLOY. Concepts are combined according to principles that produce "optimal" blends. Typically this optimality results in "common sense" blends, but for particular poetic effects different, "dis-optimal" criteria can be utilized. "Phrase templates," granular fragments of poetry organized by narrative clause type, are combined with the output of ALLOY (converted to natural language by mappings called "grammar morphisms") to result in poems that differ not only in how the phrases are selected and configured, but in the meaning being expressed by the blended concepts. The phrases are said to be "instantiated" when they are combined with the natural language representations of the blends by replacing "wildcards" in the text. These wildcards are tokens representing where generated output can be incorporated; they also contain variables that specify how they are to be replaced, e.g. constraining the choice of theme domains, or selecting the lexical form to be mapped to by the grammar morphism. These templates are selected according to an automaton called a "Narrative Structure Machine," which also structures the reading of user input.

Multimedia Semantics
The GRIOT system can also dynamically compose modular graphical elements. This functionality is split between a server (implemented in LISP) to handle semantics and graphical discourse structuring and a client (implemented in Processing) to handle graphics processing and user input as depicted in the Figure below.

Figure 2: The Generative GRIOT Multimedia Semantics System
The server consists of the following components:

1) Semantic annotation
2) Discourse structuring rules
3) Priority morphism (matching) algorithm
4) Image layout data structure
This extends elements of the GRIOT system with an algorithm to judge fitness (matching) of images to be composed and a layout structure for multimedia images in addition to the standard discourse structuring rules. The client consists of the following components:

5)Graphical assets
6) Graphical layout rules
7) Duplicate image layout data structure
8) GUI input and output protocols

Graphical assets are actual image data files. These assets are described on the server side using semantic annotation. (the relationship between the metadata and image data files is indicated by a dotted line in the Multimedia Semantics Figure above) This annotation, using XML that is parsed and processed to produce LISP data structures, describes the visual, structural, and conceptual content of images.
Fox Harrell's statement on The Griot System originally appeared on the website of the Digital Media Program, School of Literature, Communications, and Culture Georgia Institute of Technology

Dylan Harris
All Hands
Sound Forge, Soundtracker Pro, Audacity, Studio Artist, Paint Shop
Pro, the Gimp, GarageBand, Final Cut Express, Windows Notepad

Originally from England, now living in Dublin, "arts explorer"
Dylan Harris is a poet and software engineer whose print and multimedia
poetry has appeared in print and online.
I'll write a poem using pen, paper and beer. I'll use Sound Forge, Soundtracker Pro or Audacity, depending on reverb, to make an MP3 recital. I'll assemble a videocast using the recital, photos processed in Studio Artist (I like it), text in Paint Shop Pro (windows fonts) or the Gimp (unix fonts), in GarageBand (simple) or Final Cut Express (complex). The videocast is posted using iWeb.
Except for videocasts, I prepare web pages using Windows Notepad, because it doesn't exclude things its designers didn't expect.

William Harris
Hyper Poems
http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Hyper-Poetry/HyperPoetryIndex.html
Microsoft marquee

William Harris (1926-2009) taught classics at Middlebury College in Vermont for thirty-two years. A sculptor, composer, and poet, when he retired in 1990, he worked with computers -- compiling an electronic Latin dictionary, Humanist's Latin Dictionary, that was published by Centaur.
During the ensuing years, Harris created Humanities and the Liberal Arts a website that is in itself a narrative of a Vermont life spent in the study of the classics and the making of art. In an online essay about his life he wrote:

"I am still surprised how much varied thinking went into that website. In high school I was bookish, I eagerly perused Jowett's Plato and fastened on Hippias the Elean with pure delight. He wove his cloak, made his sandals, composed an ode to commemorate the race he won, and sang it with his own lyre in hand. Plato looked askance at him, but I was delighted and got his message immediately: Do everything you can yourself, in short become what would eons later be called a Renaissance Man. In this age of specialization there are costs to all this but I held to my ideal firmly. The proof of the pudding is found in the materials in this website, which people often remark has the mark of the work of a Renaissance Man. Yes, that is what I always thought a teacher should be like. a person interested in more than his discipline, a citizen of the ideas of the world."

In recent years, Bill Harris created a series of evocative electronic poems and image/text works. "I want a poem to be meditated, not read through," he writes in his essay for Authoring Software. "So by taking it off the page and making it a variable field of words, I think we are trying something new and something possibly very interesting."
A World War II Veteran, Harris, who had been battling cancer for several years, died at the age of 83 in February 2009.
Hyper Poems
Authoring is done through MS "marquee" program, which was introduced in early version's of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Deprecated because of difficulty of web spiders to scan a moving text, it now works on IE 5/6, on Netscape 7, on iCab for Mac and elsewhere, and is retained for legacy files on Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Firefox.
My primary concern is with text and what can be done with it in a poetry medium. We often think of poetic text as composed first and permanently written in ink or etched in stone, missing the possibilities of a poem in fluid text medium. Here I have used a very simple program which has often been used for minor and even frivolous purposes. I hand code my material for html as I always do, so I have complete control over the primary level. The poem is not written out first and then transferred into the motile form, but written line by line on the screen as I compare contrasts and inner meanings for each group of two or three lines. But the order of the lines is not changed, only the internal organization of each line as it confronts another.
The Microsoft program offers a short list of variable elements, including speed of horizontal travel, right and left, a possible but useless up and down, a frame delay, and some screen color possibilities. Using just the text basics, I can concentrate as an author on the content of my text, avoiding complex programming and some of the problems which complexity involves.
This would sound all too simple except for one factor. Since the lines of text are uneven in length, this affects the scrolled repetition which is thrown into its own seeming quasi-programmed a-synchronicity. So lines will never match up as with the first reading, they will continue to get further and further away as individual components from my "ur text". Thus the reader is given more and more discrete projections of recurring poetic motions, which in a ten line piece with perhaps three nodes of meaning or "events' per line, will be displaying to the reader's eye about twenty groupings of words continually appearing in different conjugations.
Thus each poem is continually evolving out of its own internal history, which at times may give a very different appearance to the whole display on the screen. The first appearance will be even like any text. Next some lines will start to go in different directions, and some will have a different programmed speed while others re-speed themselves later. Later, as a surprise, groups of words may possibly arrange themselves to the right and left of the screen leaving the center empty, or they may all congregate centrally before starting to wander sideways. The interesting thing about this variability is that as the poem progresses, more of the text obeys the internal patterning generated by the running program, and less and less the initial pattern which I have set up.
In the last twenty years, our visual comprehension of momentary chunks of text has developed to a remarkable degree. A tenth of a second on a typical TV display will give a real sense of a picture or of a chunk of advertising wording. Everything has speeded up as we learned how to scan rather than to read, how to intuit ideas rather than investigate them. Look at the slow text sections of an old silent movie and you will see the difference in reading speeds in less than a century.
A desire to break out of the fixedness of text appeared already in the later 19th century, when Mallarmé in his "Coup de dés. . . . ." tried to imitate something like fortuitous reading on a printed page. In the world of Dada words appeared everywhere, in designs and by pure chance, always suggesting that they were loose and mobile in some sense. But little could be done with real mobility until we moved into the electronic age; these new HyperPoems which I have been working with are the front fringe of a very different new set of sensibilities.
Some people who have been heavily schooled to be linear, cannot "read" these new motion poems, which are as if one were walking into a flowering meadow and standing a moment taking it all in bit by bit. There is no order but just what you see, and your eye will rove rather than classify as it moves from edge to edge. When you come back tomorrow there will be changes in the meadow and also in your perception, because all is in change as Heraclitus well said. So the walk in the meadow or the perusal of a HyperPoem for several minutes might be considered as an investigative essay in changeability and variety. It could be in the world of nature, while in these poems it will be in words and text.
I want a poem to be meditated, not read through. So by taking it off the page and making it a variable field of words, I think we are trying something new and something possibly very interesting.

Ian Hatcher
Signal to Noise, Opening Sources
http://clearblock.net/stn
http://openingsources.com
HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MYSQL

Ian Hatcher is a writer, musician, and programmer from Seattle. His work has been presented at the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization and Electronic Literature in Europe conferences and published by Counterpath Press.
He is the primary composer for the Chicago-based contemporary dance ensemble The Moving Architects, with whom he performs live.
As of 2009, he is a graduate student in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Signal to Noise, Opening Sources
All my work in elecronic writing has been created for (and often in response to) the architecture of the web. My primary interest for some time now has been the development of adaptive multi-reader texts -- works which track multiple simultaneous readings and navigations and use this data to influence and evolve content in realtime. No authoring software yet exists with this kind of functionality, at least not for my purposes, so I've been writing the engines myself using a combination of programming languages and libraries. The method I'm using to continuously pass data between a reader's browser and my PHP code is AJAX, which is remarkably easy to learn and implement if you go through a Javascript library such as JQuery, Mootools or Prototype. Anyone interested in authoring web-based work (AJAX aside) should definitely spend some time experimenting with these libraries, which provide excellent sets of tools to make Javascript far easier and more intuitive to write. As a bonus, they let you safely ignore a lot of the pitfalls of making one's code compatible with Internet Explorer.
I like HTML, Javascript, and PHP because they are all free and, in the first two cases, produce inherently open-source work. You can go to almost any page with Javascript, view the source, find the linked .js file, and check out exactly how it operates. There is a certain nifty elegance to this kind of transparency.
Some software I've found useful:
Aptana, a free and open-source development suite.
MAMP/LAMP/WAMP, free virtual server software. Indispensable when
coding in PHP.
JQuery and Prototype, my two favorite Javascript libraries. Also free.
TextMate , unfortunately not free, but the best text editor available for OSX.

