Emotional characters for automatic plot creation

The Virtual Storyteller is a multi-agent framework for automatic story generation. In this paper we describe how plots emerge from the actions of semi-autonomous character agents, focusing on the influence of the characters’ emotions on plot development

15th Annual Fall Fringe Festival, October 7-29, 2011

This is the concert program of the 15th Annual Fall Fringe Festival performance beginning on Friday, October 7, 2011 at 8:00 p.m., at the Boston University Theater, 264 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók, Three Decembers by Jake Heggie, and Intimate Apparel by Lynn Nottage. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Incite 2012: Angels and Demons, March 10-12, 2012

This is the concert program of the Incite 2012: Angels and Demons performance on Saturday, March 10, 2012 at 8:00 p.m., at the BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center, 199 Chambers St, New York. New York. Works performed were Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen and Bluebeard's Castle by Béla Bartók. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Affect and Metaphor Sensing in Virtual Drama

We report our developments on metaphor and affect sensing for several metaphorical language phenomena including affects as external entities metaphor, food metaphor, animal metaphor, size metaphor, and anger metaphor. The metaphor and affect sensing component has been embedded in a conversational intelligent agent interacting with human users under loose scenarios. Evaluation for the detection of several metaphorical language phenomena and affect is provided. Our paper contributes to the journal themes on believable virtual characters in real-time narrative environment, narrative in digital games and storytelling and educational gaming with social software

Diguise, Containment and the \u3cem\u3ePorgy and Bess\u3c/em\u3e Revival of 1952–1956

Life in the cultural shallows tested the character of American art. Where the Depression had encouraged artists to engage in social and political criticism, the early cold war years constricted and confounded them. By conflating dissent and disloyalty, the triumphant conservatism of the cold war not only shifted the frame of cultural reference dramatically to the right, it narrowed it as well. This had a profound impact on America’s cultural establishment. With conservatives now in possession of the moral absolutes, the more politically progressive artists felt pressed into the position of endorsing ambivalence and moderation. The result, for many, was a quiet retreat from principle; unwilling to blindly adopt the conservatives’ standard of good and evil, and yet unable to risk their own, forward-thinking artists ended up chronicling rather than challenging their age. So much of fifties art became an exploration of the ordinary—domestic comedy, social commentary, “wistful melodrama,” sermons on rootlessness or delinquency or affluence—instead of a questioning of the larger truths. Tragedy, which, by challenging certitudes, required the moral commitment of liberal writers, became, in this context, anachronistic. “We are not producing real tragedy,” observed Leonard Bernstein in 1952, because “caution prevents it, all the fears prevent it; and we are left, at the moment, with an art that is rather whiling away the time until the world gets better or blows up.” Art had adopted the Technicolor blandness of the age

Interactive Story Generation

Wind\u27s End is an experiment in interactive story generation in which stories are created from sequences of independent yet often cohesive non-player character goals. A Drama Manager controls the evaluation of these goals within a given frame of increasing dramatic intensity. The player may interact with non-player characters through combat or an objective-based conversation system, and affect the story as desired. The goals for this MQP were to implement interactive story generation and to create an engaging, re-playable game

Boston University Symphony Orchestra, Monday, November 23, 1998

This is the concert program of the Boston University Symphony Orchestra performance on Monday, November 23, 1998 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were First Essay for Orchestra, Op. 12 by Samuel Barber, Symphony No. 5 by Charles Fussell, and Symphony No. 9 in E minor, Op. 95 "From the New World" by Antonin Dvorak. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

Being in the zone and vital subjectivity: On the liminal sources of sport and art

With the aim of re-contextualising the social dimensions of Being in the Zone whilst retaining its psychological resonance, this contribution thinks Bitz alongside van Gennep's notion of liminality and Turner's notion of the liminoid. Bitz research centres around the liminoid spheres of sport and art, and it is in these social contexts that it has its primary meaning. This move enables the articulation of a critical distance from the role the ‘being in the zone’ concept is coming to play in new forms of governance and corporate activity which aim towards a super-productive 'vital subjectivity'. In these contexts, Bitz does not address people as thinking subjects who must self-manage by making decisions, but as unified and (ideally) unconscious mind/bodies seeking experiences composed of an optimal balance of feelings. This optimal balance, at the same time, promises something interesting to the manager: an individual operating at full-capacity and yielding maximum productivity with no need of extrinsic reward. Situating Bitz in relation to liminality contributes to the task of tracing the genealogy of the vital subject back to a set of social practices directly concerned with the incitement and management of affectivity and emotion