Aleph Null is best viewed by the light of a full moon. Or near full moon. Same with the set of stills I made. I mean they do like a bit of darkness.

If you’re using a PC, I’d recommend Chrome to view Aleph Null. At least on my machine, Chrome provides the smoothest performance. Firefox provides a similarly high framerate, but is a bit jerky from time to time. Internet Explorer kind of sucks. On the Mac, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari seem to be fine.

Aleph Null is my first piece with the new HTML 5 canvas tag which requires no plugins and works in all modern browsers, including mobile phones. It’s exciting to have such a canvas to work/play with in a public technology that is not at the mercy of a corporation’s business plan or its continued existence. Such must be the future for net art; it isn’t feasible to rely on corporations to support tools indefinitely, whereas technologies developed in the public sphere stand more of a chance of at least achieving their logical growth and form from their potential.

Aleph Null is color music. Colors are tones. Notes are tones. Music is tones moving in time. This is color tones moving in time.

It takes practice to tease the really good stuff out of it. It’s like an instrument that way. Or a game in which the goal is to experience color music and create visuals you like. It’s like hunting the Snark, beauty or butterflies. Unlike most instruments, Aleph Null will play something whether a person is playing or not. But it benefits immensely by a human player. It knoweth not beauty, is but the instrument of thine own incandesence.

The Club

The politicians are conservatives who have blasted away both at home and abroad. Via deregulation, the shock doctrine, and explicitly military means. The business men are CEO’s who are mostly now behind bars, or have been. The psychopaths include (Ex-Colonel) Russell Williams who, until the time of his arrest for two sex murders, headed CFB Trenton, the largest military air-base in Canada.

So it’s a bit of a Dorian Gray piece. But they are each others’ deformities.

Here’s what Andy Warhole said about The Club: “they look like some kind of Auschwitz-Chernobyl mutant legacy, and maybe they are — this is like morphing, blocpix, mr. potatohead, and various slice-n-dice technologies… but not them — this is new — and of course i love your politics ”

Much of the work I’ve done with dbCinema, the graphic synthesizer I wrote in Adobe Director, has been toward beauty. This is quite different. But The Club was still made with dbCinema. There’s other work I’ve done with dbCinema here.

It has not been long since the last one, but there’s a new story at webyarns.com…

“This Is Not A Poem” is a toy, a game, a language engine, and a poem all at the same time….

The new plaything is at http://www.ThisIsNotAPoem.com

Also, in case you missed it, “My Nervous Breakdown,” released a few months ago, is available at
http://webyarns.com/MyNervousBreakdown.html

For other stories, both new and old, please visit http://www.webyarns.com

Many thanks for your interest!

yours,

alan
–
stories for the web
http://www.webyarns.com

Announcing: _feralC_ – A Socumentary

_feralC_ is a socumentary* which is textually driven by the interactions of five Twitter chars [primary characters or entities] and their Pupa Mistress (PM). The PM initially functions as a Twitter based information hub for the interactions between the chars and other contributing entities (such as yourself). These additional contributing entities, or secondary chars, may or may not be biological-based: please note that Synthetic individuals may contribute to the project’s tweet flow. Please play nice with the Synths.

Inquisitive #feralC Chars in Action

As the five primary chars are unveiled, “audience” members are encouraged to participate in the project’s flow by following and responding to each individual char via Twitter. If you are tweet-responding, please make sure to tag your tweets with the #feralC hashtag. And be warned: if you choose to actively participate you’ll be drawn into the narrative flow – including episodic summaries posted at netwurker.net. If you don’t want your input to be incorporated in this fashion, please message the PM directly or via her email.

