Off Center

On today’s episode, recent PhD graduate, Marianne Gunderson, joins Scott for a discussion on creepypasta, fanfiction and monsters, and machine vision. Doctor Gunderson has started her postdoctoral research at the ALGOFOLK (algorithmic folklore) project connected to the Center for Digital Narrative.

References

Andam, Julie. 2015. Skam. NRK.

Atalaia, Nuno, and Marianne Gunderson. “Alexa’s Monstrous Agency: The Horror of the Digital Voice Assistant.” Not available in BORA awaiting publishing.

4Chan. 2003. “What is 4chan?” 4chan. https://4chan.org/.

Gunderson, Marianne. 2017. “What is an omega? Rewriting sex and gender in omegaverse fanfiction.” [Master's thesis]. DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.14405.47849.

Gunderson, Marianne. 2024. “The Nexus of Algorithmic Visions: Agency, Imaginaries, and the Self in Sociotechnical Situations.” [Doctoral thesis]. https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/handle/11250/3161190.

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this short byweekly AI update, hosts Scott Rettberg and Jhave Johnston talk about the use of AI in filmmaking in places like Hollywood. While actors and writers fear AI could take over their jobs, its use in filmmaking is rapidly growing. 

References

Bateman, Justine. 2024. “Hollywood is dead, according to Justine Bateman. Here’s what comes next.” Fast Company. Effective November 2, 2024. https://www.fastcompany.com/91220089/hollywood-is-dead-according-to-justine-bateman-heres-what-comes-next. 

Gordon, Devin. 2024. “What if A.I. Is Actually Good for Hollywood?” The New York Times. Effective November 6, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/01/magazine/ai-hollywood-movies-cgi.html. 

Viggle. n. d. “Home.” Viggle AI. Accessed December 2, 2024. https://viggle.ai/home. 

Wonder Animation Studio. n. d. “Home.” Wonder Animation. Accessed December 2, 2024. https://wonderanimation.us/. 

Zemeckis, Robert, director. 2024. Here. Miramax. 1 hr., and 44 min. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18272208/. 

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

Mark Amerika is a visual artist, media theorist, and novelist. He is a professor of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado. In this episode, Scott and Mark will discuss Mark's career in art and academia, and some of his field-defining works.  

References

Amerika, Mark. 1997. GRAMMATRON. Alt-X. https://www.grammatron.com/  

Amerika, Mark. 1995. Sexual Blood. Black Ice.  

Amerika, Mark, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder. 2023. Posthuman Cinema. https://posthumancinema.com/. 

Gillespie, William, Rettberg, Scott, Stratton, Dirk, & Marquadt, Frank. 1999. The Unknown [Hypertext fiction]. Web. http://unknownhypertext.com/.   

Rettberg, Scott. 2003. Destination Unknown: Experiments in the Network Novel. [Dissertation]. https://retts.net/documents/rettberg_dissertation.pdf  

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

Back with a new episode and song, are David Jhave Johnston and Scott Rettberg. In today’s episode, they will discuss AI agents. Secret agents, travel agents, helping you with anything you need. Whether that may be spying on people or booking that holiday you wanted to go on, the AI agents can do it for you. Listen now for this new AI update.  

References

Fourney, Adam, et al. 2024. “Magentic-One: A generalist multi-agent system for solving complex tasks.” Microsoft. Effective November 4, 2024. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/magentic-one-a-generalist-multi-agent-system-for-solving-complex-tasks/

Grosnit, Antoine, et al. 2024. “Large Language Models Orchestrating Structured Reasoning Achieve Kaggle Grandmaster Level.” Hugging face. Effective November 6, 2024. https://huggingface.co/papers/2411.03562. 

Lu, Yadong. 2024. “OmniParser for pure vision-based GUI agent.” Microsoft. Effective October 8, 2024. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/omniparser-for-pure-vision-based-gui-agent

Riegler, Michael Alexander. 2024. “Exploring OpenAI’s Swarm: An experimental framework for multi-agent systems.” Medium. Effective October 12, 2024. https://medium.com/@michael_79773/exploring-openais-swarm-an-experimental-framework-for-multi-agent-systems-5ba09964ca18

The Big Sleep Team. 2024. “Project Zero. From naptime to big sleep: Using large language models to catch vulnerabilities in real-world code.” Google Project Zero. Effective November 1, 2024. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2024/10/from-naptime-to-big-sleep.html#bigsleepteam

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

Welcome back to a new episode of Off Center. Today, Scott is joined by Talan Memmott, a professor of Mass Communication at Winona State University. They discuss Talan's career as a digital artist and electronic literature artist, highlighting his latest work in cripistemology. Tune in now!

References

Jackson, Shelley. 1995. Patchwork Girl. Eastgate Systems.

Joyce, Michael. 1987. Afternoon, a story. Eastgate Systems.

Memmott, Talan. 2024. “A Cripistemology of Breath.” YouTube. 4 min., 32 sec.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VRCSILVdgM

Memmott, Talan. 1998. BeeHive - Hypertext/Hypermedia Literary Journal, 1(1). https://archive.thenext.eliterature.org/beehive/archive/11arc.html.

