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

Friday, May 6th 2011
7pm
721 Broadway, New York, NY
Ground floor (Common room)
FREE

Over the course of Spring semester, sixteen 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.

Some examples of projects that may make an appearance at the event: movie dialogue remixed in real time; dynamic newspaper blackout poetry; an endless exquisite corpse from Twitter search results; infinite generative creation myths; and much 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 Sofy Yuditskaya and Martin Bravo. Download a full-size version here.

Since the 2011 version of Reading and Writing Electronic Text begins tonight, I thought I would finally post these photos of last year’s performance event. (Photos courtesy master photographer Rob Dubbin.)

Here are some of the final projects that came out of last year’s class:

• Benshi Organ (Eric Mika and Alejandro Crawford)
• Rhymatron (Noah King)
• A Few of ITP’s Favorite Things (Jorge Just)
• Nursery Rhyme (Zevensuy Rodriguez)
• A Textual Feminist Orgy (Krystal Banzon)
• Hey Ho Let’s Go (Tamar Ziv)
• Tagrostics (Jenine Durland)
• Circumstantial Decision Making (Joshua Clayton)
• Ramayana Remixed (Khairani Barokka)

Stay tuned for updates about this year’s class!

Poetry in the Post-Now
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery, New York, NY
May 8th, 2010, 12pm-2pm

This is going to be an amazing event. There will be performances, demonstrations, installations and readings from two ITP classes this semester: my Reading and Writing Electronic Text class and Nancy Hechinger’s Writing and Reading Poetry in the Digital Age.

This event is intended to be a showcase for the many text-, language- and poetry-driven projects at ITP, which are sometimes unsuited to the noisy glamor of the regular ITP show (which you should also attend!). I have been overwhelmed by the quality of student projects in both classes, and I’m excited to see them presented and performed.

A sampling of projects from my class: Ramones lyrics interpreted as code, Semaphore Hero, “tagrostics” (procedurally generated acrostics built from word frequency analysis), reading the Ramayana with regular expressions, procedurally generated Vogon poetry, poems composed by weather conditions, self-conversation mangled by Markov chains, physical interfaces for remixing movie subtitles, and more! It may not actually be possible for there to be a better way for you to spend your Saturday afternoon.

Here’s the poster in PDF format. Promotional materials designed by Ted Hayes.