2009-2010 Events
Noah Wardrip-Fruin lecture - April 8, 2010
Digital Assembly Lecture Series
“Process-Oriented Fictions: Narrative in the Age of Media Machines”
Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Thursday April 8, 2010
- 10AM -12PM
Critique/Discussion, FAC302
- 5PM - 7PM "Playing What We
Mean: Games, Fiction, and Expressive Processing" Reitz Union Room 282
Sponsored by Digital Media Art and Digital Assembly
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a creator of literary art in digital media whose work connects writing with the arts, humanities, and computer science - with a particular interest in fiction and playability. His projects of different sorts include The Impermanence Agent, Screen, The New Media Reader (co-edited with Nick Montfort), three edited collections with Pat Harrigan (First Person, Second Person, and Third Person), and the group blog Grand Text Auto. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Expressive Intelligence Studio in the Department of Computer Science at the UC Santa Cruz.
His book Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies is just out from MIT Press and is the first in the new Software Studies series.
You can download Expressive
Processsing introduction at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chapters/0262013436chap1.pdf
"Meaning What We Play: Games,
Fiction,
and Expressive Processing" (Reitz Room 282, 5pm)
"Today's games have well-developed models of spatial movement, combat,
and economics. But their models of fiction barely deserve the name.
Even those supporting the most ambitious games are burdensome and
bug-prone for authors - while providing the player quite limited ranges
of meaningful choice. This talk discusses examples of more dynamic
approaches to fiction, considering lessons past work presents for
authors wishing to craft models that express their visions for playable
fiction. At the same time, the talk argues that critics need to begin
to interpret the computational processes of computer games (and digital
media generally) and connect them to an understanding of audience
experience." (Noah Wardrip-Fruin)
For further information contact Mauro Carassai at mcarassai@ufl.edu
Futures of Digital Studies 2010
5th Annual Digital Assembly Conference
University of Florida, February 25-27
The conference will focus on the dialogue between various forms of digital literacy connected with recent technological developments in networked and programmable media in relation to human expression and forms of representation. We seek to put in conversation digital artists and digital critics in order to examine the 'state of the art' of digitally mediated practices and to envision possible futures for the current overlapping platforms, software, formats, hardware and artistic processes through which we experience digital culture. The two-day conference's thematic focus on the 'literary' in the digital age is integrated with a fundamental attention to visual art, music and sound, computer science, and other aspects of digital culture through an art exhibit and a concluding roundtable videoconference session with an international group of participants.
Please see our full conference page and submission information.