Chris Joseph
Inanimate Alice by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph
http://www.inanimatealice.com
___ http://www.chrisjoseph.org/
Photoshop, Premiere, Sound Forge, Acid, Flash

Digital writer Chris Joseph, aka babel, creates electronic literature, multimedia, and interactive art.
His work has been exhibited internationally, including among many others, the 2008 Biennale of Sydney; Visionary Landscapes, Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2008; Digital Media Valencia 2008; Boston Cyberarts, E-Poetry, and SIGGRAPH.
His current work includes Flight Paths, a "networked novel" funded by the Arts Council England; Inanimate Alice, a series of interactive multimedia stories; and remixworx, a collaborative digital remixing community.
From September 2006 until September 2008, he was the first Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies in De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Chris Joseph is editor of the post-dada magazine and network 391.org.
Inanimate Alice
Inanimate Alice is a series of multimedia short stories depicting the life of a girl growing up in the early years of the 21st century. Across ten episodes, the story of Alice, games animator, and her one true friend in life, Brad, the game character she has created, is told using a combination of text, sound, and images. "Episode 1: China" begins with Alice aged eight and subsequent episodes track her through adulthood until her mid-twenties. Each episode becomes increasingly interactive and more game-like, reflecting Alice's own developing skills as a game designer and animator.
Inanimate Alice represents a project that could not have been created or distributed without the software developments of the past decade. The series uses manipulated photographic images, illustrations, video, sound, and text to tell the story. These elements were created using a PC and various softwares: Photoshop (graphics), Premiere (video), Sound Forge and Acid (sound effects and music).
Finally Flash is used to combine these elements and create the final work. Flash offers a method for creative artists to produce high-quality multimedia at a relatively low cost, and even more importantly, it allows a cost-effective and simple method for distributing the piece to a worldwide audience.
More specifically, Flash was chosen for the following reasons:
1. It has a very wide user base, so represents a great way to distribute work online without putting off those users who are unfamiliar with installing software plugins;
2. It allows the relatively simple creation of randomized, non-linear and interactive elements. For example, in each episode there are elements that are generated at random from a set of pre-defined possibilities (such as Ming's paintings, and the motion of the texts) -- possibilities that can be explored with this kind of digital animation, as opposed to a linear (filmed) animation;
3. It offers an extremely wide range of animation styles. Movement between scenes in Inanimate Alice is generally very dynamic, employing slides, pans and zooms to suggest an animated graphic novel, in a style that blends comic, animation and film. But techniques and elements of classical animation can also be found throughout, for example Alice's hand-drawn animations of Brad, or the looping desert backgrounds in Episode 1 that are reminiscent of early Disney cartoons. All these styles can be easily explored within the Flash authoring environment.

Rob Kendall
Pieces
http://www.wordcircuits.com/pieces
Flash; XML, X-Lit

Born and raised in Canada and currently living in Menlo Park, California, Robert Kendall is an e-poetry pioneer, who has been creating interactive multimedia poetry since 1990.
His book-length hypertext poem, A Life Set for Two, was published by Eastgate Systems in 1996, and his hypertext poetry has also been published and exhibited Internationally including The Little Magazine; Iowa Review Web; BBC Online; Cauldron & Net; Dodge Poetry Festival; the Second Annual Poetry Video Festival, Chicago; Manhattan Cable TV; and the Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia.
Kendall's printed poetry has appeared in Rattapallax, Contact II, River Styx, New York Quarterly, Barrow Street, and Indiana Review. His print work, A Wandering City, (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) won the CSU Poetry Center Prize.
He is co-developer of Connection Muse, an adaptive hypertext authoring system for Web poetry and fiction, and his articles and essays about computer technology and computers in the arts have been widely published including in PC Magazine, PC Computing, Poets & Writers Magazine, Leonardo, Electronic Book Review, Cortland Review, Kairos, and Purdue University Press.
Robert Kendall is the host of the website Word Circuits
Since 1995, he has taught hypertext poetry and fiction through the online program of the New School University in New York.
Pieces
I created this work in Flash. It makes use of drag-and-drop functions and transitional fades that very few other delivery systems can create. The method I use for text-handling is not the one normally employed by Flash authors. All the text is stored in an XML file, which is read by the work's SWF file at runtime. This means that I can edit or expand the text of this work freely without having to recompile the SWF file. I can also easily organize it into paths and sections/lexias. It's very difficult to work with large quantities of text in Flash, unless you put the text into external XML files in this manner.
Pieces is the first step in a large-scale project from which I hope will eventually emerge an X-Literature XML specification--an XML format that will allow me and other authors to create complex Flash works solely by creating content in XML that will be rendered by a Flash-based X-Lit Player. I will be working in conjunction with the ELO to work out the details of the X-Lit spec itself. In conjunction with developing a preliminary version of the spec, I am also building an authoring tool in AIR (a new programming IDE recently released by Adobe) that will let people create Flash works without having to use or even own Flash. My XML format currently handles only text, but ultimately it will also handle graphics, video, and audio, and will store elements defining animation, interaction, styles, and interface elements. Preliminary details about the project, which is in its very early stages, are available at http://www.wordcircuits.com/xlit
Prior to working in Flash, I used the Connection Muse to help create most of my Web work. This is a JavaScript-based authoring system for adaptive hypertext, which I codeveloped with the French computer scientist, Jean-Hugues Réty ( http://wordcircuits.com/connect). This system allows the components of a hypertext to respond dynamically to a reader's progress through the work, changing links and content to suit the current reading situation. Many of the features of Connection Muse have already been incorporated into my XML format, and I hope eventually to port all the system's features to the X-Lit authoring system.
When the X-Lit spec, player, and authoring tool are fully developed they will allow an author to store in a single XML file all the text and pointers to external media content for complex hypertexts, interactive pieces, and animated works. Features not supported by X-Lit can still be implemented directly in Flash, so an author won't lose any functionality by using the system, even if it doesn't directly support all desired functions. I'm excited by the prospects of this system and its new approach, and I hope it will someday see wide use.

Antoinette LaFarge
Demotic
http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~players/demotic/gallery17.html
YIN MOO, Max/MSP

Antoinette LaFarge: "A diagram showing the communication flow among the various performers in Demotic 2006. The black area at left represents the telematic performers, while the white area is the stage and the gray is the audience." Complete Statement

Deena Larsen
Pines at Walden Pond
Trellix

Denver Colorado Native Deena Larsen has been a central voice in the writing and understanding of new media literature.
Her seminal hypertext, Marble Springs, about the lives of women in a Colorado mining town, was published by Eastgate Systems in 1993.
Her work has been published by Eastgate; the Iowa Review Web; Drunken Boat; Cauldron and Net; Riding the Meridian; Poems that Go; The Blue Moon Review; and New River.
For many years, she hosted forums and workshops for the eliterature community, and she currently hosts the website Fundamentals : Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature
Pines at Walden Pond
I have used a lot of authoring tools, but if I have to choose only one, let it be Pines at Walden Pond, which I did with Trellix. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/deena/pines/
Trellix was/is an early software for the web--before Dreamweaver. It allows users to show node maps and trails between nodes. The squares and lines on the tree are generated from Trellix. I spent a day at the Trellix office and betatested their software by putting Pines together. It went surprisingly fast--this was the only work that I have ever created where I actually spent more time composing than I did re-coding and re-editing and bug fixing.
For more information about Deena Larsen's work, visit http://www.deenalarsen.net/

Donna Leishman
RedRidingHood
http://www.6amhoover.com/redriding/red.htm
http://www.eliterature.org/collection/1/works/leishman__redridinghood.html
Software: Flash, Sound Forge

Donna Leishman's work is a combination of critical writing and practice-led research in digital art with a particular interest in the intersection of narrative with Internet based interactivity. Her practice has been exhibited internationally both in art and design contexts. Themes in the research include the aesthetics of dissonance, visual digital literature and the psychology of literary characterization.
Donna Leishman is currently an academic specializing in digital media design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in the University of Dundee, Scotland. She was an Emmy award nominee for her work on The Rosie O'Donnell Show, and her responsive animations have been showcased in The New York Times and The Guardian Online, as well as exhibited at The Lighthouse, Glasgow, Scotland; Alt-w: New Directions in Scottish Digital Culture; Studio Zeta, Milan; the Boston Cyberarts Festival; the DeCordova Museum; Technopoetry Festival, Georgia Tech; UKinNY Festival, Parsons School of Design, New York; and Visionary Landscapes, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Vancouver, WA.
With background as a visual artist and web designer, she has created a series of visually-rich narratives and fairytales that combine elements of magic realism and pop culture with animation and interactivity. In her statement for Authoring Software, she talks about the creation of her classic (launched in 2000) animated and interactive version of "Little Red Riding Hood", and in particular about her use of Flash.
"All works are seeded and born within traditional sketchbooks, so I draw everything first but they grow and become real within the Flash environment," she observes.
More information about Donna Leishman's work can be found on her website at http://www.6amhoover.com
Donna Leishman: RedRidingHood
The interface, interactivity and animation within RedRidingHood, like subsequent projects: The Bloody Chamber, Deviant: The Possession Of Christian Shaw and Contemplating Flight, was entirely produced using Abobe Flash. Simple sound editing software such as Soundforge or Audacity was used to create and or edit the sound content. Given my background as a visual artist and web designer the quality of the graphics were of key importance, Flash offered (and still offers) a robust yet simple drawing toolbox -- a small sister to professional vector art packages such as Illustrator and Freehand. In 2000, it was important to consider the streaming and filesize of the animation (Broadband wasn't a common luxury), so Flash allowed bigger bang for your buck in terms of both graphic and animation/movement complexity given its excellent streaming compression. I had previously written about the problematic aesthetics of early Elit works which tended to be of poor visual / typographic quality, I argued that the audience scope was thus limited and rarefied and unlikely to reach broader public audiences.
I still work entirely within vectors rather than bitmaps, vector animation rather than video or film. My PhD thesis touched upon the value or interest in establishing a sense of digital crafting or the *fragital* -- a hybrid of detailed line art and a sense of handcrafting, a holographic touch from the author yet within digital media. All works are seeded and born within traditional sketchbooks, so I draw everything first but they grow and become real within the Flash environment.
Flash also allowed me to program and develop actionscript generated random sequences (within the Dream Sequence in RedRidingHood) and manage the non-linear narrative structuring. The Flash Player is also very pervasive and has penetrated the majority of web users. Sound editing and syncing sound to action and motion remains a fascinating process and one that, time permitting, I would like to develop so the total media crafting, image, movement, interaction and audio is completely complimentary.

