TheGreatHatsby is the name of an AIM bot that instigates conversation between two totally unrelated people. Its name is a play on words from the book The Great Gatsby. It is a relay bot that retrieves the most recently updated Live Journal posts and obtains the AIM screenname of the posting user. It then sends the user the message “i say, old bean, have you seen my hat?”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheGreatHatsby

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Someone sent this to me in response to the “Word Disassociation” that Adam had sent on. Not quite the same thing, but you Maya-heads will get a kick out of it — electronic writing in Maya! There is a version in French and English.

http://clik.clak.free.fr/ 

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You can leave comments here for The Jew’s Daughter. Here’s a bit to start you off:

Morrissey..explored the subject of textual context and reconfiguration in The Jew’s Daughter, a work in which rolling over active words changes passages of text on the same screen, as opposed to prompting a change of screen. The screen stays while the text changes, embodying Michael Joyce’s notion that “electronic text replaces itself.” Shifting the content’s context destabilizes the act and process of reading. The reader of The Jew’s Daughter learns to expect disorientation within the words themselves. To extract a quote from The Jew’s Daughter, and thus to participate in decontextualizing content: “Things seek realization in new configurations” (screen 221).

From The Iowa Review, “The Very Essence of Poetry” by Jessica Pressman.

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Following are the individual assignments for class presentations over the next month. Please do a “walk through” of your 2-3 pieces and have a few discussion questions ready. This should all take 10-15 minutes; it’s very informal, merely a way to expose ourselves to lots of different work.

April 4

Lisa Oliver

• John Cayley et. al., “What We Will”
  http://www.z360.com/what/
• Andrew Hieronymi, “Floating Sushi”
  http://www.andrew3000.net/

Andrew Fox

• David Clark, “Meanwhile”
  http://www.habitatstudio.ca/~cmendis/meanwhile/
• Lev Manovich, “Soft Cinema”
  http://www.softcinema.net/?reload

Daniel Cannizzaro

• Chris Joseph, “Intimate Alice”
  http://www.babel.ca/
• Patrick Farley, “Electric Sheep Comix” (pick one)
  http://www.e-sheep.com/
• Entropy8Zuper, “Endless Forest”
  http://entropy8zuper.org/

April 11

Jason French

• Sissyfight 2000
  http://www.sissyfight.com/
• GameLab, “Diner Dash” (and other games)
  http://www.gamelab.com/

Scott Kolp

• Stuart Moulthrop, “Pax, An Instrument,” and “Reagan Library”
  http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/
• Dagmar Chili Pitas
  http://dagmar_chili.pitas.com/

Adam White

• William Poundstone, “New Digital Emblems”
  http://www.williampoundstone.net/
• Paul Chan, “Alternumerics”
  http://www.nationalphilistine.com/alternumerics/
• Darren Wershler-Henry, “Nicholodeon”
  http://www.chbooks.com/online/nicholodeon/index.html

April 18

Raphael Lee

• Diana Slattery, “Glide”
  http://www.academy.rpi.edu/glide/
• Noah Wardrip-Fruin et. al., “News Reader” and “Regime Change”
  http://turbulence.org/Works/twotxt/index.htm

Daniel Byers

• Gustav Morin, “Spaghetti Dreadful”
  http://www.ubu.com/ubu/morin_spaghetti.html
• Braxton Soderman, “E-texts”
  http://thefollowingphrases.com/
• Thomas Swiss, selected works
  http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/swiss/projects.htm

William Durette

• Talan Memmott, “Self Portrait(s) [as Other(s)]” and “Lexia to Perplexia”
  http://memmott.org/talan/
• Caroline Bergvall, “Eclat”
  http://www.ubu.com/ubu/bergvall_eclat.html

April 25

Alice Liu

• Juliette Martin, “Hyperbody” and “oooxxxooo”
  http://www.julietmartin.com
• Barbara Cole, “Foxy Moron”
  http://www.ubu.com/ubu/cole_foxy.html

Elliott Breece

• Charles Bernstein, “An Mosaic for a Convergence”
  http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/ebr6.htm
• Nick Montfort and William Gillespie, “2002: A Palindrome Story”
  http://www.spinelessbooks.com/2002/book/index.html

Joshua Spechler

• David Clark, “A Is For Apple”
  http://aisforapple.net/
• Ron Silliman, “Susnet Debris”
  http://www.ubu.com/ubu/silliman_sunset.html
• Caitlin Fisher, “These Waves of Girls”
  http://www.eliterature.org/Awards2001/fiction-FisherCaitlin.php

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I couldn’t find anything too provocative on the web for this one, so this is from Wikipedia:

While today it looks like a black and white copy of Wired magazine, and its prose reads more or less like boilerplate for any of the heady techno-utopian pronouncements of the 1990s, it should be noted that it presaged the development of the original ARPANET by two years, and preceded the widespread civilian use of the Internet by almost twenty. For this and other reasons McLuhan is often given the moniker “prophet.”

Go to town…

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Net’s flavor of the month…

A IS FOR APPLE
http://aisforapple.net
“A is for Apple is an interactive work that investigates a cryptography of the apple. Using an ever expanding series of associative links, the work looks for hidden meanings, coincidences and insights that stem from the apple. This leads to a vast web of references from western metaphysics, popular culture, the history of cryptography, ideas of language, and psychoanalytic theory.”

MEANWHILE
http://meanwhile.ca
“Godard once said that a film must have a beginning, middle and an end but not necessarily in that order. MEANWHILE explores new ways to detour from the well-trodden path of narrative by giving the viewer a choice at the end of each scene as to which direction in time they want to move in the story.
The nine scenes in this screwball comedy can be seen in any order; each path revealing the intricate interconnectivity of the characters follies, obsessions, and ambitions.”

LIKEWISE
http://chemicalpictures.net/cp/likewise

RIDDLED WITH THE STINX
http://riddledwiththestinx.net/stinx

PERSONAL SITE OF DAVID CLARK
http://chemicalpictures.net/cp

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I thought this was pretty cool:

http://yugop.com/ver3/stuff/03/fla.html

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Here’s a really successful electronic writing piece that takes great advantage of 360 degree photography, sound and interface. It’s a collaboration between John Cayley, Giles Perring, Douglas Cape, and others – they call it “broadband interactive drama.” Definitely worth checking out.

What We Will

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The following is from the Village Voice review of the original production of 70 Scenes of Halloween in 1980:

Jones’s deadpan farce with intellectual aspirations ends long after it should, but on the other hand it could end anywhere. Time in the play is out of joint, non-continuous, as fragmented as a series of television programs. It does not flow forward with the certainly of out-and-out narrative; events follow one another in a series of near repetitions, so that you feel they are overlapping.

Unlike most plays, 70 Scenes does not seem to be taking place in time at all, but in space. It is as if each scene were a discrete sketch traced onto the thinnest of translucent paper, and then all 70 of the tracings were juxtaposed one on top of the other in order to create a complex, multilayered drawing in which the lines were sometimes a little fuzzy but the total image was deep and singular and memorable.

It is also possible to interpret the play with old fashioned Freudian tools. Then you would say that the Beast and the Witch personified the sexual underminds of Jeff and Joan, although I would prefer them to remain the separate creatures they so palpably are on stage.

Although he gently needles them, Jones seems to have an affection for the characters he created. One thing I take him to be saying is this: In a sexual age which rightly relegates D. H. Lawrence to a dim time of prerevolution, the dominion of the libido is finally populated with likable citizens.

Jopes’ website has complete editions of other plays of his, as well as his provocative manifesto against mainstream drama, “Geezer Theater”: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/diogenes_/homepage.htm.

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