Trip report: E-Fest 2006 at Brown

Rhode Island is fortunate to have one of the most active literary hypertext communities in the country, and this week they sponsored E-Fest which brought together theorists and artists for discussion and performance.

Only had time to get there for one panel yesterday, on "The Game of Fiction." Some interesting ideas from Lutz Hamel of URI on using evolutionary computation to generate both game moves and textual content.

The evening demos were spectacular. Jim Carpenter ran three machines, two reading spontaneously generated poetry, and the third reading and projecting the source code; it was weirdly effective, and the emergent intersections of the texts were delightful.

Scott Rettberg read and showed Implementation, a cut-up novel distributed on the web as label templates to be printed out, stuck on, and photographed in the world. Quite cool juxtapositions of text and location.

And Stuart Moulthrop showed some new fictions, including one using a neat "deep dive" interface that plays with access to the text along a time dimension using a SCUBA metaphor. And as an encore, he read a bit of Pax, one of my all-time favorite works, a dreamy, terrifying meditation on air travel, security, and terror. Or something.

Didn't have time to get back today for the real-time demos of Robert Coover's Cave, but the clip he showed of this room-sized 3-D writing/audio/image space was amazing; I hadn't seen it for several years, and the fluidity of motion, and abilities for writers to directly create and interact in the room now looked most impressive.