Judy Malloy
Paths of Memory and Painting
http://www.well.com/user/jmalloy/luminous_landscape/paths.html
DHTML

Judy Malloy: CD version of Paths of Memory and Painting, created for Language-Driven Installation Art, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Brown University, Providence, RI, June 3-6, 2010

Judy Malloy is a poet who works at the conjunction of hypernarrative, magic realism, landscape, and information. A pioneer on the Internet and in electronic literature, since 1986, she has created a series of hypernarratives works, including its name was Penelope; (Narrabase, 1989; Eastgate, 1993) Forward Anywhere (with Cathy Marshall, Eastgate, 1996) and Concerto for Narrative Data. (Iowa Review Web, 2008).
Her work has also been exhibited/published by the San Francisco Art Institute; Tisch School of the Arts, NYU; Sao Paulo Biennial; the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art; Boston Cyberarts Festival; The Walker Art Center; Heller Gallery at the University of California at Berkeley; the National Library of Madrid; The Houston Center for Photography; the Cleveland Institute of Art; Institute for Contemporary Art New Orleans; San Antonio Art Institute; P.P.O.W., New York; Springer-Verlag; Tanam Press; Seal Press; E.P. Dutton, MIT Press; Blue Moon Review; and the National Endowment for the Arts website.
She had been an artist in residence and consultant in the document of the future at Xerox PARC; Arts Wire Network Coordinator, the Editor of NYFA Current, a coordinating editor for Leonardo's electronic publications, and Editor of Women, Art & Technology. (MIT Press, 2003) In 1994, she created one of the first arts websites, Making Art Online. (currently hosted on the website of the Walker Art Center)
Her statement for Authoring Software documents Paths of Memory and Painting, a three-part work of hypertextual narrative poetry that uses an innovative series of arrays of poetic lexias to take the reader on a journey of recollected art experience. Visit her Authoring Software page to find out more

Mark Marino
Marginalia in the Library of Babel
Software: Diigo
a show of hands
Software: Literatronica

Mark C. Marino is a new media writer whose work has appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, volume 2 of the Electronic Literature Collection, The Iowa Review Web, Hypperhiz, The New River Journal, and SpringGun Press. A noted collaborative scholar in the digital humanities, he teaches writing at the University of Southern California, where he directs the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab, including the Critical Code Studies Working Groups. Additionally, in 2011, he taught Game Studies and Critical Code Studies as a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Bergen. He is also Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization.
Marino contributes two commentaries to Authoring Software. The first is Marginalia in the Library of Babel, which uses Diigo to create a fascinating work of literary information art. "It starts with Borges. It always starts with Borges, the god of our hyperlinked souls," Marginalia begins. "I fight the solitude of the vertigo he has imagined for me, and yet I may have finally found a way out of the labyrinth."
The second is a show of hands, a work of electronic literature that Marino has also adapted into a stage production. a show of hands, is written with the adaptive hypertext system Literatronica, (aka Literatronic) created by Juan B. Guiterrez. In Marino's words, a show of hands "takes advantage of the system by offering the re-shuffleable lives of a Mexican American family, with storylines chopped up telenovela-style. Yet, their fates pull them inevitably toward the May 1 Immigration Reform marches.". Visit Mark Marino's Authoring Software page to find out more.

Mez
Poetic Game Interventions [V.1] [from the Twittermixed Litterature Series]
Twitter and World of Warcraft

Australian-based net.artist, Mez Breeze has been creating of Internet-based code poetry and poetic game interventions for fifteen years.
Her work has been exhibited widely, including ISEA; ARS Electronica; The Metropolitan Museum Tokyo; SIGGRAPH; The Brooklyn Academy of Music; New Media Scotland; Laguna Art Museum; Alternator Gallery, Canada; HTTP Gallery, London; and Postmaster Gallery, New York.
She was JavaArtist of the Year 2001 and in 2002, she was the winner of the Newcastle Digital Poetry Prize.
Poetic Game Interventions [V.1]
I began my MMOG interventions in the 90's using the _Everquest_ game interface 2 project/interject in2 the conventional game-chat stream by riffing off other players chatlines and reworking chat sections via poetic manipulations. I'd also mangle logs of these chats and project them into a wider networked sphere by reposting them to various email list forums.
I'm currently extending this type of poetic intervention/textual reworking of game_text during my time playing World of Warcraft. My latest intervention is titled "Twittermixed Litterature" and involves WoW characters ["toons"] on the Bloodscalp Server standing in Ironforge [an in-game location] + live remixing [in_game] chat that occurs between players and guild/character names that rotate past. I then remash these lines [+ any feedback I receive in-game from the players themselves] into a live Twitter stream, making a multi-access channelling or [as I labelled it in the press releases]: "Twittermixing prefound identity marker texts from live-time character actions in World of Warcraft" and "MMO Voyeur Aggregationistic Rem(H)ashing."

Ethan Miller
Narrative Units -- http://ethanmiller.name/projects/narrativeunits/:
Code based, networked data visualization

Software tools used: Written in the Python programming language,
and depends on the Python libraries PyGame (for rendering graphics)
and BeautifulSoup (for reading HTML).

Narrative Units
Interface/authoring tools are an interesting question to me... For the last three years or so I've worked almost exclusively within a command-line interface. My code editor is Vim. Like many CLI users, I find it efficient and simple - it allows me to think through the keyboard without a lot of hunting and clicking with the mouse to interfere.
From the perspective of media practice, I see the interfaces I use while working as very much a part of the work. Here is a screenshot of Narrative Units: http://ethanmiller.name/media/images/uploaded/narrunits_.png which may explain more visually than I can articulate verbally. I think the relationship, on the one hand, may have to do with the parameters/biases imposed by software: Programming languages and plain-text/code editors offer relatively more freedom of movement than 'wizards' and options panels (more possibilities for errors isn't a bad thing either).
Beyond that though I think a plain text interface in the context of a visual/auditory/networked practice speaks to the soft borders between those forms and the codes that run through them. The relationship, say between code that creates an image, the image file, and how it's represented on a screen, is complex and fascinating. The transformations all happen through 'languages' which are comfortably represented in plain text. I guess, for me, keeping my working interface within the confines of plain text, while creating visual/auditory work, keeps me situated within that "boundary" area that I find so interesting.

Nick Montfort -- http://nickm.com
Lost One: Curveship, Python

New media writer and scholar Nick Montfort is the author of the MIT Press books Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (2003) and Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (2009, with Ian Bogost) and co-editor of The New Media Reader. (2003, with Noah Wardrip-Fruin) He founded and blogged at Grand Text Auto, a group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art, and now blogs about interactive narrative, poetic digital writing, and new media history at Post Position.
Montfort is a leading writer and programmer, whose interactive fiction authoring system, Curveship, was released in 2011. His work includes The Purpling; (published in The Iowa Review Web) Ten Mobile Texts; ("five stories, an aubade, an epic, a sestina, a lipogram, and a ballad for Short Message Service", published in The New River) and Fields of Dream. (with Rachel Stevens, published in Poems that Go) Additionally, his work has been exhibited at or published in FILE, Sao Paulo, Brazil; bleuOrange, Montréal, Canada; the Carmen Conde Centenary, Spain; Cauldron & Net; the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the Beall Center for Art + Technology, U.C. Irvine and the Digital Arts and Culture Conference.
An Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nick Montfort currently serves as the President of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Lost One
An interesting recent piece for me to mention is Lost One, which has not been released but was first publicly read at the Open Mic & Mouse, The Future of Electronic Literature Symposium, (sponsored by the Electronic Literature Organization and Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) University of Maryland, May 2, 2007.
This piece was written to demonstrate my interactive fiction system Curveship, (formerly called nn) which is also unreleased. I began work on this system as part of my dissertation work at the University of Pennsylvania. Curveship is written in Python. It is is currently a research system -- good enough to prove some points that I have been trying to prove. I am finishing a more stable and comprehensible version of the system and working on some longer-form interactive fiction in the system. I hope to release Curveship around the end of this summer. (2009)
I'm particularly interested in writing e-lit in programming languages that are capable of general computation. Curveship falls into this category, while also providing specific facilities for varying the narration of a story independent of what the underlying events are. I'm also currently working on a series of very small Perl poetry generators and on some story generators in Perl. I have also written electronic literature in Inform 6, Processing, HTML, Java, the Windows 95 help system, and plain text.

