Not-so(-super)-secret Project
OK, so in honor of not having written pretty much anything in close to a year (winter, looking back on my past posting habits, seems to be my writing time anyway) I’ll reveal the secret project alluded to in my last post:
Degenerate Forms. An algorithmic poetics. Basically, for my expressive computing class, a couple of guys (paul, brendan, and I) wrote a collection of scripts that grab some text from the internet and arrange it into “Poetry.” (note the capital “p”.) That wiki page is sort-of part of the art, so be careful when reading.
In the “art college” sense, we’re commenting on the semi-relatedness of all things in the news, and their transience. I’m torn about the fact that some of our sources for text are “weird” news, like the yahoo oddities page, although in general the quantity of stuff from that is totally dwarfed by what’s in things like the NYTimes. The other direction we could have gone would be to have used things from project gutenberg and wikisource. That would have given us “prettier” text, especially had we used some of the poetry available. However, given that we are really trying to do something “of the moment,” those don’t really make sense, nor do they fit in with the whole art-college aesthetic. So we stuck to twitter and various news sources.
Anyway, here’s some of the poems generated, (although, if you’ve got the know-how, it’s really better to do it live) let me know what you think.