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Text lathe prototype

March 24, 2010 in blog by adam | No comments

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.

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A Tree With Managers and Jittery Boats

September 10, 2009 in blog by adam | No comments

An experiment in interfaces for generative text from Jason Nelson (whom you may better know as the creator of i made this. you play this. we are enemies and game, game, game and again game).

The snippets of text are arranged in hierarchical menus, and seem to cohere both vertically (from top to bottom within the same level of hierarchy) and horizontally (from left to right, as you drill down deeper into the hierarchy). I would be interested to hear from Jason how the snippets were composed, and what his methodology was for arranging them.

I’m struck by the similarities between this piece and Nick Montfort’s ppg256 series. While Montfort and Nelson clearly have different stylistic aims, both are using computers to define procedures for combining snippets of text. The procedure in A Tree With Managers… relies more heavily on interactivity than the procedure in ppg256, but the underlying data structures, and the kinds of choices that can be made, are analogous.

(One method of more directly comparing the output of the two procedures might be to transcribe the snippets in A Tree With Managers…, along with their relationships, then create a program to randomly traverse them. Maybe a weekend project?)

(via, where you can also find comments and discussion)

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The Longest Poem in the World

August 20, 2009 in blog by adam | 1 comment

longestpoem

The procedure: scrape Twitter’s public timeline and find rhyming couplets. The effect is striking: even though the juxtaposition of tweets is essentially random, the presence of rhyme gives them a strange cohesion.

The only obvious weirdness comes when the procedure tries to rhyme emoticons, as in the following couplet:

Finished a paper for class and time to relax. Yay me!!
Showered and feeling good :) How are y’all smelling? :b

On second thought, I like that: it’s as though the procedure suggests you read the emoticon aloud in a cutesy way (“time to relax, yay me! / … how are y’all smelling? colon lowercase bee”).

(via)

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Murmur Study

August 13, 2009 in blog by adam | No comments

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).

(via rhizome.org)

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