Judd Morrissey
The Last Performance [dot org]
http://www.thelastperformance.org
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Drupal

Writer and code artist Judd Morrissey creates electronic literature, performance art, and site-specific installations.
His My Name Is Captain, Captain (in collaboration with Lori Talley) was published in 2002 by Eastgate Systems, and he was a recipient of a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers' Grant in 2006.
His work has been exhibited and published Internationally including Visionary Landscapes: the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Vancouver, WA; The Iowa Review Web; Eastgate; E-poetry 2005, London; Cerisy 2004, Normandy, France; Computers and Writing 2004; Language and Encoding, University of Buffalo; p0es1s: International Exhibition of Digital Poetry, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Rockford Art Museum; Chicago Cultural Center; Mobius, Boston, MA; and the DeCordova Museum.
Judd Morrissey is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Writing, Art and Technology Studies, and Performance.
He is a founding member of the interdisciplinary art-making and curatorial collective, OPENPORT and an Associate Member of Goat Island performance group.
The Last Performance [dot org]
Project Information
The Last Performance is a constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness in relation to architectural forms, acts of building, a final performance, and the interruption (that becomes the promise) of community.
This project was conceived in response to the work of the Chicago-based performance collective, Goat Island, (of which I am a part) and their decision, after 20 years of practice, to create a last performance. The electronic work is evolving over two years in parallel with the creation and performance of the company's final performance work, The Lastmaker.
The structure of the project is taken from my research with Goat Island into double buildings, a phrase we are using to describe spaces that have housed and survived multiple historical identities, with a specific concern for the functions of churches, mosques, and museums. The central structure of The Last Performance is a virtual dome, based on the cupola of a particular Croatian double building, a construction of circles within circles consisting of 4,680 glass lenses. The lenses of the cupola have been transposed as compositional spaces that will be populated until the dome is complete. The dome writings are also processed as source material to create a constantly evolving textual landscape.
Technical Framework
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Drupal
I wanted to situate The Last Performance [dot org] in relation to the overall dialogue and data-flow of the web as an evolving collaborative space -- to engage "web 2.0" as a site for composition, a readymade environment, a foundation for responsive practices. It was important to me that the project be more or less transparent with current open-source web standards and protocols.
For the basic functionality of this project, I used the PHP/MySQL content management system, Drupal. This enabled me to rather quickly lay a foundation for handling participant accounts, session tracking, built-in RSS aggregation, content tagging, and many other useful and/or ubiquitous features. The overall visual architecture and textual processing is handled using PHP for database queries, parsing and re-composing, and mathematically determining the (CSS) positioning of elements based mainly on the geometry of circles. Some text imaging is also done with the gd graphics library for php. Many of the individual pages are HTML files using Ajax to communicate with PHP.
For some time, I have been working mainly with an integrated set of web-based languages, so this project continues to extend this approach. For writers or artists interested in experimenting with PHP, I recommend the MAMP / LAMP / WAMP applications for a very quick and easy development environment.

Stuart Moulthrop
Recent Projects
Flash

One of the first creators of new media literature and a distinguished new media writer, digital artist, and scholar, Baltimore, Maryland native Stuart Moulthrop is the author of the seminal hyperfiction Victory Garden, (Eastgate, 1992), a work that Robert Coover included in the "golden age" of electronic literature.
His works -- that include Hegirascope, (1995) Reagan Library, (1999) Pax, (2003) Under Language, (2007) and Deep Surface (2007) -- have been exhibited and or published by Eastgate, The Iowa Web Review, the ELO Electronic Literature Collection; New River; Media Ecology; The New Media Reader; Washington State University Vancouver; and the Digital Arts and Culture Conference. Two of his works have won prizes in the Ciutat de Vinaros international competition.
Stuart Moulthrop is a Professor in the School of Information Arts and Technologies at the University of Baltimore where he is the Director of the undergraduate Simulation and Digital Entertainment program.
He has served as co-editor for Postmodern Culture, was co-founder of the TINAC electronic arts collective, and was a founding director of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Under Language and Deep Surface
Since the turn of the century, I've been working exclusively in Flash, with an increasing emphasis on code-intensive, object-oriented projects.
Also important are various tools for generating 3-D images and animations, including 3DStudio Max and Poser, tools for converting text to artificial speech, such as TextAloud, and the sound library at Freesound.org
My most recent projects are:
"Deep Surface" http://www.hermeneia.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1871&Itemid=654
"Under Language" http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/ul/
My headlong dive into ever more elaborate code structures has brought my work closer to the thermocline between e-lit and computer games. Both the most recent pieces have explicit game features, such as end-of-play conditions (game over), and scoring systems. You can probably tell that I spend much time in my day job (which, oddly enough, happens mainly at night) teaching aspiring game designers how to think with code.
Withal, I remain a compulsively verbal artist, and can't shake the type off my boot blocks, even as I seem compelled to invent "new disorders" of writing (as I recently heard John Cayley quote Derrida).
Flash remains a convenient choice for many things -- though it bears noting that ActionScript 3 demands significantly more patience and attention than its precursors, and turns casual scripting into something much more like industrial-strength programming. Adobe seem to assume that graphic designers and application developers will be happier if their tools clearly delineate their job functions (i.e., the designers are discouraged from touching code). I think that's a terrible development for ARTISTS.
In the future, I'd like to build with materials that aren't Adobe -- using things like Processing, especially the excellent RiTa system from Daniel Howe at Brown, or a fascinating utility called Dasher, which is a gestural substitute for keyboard input. Also on my do-list are Inform, the venerable authoring system for traditional interactive fiction, and of course, HTML-JavaScript, where I still have deep roots.

Alexander Mouton
Velvet
http://www.unseenproductions.net/velvet.html
Flash, HTML, Java Script, Photoshop, Final Cut, Logic, QuickTime

Working with photography, video, bookmaking, sequenced images, and sound, Alexander Mouton creates artists books and electronic works online and in performance and installation situations.
Produced by Unseen Press, his artists books are in collections Internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Kunst Bibliothek in Berlin, Germany
He is Assistant Professor of Digital Art & Design at Seattle University in Washington, where he also teaches artists' book structures.
Velvet
As a visual and sound artist working also within the form of the artists' book, I understand net art as a virtual extension of a much older physical tradition of self-published artists' books. I began working with narrative/poetic artists' books in the early 90's and began experimenting with Director in 2001 as I was able to incorporate motion and sound into the mix. I moved thereafter to the Flash programming environment because it affords a better possibility for compressing video, still images, and sounds to sufficiently small sizes for web publishing without sacrificing the aesthetic integrity of the media.
I work with Final Cut and Quicktime Pro for video editing, Adobe Photoshop for image editing, and Logic and Audacity for sound editing. Currently, I combine the raw materials from these programs using Flash, and with javaScript and actionScript I can customize the users viewing environment, incorporate interactivity, and program randomization features to break from traditional linear narrativity
For the piece Velvet specifically, my goal was to produce a highly interactive environment which was very personal in nature and which immerses a user inside the mind and identity of the artist for the exploration of states of mind, dreams, and memory. I was also interested in incorporating as many media as possible - text, still images, sounds, & video - and to do so using a diverse body of work from over the past 15 years of my active art-making. The interactivity plays a significant role, not only for navigation, but for the generation of meaning. Velvet was designed with a non-linear narrative in mind, with an overarching structure in place that allows for a degree of authorial direction amidst the user-determined sequencing.

Karen O'Rourke
Eavesdroplets@Dispatx
Process: interactive and collaborative strategies for the creation of narrative

Karen O'Rourke, whose work includes telecommunications projects, information art, and artists software, has created a coherent, innovative body of work in experimental new media narrative. Exploring mapping and the experience of place using collaborative strategies, her projects include City Portraits, which involved participants in 11 world cities creating "portraits" of their towns through the exchange of images and Paris Réseau, which explores the City of Paris with texts, images and sounds.
Born in Ithaca, New York, Karen O'Rourke is Maître de conférences in art and communication at the Université de Paris I. (Panthéon-Sorbonne) Her work had been exhibited and published internationally, and she is a recipient of the Leonardo Award for Excellence. In Eavesdroplets@Dispatx, she continues her vision of urban space and collaborative text works with a description of a project created for the UK and Barcelona-based Dispatx Art Collective. Visit her Authoring Software page to find out more.

Regina Pinto
AlphaAlpha
http://arteonline.arq.br/a/
Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0,
Dreamweaver 8.0, Flash 8.0, Photoshop 7.0 and Sound Forge 9.0