If engagement isn’t high on your list, feel free to absorb the feralC Tweet list and/or blog entries and contribute via comments instead. For more comprehensive information on how to participate, please visit the Instructions Page:

“_feralC_ uses Twitter as its principle story-telling medium. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, here’s the official glossary and a basic explanation…

The _feralC_ story develops as the 5 primary chars [characters] chat and interact through their tweet dialogues:

• Gossama
• Hud Ballardrina
• Shadow McClone
• Miss Stressa
• Quentin Reader

The story unfolds via live Sessions where both primary chars and secondary chars [see below] engage with each other. These Sessions normally last between 1 – 2 hours. Check the Welcome Page for regular updates regarding Session times. Each Session is monitored and recorded by the Pupa Mistress – a “Behavioural Augmentologist” who oversees the chars through her Twitter stream [you can also follow her updates through this RSS Feed]…Pupa also analyses and summarises char [inter]actions via various blog posts featured on the Welcome Page: these are categorised by Series, Episode and Session numbers…

As _feralC_ is dynamically designed to incorporate audience responses, the developing story will also be shaped by you and others who choose to participate [you're "secondary chars"].  Primary chars may also respond sporadically to you – the secondary chars – outside scheduled Session times, so don’t be shy in responding through replies at any time. In order to become part of the dialogue and contribute to the storyline, please make sure to tag your tweets with the #feralC hashtag if contributing via Twitter. If you’re not a Twitter user you can still participate via comments on this blog [please still include the text "#feralC" in your comment if you're directly addressing or responding to a char] or email the PM with questions or contributions.

#feralC Chars

An easy way to passively follow all 5 chars and their collective dialogue is to regularly check in with the _feralC_ Twitter list found here. You can also search for updates on the project via Twitter by typing in “#feralC” into the Search bar. There are various clues peppered throughout the project that are designed be pieced together to develop the story. Please actively question the chars and openly speculate regarding how these elements fit and shape the storyline. There’ll also be elements that you’ll encounter during _feralC_ that incorporate Augmented Reality and QR Code technology.

Please be patient while the story unfolds: the project is designed to progress over the long term. Most of all, be curious, search for clues and enjoy delving into the _feralC_ world: the chars [well at least *most* of them] don’t bite…”

Commissioned by: Arnolfini. Hosted by Alias Frequencies.

—————————————————————————————————————————–

* “A “socumentary” is an entertainment form that merges Choose Your Own Adventure /Alternate Reality Drama/Social Game and Social Networking conventions. The result is a type of synthetic mockumentary that exists entirely within social media formats.

Andrei Gheorghe's poem made of rhyming tweets

Here is the author’s description:

“The Longest Poem in the World is composed by aggregating real-time public twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme. It is constantly growing at ~4000 verses / day. You can see more verses by clicking the three dots at the bottom (• • •) Made by Andrei Gheorghe.”

It’s interesting to read a bit of this. And if you reload it, it changes. So perhaps it is being added to top-up rather than bottom-down.

The almost-perfect Twitter longest poem in the world. Shoot me now. No, wait; it has not quite unfurled.

We read at edition.cnn.com that “Gheorghe said he doesn’t consider his work art. “It was just a random idea that popped up and I played with it. And it is what it is.”" Gheorghe is a web developer from Romania.

I expect it is art. There are all sorts of different types of art. From pop and viral to esoterica. This is definitely viral. And possibly pop. And definitely computer and net art.

It’s a really good code idea. Random tweets one after another would be dismal, but tweets with the same syllable count that also rhyme, why, they twitter quite delightfully, as it turns out.

Here we have a feed-based piece that saves Twitter from itself. It’s doing something interesting with a very odd database.

When I read it on Friday afternoon, it was all about people getting ready for the weekend.  A poem in rhyming couplets that may chronicle the time but is continually atwitter with the buzz of the moment. Remarkable.

Wallace Stevens said that poetry is a matter of making silk purses out of sows’ ears. I don’t know how silky this one is but surely it’s made of almost a hundred percent sows’ ears.

And how would you implement the idea? You’d need a rhyming dictionary (like this one). That is stored on the server. It isn’t downloaded to the client. All the writing happens server-side. It isn’t clear what language the server-side processing is done with. PHP or Perl or ASP or Java or whatever. The rhyming dictionary would probably have an API for that language. So that you could, say, send the dictionary a word and get back all the words that rhyme with it. Or you could send the dictionary two words and get back a yes or no as to whether they rhyme.

If it was a good rhyming dictionary, you could also send it a word and get back a number. This number would be a label for the set of words that rhymes with the word you sent. So you get the same number back if you send, on different occassions, two words that rhyme. And you get different numbers back if, on different occassions, you send two words that don’t rhyme.

