Events
Week of Events
Nick Montfort: “Line of Inquiry: Many Authors Explore Creative Computing Through a Short Program”
Nick Montfort: “Line of Inquiry: Many Authors Explore Creative Computing Through a Short Program”
The following one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 continually generates a pleasing random maze pattern. In this talk, I argue that this tiny program can serve as a Rosetta Stone to help us understand the interconnected cultural and technical aspects of creative computing, practices of using the computer expressively and […]
Tony Michels: “The Roots of Jewish Socialism: From New York to Russia and Back”
Tony Michels: “The Roots of Jewish Socialism: From New York to Russia and Back”
In the late nineteenth century, a socialist workers' movement burst onto the scene in New York City's immigrant Jewish "ghetto." Over subsequent decades and in cities around the country, hundreds of thousands of men and women participated in this Jewish labor movement. They recast Jewish culture and community, and made a strong imprint on American […]
Nick Montfort: “Curveship: Interactive Narrating for Interactive Fiction”
Nick Montfort: “Curveship: Interactive Narrating for Interactive Fiction”
Curveship is an interactive fiction (IF) development system that adds support for interactive narrating -- automatic narrative variation that is accomplished through text generation. For 30 years, IF development systems have done very well at allowing us to build and manipulate world models, which are then encountered by players using text-based interfaces. Curveship aims to […]
Vilashini Cooppan: “Disciplining World Literature: History, Memory, & the Work of Worlding”
Vilashini Cooppan: “Disciplining World Literature: History, Memory, & the Work of Worlding”
Professor Cooppan’s in-progress Race, Writing, and the Literary World System combines the economic analysis of world systems theory, world literature models of global literary movement, traditional theory and history of the novel, and psychoanalytic and philosophical studies of political affect. It explores how literary economies have helped to express, translate, shape, and contest the history […]
Bishnupriya Ghosh: “The ‘Saint of the Gutters’: Mother Teresa as Corporeal Aperture”
Bishnupriya Ghosh: “The ‘Saint of the Gutters’: Mother Teresa as Corporeal Aperture”
The customary critique of Mother Teresa reads her image as a compromised mass commodity, the anointed saint who habitually produces the “third world” as her necessary gutter. While it is certainly the case that global icons of her ilk lure consumers into commodity fetishism, isolating them from social relations, we see these recursive images routinely […]
Nick Montfort: Riddle & Bind & Generators
Nick Montfort: Riddle & Bind & Generators
Nick Montfort will read from his recent book, Riddle & Bind (Spineless Books, 2010), which contains poems that relate to his work in digital media. These include riddles (figuratively describing something that is left for the reader to guess) as well as constrained writing à la Oulipo. Then, he'll read some of the output of […]
CANCELLED: The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series
CANCELLED: The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series
The The Writing Program’s 2011 Reading Series has been cancelled on 01/12/2011 due to illness. Chuck Atkinson will be reading poetry. Sarah Rabkin will be reading from her forthcoming book, What I Learned at Bug Camp: Essays on Finding a Home in the World. Stephen Sweat will be presenting on the representation of literacy in […]
Joshua Schreier: “Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria”
Joshua Schreier: “Arabs of the Jewish Faith: The Civilizing Mission in Colonial Algeria”
How did Algerian Jews respond to and appropriate France's newly conceived "civilizing mission" in the mid-nineteenth century? The mission to civilize may have been rooted in French Revolutionary ideals of regeneration, enlightenment, and emancipation, but it developed "on the ground" as a strategic response to the challenges of controlling the diverse and unruly populations of […]
John MacFarlane: “A Puzzle about Modal Necessity”
John MacFarlane: “A Puzzle about Modal Necessity”
When does it make sense to be uncertain whether it's possible that p? On many accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, including the one favored by Professor MacFarlane, epistemic modal uncertainty should be appropriate only when one is (a) uncertain about what one knows, or more generally about what is contained in the body […]
A Celebration of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Novel “I Hotel”
A Celebration of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Novel “I Hotel”
As part of the Living Writers Series, Literature and Creative Writing Professor Karen Tei Yamashita will read from her novel, I Hotel; Finalist for the 2010 National Book Award, Fiction. There will also be conversations with: • Allan Kornblum, publisher for Coffee House Press • Sina Grace, illustrator of I Hotel and UCSC Creative Writing […]