Born in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, digital artist, writer and curator Regina Pinto has been creating innovative work on the web since 1997. In her current project, AlphaAlpha, she uses a variety of software applications to create a dynamic work of visual poetry that -- in this screen-viewed medium where text can be encountered in a visual manner -- focuses attention on the representation of the first letter of the alphabet, resulting in a work of collaborative art that, with its evocative connotations of "first letter", also imagines and illustrates how words and text can be represented on the Internet.
Regina Pinto believes that one of the good characteristics of globalization is that it allows the exchange of national and international artistic experiences. She "lives, loves and believes" in net art, and her work as artist or curator is primarily done for the web. She was a finalist for the 2005 Leonardo Global Crossings Award, and recipient of an honorable mention from the 2007 Art on the Net, Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the UTS Gallery in Australia, Galeria Mezanino, FILE - Electronic Language International Festival, ARTfem TV, and Rhizome. Projects include The Museum of the Essential, and Beyond That, a virtual museum that exhibits the work of international artists, with an emphasis on South American digital art.
Much of her work uses humor, unusual juxtapositions and interesting ideas to look at global trends, for instance, The Snowmen Congress in Rio in which conceptions of snowmen were solicited from all over the world and exhibited on the Internet, presented in lectures and performances on a stage on Ipanema Beach -- with an emphasis on Global warming and its impact on the fate of snowmen. More information about her work can be found at The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That, The Library of Marvels and on her blog at http://pintor.tumblr.com
The AlphaAlpha project is a classic collaborative work in that participants were invited to create within the context of an interesting idea, and the producer incorporated their work in a framework that in this case includes texts and visual implementations of the letter "A". The project both alludes to the vibrant South American tradition of visual poetry and calls attention to how text can be represented on the World Wide Web. Participants were from all over the world including Brazil, USA, Canada, Chile, France, UK, Argentina, Finland, Croatia, Serbia, Germany, Uruguay, Spain, and Mexico.
AlphaAlpha
The concept of this netbook is the proper "history of writing, which is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention." [1]
AlphaAlpha is composed of 365 instances of the letter "A" plus one more for the leap year. The letters are collected in groups of about ten. AlphaAlpha is a collaborative work and includes participants - artists & poets -- from all around the world. AlphaAlpha is a good example of the possibilities of net art.
Net art is being simultaneously conceived and created by many artists from various terrestrial coordinates. To make collaborative work with artists from different coordinates is one way to proceed -- a very interesting way for someone with my deep interests in art and anthropology. A project such as AlphaAlpha, for example, which started with a simple call for a letter "A", received a great variety of pieces, pieces that tell us about the individuals and about their cultures.
The amazing success of the project, I am sure, was to ask for the letter "A". Who does not know how to make an A? It is the first letter that we all learn, and as Patrick Burgaud wrote on his inspired work -- http://www.arteonline.arq.br/a/p_a_trick_burgaud.html -- "Avant le A l' humanité n' existait pas" ("Before the A, humanity did not exist".) Working together demonstrates our shared humanity.
Using Adobe Premiere Elements 7.0, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, Dreamweaver 8.0, Flash 8.0, Photoshop 7.0 and Sound Forge 9.0, AlphaAlpha was produced by Regina Pinto. Participating artists were:
Joesér Alvarez (Brazil)
Bruce Andrews (USA)
Jim Andrews (Canada)
Paulo Aquarone (Brazil)
Isabel Aranda - YTO (Chile)
Isabelle Arvers (France)
babel (Canada & UK)
Vera Bighetti (Brazil)
Bruno (Brazil)
Patrick Burgaud (France)
Josely Carvalho (Brazil)
Steve Dalachinsky (USA)
Martha Deed (USA)
Rodolfo Franco (Brazil & Spain)
Marcelo Frazão (Brazil)
Muriel Frega (Argentina)
Sabrina Gledhill (Brazil)
Lisa Hutton (USA)
Satu Kaikkonen (Finland)
Maja Kalogera (Croatia)
Roberto Keppler (Brazil)
Manik (Serbia)
Brigitte Neufeldt (Germany)
Millie Niss (USA)
Clemente Padín (Uruguay)
Margaret Penfold (UK)
Yuko Otomo (USA)
Edward Picot (UK)
Regina Pinto (Brazil)
Isabel Saij (France)
José Roberto Sechi (Brazil)
Reiner Strasser (Germany)
Jurgen Trautwein (USA)
Myron Turner (Canada)
Susan Turner (Canada)
Paulo Villela (Brazil)
Miguel Jimenez - Zenon (Spain)
Araceli Zúñiga. (Mexico)

________
1. Frederic W. Goudy, The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering,
Chapter 1: "The Beginnings of the Alphabet"

Kate Pullinger
Flight Paths by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph
http://www.flightpaths.net
CommentPress, Netvibes

Born in British Columbia and based in London, Kate Pullinger writes for print, digital media, radio, and film. Her recent work includes the multimedia graphic novel Inanimate Alice and the networked narrative Flight Paths.
Her works of fiction have been published by Phoenix House, Bloomsbury, Cape/Picador, Five Star, and Serpent's Tail. She co-wrote the novel of the film The Piano with director Jane Campion, and from 2001-2007 she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her new novel, The Mistress of Nothing, is in press in the UK by Serpent's Tail and in Canada by McArthur & Co.
Kate Pullinger currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.
Flight Paths
We've been working on Flight Paths for around five months now, and a lot of that time has been taken up trying to figure out how to make it work. Despite massive advances and changes on the web over the past few years, it still remains fairly complicated to create an open access site that can include multimedia.
The first version of Flight Paths went up in a WordPress blog, with the add-on of CommentPress, the widget created by the Institute of the Future of the Book that allows us to foreground comments on the right-hand side of the page, instead of buried beneath each post. While this seemed like a good idea at the time, this widget was actually created for people to comment on works that were already written; CommentPress works best when you've got a draft of a text that you want to allow people to comment on paragraph by paragraph. It doesn't work so well when the project, like Flight Paths, is being created afresh.
At the same time as working on the public face of the project, Chris and I have been busy in the background making links with other organisations, collecting submissions from interested people, creating our own submissions, visiting the supermarket in Richmond to make recordings and take photos and videos, interviewing the journalists behind the original project, etc etc.
After a few months, it began to become clear to us that the wordpress blog wasn't really the right venue for this project - a blog is a blog, even with the fab CommentPress widget - and what we are trying to do is not create a blog. Neither of us are natural-born bloggers, and this project isn't about writing a blog. Around this time, Netvibes, a homepage application that we had both been using, launched Netvibes Universes, and this seemed like the ideal platform to move 'Flight Paths' to - we'd always wanted to be able to curate the web for this project, to be able to collect things from all over the web, as well as collecting submissions. The Universe does in fact work well as a curatorial platform, although, inevitably, we've had mails from some of our contributors saying they can't get the Universe boxes to open.
However, quite apart from whether or not the Universe works across various browsers and operating systems, another issue for us is where to house the discussions that arise out of the submissions and from the various issues and themes behind the project. With the CommentPress widget the blog was almost okay for discussions, though we have never used the blog as a blog and have always manipulated the posts, using the Table of Contents the CommentPress widget created, trying to keep numbers of posts to a mininum in order to stop entries from being buried in the blog archive. This was quite labour intensive, and also counter-intuitive -- again, trying to make a blog resemble something that isn't a blog -- so recently we've decided that, for discussions, we should use a forum. We've put a forum up in the Flight Paths universe, and are currently pondering how best to organise it.
All of this has been slow and time-consuming; I've found I've needed ages to ponder it all and get my head round how best to make this project work online. Doubtless we will continue to tweak it as it grows.

Jim Rosenberg
http://www.well.com/user/jer/
Squeak

Interactive poetry pioneer Jim Rosenberg has been working with with non-linear poetic forms since 1966, and his Diagrams Series 4 was published on the seminal Art Com Electronic Network on the WELL. His visually elegant, word-dense, spatial hypertexts -- including Intergrams and The Barrier Frames and Diffractions Through -- are published by Eastgate.
His work has also been performed, published and/or exhibited at The San Francisco Poetry Center; Intersection, San Francisco; Cody's, Berkeley; St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, New York; The Kitchen, New York; Harvard University sponsored by The Grolier Poetry Bookstore; Leonardo; E-Poetry; and the Electronic Literature Organizaton Conference.
Rosenberg is an influential hypertext and new media poetics critic and researcher, whose writing has been published in the ACM Hypertext Conferences and the Electronic Book Review, among others.
He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, painter Mary Jean Kenton.
I have come to believe that authoring systems are the problem, not the solution; the short answer to what authoring system I use is: I don't. The authoring system should be smashed -- to smithereens. Let the smithereens loose. What I use is not an authoring system but an ecosystem for nurturing feral smithereens.
This means: the object of attention is (surprise): the object. Authoring is not something you "do" in an "authoring system" -- as opposed to some other habitat of the object as encountered by the reader; authoring is just something naturally there, as a normal function of what an object does. It is not something you turn "on" but something you might decide to turn "off". "Playing" is not something that you do in some separate jail called a "player" or something you do inside that prison otherwise known as "web browser window", it is something the object naturally does. In place. Feral. Loose on the desktop, perhaps. Or if it's in a specific place, a place that you made -- the place is itself an object. Everything is an object. Including zero.
In this environment there is no boundary between "playing" and "authoring". There are only objects that behave. Some behaviors modify the object, some don't. Some behaviors modify other behaviors, some don't. Some behaviors I had to code myself, most I didn't. The concern is not authoring, but doing: What does the word object do, what can you do to it, with it, for it (or even against it.)
An object space. An open object space. Generic enough that I don't have to write all the code, but open meaning I can write my own code and insert it into the space so there is no boundary.
So, of course there is "a system"; I'm not supporting my poetry in an environment I programmed 100% myself in machine language from bare metal -- no one would do that. The object system I use is called Squeak. You could argue, I suppose, that there is no real difference between Squeak and an authoring system, but most authoring systems are not so generic. The list of packages which have been produced in Squeak is quite broad, resembling a scaled-down list of packages available for a generic operating system. The Squeak "World" could easily serve as the main GUI desktop for an operating system, as Gnome or KDE does for Linux.
This is just a snapshot. For a more serious write-up, I still stand by "Questions about the Second Move", which appeared in Cybertext Yearbook 2002-2003, and for the technicalities, "Hypertext in the Open Air: A Systemless Approach to Spatial Hypertext", (pdf) from the Third Workshop on Spatial Hypertext at Hypertext '03.

Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Vniverse - http://vniverse.com/
slippingglimpse - http://slippingglimpse.org/
Director; Flash

Stephanie Strickland is the author of V, which was one of the first works of literature to appear simultaneously both in print, V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una, Penguin, 2002, and on the Web, V: Vniverse. Her cyberpoem True North was published in print by the University of Notre Dame Press and as a work of literature on disk by Eastgate. True North was awarded the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Salt Hill hypertext prize. V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una also received the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award.
Strickland's digital works include V: Vniverse, with Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo; Errand Upon Which We Came, with M.D. Coverley; Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot; and slippingglimpse, with Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo and Paul Ryan. Print scores for the Ballad and slippingglimpse appear in her book, Zone : Zero, which was published by Ahsahta in 2008. slippingglimpse was introduced at E-Poetry in Paris and featured at E-poetry in Barcelona. Her poetry has also been published/exhibited by The Paris Review, Grand Street, New American Writing, Fence, Black Clock, Zoland Poetry, Vlak, The Poetry Foundation, The Iowa Review Web, Cauldron & Net, Drunken Boat, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, Word Circuits Gallery, Blue Moon, The New River, Furtherfield, and Poets for Living Waters.
Her essays about electronic literature appear in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, ebr, Isotope, and volumes from MIT Press and Intellect Press Ltd.
A member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, she edited the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection with Kate Hayles, Nick Montfort, and Scott Rettberg. She also co-edited an issue of The Iowa Review Web.
Stephanie Strickland has taught hypermedia literature as part of experimental poetry at many colleges and universities, most recently in the PhD poetry program at the University of Utah. She lives in New York City.
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo is a New York City-based digital artist and educator, whose innovative work utilizes incremental streams of words and/or photographs to create new media art and literature.
Her work has been exhibited and/or performed at the Modern Museum of Art; (Bogota) Hammer Museum; (UCLA) Exit Art Gallery, NY; CalArts; Rhode Island School of Design; Net Art Columbia; E-Poetry; and the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, among others. She an active member of Madarts, an arts collective based in Brooklyn, NY.
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo has taught art and design courses in Colombia, South America; New York; Guatemala; Dominican Republic; and Japan.
She is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Design in the School of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City.
Vniverse and slippingglimpse
1-Why did we use Director for Vniverse and Flash for slippingglimpse; or, what is the relationship of interface/content to the tools we used?
V: VNIVERSE: Our original thought was to use VRML, or to make an installation, to actually seem to move in a three-dimensional star space-to turn to look at different texts as you turn in space and trigger the stars. Perhaps, today, were we at Brown or someplace with a CAVE, it would be possible to work out such a piece for a CAVE.
But in fact in 2000, we used Macromedia Director because it was the most widely used multimedia authoring tool at the time, and it was what Cynthia was using in graduate school. The biggest problem was drawing the constellations, getting the lines/diagrams to be dynamically generated whenever anyone rolled over or clicked a star.
The biggest ongoing challenge is to make sure our projects are up-to-date and viewable as hardware and software changes at such a fast pace.
SLIPPINGGLIMPSE: The main reason for using Flash for slippingglimpse was so that we could dynamically animate and visually layer text on top of videos. Director can't do it. You can track motion and layer text on video in Processing, but Processing requires a Java applet on the viewer's machine that is not as widely adopted as the Flash player, and we wanted the project as accessible online as possible.
As well, Cynthia was interested in learning Flash. However we wished to do things that Flash barely supports, certainly not Flash 7. Fortunately Flash 8 came out just in time to do our project. There is a new bitmap API in version 8 that facilitated the motion capture script. We continued to have problems with how many pieces of text we can use at once. Doing multiple things at once and drawing them is something Flash 8 is still pretty clunky at. Therefore we had to break down the poem text and select something like 10 to 15 phrases ranging in length from 1 to 7 words to be dynamically chosen and drawn in the full-screen (water as reader) mode of the piece.
2-How has our use expanded new media practice?
V: VNIVERSE: To our knowledge it hasn't, but we believe the Vniverse interface is capable of being generalized. At a reading at U. California Santa Barbara, an audience member felt it was a widely usable data visualization. It combines diagrammatic structures with text in a pleasing way.
We feel the most interesting aspect of the programming is that the whole program happens in one frame, and therefore time is generated via coding and not a timeline. Sticking to one frame allowed us to dynamically generate the animations of text and of constellations, as opposing to predetermining and then animating them. We wanted to create a space that would allow infinite possibilities for interaction and not one where we had to predict how users would interact.
SLIPPINGGLIMPSE: We haven't seen any other video-based Flash pieces with dynamic layering of text elements. We have seen motion capture programming in performance and installation work, but not much online and rarely with text.
3-What is the relationship between the print work and e-work; or, what is the relationship of interface and content?
SLIPPINGGLIMPSE: There is an ecologic-philosophic practice of threeing (described in Paul Ryan's book, Video Mind, Earth Mind) that is related to the three-mode structure of slippingglimpse. In this digital poem, we aim to give equal weight to two kinds of language: to weight natural languages and human readers equally with non-human languages-and non-human readers. The computer is, of course, a non-human reader; but, in this piece, so is the water-and the water, as well, is a non-human text, a text affected by gravity, by chaotic attractors and catastrophic changes in state, patterning itself, resolving its interior motions into forms that continuously renew. These forms are called chreods.
In slippingglimpse, water (in the 10 ocean videos) is the first reader. We track the water reading by using motion capture coding that assigns the text to locations of movement in the water. The metaphor is that the water's motions provide a scanning, as our eyes scan text. This aspect is best read in the full-screen mode.
In turn, in the scroll-text mode, the poem-text tracks, or reads, image/capture technologies by sampling and recombining the words of visual artists who use digital techniques. It combines their words with Strickland's own-and with words from an old folktale, The Passion of the Flax, which explores the very oldest capture technologies, such as harvesting plants for food and flax for paper.
Completing this "round-robin" of reading, image-capture videography-and-video-editing read the water's flow pattern, reading for and enhancing these patterns to which dynamical systems return even as they continuously change. The high-resolution mode shows the chreod patterns best.
With respect to V: Vniverse and True North, versions of question 3 were posed in Jaishree K. Odin's Iowa Review Online interview http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/strickland/stricklandinterview.pdf

Sue Thomas
Hello World: travels in virtuality
Print book: http://www.rawnervebooks.co.uk/helloworld.html
Free download: http://www.rawnervebooks.co.uk/helloworlddownload.html
Blog/webview: http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/helloworld/
LamdaMoo: telnet://lambda.moo.mud.org:8888 type 'co guest' to connect

Born and based in England, writer/new media writer Sue Thomas
founded the seminal trAce Online Writing Centre in 1995. Her online
writing projects include the The Noon Quilt, a collaboratively-created
new media "quilt" of art and writing and the online forum Writing and the
Digital Life that explores digital technologies, writing, and lived
experience.
Published by Raw Nerve Books, Overlook, The Women's Press and Five
Leaves, among others, her print works include the cyberspace travelogue
Hello World: travels in virtuality; Correspondence; (short-listed
for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel) Water;
and Wild Women: Contemporary Short Stories By Women Celebrating Women.
She is currently writing The Wild Surmise, about relationships between
cyberspace and the natural world.
Sue Thomas is Professor of New Media in the Institute of Creative
Technologies and the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University.
Hello World: travels in virtuality
I fell into LambdaMOO in 1995 and knew immediately that it would change
my creative life for ever. Until then I had written text, but at Lambda
I could actually live in it, be made of it, and travel along it. I had no
idea what would happen as I began to learn how to be an artist of the MOO,
but I hung out in The Living Room ( @go #17 ) making a nuisance of myself
with Francesca da Rimini (Gashgirl) and other members of the Australian
feminist performance group VNS Matrix, and experimented with virtual presence
at a number of online events which exhorted participants to be ready to sit
by their computers for hours at a time ("Bring sandwiches" said an invitation
email) and playing around with our identities until everyone's heads were
spinning. I was writing all the time, but it wasn't a book, it was a life.
Entire days were spent typing, and I often turned on a capture file to log
every interaction, every conversation, every line of code. I built rooms,
emotions, and people. I morphed from one persona to another and swam around
in a mess of ego, mine and others, learning not just who I really was but
also who I really might be.
I wanted to write about LambdaMOO but I didn't know how. For several years
I tried to write a novel set there, but it was banal and embarrassing,
demanding enormous footnotes explaining to the reader exactly how it
really is possible to sit in a virtual hot-tub ( @go #388 ), have virtual
sex, or communicate telepathically. In the end I gave up - indeed, I gave
up writing altogether in despair at what seemed to be the limitations of
words. But it was only temporary. About a year later I had a revelation
when I realised there was no need to wrap the whole experience up into
fiction. What I needed to do was write about it as nonfiction. After all,
it was indeed very real, not just to me but to hundreds of others who
spent part of every day in text-based virtuality. Those imaginative
people at Raw Nerve Books picked it up and were enthusiastic about
providing a webview as well where I could add on all those extra
elements that only come to you after a book has gone to print, and
so in 2004, nine years after my first visit to LambdaMOO, Hello World:
travels in virtuality was published in hard copy and I, at last,
felt I had got to grips with my virtual life and could finally relax.
@go #388
The Hot Tub
The hot tub is made of molded fiberglass: on three sides a bench will
seat five comfortably (and ten who are friendly), and on the fourth
side there is contoured couch for one luxurious soak. There are two
rubber mounted buttons here. You may push either the right or left
button. The rising sun puts a rosy glow on everything. The
underwater light is on. The bubbling jets are on.
You see thermometer and Hot Tub Bar here.
Aaaahhhh! The water is at that perfect
temperature where you can just lie in here forever.
Splash!
Materials
Hello World: travels in virtuality is made with object oriented
programming via the LambdaMOO Core; lots of post-its and small notebooks;
manuscripts created with A4 paper and inscribed by nice black pens
(medium tip) then typed up in Microsoft Word; ink, print and paper via
Raw Nerve Books; PDF downloads; Typepad blogging software, and the user's
imagination.
I am now working on The Wild Surmise, a study of nature and
cyberspace which aims to bring the virtual and the material even closer
together -- http://www.thewildsurmise.com

