Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a professor in the Computational Media department of the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California system. Located on Monterey Bay, on the ed ...

, and is an advisor for the

Expressive Intelligence Studio The Expressive Intelligence Studio is a research group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, established to conduct research in the field of game design technology. The studio is currently being run by Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin ...

. He is an alumnus of the Literary Arts MFA program and Special Graduate Study PhD program at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

. In addition to his research in

digital media Digital media is any communication media that operate in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital media can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronics device. ...

computer games A personal computer game, also known as a PC game or computer game, is a type of video game played on a personal computer (PC) rather than a video game console or arcade machine. Its defining characteristics include: more diverse and user-dete ...

, and software studies, he served for 10 years as a member of the Board of Directors of the

Electronic Literature Organization The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature". It hosts annual conferences, awards annual prizes for works of a ...

Career

Wardrip-Fruin's twinned research track --

arts The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both ...

and

humanities Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at t ...

on the one hand and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

on the other—is reflected in the table of the contents of ''

The New Media Reader ''The New Media Reader'' is a new media textbook edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort and published through The MIT Press. The reader features essays from a variety of contributors such as Lev Manovich, Richard Stallman, and Alan Turing ...

,'' which he co-edited with

Nick Montfort Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for ...

. He has also co-edited a series of

new media New media describes communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for ...

textbooks and anthologies with Pat Harrigan: ''First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game'' (2004) as well as ''Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media'' (2007), ''Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives'' (2009), and ''

Expressive Processing ''Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies'' is a digital media textbook authored by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and published through the MIT Press. Throughout the book Wardrip-Fruin takes a look into "expressive proc ...

'' (2009), all of which have been influential in the development of new media studies. His collaborative works of

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a constr ...

in installation form include ''Talking Cure'' (with

Camille Utterback Camille Utterback (born 1970 in Bloomington, Indiana) is an interactive installation artist. Initially trained as a painter, her work is at the intersection of painting and interactive art. One of her most well-known installations is the work ''Tex ...

, Clilly Castiglia, and Nathan Wardrip-Fruin; 2002), which includes live video processing,

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the ...

, and a dynamically composed sound environment and ''Screen'' (with Sascha Becker, Josh Carroll,

Robert Coover Robert Lowell Coover (born February 4, 1932) is an American novelist, short story writer, and T.B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. Background ...

, Shawn Greenlee, and Andrew McClain; 2003), which was created in the Cave at

. He has also collaborated on what he calls "two textual instruments": ''News Reader'' and ''Regime Change'' (with David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich). He also created Gray Matters with Michael Crumpton, Chris Spain and Kristin Allio (1995–97). His single-authored book, ''Expressive Processing,'' was published by MIT Press in 2009. In it, as Doug Reside describes, Wardrip-Fruin “makes a compelling case that software studies as a field is not only an interesting avenue of research for new media specialists but also should increasingly be a basic activity of educated citizens in a 21st century democracy.”

Screen (2003)

Wardrip-Fruin's interactive media art piece ''Screen'' is an example of digital installation art. To view and interact with the piece, a user first enters a room, called the "Cave," which is a virtual reality display area with four walls surrounding the participant. White memory texts appear on the background of black walls. Through bodily interaction, such as using one's hand, a user can move and bounce the text around the walls. The words can be made into sentences and eventually begin to "peel" off and move more rapidly around the user, creating a heightening sense of misplacement. "In addition to creating a new form of bodily interaction with text through its play, ''Screen'' moves the player through three reading experiences — beginning with the familiar, stable, page-like text on the walls, followed by the word-by-word reading of peeling and hitting (where attention is focused), and with more peripheral awareness of the arrangements of flocking words and the new (often neologistic) text being assembled on the walls. Screen was first shown in 2003 as part of the Boston Cyberarts Festival (in the Cave at

) and documentation of it has since been featured at The Iowa Review Web, presented at SIGGRAPH 2003, included in Alt+Ctrl: a festival of independent and alternative games, published in the DVD magazines Aspect and Chaise, as well as in readings in the

Hammer Museum The Hammer Museum, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles, is an art museum and cultural center known for its artist-centric and progressive array of exhibitions and public programs. Founded in 1990 by the entrepreneur ...

HyperText Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references ( hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically ...

series, at ACM Hypertext 2004, and in other venues."

References

External links

Personal website

Expressive Intelligence Studio Blog at UC Santa Cruz

Article on Noah's new book ''Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies''

"Talk Time" (Interview with Hamish Mackintosh for The Guardian (June 5, 2003))

Uncharted 2’s Sloppy Fiction
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wardrip-Fruin, Noah American literary critics American artists American mass media scholars Mass media theorists Living people MUD scholars University of California, Santa Cruz faculty Video game researchers Year of birth missing (living people) Brown University alumni Electronic literature writers

Career

Screen (2003)

See also

References

External links