Intermedia Systems
In 1906 an English mathematician named Charles Howard Hinton published a book arguing that the fourth dimension was not merely something to be calculated but something a person could learn to see, given enough practice. His method was a set of small painted wooden cubes, each with its own colour and name, to be handled and [ ]
charm.farm When I first wrote about charm.farm in 2023, the charm was a self-contained HTML document: a 256×256 bitmap, a 60-token caption, and a chain of JSON Web Tokens embedded in meta tags. Provenance lived inside the file. Transfer the file, transfer the record. Remove the tokens and you had destroyed the object s history — it lost its charm. That experiment [ ]
The Delve (codename: YES-hybrid) pipeline treats game balance as an empirical systems problem, using D D 4th Edition tactical roles as the functional heuristic for piece design. By mapping roles like the Defender, Striker, and Controller into Betza notation, a compact movement algebra, the project translates high-level RPG intent into precise, engine-native atoms of play. This allows [ ]
blackmail.fyi Knowledge graph extraction pipeline + interactive WebGL visualization** of entity–relationship data from Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail (vols 1 2). The project turns ~1.1M tokens of source text into a queryable graph (~2,800 entities, ~4,200 edges) with citations, then renders it in the browser with filtering, pathfinding, and evidence-linked drill-down. Helps visually…
The Ghost Campaign is an always-on fantasy world simulator that advances in real time and records what happens. There are no protagonists, no input, and no reset. The system runs continuously, and the world accumulates history whether anyone is watching or not. The project is inspired by BECMI-era abstractions, but it is not an attempt [ ]
Weather as a Service provides on-demand weather for fantasy role-playing games. It adapts the World of Weather appendix from Wilderness Survival Guide into a service that produces conditions such as clear days, storms, fog, and seasonal variation. The system uses the original tables and logic, with minor adjustments for presentation. Instead of consulting a book [ ]
Because I need to numerically simulate castle sieges, I also need to simulate an economy capable of supporting both castles and sieges. To seed that economy, I need ruins of an old civilization, along with enough old coin to make those ruins matter. From there, everything else follows. War Machine is the dungeon productivity tool [ ]
Court Hill Equinox is a sound piece made on the equinox at Court Hill, where I live. It was recorded and assembled on that day, in that place. The work is a simple expression of life as it was occurring at the moment of balance between seasons. There is no attempt to dramatize or resolve [ ]
Baseball Simulator code Baseball Probability Toy is a small simulator for exploring baseball outcomes through probability rather than play-by-play realism. It models plate appearances, scoring, and game flow using simple statistical inputs and random sampling. Stats Used in the Probability Model The simulation uses the following player stats to determine at-bat outcomes, fielding plays,…
https://github.com/mbutler/Pluck Pluck is a lightweight JavaScript sound library built on the Web Audio API. It grew out of my work on Monsoon Station, where I reached a point where existing audio libraries were either too heavy, too opinionated, or didn’t quite fit the way I wanted to work with sound directly in code. Rather than [ ]
https://gist.github.com/mbutler/24ba7d2b46d21aa0cef9aa760da9126d Zalvek the Cipher is an experiment in creating self-contained, cryptographic game characters that exist entirely within a single HTML file. It follows directly from earlier work like charm.farm, continuing an interest in characters and systems that are portable, inspectable, and self-contained. There is no backend, no account system,…
Hexcom is a large, ongoing mission-based tactical play environment for Dungeons Dragons 4th Edition, designed and operated as a Discord-native system rather than a traditional campaign. I created and ran Hexcom under a pseudonymous handle as both a game mode and an organizational experiment. At its core, Hexcom breaks play into short, self-contained combat [ ]
Next Generation Semantic Search grew out of a game a friend runs on WhatsApp called Picardle. Instead of guessing words, players are shown screenshots from Star Trek: The Next Generation and try to identify the episode by describing its plot. Exact episode titles are rarely guessable, so scoring is based on semantic closeness rather than [ ]
https://monsoonstation.com/ Monsoon Station is a real-time weather music project that generates evolving sonic landscapes from live atmospheric data. It listens to the sky continuously, translating changes in the structure of the atmosphere into sound. In addition to surface measurements like temperature, pressure, and wind speed, Monsoon Station draws on radiosonde data from NOAA—weather balloons…
