Glos Is

((((A literary, artistic, communicative happening in Brooklyn. I just talked to Mr. Daniel Grossman today and apparently things are starting to kick with the thing. Along with displaying the talents of many of my friends, they have one of my college short stories up (The Kenzaburo Oe-inspired "I Fear Gooks Metal), and hopefully will have some more soon--I still edit things I wrote in college. The story's 6 web pages long (I don't know why it couldn't just be one) and you have to click "Next" on the left side of the screen to continue reading. I still look for that link to be on the lower right of the text, but other than that, it's a great site.)))
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"If I had the language then, to add my own entry into the "The World of Knowledge" it would have said that the skin is spongy and changing, like a beach at high tide. The body is plastic. The sinews are cantaloupe. We grow ourselves up in fits and starts, and if an object draws too close while we grow, the skin will overtake it, carrying it into the thick layers, the way weeds grew over Grandmother's car after she quit driving--the chrome and cracked vinyl vanishing into the gradual layers of dirt and geology. The body expands, then shrinks, churning up the things absorbed in youth and coughing them up in later years. Thus, all history renders into sweat and defecation. We grow old, our shells harden; become a mixture of wax and stone. Silts clean their way in, dripping deep to the marrow, hollowing out tracks and blooming, years later, when uncovered by one attentive, young scientist."
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"In muffled darkness, I imagined a gookworm digging inside my leg with hooks, weaving a fibril sack in between bone and the cantaloupe stuff. My teacher had brought a cocoon into class and we passed it around so that each of us could press the delicate silk to our ears and hear the sound of what seemed like ancient baby teeth inside when we rattled it. Someday it would be a butterfly. Now the cocoon lay dormant in my own leg, inherited from my father, respiring slowly and clicking its new, wet mandibles. It would bide time for years to pass and for my body to grow tough and strange to myself; when I grew so far off the floor that my head would fear my feet. When so much would be asked of me, I would return home at the end of each day, sun-burned and aching, too wasted to do anything but fall half-asleep to the drone of the newsman just talking. It was my curse. Some terrible day, when I was pocked with hair and scars and my breath was like steel wool and rotten beef. On that day the gooks metal would chew its way towards daylight and emerge through the birthmark on my leg."

Grand Text Auto

((((Blogs are the yesterday's next big thing. However, many of the popular, long-standing ones seem mired in techno-geekiness and left/right "blogosphere" punditry as a sort of knee-jerk backlash to the antique blandness of mainstream media. That's my opinion for this particular minute.)))

EXHIBITION: Grand Text Auto

LOCATION: The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine

OPENING RECEPTION: October 4th, 6:30pm-9:00pm, Beall Center

SYMPOSIUM: October 5th, 1:00-5:00pm, Studio Art Bldg. 712, Room 160, UC Irvine

PERFORMANCE: October 5th, 6:00-8:00pm, Winifred Smith Hall, UC Irvine

GENERAL CONTACT: (949) 824-4339 or http://beallcenter.uci.edu

OVERVIEW

Many blogs have become books - from The Baghdad Blog to Belle de Jour. But Grand Text Auto is the first blog ever to become a gallery exhibition. It opens October 4th and runs through December 15th at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition features the work of Grand Text Auto members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and their collaborators.

Grand Text Auto is a blog about the potential of digital media, from literary websites to experimental computer games. At the exhibition, the blog members will put these ideas into practice, showing a variety of cutting edge works. Some use the latest in artificial intelligence technology, such as Mateas and Stern's interactive drama Façade -- of which The New York Times says, "This is the future of video games." The Beall exhibition will feature the first public showing of a life-sized "augmented reality" version of Façade, created in collaboration with Georgia Tech's GVU Center. Virtual reality is also on display, as with Wardrip-Fruin's collaborative work Screen, a literary game played with 3D text -- never seen before outside of a research lab and presented with support from UC San Diego's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts.

On the other hand, some works in the exhibition use decidedly do-it-yourself techniques, such as Montfort and Rettberg's Implementation, an experimental novel distributed around the world on mailing labels. Others are quirky, such as Flanagan's [giantJoystick], a replica Atari 2600 joystick so large that two people must work together to play (this has its North American debut at the Beall show).

In addition to the gallery show, the members of Grand Text Auto are working together with the Beall Center to present a live symposium and performance evening, both on October 5th. The afternoon symposium (1-5 p.m.) will discuss the power of collaborative blogging, new directions for computer games, and the place of language in digital media. The evening performance (6-8 p.m.) will feature the disturbing and humorous interactive cinema experience Terminal Time (which automatically creates outrageously biased documentaries of the past millennium) and a live performance of the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown (which tells the tale of a rollicking cross-country book tour). Parking for these events is available in the Student Parking structure at the corner of Campus Drive and West Peltason.

Online, Grand Text Auto (http://grandtextauto.org) is a blog with more than 200,000 visitors a month, collectively authored by six artists and scholars. Offline, Grand Text Auto members have been shown in major art museums, been written about in leading national periodicals, and shipped games that have met wide acclaim and sold millions of copies. The Grand Text Auto exhibition is the first time that these artists will show their work together. Delve into Grand Text Auto's digital depths October 4 - December 15, 2007 (closed November 22-26) and witness the live debut of blog-meets-reality.

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