A Picture Worth 11,739 Words

A picture worth 11,739 words

This afternoon, I was playing around with some images, glitching them up through a hex editor, because sometimes that's what I do during my downtime at work. Those who recognize the screenshot as Spiceworks will probably guess what I should have been doing while I was creating this image. While modifying the code, I began drifting into thought. I began wondering what, deep into this image's code within which I was working, was this image trying to say, beyond that of the product of a typical image viewer?

So I removed myself from the hex editor, and tried a text editor. Well, we all know that the text editor will display a bunch of gibberish, since looking at the code of such a file is not really the text editor's job. Okay, I understand that.

So here's what I did next:

1) Changed the character encoding of what the text editor (in this case: Word) presented into Chinese.

2) Copied the Chinese characters into Google translator, and translated into English.

3) Copied the now-English text back into the text editor.

4) Ran a spell check, making every suggested change along the way.

The result is here in .pdf format: CAPTURE.PDF

What began as gibberish is now 11,739 words, most of which are readable to some degree. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from this text:

"and obesity have been implicated with premature failure of the implant by loosening, fracture"

"throwing the world the sobbing tender"

"Beam roars me? Radiance of fire, the petal"

"Song s? Naked? The Run violence?"

"the defecate + ingot official pay the Hour Ling F * N, few paid"

"Complain? 0 species of bamboo"

"executive irresolute Shang trafficking curse? earn?"

are among many others.

Try this on your own, with a variety of images. Look for stories unfolding within.

Find out exactly, and in how many words, the worth of your picture.

-SRT

Famicommunist Poetics

Famicommunist Poetics flyer

This fall, I will be teaching a class at UnderAcademy College entitled Famicommunist Poetics. The course description is as follows:

"This class will explore Famicommunist aesthetics and constraints from within a post-Fujian framework. We will experience existing work that has ranged from the textual, to the visual, to the procedural, through many points in between. In addition, we will produce an extensive portfolio based on our non-digital experimentation with ASCII, sprites, volition, easter eggs, cheat codes & passwords, as poetic forms and constraints, in addition to others that will be created within the class."

In a nutshell, in this class we will be composing concrete poetry based on the visual aesthetics and input methods of classic video games. By classic, I am referring to games released during what I call the Fujian era, i.e. the years during which the Atari VCS was produced (1977-1992). This will by no means limit us to games released on the Atari console, but rather the games and consoles that were released during this time period, including, but not limited to, the Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Master System, various handhelds, arcade cabinets, &c &c &c.

Anyone is welcome to register for the class through the UnderAcademy website. If you are unfamiliar with UnderAcademy, I highly recommend checking out their website for further info. Registration will be closed once the class hits 15 students, so don't wait!

In addition to Famicommunist Poetics, I will also be co-teaching a class with every other UnderAcademy digressor entitled Too Many Cooks. You may find more info on this class, and others, here: UnderAcademy Courses

While I'm discussing UnderAcademy, I also want to note a couple things that have developed there since my last blog post:

During the summer, Associate Professor of writing at University of Southern California Mark Marino led a special, steamy seminar entitled Grammar Porn, and has posted highlights of student work in Bunk Magazine, which can be found here: Bunk Magazine

Quite recently, The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an article on their Wired Campus blog regarding UnderAcademy, which you can read here: The Chronicle

If you have any questions about UnderAcademy or these classes, feel free to contact me. Hope to see some of you on the roster!

-SRT 

17-Syllable, 43-Word Haiku

** You will need a browser that supports animated gifs in order to truly appreciate this blog post **

In an attempt to create a microstiche, I began using my phone to create tiny animated gif poetry (via free apps; do a simple search and experiment to find one you like). My first attempt resulted in this:

Feel free to zoom in to see the animation. I know it's tiny, but I like the micro aesthetic.

The idea was to use the text within a template word as a visual constraint for writing additional words within this template word. In other words, I was trying to either use the words that naturally appear within the "title" word, or "engage" only certain pixels of a letter, in order to produce a letter (punctuation, whatever) that doesn't appear in that spot within the template word.

For instance, there's this:

Again, zoom in if you'd like.

On paper, this microstiche could be titled and written as:

Theater

Theft,
a
h-ate,

the
later
fate.

In the microstiche version, however, you get an entire poem (albeit pedestrian in this case, feel free to do better!) all wrapped up into one word. I am a huge proponent of terseness and economical language husbandry, so this is a nice, quick way to experiment.

I am very pleased with how this microstiche has turned out, and I'm sure it has another term for it technically and it's probably been done a hundred times before. But I'm having fun with this, and in Moment Art terms, this is a perfect way to spend only a few minutes a day creating fun little poems. I highly encourage it!

After playing with a few microstiches, I became curious about how much language I could squash into these single words. For instance, how could I expand something like a haiku, so that an entirely new dimension of narrative would appear overtop a constraint of 17 syllables?

