Introductions
Please use the comment function below to tell us a little about yourself: your year and major, where you're from, what attracted you to this course, and anything else that you'd like us to know about your background and interests.
Formal Systems
Remember the criteria for a formal system: a set of tokens or units; a set of rules for their manipulation; and, a starting position. Given that, can you think of an example of some aspect of your life that can be modelled as a formal system? Whether it's how you sort your socks or decide what classes to take? (Remember, you need to be able to articulate the rules.) Anyone willing to start us off?
Mark Saporta's Composition No. 1
Here's a detailed description of a reading of Mark Saporta's recombinant novel Composition No. 1, which Marie-Laure Ryan cites as perhaps the only actual example of a Complete Graph. The description, incidentally, is by Nick Montfort, whose work we'll be encountering again during the semester.
Haiku Machines
If you'd like to share some output from your Haiku machine, feel free to do so below!
Forking Paths (Not)
Here's a classic example of what Aarseth terms a "unicursal labyrinth" (only one correct path).
A Piece of Pi
No direct bearing on the course content, but I couldn't resist posting this piece of pi (to one million decimal places). [Thanks KF]
Game of Life
The Game of Life is one of the most famous formal systems ever devised, by the mathematician John Conway. We'll be seeing it again later in the semester when we read Ellen Ullman's novel The Bug.
You can read all about it by following the link. Play the Game of Life by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner, drawing a starting pattern with your mouse, and then clicking Go. Try zooming out to see how your system proliferates.
Recursive Sims
From Wired News:
"The Russian Nesting Doll of Games. The object of The Sims, a popular video game, is to keep the characters happy in their daily lives. Now comes a fan-made plug-in that lets the in-game characters amuse themselves by -- what else? -- playing the SimCity video game. By Daniel Terdiman."
Full story here.
In the News
Via GrandTextAuto: An AP wire service story on the rapidly emerging field of Ludology, or the study of (video) games:
"Rejecting the stigma that games are only for kids, researchers around the world are making computer games the subject of serious academic pursuit alongside literature, music and art. They are staking out space in universities -- with Ph.D. programs, research centers and online journals."
Espen Aarseth gets a mention.
Yesterday's Links
Here are links to the sites I showed in class yesteday:
Illuminated Manuscripts (Bodleian Library, Oxford)
Yesterday's Links
Here's the Travesty program I briefly demoed in class.
See also Ray Kurzweil's site, which features both a Cybernetic Poet (a program that writes new poems in the style of famous authors) and AARON, a program that paints its own original pictures.
Freedom and Constraint
"The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant."
--Raymond Queneau
Marc Blank's Deadline
If you'd like to try Marc Blank's Deadline, which is discussed by Aarseth as a representative Infocom game, there's an excerpt online here. Scroll down about 2/3 of the way to find it.
The whole review is well worth reading.
Repost: The Game of Life
As seen in The Bug: The Game of Life is one of the most famous formal systems ever devised, by the mathematician John Conway.
You can read all about it by following the link. Play the Game of Life by clicking the button in the top right-hand corner, drawing a starting pattern with your mouse, and then clicking Go. Try zooming out to see how your system proliferates.
Old School Moveable Type
Photos from our Pyramid Atlantic letterpress course this past weekend (that's my wife, Kari). Click any of the images for a more detailed look.
Type in a California Job Case and a galley tray.
Drawers of type with two small platten presses.
Language in the palm of my hand (12-point type).
Using a composing stick.
A bit further along.
Standing type (note the blanks for white space).
Locking up (the type is transferred from the composing stick to the bed of the press and wedged in place by the small pieces of wood, called "furniture").
The pressure on the furniture is reinforced by tightening the quoin key.
Ink.
At last we're ready to pull the press!
Another pull.
Where the furniture, quoins, and quoin keys are kept.
Two tiny little platten presses.
The fruit of our labor (excerpt from Ovid's Metamorphoses, as translated by John Dryden--a passage from the Procne and Philomela myth).
Outside Pyramid Atlantic on Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland.
Oulipo Comix
Exercises in Style was inspired by a work of the same name by the French writer Raymond Queneau. In that book, Queneau spun 99 variations out of a mundane, two-part text about two chance encounters with a mildly irritating character during the course of a day. He started by telling it in every conceivable tense, then by doing it in free verse and as a sonnet, as a telegram, in pig latin, as a series of exclamations, in an indifferent voice... you name it.The goal of this project is to apply the same principle to comics by creating as many variations as possible on a simple one-page non-story: different points of view, different genres, different formal games, and so on.
The First Bug
The first documented computer bug, discovered by Grace Murry Hopper in a Mark II computer at Harvard University in 1945.