Memmott, Talan. 2014. Digital Culture World Lecture Tour. [Netprov].

Memmott, Talan. 2023. Introducing Lary: The San Biagio Frescoes of Pietro Golamuto. https://talanmemmott.info/?p=729.

Memmott, Talan. 2000. Lexia to Perplexia. Electronic Literature Collection Volume One. https://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/memmott__lexia_to_perplexia.html.

Memmott, Talan, & Scott Rettberg. 2019. The Limerick Diet. Electronic Literature Organisation conference.

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this AI update, hosts Scott Rettberg and David Jhave Johnston dive deep into the evolving relationship between AI and human reasoning. They explore how AI models like GPT are learning to "think" through synthetic chain-of-thought processes. Tune in for the latest AI updates.  

References

Brown, Noam, and Tuomas Sandholm. 2019. “Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker.” Science 365, 885-890. DOI:10.1126/science.aay2400. 

Meta Fundamental AI Research Diplomacy Team (FAIR) et al. 2022. “Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.” Science 378, 1067-1074. DOI:10.1126/science.ade9097. 

Tessler, Michael Henry, et al. 2024. “AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation.” Science 386(6719) DOI:10.1126/science.adq2852. 

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

This week's episode fits the Halloween theme. Spooky places, historical sites, and digital narratives. In this episode, Scott is joined by Nicole Basaraba, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at Trinity College in Dublin. They discuss topics such as cultural heritage research and dark tourism. 

References

Basaraba, Nicole. 2023. “The Rise of Paranormal Investigations as Virtual Dark Tourism on YouTube.” Journal of Heritage Tourism 19(2): 287–309. doi:10.1080/1743873X.2023.2268746. 

Basaraba, Nicole. 2022. Transmedia Narratives for Cultural Heritage: Remixing History. Routledge. 

Sam and Colby. 2014. Sam and Colby. YouTube. [YouTube Channel]. YouTube. Retrieved October 24, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/c/samandcolby/about. 

Sam and Colby. 2021. Our Demonic Encounter at Haunted Sallie House. YouTube. 1 hr., 10 min. Retrieved October 24, 2024, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bqwiR871KU.  

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this short biweekly AI update, hosts Scott Rettberg and Jhave Johnston talk about this year's Nobel Peace Prizes for AI research. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, and Demis Hassabis and John Jumper received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Tune in to find out what their discoveries and inventions are.  

References

Baker Lab. n. d. “Baker Lab.” Retrieved on October 24, 2024, from https://www.bakerlab.org/. 

Google. n. d. “About.” Google DeepMind. Retrieved on October 24, 2024, from https://deepmind.google/about/.  

Hopfield, John J. 1974. “Kinetic proofreading: a new mechanism for reducing errors in biosynthetic processes requiring high specificity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 71(10), 4135–4139. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.71.10.4135. 

Jumper, John, Richard Evans, Alexander Pritzel, et al. 2021. “Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold.” Nature 596, 583–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2. 

Rumelhart, David E., Geoffrey E. Hinton, and Ronald J. Williams. 1986. “Learning representations by back-propagating errors.” Nature 323, 533–536. https://doi.org/10.1038/323533a0. 

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

In this episode, Jordan Magnuson, Fulbright scholar at the Center for Digital Narrative, joins us for an interesting discussion about indie games. Jordan has a background in making video games from a very young age. Together with Scott, they discuss the crossover between games and poetry.  

References

Electronic Literature Organisation. n. d. “Electronic Literature Organisation”. https://eliterature.org/.   

Magnuson, Jordan. 2023. Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice. Amherst College Press. 

Magnuson, Jordan. 2018. “Poetic Videogames”. https://www.poeticvideogames.com/about. 

Mojang Studios. 2011. Minecraft. 

Mossmouth. 2013. Spelunky. https://spelunkyworld.com/index.html.

Pope, Lucas. 2013. Papers, Please. 3909. https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/. 

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.

Robert Coover was one of the most important American novelists of the 20th Century, the author of more than twenty books including novels, short story collections, plays and other writings. He was also a leading figure in the field of electronic literature, the teacher of many digital writing workshops at Brown University, the co-founder of the Electronic Literature Organization, and a tireless promoter of the field and of innovation in digital writing. 

Robert Coover passed away on October 6, 2024, in the company of his family in Warwick, England, listening to “Penny Lane” by the Beatles as he drew his final breath. 

This collage of voices, adapted from a simultaneously released Off Center podcast, is part of a larger project based on interviews that Robert Arellano and Scott Rettberg have been conducting with critics, creative writers, students, and friends of Coover in 2023-24, including many of the people who knew Coover’s work best. We also include a segment of a lecture titled “A History of the Future of Narrative” that Coover gave at the University of Bergen in 2008, and segments of interviews Larry McCaffery conducted with Coover in 1979 and 1999.

In order of first appearance, the speakers include Robert Coover, Scott Rettberg, Robert Arellano, Larry McCaffery, Lance Olsen, Nick Montfort, Stéphane Vanderhaege, Caitlin Fisher, Thomas A. Bass, Tom LeClair, and Alvin Lu.

This work was partially supported by the Research Council of Norway Centres of Excellence, project number 332643, Center for Digital Narrative.