Allison Parrish: words and projects
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Lipstick Enygma by Janet Zweig is an amazing physical/electronic public text generator, made for the Harris Engineering Center at the University of Central Florida, Orlando. Watch the video below:
The page linked above has more examples of text that the piece is capable of generating (“Modemheads in nerdistan!”, “Hack into me mintily.”) I would love to know what algorithm underlies the text generation! (via today and tomorrow; see also Zweig’s Impersonator, a similar piece from 2002)
Text lathe prototype from Adam Parrish on Vimeo.
This is a little prototype for a textual interface that I came up with last week after receiving my nanoKONTROL. (I saw Jörg Piringer use one of these in a live electronic sound poetry performance last year at E-Poetry, and I knew I had to have one.) The idea is that two knobs on the controller determine how much text is cut from either side of a text fed to the program on standard input; another knob controls how fast lines of text are read in and displayed. It’s a very simple mapping, but I’m pleased with the results so far.
Here’s the latest iteration of Nick Montfort‘s ppg256 series, an ever-growing set of succinct poetry generators written in Perl. This one happens to be programmed to output to an LED sign, which is currently installed at Axiom (a Boston-area gallery for new and experimental media).
I would love to see how the piece looks and works in the context of a gallery. But more than anything I’d like to see some video: how the code manages the style and movement of the text can’t be anything but vital to the understanding of the piece.
Check out the thread at netpoetic for more photos and some interesting discussion.
In the most recent entries to the ppg256 series, Nick has started to explore the generation not just of abstract poetic form, but other speech genres as well: ppg256-3 generated tiny narratives (“the__bothat and one__orcman cut_out”), while ppg256-4 generates absurd imperatives (“delap the dappap, boss”). Like the other entries in the ppg256 series, ppg256-4 one is concerned with constructing plausible English words from minimalist parts; unlike the others, ppg256-4 is okay with (and even seems to revel in) neologism.
I’ve embedded some of the output of the (non-LED version) of ppg256-4 after the jump, in order to give a bit better sense of the program’s flavor. Read the rest of this entry »
Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.
Murmur Study is a physicalized reading of Twitter, created by artists Christopher Baker and Márton András Juhász. (More details and photos.) The process, according to the artist’s site:
This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below.
I’m not quite sure I understand the reason to single out tweets that match those particular text patterns—how is this format more appropriate for illustrating the mass of “emotional” tweets? (as opposed to tweets about kittens, tweet spam, tweets from political figures, tweets about thermal printers, etc.) Stunning in its scale, nevertheless.
See also: bitfall and Simanowski’s keynote from e-poetry 2009 (not linked, because I can’t find a link).
On Day 3 of 5-in-5, C. Anderson Miller and I decided to collaborate on a board game. We ended up with a game we call Subwoofer Tactics. It’s a turn-based game in which players compete to knock their opponent’s pieces off the game board by vibrating the board with a subwoofer. Read more about the game here (including the official rules for tournament play). Watch the video below to see the game in action.
Subwoofer Tactics from Anderson Miller on Vimeo.