Exhibition at the Beverly Art Center, Chicago [note: if you would like to take ownership of the digital surrogate of your physical print from the show, go to the URL https://iws.mx/charm.farm/ hash .html where hash is the long random string of characters printed on the front paper] “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of [ ]
Microscope GPT is a custom GPT configured to support play of Microscope, a collaborative world-building role-playing game. It encodes the rules, procedures, and constraints of the system, and uses them to facilitate structured play rather than generate narrative content freely. The model is trained to respect Microscope’s core mechanics: periods, events, scenes; palette restrictions; player [ ]
charm.farm is an art collective implemented as a distributed autonomous organization. It was launched on the Ethereum mainnet and structured as a conventional DAO, but its purpose was not primarily financial or governance-driven. The DAO was a scaffold—useful mainly as a coordination and modification layer for a broader experiment. The core question behind charm.farm was [ ]
Version 1.1 Table of Contents Introduction Objectives Rationale Color Term Choices Ordering of Color Index Use of ASCII Characters for Keys Use of Numbers for Values Key/Value Pair Representation Color to Number Mapping Protocol Description Encoding Decoding Special Commands and Message Buffering Use Cases Future Work and Recommendations 1. Introduction The Color-Encoded Information Protocol…
charm.farm Part of the We Are Tech and Tech Are Us exhibit at Agitator Gallery, Chicago Powered the relics featured in dATAPLOT: Shared Hallucinations at Beverley Art Center Art Machines or A Hypothetical Blueprint for the Emergence of New Media. At the crossroads of art(ifice) and artificial intelligence, the charm.farm project emerges as a speculative [ ]
Mazz Muzzleflash s Automatic Drawing on the Radio is an application that compiles GPT scripts converted into speech and spliced together with music downloaded from the web into a radio program. This is a companion project to Nathan Peck s project Drawing on the Radio . Live night hacking in Plato Township
Think of this type of NFT as a magic item from your Dungeon Master. You can put as many magic potions in your inventory as you want, but unless they were issued by the DM, they are worthless in your game. There s no need to distribute your inventory list to every DM in every game [ ]
In response to the rise in Synthetic Arts and AI being banned from most Art communities. Model Decoder Settings Model: gpt2/large Top-p: 0.9 Temperature: 1 Max time: 1 Prompt: "The Zirconian Manifesto Art is" The Zirconian Manifesto Art is not dead – it is the future. If art was just a thing we could [ ]
I turn in confusion. I see the shadow of the man in the yard. He is a tall man in a hood with a scarf over his face. He is in fact my neighbor who is supposed to be at work. He is doing things for his wife in the house, and I believe he [ ]
An artist, fed up with his Art not being Real, decided to work on only one painting for the rest of his life. “The paint needs to come alive! It needs to be Real!” he shouted in his empty studio. The artist hadn’t seen another person for many days. Many of his friends and colleagues [ ]
My last performance of Intermedia Workshop was in May 2003. In it, I showed the 1954 school psychology film, Facing Reality . an informational film about when reality seems too difficult for us to face, we retreat behind defensive mechanisms. There s a scene in a high school class where a boy named Mike is is being peer-pressured [ ]
Gallery visitors feel simulated weather phenomenon generated from data collected by scientific instruments in a local nature preserve Puppeteers control real mollusk “puppets” through office equipment. Simple stage directions are translated into electrical impulses Visitors can harvest virtual organs of a simulated cadaver by scanning barcodes. Virtual organs can then be reassembled to form new […
Proof-of-concept for a vinyl record. Record should be part of an abandoned vinyl Collection left in the common space in a large House which will accommodate at least 9 housemates. Listener should be the first housemate to move in at the beginning of July and have at least a week alone in the house to [ ]
Non-Fungible GANscapes is a series of digital landscapes generated using a Generative Adversarial Network and distributed as non-fungible tokens. The works were trained on curated landscape imagery and produced as machine-generated scenes that sit somewhere between photographic memory and synthetic terrain. The project was originally developed as part of a multimedia art course I taught [ ]
Allows users to load text files and create custom annotations, which are stored in a database. Text Annotator from Matthew Butler on Vimeo.