Eugenio Tisselli
MIDIPoet
http://motorhueso.net/midipeng/index.htm

Born in Mexico City, Eugenio Tisselli is a writer and programmer, whose work includes artists software, social technologies, and digital narratives. His installations, performances, software and text works have been featured in publications, festivals and exhibitions around the world, and he collaborates regularly with artist Antoni Abad at the mobile phone networking site http://megafone.net
Since 1999, when he wrote the first version of his MIDIPoet software, he has created a series of visual poetry performance works composed with sound, projected words, and visual images. Sometimes starting with a few words and building -- in conjunction with sound -- to the inclusion of graphic images, photographs, and arranged words; sometimes combining still phrases with moving words and performer actions, his work highlights the relationship of letters to words and groups of words, as well as the relationship of the performer to the words in ways that are important to an exploration of reading/viewing text in the development of new media literature.
Tisselli has been an associate researcher at Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris. He currently teaches at and is co-director of the Master in Digital Arts at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.
For his contribution to Authoring Software, he writes about the creation and uses of MIDIPoet software.
More information about Eugenio Tisselli's work can be found at http://www.motorhueso.net
MIDIPoet
Back in 1999, when I wrote the first version of MIDIPoet, software for the real-time manipulation of texts and images via MIDI was either expensive or very difficult to use. (and in some cases, both) So, my aim was to develop a software tool that would be powerful, easy to use, and that would allow me (and others) to compose and perform interactive pieces of visual poetry.
In its current version, (which was released in 2002) MIDIPoet consists of two applications: MIDIPoet Composer and MIDIPoet Player. As their names suggest, Composer contains a set of tools for creating MIDIPoet pieces, and Player performs them. The MIDIPoet environment has its own programming language, made up from relatively complex text commands. In order to make things easier, (and allow other people to approach the tool with realtively little pain) MIDIPoet Composer offers a visual way of creating MIDIPoet pieces, so there is no need to write code. MIDIPoet itself was written in a combination of C++ and Visual Basic, and only runs under Windows. It is available for free download at http://motorhueso.net/midipeng/index.htm
MIDIPoet has been used in different contexts: digital poetry performances, interactive installations and even VJ sessions. Of course, it offers very limited possibilities when compared to other current electronic literature authoring software; yet I find that MIDIPoet is interesting precisely because of its limitations. I believe that every tool potentially pre-determines the results of its usage, imprinting its recognizable marks onto the pieces created with it. I also find that there are very few tools oriented towards performative electronic literature. The fact that MIDIPoet can be controlled either by the computer's keyboard or almost any MIDI instrument makes it a very adequate tool for live presentations.
MIDIPoet performances
Here are some of my videos of my MIDIPoet performances:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhGHN3pnvps (Barcelona, 2008)
http://vimeo.com/8278370 (E-Poetry, Barcelona, 2009)
And finally, a poetry performance / concert by Christopher Funkhouser using MIDIPoet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9PkkqOzCf4 (ELO-AI, Brown University, 2010)

Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Screen: Cave Writing;
Role Playing Games

Newmedia writer and scholar Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a co-creator of Screen, a virtual reality narrative on the walls of a room-sized space. "Memory texts appear on the Cave's walls, surrounding the reader. Then words begin to come loose. The reader finds she can knock them back with her hand, and the experience becomes a kind of play - as well-known game mechanics are given new form through bodily interaction with text." he writes to describe this work in Screen (2002-present).
The author of four MIT Press books, including The New Media Reader; (2003 with Nick Montfort) and Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives; (2009, with Pat Harrigan) he is also a co-host of Grand Text Auto, a group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art.
His work has been exhiited and/or publshed by the Guggenheim Museum; Sandra Gering Gallery; SIGGRAPH; Whitney Artport; Hypertext 2004; Boston Cyberarts Festival; Beall Center for Art + Technology, UC Irvine; Leonardo; and the Iowa Review Web among others.
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Screen
Probably my most interesting work, from this perspective, is Screen.
When we were moving the Brown Cave from the SGI/Irix machines to IBM/Linux machines, we knew we had to do major work to translate the piece. So we decided to start over from scratch, creating an approach to literary work in the Cave that became the basis for the Cave Writing software project that continues today.
Here's a SIGGRAPH sketch on the initial work: http://www.noahwf.com/texts/nwf-caveWriting.pdf
Here's the website with some information on the current effort: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/wdm/cave+writing+resources
And, in terms of my writing, you might be interested in these sections from my forthcoming book that talk about the platforms used for story/game RPGs and how they shape the experience: http://grandtextauto.org/2008/02/05/ep-32-role-playing-games/
http://grandtextauto.org/2008/02/06/ep-33-an-example-star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic/
Finally, yes, the Software Studies initiative is quite connected to these questions. We're hoping to have a meeting next year to discuss the platforms/software used by elit authors. I'm really looking forward to hearing more of what you find.

Joel Weishaus
The Way North: Dreamweaver; Photoshop
http://web.pdx.edu/~pdx00282/North/Intro.htm
Mirror site: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/North/Intro.htm

Born in New York City, writer, critic, digital artist Joel Weishaus has lived and worked in the West -- the San Francisco Bay Area, Taos, Albuquerque -- for many years. He now makes his home in Portland, Oregon.
His writing and digital literary art have been exhibited and/or published by City Lights Books; North Atlantic Books; Albuquerque Museum; Stanford University Museum of Art; Adleburg Poetry Festival, Adleburg, England; Electronic Language International Festival, San Paulo, Brazil; and The 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference; among others.
Joel Weishaus has been a photography critic for Artspace: A Magazine of Contemporary Southwest Art, and an Adjunct Curator (Video Art) at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
He is presently writing and distributing an online journal, The Gateless Gate, which is "a walk for the sake of walking about the rugged trails of existence-non-existence, switchbacking the sacred and profane."
The Way North
Dreamweaver is the central program I use for digital projects, an apt name for work that goes a-dreaming, and everything seems to end up there. I also use an old version of Photoshop, mainly for sizing photographs, and an array of smaller programs. It's not the technology that interests me, and certainly not the interrogation of code, but how language finds itself somewhere else, and sheds its limitations.
The Way North was originally titled "The Idea of North," as homage to an old CBC radio broadcast by a genius named Glenn Gould. I chose "The Way" over "The Idea" to indicate movement that's not only in the head, but kinesthetic too, actual walking.
The project's theme is climate change, the importance of which I suggest visual artists and poets haven't touched yet in any meaningful way. Focused on the folkways of the Inuit People, whose culture has been the hardest hit, their experience is one indicator of the future distress this planet is facing. A northerner by temperament, who exiled himself in a southwestern desert for 23 years, The Way North is also a celebration of finding my way home.
I call the genre of my digital work, Digital Literary Art, which is the dream of combining text and image begun during the Upper Paleolithic on cave walls and itinerant rocks, and realized here primarily with text: how to write it across and down a monitor; how to work it into a larger vision of itself. There are also photographs, some sound, and animations, with text boxes triggered by hidden links. In fact, all the links are hidden, my request being that the reader caress the page to see what opens up.
I am a first-generation digital literary artist. Having grown up in front of a typewriter, I was dragged to the computer, where I now comfortably live. For now at least, what holds the two paradigms together is the keyboard, whose basic layout remains the same. Like the land bridge that once spanned the Bering Strait, we have something solid over which fingers walk and minds leap, so far.

Nanette Wylde
The Qi Project, 2008
http://qiproject.net
Flash, Final Cut, Perl, CGI