Rhyming is an equivalence relation.  It partitions the set of words into disjoint sets. Each of the sets in the partition is made up of words that rhyme with one another.

Of course you also need access to lots of current tweets. I’m not sure how this would go. Would this be limited to a set of your friends or what? Anyone have a sense of how that would go?

If you wanted to make it so that each two tweets in a rhyming couplet have the same number of syllables you have to be able to count syllables in a word. In English, that’s usually a matter of the number of vowel clusters. For instance, ‘beautiful’ has 3 syllables and 3 vowel clusters: ‘eau’, ‘i’, and ‘u’. There are exceptions to this rule, such as ‘estuary’, which has only 3 vowel clusters (‘e’, ‘ua’, ‘y’) but 4 syllables, or ‘one’, which has 2 vowel clusters but only 1 syllable, but the rule works broadly enough to be of use.

So for each tweet, you have a few pieces of info.

1. The tweet itself.
2. The URL of the tweet. 
3. The number of syllables in the tweet.
4. The last word in the tweet.
5. And all the words that rhyme with the last word in the tweet.

Alternative to 5 would be the number label for the set of rhyming words, if the dictionary had that feature (discussed above).

Given two tweets, to determine if they can make a couplet, you compare item 3 in each tweet to see if they’re the same. And you compare item 4 to make sure they’re different (so you don’t rhyme x with x). And you compare item 5 to make sure they’re the same or that the one word is in the set of the other word.

If that pans out, you write the couplet to the poem, which is maintained on the server. Top-up. In other words, when you add a couplet to the poem, you add it to the top of the poem.

And when somebody visits the site to look at the poem, you feed them the most recently generated couplets.

by Jim Andrews
vispo.com

For this third in a series of ten posts on digital literature, I asked myself, as one would interrogate a terror suspect, Why do you write digital literature?

At first, I choked (it was a kind of psychic water boarding), and then I came up with this….

(1) Because I like it.

I like the excitement of an empty Flash page waiting to be filled. I like the challenge of starting something new, and hoping it will be different than anything I’ve done before. I like playing with text, images, and audio, looking for ways to synthesize them into a single, cohesive whole. I like the puzzles of code, the goal of lower load times, the fickleness of browsers and portable devices…

Sure, I curse at the ceiling, tear my hair out, and contemplate suicide when things go wrong. But mostly I’m happy, and, as it is with so many writers, that’s enough.

(2) Because I feel special. No kidding, I do. There’s something about working in an emerging art form (and yes, digital literature is an emerging art form), exploring the undiscovered territory where the signposts are mostly the ones you put up. And you put them up not for others, but for yourself so you know where you’ve been, and how to get back, so you can go someplace else. For sure, it’s a kick, marching among the avant-garde….

For years, I wrote traditional text fiction, lost among the many, and now I find myself among the few. Somehow, that’s reassuring.

(3) I’ve got to write something, don’t I? and…

(4) If I stopped now, what would I do with my time? I’ve tried tarring roads, teaching (I still do that), grave digging, nude modeling, parking cars, ghost writing, driving a tractor, fixing fences, giving blood, donating sperm, collecting trash, life-guarding, illegal merchandising (years ago), library shelving, writing specifications for the Gallup Poll, selling Italian ice, changing bedpans, washing dishes, salad prep, cutting grass, delivering newspapers, delivering flowers, grocery bagging, and so on, but none of it works.

There is no substitute. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t work.

(5) It’s expected of me. Yeah, I know, not too many people are out there reading digital stories for the web–it’s not high on their To Do list. But there are some who read my (and other digital writers’) work on a fairly regular basis, and after the first few years, they expect us to produce. It’s not a written contract, and it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece every time, but it has to be something so they can drop in, take a quick look, and be satisfied that, yes, the world still turns. The sun still rises and sets in Buffalo, Portland, Sydney, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Rome, Bergen, Barcelona….

You name the place, and the sun rises and sets. The seasons change, the watch ticks, the world turns.