Matthew T. Butler Intermedia Workshop notes University of Iowa 1999-2003 Intermedia Writing explores language from a visual arts perspective. It examines the relationship between word and image as well as word as image. It asks, How can we write with video, with paint, with our bodies? How does language function in the artist s studio? Intermedia [ ]
Originally appeared in Infinite Regress In 1983, at the tender age of 8, I had my first real crisis as an artist. It involved a new-media project I was working on for Mrs. Widenbacher’s class that called for a particular interactive element that I knew would really drive home what I was trying to say. [ ]
I ve recently been interested in the Traveller RPG, in particular, the Mongoose 2nd Edition. The game has some fascinating rules to randomly create characters and worlds. One aspect from the classic game is the use of Universal Personality Profiles, which is a hexadecimal number that expresses characteristics (Strength, Dexterity, etc.) in an ordered sequence ranging [ ]
Towards an artificially intelligent dungeon master http://iws.mx/aidm/ It was announced recently that Lee Sodol, 9 dan rank Go player, was quitting the game professionally, citing the dominance of AI as a contributing factor to his retirement. He described AlphaGo, the program that defeated him, as an entity that cannot be defeated . A similar fate fell [ ]
The people of the Seventh Mountain worship the new gods . They have a religion that is based on The Book of Hanai Suyuu Nozuma and promises a fairer game. At first we concluded that there were some issues with the Grand Eliyahu (a deity) which outweigh his inhabitants dumb. Their assistance has been huge. [ ]
Phoenix Command work continues apace as I combine the core systems documents into one 384-page hard cover book. This textbook contains the main Small Arms Combat System, the advanced rules with expansion, the artillery system, and mechanized system. A companion book with weapon data should follow in the coming months. The book is essentially just [ ]
For almost 20 years I ve been generating books with various pieces of software. I ve published most of these as short run paperback books as Intermedia Writing Systems, a very small press in Iowa City. From Babble! to Open Wound, it s been fun to see the mangled hodge·podge of text in these books. In February of [ ]
My obsession with Phoenix Command enters year two as I create a mobile application to help manage Phoenix Command games.
This is a story map I made for my mom about her dad s time in World War II.
Mapplication is a tool I built with my co-workers (Rob Shepard, Ethan DeGross, and Alyssa Varner) as a way to rapidly prototype maps for researchers and scholars. It accepts a CSV file upload and outputs a leaflet map. It converts the spreadsheet into valid GeoJSON, allows the users to pick a marker color and map [ ]
Governments and corporations realize personal data (consumer, creative, social, etc.) is the most valuable commodity. Tremendous wealth is generated from this, so a type of Universal Basic Income is established whereby people trade their data for a baseline standard of living. The poverty rate plummets and the move is heralded as a huge societal win. [ ]
I have recently been very interested in Truth as a value premise. Not True in a boolean sense of it being opposite of False, but true in the sense that it is counter to fake. What is true? What is fake? Can something or someone be true and fake simultaneously? I created this app (based [ ]
see also: phoenixcommand.net In February of this year, I became fascinated with this 30 year-old game called Phoenix Command. Phoenix Command was a role-playing game system published by Leading Edge Games, and copyrighted by Barry Nakazono and David McKenzie. Various versions of the system featured in the games Morning Star Missions, Living Steel, and Aliens [ ]
A forest reading of the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, Kubla Khan
PLAY KARATE GOLF In a futuristic world, one karate master must travel from golf course to golf course, fighting the ultimate dragon. It is built with Phaser.js and various art assets from around the web. You can view the code here.
Pirate Cup is a game based almost exactly on the 1988 FASA classic, Circus Imperium. It was built with Phaser and used free art assets from Kenney. Once again, I find it next to impossible to polish a game and finish it up enough to actually release it. I enjoy the challenge of implementing rules [ ]
This node app generates random json maps compatible with Tiled and Phaser.js. It uses a cellular automata algorithm to generate the background and then randomly places objects on the map. First set a birth and death rate as well as various spritesheet tiles for your background and objects then run app.js. The json output can [ ]
Recently, I ve become interested in the so-called funnel method of character creation in the RPG Dungeon Crawl Classics. The funnel is a process of deriving your 1st-level character by running a handful of 0-level commoners through a dungeon and seeing who comes out the other side alive. A group of players would need to funnel [ ]
For the past couple of days I ve been fascinated by the Mythic GM Emulator. I created this mobile application to automate rolls on the Mythic Fate Chart. Set a Chaos Rank, choose your Odds, and it will determine your outcome plus random events based on a pseudorandom javascript d100 roll. Check out the code on [ ]