Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an appreciation of Millie Niss, the writer and new media artist, and founder of this site, who died in November of last year.

"One thing which came across from Millie's correspondence, as well as from her own work and her occasional online commentaries, was her sense of perspective about new media art... Her insistence on clarity and user-friendliness, her desire to reach out to an audience of "ordinary" people whenever possible, was one of the things which made her voice such a distinctive and refreshing one in the new media world. "

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewmillieniss.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=372 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

The idea of the London Churches project is to visit every church in the City of London - and probably a few outside - and use the visits as the basis of an online work. This isn't a blog, and it certainly isn't a historical or architectural guide. It's a work of hyperfiction, but derived from real places, real experiences, real observations and real conversations. In many ways it isn't about the churches themselves, but the experience of visiting them.

Part 1 is based on a visit made on Monday 6th April 2009, which took in the following:

St Martin-in-the-Fields
St Paul's, Covent Garden
St Clement Danes
Temple Church
St Dunstan-in-the-West
St Bride's, Fleet Street
St Martin, Ludgate

To view the London Churches project, go to http://edwardpicot.com/londonchurches/ .

- Edward Picot

http://edwardpicot.com - personal website
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange

Newly co-published by Furtherfield and The Hyperliterature Exchange: an examination of the new genre of art computer games, dealing with The Princess Murderer by Geniwate and Deena Larsen, The Free Culture Game by Molleindustria, The Marriage by Rod Humble, Samorost 2 by Amanita Design, The Graveyard by Tale of Tales and Gravitation by Jason Rohrer.

"The fundamental question, which haunts all attempts to create art from computer games, is whether it is really possible to reconcile the two. It could be argued that art requires a different kind of concentration from a game, and uses a different part of the mind - and that the more intensely you play a game, the less inclined you will be to pay attention to any artistic qualities it may possess"

To read the whole article, go to http://www.hyperex.co.uk/reviewgamesasart.php or http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=345 .

- Edward Picot
personal website - http://edwardpicot.com

“The wind was blowing harder now, and the snow was coming down in thick flurries, which quickly turned the fronts of their clothes white and made it difficult either to see or hear; but Dora thought she heard a snatch of music. Then one of the little boys started jumping up and down and pointing. 'Look! Look! They're dancing! They're dancing!' Everyone looked where the little boy was pointing. On the far side of the snow-field, next to the fir trees, the snowmen and snow-women were moving.”

“They landed in a huge circle of white dust, with a rim of sharp-looking rocks all the way round the outside. Everything was bathed in harsh colourless light, like moonlight but ten times as powerful. In the middle of the circle of rock was a massive square stone slab, and on the slab, flat on his back, lay a giant with his eyes closed.”

The children fly with some owls to the moon, where they meet the Queen of the Night and hear the story of Pandora and Prometheus. The seventh chapter of twelve.

"This is wondrous" - Joel Weishaus, http://web.pdx.edu/%7Epdx00282/
"I am reading your 'The Puzzle Box' and loving it." - Regina Celia Pinto, http://www.arteonline.arq.br/

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/
(If you don't see links to all seven chapters when you get to the Puzzle Box index-page, click CTRL + Refresh to update the page.)

"Urizen separated out a region from the rest of eternity, shrank it into solid matter, weighed it in his scales, measured it with his rods and plumblines, circumscribed it with his compasses, and wrote laws for it in his great brass-bound books. This sorry region, the region over which Urizen rules, is the universe in which we live..."

The children are kidnapped, then meet a visionary in a field of skylarks, and hear a new story about the creation of the world. They are pursued by baddies in black cars, who seem to be after the box.

http://www.edwardpicot.com/puzzlebox/

- Edward Picot
http://hyperex.co.uk - The Hyperliterature Exchange
http://edwardpicot.com - personal website

Sporkworld has undergone a thorough renovation without, we hope, changing the basic character of the site. Formerly orphaned works now have links, and the diverse authorship of Sporkworld's content has been made more explicit. The changes may not be obvious at first, but further exploration will reveal that there are several new sections, dead wood has been removed, and the design of the site has been made more consistent.

Please visit the new video and gallery sections.

We have also recently started a new sister site, the Sporkworld Microblog, to publish spontaneous visual and textual experiments by the Sporkworld Team, along with book, software, and music recommendations. We will add new material to the Microblog several times a week, so please bookmark it and check frequently for updates. You may also view the Microblog (except for videos) on a mobile phone at http://sporkworld.tumblr.com/mobile.

In addition to the Microblog, this Community site, and the Sporkworld Bookstore (where you can buy books and other items reviewed on Sporkworld), Sporkworld now has its own YouTube Channel. In an effort to participate in new advances in web interactivity, we expect to add more sister sites as opportunities become available. We welcome suggestions of new kinds of web publishing; please send your ideas to Sporkworld. If we act on your advice, you will be eligible to receive a genuine Unicorn as a reward for your contribution to the site.

Sporkworld is attempting to enhance its brand by embracing Web 2.0 and the new mobile internet (buzzword alert :-)), so please check out our new microblog:

http://sporkworld.tumblr.com/

If you have a mobile phone which can view web pages, try viewing the microblog at the link:

http://sporkworld.tumblr.com/mobile

-Sporkworld Webmaster aka Millie Niss

Sporkworld sends its friends a New Year's Greeting in the form of a puzzle topologically related to the Rubik's Cube. We will send (via snail mail, as we traffic only in real fake Unicorns, not virtual fake Unicorns) a Unicorn to the first person who sends an explanation of how to solve it to men2@columbia.edu , with or without explicit group theory… For a solution to count, it must be clear enough to allow Sporkworld's resident naive beta tester to solve the puzzle from any initial solvable state.

http://www.sporkworld.org/webart/newyear.html

I submitted "Pillophilia":
http://www.sporkworld.org/pills
to the Buffalo Digital Media Arts Festival at Canisius College:
http://chupacabra.canisius.edu/festival/index.php
where it won the Peoples' Choice award.

The piece consisted of the song "I am the very model of a psychopharmacologist" (my lyrics, adapted from Gilbert & Sullivan), performed by Michael Szpakowski, with his piano accompaniment. The song is presented in a Flash-based player with subtitles. The second part is a music video for the song with Elana Shneyer's acting, along with 2D (Flash) animation, and 3D (Swift3D) animation. The third part is a Flash application that gives information on each drug mentioned in the song.

Sporkworld also got a 3rd Place award in the Web Design & Interactive category for "News from Erewhon":
http://www.sporkworld.org/news
by Martha Deed and Millie Niss, which was originally published in the Iowa Review Web:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/mainpages/tirwebhome.htm
in 2005.