(6) Because digital literature is an art form that I enjoy reading. My policy as an artist/writer (one which is sometimes difficult to adhere to) is never write anything I would not want to read myself. I tell it to my students, invest its importance with biblical resonances, and expect them to follow it.

My hypocrisy does not extend so far as to exclude myself, but it’s no problem, because for me, digital literature is the thing. I am constantly reading it, studying it, bookmarking it, creating it, and talking about it with anyone who will listen. I’ve taught it, curated it, performed it, published it, and copied it. I admire it, hate it and, in the end, there is only one word that sums up my relationship with it: obsession.

Do I always write what I would want to read? Yes, unless, for the moment, I’m someone else.

(7) Because text is not enough. For years, I wrote stories for the static page, relying on print to say it all. I had fun, worked hard, and had some success, but in the end, it was a wall which I wailed on so many times, it was impenetrable, I lay broken beneath it. I was a wreck, and looking for a way out, and digital literature was it. Maybe one day I will go back…

(8) Because I only have seven reasons so far. Which is to say, I don’t need a reason….

(9) Because I don’t have a hobby, and although digital literature is not a hobby for me, if I did have a hobby, there might not be time for digital literature. My time would be taken up with, well, you name it: knitting, golf, drinking….

(10) I want to be rich, and digital literature is the only way I can imagine to make it happen. This tells us two things: one, my imagination is so deficient, and my awareness of real-life economics so lacking, that I could laugh (or cry); and two, I am a fiscal romantic, one who, in the face of all the facts, denies them with the ferocity of a hedge fund manager.

By which I mean, digital literature may soon make money for its authors. In 2007, of the year’s 10 best-selling novels in Japan, five were originally cell phone novels. Sure, they may not be exactly what we consider to be digital literature, and they’re still ultimately selling as hard-cover books, but they were originally read on cell phones, and by LOTS of people. Cell phone novels (or keitai shousetsu) are already being serialized for money. If Japanese authors can do it, why can’t we?

So, why do I write digital literature? It’s not for money, it’s not because I’m bored, and it’s not because I want to be famous…. It’s because, for now, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Nice to have a different sort of approach to these matters. A philosopher.

And he talks about my piece Seattle Drift. In which the basic philosophy is ‘do me’. Which, come to think of it, fits in with his philosophy, which stresses computation and interactivity in his notion of  ’computer art’, which he distinguishes from ‘digital art’.

A useful distinction. Just about all art, these days, is involved in the digital. Even dance and the most print-minded endeavors of the literary.

the most fundamental phenomenological characteristic of computers is  programmability. this is what separates computers from other types of man-made machines. ‘turing-complete’ programmability provides a radical flexibility in what machines can do. flexibility so radical that there is no proof, and probably never will be, that there exist thought processes of which humans are capable and computers are not.

there probably never will be such proof because if such proof existed, it would mean that there was proof that there are types of machines that go beyond the capabilities of turing machines. and such proof has been sought since the early days of computing, to no avail.

what does this mean for computer art?

well, there are many artists who see computers as glorified media machines. glorified typewriters. or glorified sound editing facilities. and so on. more of the same only easier and better. so their notion of computer art does not go very far. we shall have more of the same from them. because that’s what you get when you think of computers as glorified old-media machines. and of course we’re getting lots of it.

whereas if we see computers as offering really quite radical possibilities, possibilities that are poetentially as flexible as thought itself in dynamic generation, then we have to revise our notions concerning the vistas of computer art. and not settle for more of the same.

programming that is not interactive can be very interesting, of course. it can also be made to respond to the surroundings or remote data in ways that aren’t interactive with the audience but are nonetheless involved in growth and change, learning and possibly even thought of some sort. and that can be interesting in art pieces.

but i agree with Lopes that there is something special to *interactivity with people* in computer art. really good interactivity brings modes of discovery that are most interesting to me, among works of computer art. there can be a kind of dialogue or communication that is deeply satisfying as an art experience. perhaps because this sort of communication most dramatically and immediately explores our relations with machines and each other and ourselves. we get an inkling of some form of thought and communication that is a deep mixture of human thought and emotion and communication together with this new element we know is on the horizon of thought, ie, the thought of machines.