Wondermark‘s take on supernatural terms of venery. Not to spoil the punchline, but my favorite by far was “the Borg.” Grammatically, it works: there is no reason to ever refer to the Borg, except when referring to it collectively.
Tags: language, lexicography, webcomcs
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?)
Stop-motion looping animation from Billy Rennekamp, using Google Maps as the medium. It emphasizes the possibilities for creative synthesis that come along with Street View: you can seamlessly traverse a path that the Google camera van never actually traversed in real life!
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Tags: animation, urbanplanning, video
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 »
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”).
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I love this: abitbit.com, “Pure Anonymous Bits.” It records over time the results of people clicking on either a button labelled 0 or a button labelled 1. The site’s copy encourages creative and subversive use of the procedure (“Warning: the content below may be not safe for work or children, depending on how the bits are decoded”); the graphs show evidence of an epic and collaborative bit battle, with its own particular currents and momentum (as of this writing, one is winning).
Is it truly anonymous, though? It seems to remember which bits I submitted (they’re highlighted in red). Not that the lack of anonymity is a bad thing: The project’s neatly conceptual as it stands, but it’s a hair width away from effective web 2.0 parody (RSS feed of your friend’s bits; “click here to tweet your bit!”).
See also: Mark Napier’s Sacred Bits; What Colour Are Your Bits?.
Tags: code, interactivity, microblogging, socialsoftware
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).
Photos from the final performance. Here’s the full set.
I was extremely impressed with the work my students turned out in this class, especially given the time frame (only six weeks!). The final performance attracted a small crowd and a bit of press coverage from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was also featured on Networked_Performance and Nick Montfort’s Post Position. Also, thanks to Eric Scovel for serving as a guest critic on the last day of class!
Update: Leonard Richardson’s write up of the event includes photographs from the other side of the room!
Not all of the students have posted their final projects to their blogs yet, but I’ve included samples of their final projects after the jump.
Your World of Text, a collaborative text composition tool. Anything you type appears in real-time for other users. Anyone in the world can edit. The “page” itself scrolls forever in any direction, so if you can’t find a blank spot, then just hunt around. It’s running on the Google App Engine, with a backend (presumably) in Python and jQuery in the browser.
It’s a great example of how a new interface for writing can lead to weird, fascinating, beautiful writing that distinctly arises from the affordances of the interface.
Interesting to me: The fact that the page is infinite leads to a conflation of layout and territory. There’s the hotly contested initial area, where everything is constantly being rewritten, but then there are “backwaters” off in the margins that are seen less, and therefore have fewer changes. There’s no way to link or jump to a particular part of the page, so some users have created “trails” (in the form of ASCII art or small bits of text) that lead from the central area off to their own little corner. Where you put your text, and how the text is shaped, is just as important as what you’ve written.
Hulu – The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien: Shatner Reads Palin’s Tweets.
Here we have an example of politician talk satirically repurposed as poetry. The practice itself is nothing new (see Donald Rumsfeld), but Shatner’s performance here is a cut above.
These tweets form the text as performed: “From sealife…”, “Tourists from across…”, “Awesome Alaska night…”, “Left Unalakleet warmth…”. It’s interesting that Conan claims the text to be “verbatim,” even though it’s a collage of many non-contiguous tweets.
Tags: performance, poetry, twitter
