Chris Joseph

The Boston Cyberarts Online Gallery have been kind enough to make me their current featured artist with my participatory video piece, ‘Eisenstein’s Monster’. The Boston Cyberarts Festival takes place from 20 April - 6 May at museums, galleries, theatres, universities, and public spaces in and around the Boston area.

Make your own video monsters - ‘Eisenstein’s Monster’ is a participatory video piece, a tongue-in-cheek coupling of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ and the montage theories of Sergei Eisenstein.

In the interactive version the participant is invited to create life with the press of a button, then shape and twist their creatures to their whim. Biological life is transformed through the digital (in this case, digital video and Flash) and back through choices of the biological user to become new biodigital lifeforms.

If user input is impossible or not desired, there is an ‘autoplay’ version where the computer plays God.

While the piece is intended to be light-hearted, our collective fear of science playing God lurks here, as it did in Shelley’s original.

How can we ’see’ a written text? Do you have a new way of visualizing writing on the screen? If so, then McKenzie Wark and the Institute for the Future of the Book have a challenge for you. We want you to visualize McKenzie’s new book, Gamer Theory.

Version 1 of Gamer Theory was presented by the Institute for the Future of the Book as a ‘networked book’, open to comments from readers. McKenzie used these comments to write version 2, which will be published in April by Harvard University Press. With the new version we want to extend this exploration of the book in the digital age, and we want you to be part of it.

All you have to do is register, download the v2 text, make a visualization of it (preferably of the whole text though you can also focus on a single part), and upload it to our server with a short explanation of how you did it.

All visualizations will be presented in a gallery on the new Gamer Theory site. Some contributions may be specially featured. All entries will receive a free copy of the printed book (until we run out).

By “visualization” we mean some graphical representation of the text that uses computation to discover new meanings and patterns and enables forms of reading that print can’t support.

Read more at http://web.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory2.0/viz/