Hi all! The other day Jim Andrews commented that poetry generator development involves making parameters configurable by variables and graphic user interface elements. Now, over the last year or so I’ve been asking myself: ytf am I doing this? When I code a poetry generator, what exactly am I exploring? How can I formalize, track, [...]

DREAMING METHODS–OPEN SOURCE PROJECT by Andy Campbell Dreaming Methods has three new projects available to experience – each one created without the use of Flash or any other browser plugin. MAINLY THE MYSTERIES by Gregory Whitehead One of the great audio artists of our time was asked to write about what he still believes in, [...]

a couple of days ago there was the news that the last factory that produced typewriters closed (which is not true at all in fact). there are still hundreds of thousands used ones around. you can get them at flea markets for 1-5 euros. i’d really recommend buying one or a couple (in case one [...]

The magazine Dear Navigator 1:2/3 includes a new poetry generator, Sea and Spar Between, by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland. Stephanie and I worked on this project for a year, it generates about 225 trillion stanzas, and we’re delighted to see it published in the company of great writing in the School of the Art [...]

Greetings all! Over at Gnoetry Daily we’ve been exploring human-computer poetry generation using a variety of systems. These are computer tools that humans can use to write text poetry. Anyways I thought I’d put together an illustrated guide to some of the interactive poetry generators that are out there. Here’s a preview: Look below to [...]

Hi everyone!  Over at Gnoetry Daily we’ve been doing n-gram computer-assisted poetry generation for a while, and I decided to write up a little tutorial introducing n-grams and how they can be used for poetry generation.  It’s posted below; I’m trying to make it easy to understand, so let me know if there’s anything that’s [...]

I’ve been working on a new Javascript app to display images on the net. If you’ve seen any of the previous dbCinema slideshows, you may recall they didn’t have fade in/out of the images. I was finally motivated to make that sort of app. The motivation was not for the dbCinema images, but for some [...]

it’s getting readable again before i turn back into the illegible at the following and last chapter. the first language for this fourth part of my small series is called ORK short for Objects R Kool. ORK is an object oriented language with a very verbose syntax. Unlike most of the esoteric programming languages you [...]

in the third part of my small series about programs that can be read i’d like to introduce two languages out of the mass of esoteric programming languages that focus on using commands that consist of single characters or ASCII-codes. this property is crucial for my own attempt in creating an esoteric programming language which [...]

i continue my small series about esoteric programming languages with LOLCODE: LOLCODE is inspired by the infamous lolcat internet meme. Lolcats are images distributed via the net with cats and their written “thoughts” on it. The language they speak is called lolspeak (lol is the net-acronym for “loughing out loud”) an english dialect. An example [...]

I’d like to start a small series about “reading programs” here. This is somehow a follow-up of the discussion at e-poetry after José Carlos Silvestre’s talk. The point being made was that source code is meant to be read by humans. I first had to agree but then after thinking a while about it came [...]

Part 1 is here. The printed institution of intellectual property holds that works cannot be reproduced “without prior written permission” (as the legalese runs). The printed work at hand is always documentary evidence of the printer’s permission for that work, whereas any additional permission – the permission of the subject to write and read in [...]

David Jhave Johnston is a poet-programmer who has produced a large body of intermedial Flash-based net art for many years at glia.ca. His most recent project is titled Sound Seeker. He says in the “About” section that Sound Seeker is “an online real-time beat-synchronized poem animator. Sound drives the rhythm of the words: their speed and style [...]

I’ve been developing this little software application in Processing for creating letterforms and doodles for future versions of the “Scriptor” (here and here) series of digital projections. In fact, I’m moving the whole project from Actionscript to Processing, if for no other reason than that Processing was invented by one of my peers at UCLA, [...]

i started experimenting with the google web toolkit and for a starter i tried to convert my offline app nam shub mini into an online ajax web app. it took me about a day to do that without a single thought about browser compatibility. it’s really an amazing tool if you know how to program [...]