decontextualize

GENERATE THIS

Thursday, May 9th, 2013
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Ground floor (Common room)
Free

On this evening, fifteen students of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program will read aloud their experiments in generative and procedural electronic text. These experiments, built using the Python programming language, have been brewing and bubbling for the duration of the semester. Examples of what you may encounter: the Bible meeting the Kama Sutra, while the New York Times site meets its own comments. Markov chains of many sizes and varieties; otherworldly haiku; accidental hiphop; attempts to pronounce the unpronounceable. The corpus meets the body. One night only!

Reading and Writing Electronic Text is a course offered at NYU’s Interactive
Telecommunication Program. (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/). The course is an introduction to both the Python programming language and contemporary techniques in electronic literature. See the syllabus and examples of student work here: http://rwet.decontextualize.com/

Poster design by Hiye Shin.

This is just a quick notice that I’ve moved around/updated a few archival items on the site.

• Filthy Ditty now lives on decontextualize.com. It was previously hosted on Posterous, which is shutting down on April 30th 2013. Filthy Ditty is an archive of a “poem-a-day” effort I completed in April 2011.
• The syllabus and notes for Expressive Computing are now a static HTML site (at the same URL as before). Previously these files had been hosted on a poorly secured MediaWiki installation. Expressive Computing was a course I taught at Hunter College in 2008 (the first university-level course I ever taught!).

I made a new Twitter bot. It’s called @PowerVocabTweet. Here’s a screenshot:

Every few hours, the bot posts a randomly generated word along a randomly generated definition for that word. It’s a procedural exploration in a genre I like to call “speculative lexicography”—basically, @everyword‘s dada cousin.

On the surface, Power Vocab Tweet is a parody of “word-of-the-day” blogs and Twitter accounts. My real inspiration, though, comes from the novel Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin. In that book, a group of underground linguists invent a language (Láadan) that “encodes” in its lexicon concepts that aren’t otherwise assigned to words in human languages. Elgin’s contention is that the manner in which a language “chunks” the universe of human perception into words reflects and reinforces structures of power; therefore, to break the world up into words differently is a means of counteracting the status quo. (In a much less rigorous way, I attempted to explore similar issues in my design of Pey Shkoy—except in the systems of grammatical roles and thematic relations, instead of in the lexicon.)

Elgin’s protagonists (and Elgin herself, in the design of the Láadan language) did this with laser focus; Power Vocab Tweet does it in a more scattershot way. It claims random (and potentially nonsensical) patches of semantic space (which may already be partially claimed), assigns words to them, and hopes that something sticks. Try using one or two Power Vocab Tweet words in a sentence. It’s fun!

The definitions are generated via Markov chain from the definition database in WordNet. The words themselves are generated from a simple “portmanteau” algorithm; each word is a combination of two “real” English words of the appropriate part of speech. (The forms of the words and text used to generate the associated definition aren’t related.) A previous version of this code was featured on Filthy Ditty.

Update: PVT on MetaFilter, New York Review of Bots.

Only nine months too late to truly capture the zeitgeist, I made an automated parody of #whatshouldwecallme-style tumblrs. It’s called GIF and Circumstance. (Warning: potentially NSFW.)

A “#whatshouldwecallme-style tumblr” is one in which animated GIFs are paired with a title expressing a circumstance or mood—usually a clause beginning with “when.” I wrote a Python script to make these kinds of posts automatically. Here’s what it does:

(1) Search Twitter for tweets containing the word “when.”
(2) Extract the “when” clause from such tweets.
(3) Use Pattern to identify “when” clauses with suitable syntax (i.e., clauses in which a subject directly follows “when”; plus some other heuristic fudging)
(4) Post the “when” clause as the title of a tumblr post, along with an animated GIF randomly chosen from the imgur gallery.

The results range from nonsensical to eerily appropriate. Not bad for a weekend hack.

UPDATE: GIF and Circumstance on Metafilter!

Lexcavator is an experimental-ish retro arcade/word game that I’ve been working on since last March, and it’s finally ready for prime time. I’m really excited for people to play! Download it here. (Pay what you want, even if you want to pay $0.)

Some notes about the game:

• It’s programmed entirely in Python, using processing.py.
• I use Markov chains to keep related sequences of letters adjacent in the game board. The goal is to make a faster-paced word game where it’s easy to find meaty words.
• The global leaderboard is completely anonymous (I didn’t want to deal with user authentication), but it does a few things that not many other games do. First, you’re given a percentile rank for each score, which provides a better explanation of how you’re doing in comparison to other players than the global high score or a ranking alone. Second, after each game, you get a list of words that had never been found by any other player before (example from @robdubbin).

For more announcements about Lexcavator, follow @lexcavator on Twitter.

The home-grown chiptune soundtrack is available from Bandcamp. I’ve embedded the title screen track below.

POETRONIX

An evening of poetry, performance, and experimental text design from NYU/ITP’s Reading and Writing Electronic Text

Friday, May 4th, 2012
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Ground floor (Common room)
FREE

Over the course of Spring semester, eighteen NYU students have engaged in intense electro-textual experiments: composing, mangling, generating and remixing electronic text using the Python programming language. For one night only, these students will gather to present and perform their experiments to the general public.

What to expect: innovative poetic forms, bizarre textual interfaces, generative satire, advanced natural language processing techniques, and more!

Reading and Writing Electronic Text is a course offered at NYU’s Interactive
Telecommunication Program. (http://itp.nyu.edu/itp/). The course is an introduction to both the Python programming language and contemporary techniques in electronic literature. See the syllabus and examples of student work here: http://rwet.decontextualize.com/

Poster design by Inessah Selditz. (Download the full-size version here.)

I just put up a web page for Lexcavator, along with a new demo video, which you can watch below!

A piece of mine, the Autonomous Parapoetic Device, will be in “Codings,” a show curated by Nick Montfort. It opens tomorrow at Pace Digital Gallery.

Lexcavator is going to be a part of Kill Screen’s GDC party on March 8th! I’m honored and excited to have a game on display alongside games from indie heavy-hitters like Zach Gage and Ramiro Corbetta. You can help fund the event and/or buy tickets here. I’m not going to be able to attend, but it looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

(Lexcavator is an action/puzzle/word game I’ve been working on for a while. I’m planning to get a web site for the game up this weekend; until then, you can read this nice little GSW write-up from last year.)