Open Mic/Open Mouse

As this video from "nox traction" indicated, this weekend the Electronic Literature Organization hosted an Open Mic/Open Mouse evening at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC. To those familiar with the offerings of many "new media" readers as teachers, there were some homages to classic writers among the readings that were inspired by classics in information theory from the postwar period from many disciplines: among the referenced authors were Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Turing, and Ted Nelson.

Mark Marino performed a piece of "Marginalia in the Library of Babel" that charted a course of Diigo bookmarks across Wikipedia and Amazon.com. Jeremy Douglass created a "stretch text" poem with nested file folders in tribute to one of the ideas described in Ted Nelson's "Dream Machines." Finally, with the creator in absentia, Peggy Weil's "Mr. Mind" was shown to the crowd under the stars, in which a chatbot predicated on the procedures of the Turing test attempts to demonstrate -- without success -- that people are indeed human.

Although I've been working on a computer game about being the Attorney General of the United States, in which the first level involves John Ashcroft shooting eagles at "bad" statues of unclothed women in Washington D.C. while avoiding firing at "good" statues of the Ten Commandments, I wasn't able to demo it because of the old PC-to-Mac problem. Instead I showed some of Media Manifesto and a poem called "answering." Ironically, mine was not the only piece of the evening that played with voice-t0-speech technologies.