Universe Creation 101

I have had the unluckiest thing happen. My www.crossmediastorytelling.com domain expired without me being notified. It was subsequently taken by a company who now want at least $200USD for it. I cannot believe this has happened, especially with Max’s book just out and my domain name for CMS all through it! I only just changed to cross-mediaentertainment a month or so ago and just redirected all the CMS traffic to here. Not everyone knows, yet, that I’ve changed domain names, and some people won’t until they enter CMS. I had always intended to keep both running anyway (two points-of-entry). And now they never will know. I am furious and frustrated. The company who manages my domain name, registerfly, hasn’t got back to me (I received email notifications everyone of my domain name except this time). I will always autorenew now.

I feel so sad. I’ve lost a digital child.

All is good! They’ve given my URL back! Yay!

The Australian academic journal fibreculture has announced a CFP (call for papers) for their general issue next year. Tom and I were too late in getting a paper together for the New Media and New Pedagogy issue, and for some reason I never heard back from fibreculture regarding my submission for the upcoming Distributed Aesthetics issue. It should be an interesting one though, since I think Jill Walker will be in it.

Papers are other relevant works are invited for a General Issue of the Fibreculture Journal, to be published in the second half of 2006. Proposed contributions should fall within the ambit of the Fibreculture Journal’s interests, as below.

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2006.

The Fibreculture Journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their
deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of:

:: information and creative industries
:: national strategies for innovation, research and development
:: education
:: media and culture, and
:: new media arts

The Fibreculture Journal encourages submissions that extend research into critical and investigative networked theories, knowledges and practices.

I believe that one of the characteristics of contemporary entertainment is the blurring of the productions stages, in particular, how production blurs into publication/broadcast. I have previously called this the ‘caught-with-hair-in-the-curlers-aesthetic’ regarding the Girl Friday blog and even mentioned recently at LAMP the impact of the Blair Witch website on the reception of the film (which was online over a year before the film was released), but now here is another form of production publication to prepare audiences for the actual publication/broadcast/distribution and of course gather fans: podcasts by the director of Superman Returns. Subscribe to the following URL in iTunes, or download from the Blue Tights blog: http://movabletype.warnerbros.com/supermanreturns/bryansjournals.xml

Max Giovagnoli’s book is out, and I just received my copy in the mail. I wish I could read Italian! I can see that Max has utilised alot of what I’ve written on this blog over the last year or so, but he has cited me, which is good. He has also referred to researchers that I have referred to here. This is good, one of the intentions of this site is to be a portal of information about researchers working in the area, as well as being a hub for researchers to connect through. Here is Max’s abstract again:

Performing cross-media entails carrying out information, entertainment and communication campaigns in an ‘integrated’ manner, thereby simultaneously utilising a range of media forms within large editorial projects. From reality show (Big Brother, Operation Triunfo, Talpa) to film promotion (Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Ring 2). From multi-medial journalism (BBC news, SKY TV 24, RAI news 24) to video mobile telephone use and internet serials. From inter-business, institutional and political communication, to the creation of emotional marketing campaigns and new formats for cable links. The book describes, through examples, simulations, and contributions by leading international scholars, the techniques, the scenarios and the fundamental rules necessary in order to carry out communication project distributed across various media forms. Among the first publications in Europe on the subject, the work uses the research on collective imagination, emotional competence, project management and alternative dramaturgies to give order to a discipline where, to this day, too much scope is given to the talent of the individual and to an improvisation that generates mysterious successes or unexpected flops in the sectors: information, entertainment and communication.

Congratulations to Max for doing the book. It looks like a great lot of information, which I would love to read!! The book can be purchased here. It is great seeing these books coming out, and being cited. I really have to get some papers out very soon, so everyone knows what the hell I’m talking about!

Our first joint paper — that is between Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino and I (of Writer Response Theory)– was presented by Jeremy at DAC in Denmark last week. The feedback is good. In particular, Jeremy has been getting a few queries from people following up from my sections on cross-media and adaptations. I’ll be posting about these researchers soon too. Yes, there is another cross-media researcher in the world! In fact, I have 4 more coming your way. In the meantime, here is the abstract of our paper:

How do we compare eliterature forms? What does it mean for a work to be implemented as hypertext, interactive fiction, or chatbot? “Benchmark fiction” is a methodology for creating ‘benchmarks’ - sets of adaptations of the “same” eliterature content across different media for the purpose of comparative study. While total equivalence between the resulting ‘benchfic’ is impossible, praxis remains important: by creating ‘equivalent’ media and then critiquing them, we revealing our own definitions of media through process. Work on the first story to be benchmarked, “The Lady or the Tiger” (1882) by Frank R. Stockton, inspired a framework for displaying sources through interchangeable display modules. The project is considered in terms of historical precedents (Lorem Ipsum, Hello World, Cloak of Darkness, Gabriella Infinita), contemporarytheories (adaptation, remediation, media-specific analysis, transmedial and cross-media storytelling), and current experiments (chatbots, wikis, search art, cellular automata), with some discussion of design and pedagogy.

And the bot, part of the benchmark project, is here.

Douglass, J., Marino, M. and Christy Dena (2005) ‘Benchmark Fiction: A Framework for Comparative New Media Studies’ presented at Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Department of Digital Aesthetics & Communication at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

New media artist Mark Amerika is giving a talk on convergence. Mark Amerika is among other achievements, the creator of an early interactive narrative work on the web: Grammatron. His bio reads:

Mark Amerika is Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the founder and Publisher of the Alt-X Online Network (1993-ongoing), which has been described by Publishers Weekly as “the literary publishing model of the future.” He was named as a “Time Magazine 100 Innovator” as part of their continuing series of features on the most influential artists, scientists, entertainers and philosophers into the 21st century.

Mark is touring to here, Oz, and is delivering a talk this week in Melbourne. I cannot make that time but recommend others who can to do so:

“The Future of Convergent Publishing”

Professor Mark Amerika will be presenting a seminar on the future of online and distributed publishing. The Internet established an entirely new mode of publication and distribution. Recent developments in Blogging and Podcasting have enhanced the potential of networked modes of distribution that continue to revolutionise the very concept of publishing.

The seminar will be held at Swinburne University (Hawthorn Campus) on Thursday 15th December in AR103, 1.00-2.00 pm.

I haven’t been posting much because I’ve been preparing for a week-long residential in which I’m a CME mentor! I’m off doing that this week for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation so may not be posting next week either. However, know this: that soon I’ll be letting you know about some more cross-media researchers and launching the CME wiki! Yay!