Name:	Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Assistant Professor nwardrip@weber.ucsd.edu My personal website is: http://www.noahwf.com I blog at: http://www.grandtextauto.org Expressive Processing
Education:	Ph.D. in Special Graduate Study (Digital Media), Brown University, 2006 M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction, Digital), Brown University, 2003
Short Bio:	Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a digital media creator and scholar whose current work is focused on fiction and play. His digital writing/art creates new experiences of reading through bodily interaction, algorithmic recombination, game mechanics, and exploration of the potential of the network as more than a delivery mechanism. These projects have been presented by galleries, arts festivals, scientific conferences, DVD magazines, VR Caves, and the Whitney and Guggenheim museums -- as well as discussed in books such as Digital Art (2003) and Art of the Digital Age (2006). He has recently edited three books and a monograph is forthcoming. He has previously been a research scientist at New York University, a creative writing fellow at Brown University, and an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore. He is a Vice-President of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Selected Projects:	Regime Change and News Reader, 2004 Two playable textual instruments, using markov chain techniques to progressively alter documents through reader interaction. The first employs material from the American Forces Press Service and the Warren Commission Report, while the second uses live news stories gathered from the Internet. Commissioned by Turbulence. Screen, 2003-05 A virtual reality fiction in which words peel from the walls, flock around the reader, and can be struck back with the hand - creating a new type of Cave experience and bodily interaction with text. First presented at the Boston CyberArts Festival 2003 and SIGGRAPH 2003, using an SGI machine, and then ported to Linux in 2005. Talking Cure, 2002 An installation that reworks Anna O's "talking cure" in the context of a textual mirror and speech recognition. First presented at the 2002 Electronic Literature Organization symposium, UCLA. The Impermanence Agent, 1998-2002 A web agent that tells a story of impermanence, which is "customized" by drawing material from other websites visited by the reader. Presented by the Whitney Museum's Artport, Guggenheim Museum's "Brave New Word," and New Museum of Contemporary Art. Gray Matters, 1996-97 A multiscale fiction embedded in a patchwork human body, for which a new method of zooming interaction was developed. First presented at the Sandra Gering Gallery during blast5drama. The first public presentation of a zooming interface.
Books:	Expressive Processing, MIT Press, forthcoming A monograph written from the dual perspective of digital media practice and theory, this book argues that we must engage not only the surface appearance of digital works but also their internal operations. Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media, MIT Press, 2006 The first multi-author volume (edited with Pat Harrigan) to focus on issues of role-playing and story in games and related works. Its coverage ranges from influential early tabletop role-playing games to mainstream current videogames, from "playable" digital literature to cutting-edge artificial intelligence experiments. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, MIT Press, 2004 A book/website (edited with Pat Harrigan) that examines the relationship between story and game, and related questions of electronic writing and play, through a series of discussions among new media creators and theorists. Translated into Korean. The New Media Reader, 2003 A book and CD (edited with Nick Montfort) that attempts to provide an interdisciplinary foundation for the digital media field. The NMR reproduces material from the mid-1940s to the mid-1990s; includes contributions from scientists, artists, and critics; and is made up of print texts, digitized video, and operational software.