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.

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

many of us, as writers and/or artists or whatever, find ourselves working with ‘the material’ in ways that we weren’t earlier on. with less emphasis on transcribing our ‘inner thoughts and feelings’ and more emphasis on what the words are saying. and yes there are often things we want to get them to say, if we can (like now), but we observe that not only are we not entirely clear what that might be, until we find the words, but that even when we do, they aren’t quite what we thought they might be and are often better as something we didn’t anticipate at all via not mindless manipulation of symbols but through a process of writerly/artistic discovery that involves mind and mindless, material and material, material and spiritual. via engaging with the material both in an objective manner, as things on a page subject to choice and cutup, random and thoughtful selection…and all the compositional techniques we use.

and this different engagement with ‘the material’ is part of what i had in mind as a kind of materialism. of course the term ‘materialism’ has a very interesting history going back to Indian and Greek atomism and into the contemporary world in many different ways. usually the ‘material’ is atomistic. matter. a philosophy of the composition of matter and the generation of the ten thousand things.

only recently has it been associated with consumerist zeal and denials of the importance of feelings, emotions, and so on. a blip on the map.

usually there’s a scientistic element, often a strong one, to materialisms. they often seek to apply an occam-like razor to eliminate assumptions that are not required or to eliminate attribution of causes to supernatural agents. materialisms usually do their darndest to appeal only to reason and material evidence in their theories.

but of course, as artists, we are by no means in the bizness of appealing solely to reason. we don’t produce many theories of the universe and everything but, instead, are basically wordy minstrels singing into the black hole of mind and media. and, for lack of a better word, there is a ‘spiritual’ dimension to what we talk about, what we do, how we go about it, and so on. emotion, feeling, mood, tone, connotation, subjectivity, all these are normally important to art.

yet our approach, or the approach of many of us, to writing and/or art or whatever, in our current age, does involve this ‘materialism’ i mentioned that does indeed have a scientistic dimension in that we do try to keep our eye somewhat objectively not on what we ourselves are feeling and thinking about what we’re creating but on what others might also get from it and, beyond that, in our approach to working with the material as recombinant, as involved in the processes of network cutup, reassembly, and our sources of the material can be spam or texts recovered from net searches or whatever and our methods of composition can involve the algorithmic and so on. kedrick james’s term for all this is ‘writing post-person’.

but, even so, we are not so much interested in creating interesting language machines as in the human appeal of these machines made out of words. so that a contemporary, writerly materialism usually involves some sort of meditation on our relations with language and machines. not to dehumanize but to locate and explore our humanity in relation to mind and mindlessness, the intention and the unintended, the machine and the human.

there’s that kurzweil book ‘the age of spiritual machines’. with emphasis on artificial intelligence. and that’s interesting, but typically our emphasis is not on artificial intelligence but on our own intelligence extended, changed, dwarfed, zoomed, augmented, pounded, filtered, twittered, frittered, coerced, directed, freed, drugged, blasted, spliced, diced, googled, ogled, bamboozled, frugalled, layered, informationalized, playered, stirred, blurred, penetrated, iconized, infiltrated, visualized, datafied, search enginized, tokenized, blip bopified, ding donglered and piece-wise transformed via our engagement with language and contemporary language environments. our own intelligences are somewhat artificial. and we operate in a material combinatorium of language not as in a meaningless concourse of atoms but in our own very purposefully processual cyclotrons, intent upon both the material and energy of its release.

Jim Andrews
http://vispo.com

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.