Born in California, Nanette Wylde lives in Redwood City and Chico, California. Her language-centered work includes artists books, interactive net art, and audio-visual textual narrative.
Her work has been exhibited widely including Computers and Writing 2009, UC Davis; Olive Hyde Art Gallery, Fremont, CA; Purdue University; Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; The Portland Art Center; The Krause Center for Innovation Art Gallery; Euphrat Museum, Cupertino; The Lab, San Francisco; Rhonda Schaller Studio, New York; Telemar Cultural Center, Rio de Janeiro; Merced College Art Gallery; Works, San Jose; University of British Columbia, Canada; Diablo Valley College, Pleasant Hill; International Meeting of Experimental, Sound and Visual Poetry, Buenos Aires, Argentina; and SIGGRAPH.
Nanette Wylde is an Associate Professor, California State University, Chico, Department of Art and Art History.
The Qi Project
When I began working with interactive technologies in 1994 my software of choice was Director. Changes in both the software and OS X have made Director less workable for me. Some of my early projects created in Director became inoperable in OS X or technical changes were too big to remake them and maintain the original aesthetic of the project. This has made me a bit wary of overly specialized and system dependent software. Currently for interactive projects I primarily use Flash. I respond to its flexibility and stability (for now).
However, the technology I use is very dependent on the needs of the project. I still find myself working in web-based programming languages: HTML, Perl CGI scripts, and JavaScript. Although I am using Director to revive some of my earlier OS9 projects, I haven't begun a new project in Director for at least five years.
About The Qi Project
The Qi Project is an inquiry into the nature of humanity and what it means to be human at this moment in time. Qi is a Chinese word which literally means 'air' or 'breath.' It is considered to be the circulating life force. The Qi Project exists as (1) a gallery installation (2) a website (3) a process-based intervention. The gallery installation includes: two channel video, text and audience participation. The website: represents the interventions; includes elements in exhibition; and invites participation. The intervention is the process and residue of questioning: What does it mean to be human? What is humanity? This was done via postcards, email, telephone, website, and in front of a camcorder. The Project was launched at The Krause Center for Innovation Art Gallery in Los Altos Hills, California in February 2008. Continuing is the companion website.
About the Authoring Software Website
Authoring Software is a collection of information about new media authoring tools, statements by authors and software creators; and information about conferences, books, and programs organized by and for the electronic literature community. Authoring Software is a website-based learning environment for: teachers and students of new media writing who want to explore various authoring environments; new media writers and poets, who are interested in how their peers approach their work; and readers, who want to understand how new media writers and poets create their work.
The project currently contains documentation of work by new media writers, text artists, and story-tellers from all over the World, including New York, Chicago, Colorado, California, Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Washington State, Maryland, rural Ohio, rural Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Canada, Australia, England, Ireland, Spain, and Switzerland. From many countries, from rural and small town areas, as well as from urban and suburban areas, the many new media writers who are represented in this project are an indication of the importance of this field in fostering digital media and learning throughout the world.
Featured software includes commercial applications such as Flash and Dreamweaver; applications created for the hypertext and educational community such as Storyspace and Literatronica; and artist-developed software, such as Fox Harrell's GRIOT System, Snapdragon, created in Caitlin Fisher's AR Lab at York University, and Eugenio Tisselli's MidiPoet.
As a research tool, guide, and information resource for new media writers and creative writing teachers, Authoring Software highlights best practices and recommends appropriate tools to both veterans and new-comers to the field. Authoring Software's Editor in Chief is new media poet, writer, and editor, Judy Malloy.
Background
The Authoring Software project was begun in conjunction with the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference in Vancouver, Washington. Participants in the 2008 Electronic Literature in Europe Conference in Bergen, Norway were also invited to contribute. The project was featured at the Computers and Writing 2009 Online Sessions, hosted by the University of California at Davis. In 2010 a News and New Books section was added, as well as separate pages for Software Applications.
New Media Writing
New media writing (also known as hypertext literature, electronic literature, digital literature, e-poetry, born-digital literature, net narrative, net art, or interactive literature) is computer-mediated writing that uses computer technologies to create new narrative forms which may be hypertextual, multi-pathed, nonlinear, exploratory, interactive, software generated, kinetic, performative, collaborative, installation-based, augmented reality, immersive, social media-based, and/or inherently visual. It may also be multimedia, utilizing combinations of image, sound, text and/or video.
The process of creating new media literature is complex, and there are many choices of paths. Authoring Software looks at the creation of new media art as a whole process, also interviewing software creators and including other information about applications software and new media writing, such as publications, conferences, and software details. And it looks at the relationship between interface and content in new media writing with a focus on how the innovative use of authoring tools and the creation of new authoring tools have expanded digital writing/hypertext writing/net narrative practice.
return to Authoring Software
About Judy Malloy
Judy Malloy is a new media poet, who has been working in the field of computer-mediated literature for 25 years. In addition to editor of one of the first online publications devoted to art and technology, Leonardo Electronic News, (that later became Leonardo Electronic Almanac) she has experience as a database programmer and technical information specialist. She was also a core member of the mid 1980's influential software on art discussions on Art Com Electronic Network, of the Arts Wire team that worked with technology transfer in the arts beginning in the early years of the public Internet, and of the 2012 Critical Code Studies Working Group. She is the editor of the MIT Press compendium, Women, Art & Technology, and her papers include "Creative Approaches to New Media" (in Education and Technology: Critical Perspectives and Possible Futures, Lanham MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) She is the also author of Judy Malloy, "Authoring Systems", in Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality, edited by Lorie Emerson, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Benjamin Robertson. Johns Hopkins University Press,in press, 2013
A pioneer on the Internet and in electronic literature, Malloy followed a vision of hypertextual narrative that she began in the 1970's with experimental artist books created in card catalog and electro-mechanical structures, and in 1986 she wrote and programmed the seminal hyperfiction Uncle Roger. In the ensuing years she created a series of innovative hypernarratives works published by Eastgate and on the Internet, including its name was Penelope and l0ve0ne, the first selection in the Eastgate Web Workshop. In 1993, she was invited to Xerox PARC where she worked in Computer Science Laboratory as the first artist in their artist-in-residence program. In 1994, she created one of the first arts websites, Making Art Online. (currently hosted on the website of the Walker Art Center)
As an arts writer, she has worked most notably as Editor of The New York Foundation for the Arts NYFA Current, (formerly Arts Wire Current)an Internet-based National journal on the arts and culture.
Her work has been exhibited and published internationally including the 2008 and 2010 Electronic Literature Conferences, San Francisco Art Institute, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, Sao Paulo Biennial, the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston Cyberarts Festival, The Walker Art Center, Visual Studies Workshop, Environmental Film Festival Ithaca, NY, Eastgate Systems, E.P. Dutton, Tanam Press, Seal Press, MIT Press, The Iowa Review Web, and Blue Moon Review. Parts of her recent work Paths of Memory and Painting have been exhibited or presented at the Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable, the E-Poetry Festival at the Center of Contempory Art in Barcelona, and the University of California Irvine, as well as short listed for the Prix poesie-media 2009, Biennale Internationale des poetes en Val de Marne. She is currently creating a new work, From Ireland with Letters.

For information about the Authoring Software project, email Judy Malloy at jmalloy@well.com

last update May 1, 2013

Tools and Applications

Index
Writers and Artists
Talk about Their Work
and the Software They
use to Create Their Work

Mark Amerika
Stefan Muller Arisona
Mark Bernstein: __Interview wirh Mark Bernstein
Alan Bigelow
Bill Bly
Jay Bushman
J. R. Carpenter
__ The Broadside of a Yarn
__ Chronicles of Pookie and JR
__ Entre Ville
__ STRUTS
M.D. Coverley
__ Egypt: The Book of
Going Forth by Day
__ Tin Towns
Steve Ersinghaus
Caitlin Fisher
Chris Funkhouser
Susan M. Gibb
Dene Grigar
__ 24-Hr. Micro-Elit
__ Fallow Field
Fox Harrell
Dylan Harris
William Harris
Ian Hatcher
Megan Heyward
Adriene Jenik
Chris Joseph
Rob Kendall
Antoinette LaFarge
Deena Larsen
Donna Leishman
Judy Malloy
Mark C. Marino
Mez
Ethan Miller
Nick Montfort
__Lost One
__Nick Montfort and
Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between
Judd Morrissey
Stuart Moulthrop
__Under Language
and Deep Surface
__ Interview with
Stuart Moulthrop
Alexander Mouton
Karen O'Rourke
Regina Pinto
Andrew Plotkin
Kate Pullinger
Sonya Rapoport:
__Interview with
Sonya Rapoport
Aaron Reed
Scott Rettberg
Jim Rosenberg
Stephanie Strickland
__Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
Sea and Spar Between
__Stephanie Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Vniverse and slippingglimpse
Sue Thomas
Eugenio Tisselli
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Joel Weishaus
Nanette Wylde

HTML, DHTML, JavaScript,
CSS, PHP
__J. R. Carpenter
__ Entre Ville
__ STRUTS
__Judy Malloy
Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland
__Judd Morrissey
__Alexander Mouton
__Ian Hatcher
__Nanette Wylde
Microsoft Marquee
__William Harris

Flash
__Mark Amerika
__Alan Bigelow
Dene Grigar
__Chris Joseph
__Rob Kendall
__Donna Leishman
__Alexander Mouton
__Regina Pinto
__Stephanie Strickland,
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Stuart Moulthrop
__Nanette Wylde
Website Authoring
Aptana Studio
__Ian Hatcher
Trellis
__Deena Larsen
Dreamweaver
__Mark Amerika
__Regina Pinto
__Joel Weishaus
Drupal
__Judd Morrissey
iWeb
__Dylan Harris
Netvibes
__Kate Pullinger
Hypertext and
Eliterature Authoring
Experimental
__Chris Funkhouser
__Fox Harrell
__Ian Hatcher
__Rob Kendall
__Judy Malloy
__Nick Montfort
__Jim Rosenberg
__Eugenio Tisselli
Storyspace
__Bill Bly
__Steve Ersinghaus
__Susan M. Gibb
Literatronica
__Mark Marino
Tinderbox
__Bill Bly
Cave Writing
__Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Augmented Reality
Caitlin Fisher

Interactive Fiction
Inform 7
__Aaron Reed
__Andrew Plotkin

Other applications
ToolBook
__M.D. Coverley
MIDIPoet
__Chris Funkhouser
__Eugenio Tisselli
Other Languages,
Developer Tools
C++
__Adriene Jenik
MySQL
__Judd Morrissey
Perl
__Nanette Wylde
Processing
__Scott Rettberg
Python; Vim
__J. R. Carpenter
__Ethan Miller
__Nick Montfort
Squeak
__Jim Rosenberg
XML
__Rob Kendall

Web Information Management
Diigo
__ Mark Marino
Blog Applications
CommentPress
__Kate Pullinger
Twitter
__Jay Bushman
__Dene Grigar
__Mez

Moos and Muds
LambdaMoo
__Sue Thomas
YIN MOO
__Antoinette LaFarge

Visual and Video Applications
Photoshop
__Mark Amerika
__J.R. Carpenter
__Alan Bigelow
__Alexander Mouton
__Megan Heyward
__Chris Joseph
__Regina Pinto
__Joel Weishaus
Studio Artist
__Dylan Harris
Director
__M.D. Coverley
__Megan Heyward
____Stephanie Strickland,
Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
Apple Final Cut
__Nanette Wylde
Apple QuickTime
__Mark Amerika
__J. R. Carpenter
Apple iMovie
__Mark Amerika

Premiere
__Chris Joseph
Soundium
__Stefan Muller Arisona
Audio Applications
Apple Logic Studio
__Alexander Mouton
Max/MSP/Jitter
__Antoinette LaFarge

Sound Studio
__Alan Bigelow
Sound Forge
__Dylan Harris
__Chris Joseph
__Donna Leishman
__Regina Pinto