Well, it goes a little something like this:






Within each template word of this 17-syllable haiku exists an additional narrative, that allowed me to expand these 17 syllables into 43 words, which are all relevant to the overall story I had in mind when composing the haiku. Additionally, each individual word tells its own story. So as far as being economical, I think I succeeded. I acknowledge that I will need to put more effort in to writing a better haiku, but hey, it's a prototype.

And yes, the fonts are all hand-drawn. I hope some of you get a chance to play with these forms!

-SRT

Ginsberg's Tweet: Howl Revision via Twitter

On June 3rd I performed Ginsberg's Tweet, a retweeted revision of Howl, on Twitter @GinsbergsTweet. Using the Howl text as a foundation, I went through the original work, line by line and comma by comma, and searched specific keywords in recent tweets, Twitter-wide. Utilizing the most angry, upset, overwhelmed, and hopeful of the search, I retweeted these results in succession as they were presented in Howl.

Ginsberg's Tweet remains viewable on Twitter @GinsbergsTweet. You will need to scroll through the retweets to find the beginning, which is clearly marked.

Straight reading from beginning to end (especially when one is familiar with Howl) reveals an honest, crowdsourced (oh boy...) retelling of current fear and hope in much the same vein as Ginsberg himself did. Sometimes the succession of retweets is more relevant to the next/last than others, and sometimes it's as though the authors of these tweets are speaking to each other. Reading Ginsberg's Tweet aloud is something I would like to try alongside a concurrent reading of Howl.

However, I chose the Twitter platform more for its hypertextuality and its relevance to our digital culture. In Allen Ginsberg's time, words you might see scribbled on walls are now presented and archived (limitedly on Twitter itself, at least) as tweets for anyone with internet access to view. Instead of inscribing shocking headlines into concrete, a tweeter may simply display a link to a troubling article. Instead of wondering who wrote such words upon the wall, all one must do now is click on the tweeter's profile, straight to a bio and a comprehensive list of every tweet they've been making. This is the beautiful part.

The pathways that clickable words create within Twitter are so dendritic that I have yet to get through Ginsberg's Tweet fully by following the hypertext. Now, if I'm wondering just who wrote a particular tweet, I can view their bio, their tweets, the conversation that the tweet may have been part of, (their Twitter wallpaper!), who they're following, their bios and tweets, as well as read online articles (discovering their author, raging at the comment section, finding related articles), view pictures embedded within the retweets, and on and on so that to engage Ginsberg's Tweet fully is to peruse what seems like the entire internet. So I wonder: What would a full, critical reading of Ginsberg's Tweet look like?

I'm not asking anyone to do this, just merely trying to wrap my head around the expansiveness of hypertextuality.

What I will ask, however, is that you take a look at Ginsberg's Tweet, and explore it as fully as you are able.

Overall, I am very pleased with the result of this experiment. When I began this project, I never realized the expansive narrative it would create. I was mostly hoping that it would be relevant to Howl, as well as appreciated by the man whose birthday it was to commemorate.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Allen Ginsberg.

Also, to the Twitterers who unwittingly wrote this entire thing: Thank you.

-SRT

@GinsbergsTweet

Ginsberg's Tweet is a re: vision of Howl that I will be performing live on Twitter (no bots) on June 3, 2012, in honour of Allen Ginsberg's birthday. It will be an arrangement of voices that mirrors the text of Howl in its entirety. The show will begin at 8 pm EST on Twitter @GinsbergsTweet.

-SRT

Zork N plus 9

"In the bisexual's nest is a large eiderdown encrusted with precious jingles, apparently scavenged somewhere by a childless sore." 

Zork N+9

Zork N plus 9 is an Oulipo-ly rewritten version of the classic text adventure. Utilizing Dean Merenzes' Inform7 port and http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/ , each noun is replaced with the ninth noun from the original in the dictionary.

Some basics for those who are unfamiliar:

Inform7 is a programming language that uses English in a natural way, without the oft intimidating

function {
  math-like code;
}

that may prove difficult (though not impossible, see Mez Breeze) to render into a poetic form. Therefore, the process wasn't as simple as pasting the entire code into the website above, catching all the "irregular" nouns. I needed to select each noun carefully, because altering the wrong noun would cause errors.

This project was more an exercise in tenacity than it was in coding.

For example, the phrase "twisty little passages" could easily become "twisty little pastels" because the Inform7 interpreter doesn't use "passage" as a command. However, changing a noun such as "man" would cause a little trouble, because defining the Cyclops as a "mandrake" instead is something Inform7 cannot handle semantically (at least that was my experience; I'm not deeply familiar with Inform7).

I could have only altered the displayed text outputted by the program, though the player would need to input the same nouns as the original Zork, which would render the displayed text irrelevant. If the White Housekeeper has a semi-open "wink" through which to enter, the player should not need to enter "open window" to do so.

What drove me to complete this piece was to discover if the (N+9) replacement method makes the adventure any more or less exciting, or if it merely serves to add absurdity. I appreciate the Oulipo methods and the reader-driven mechanisms of interactive fiction, so I mostly wanted to play with colliding worlds.

I haven't played through the work entirely, but I've been through enough to know that it may cause a type of literary vertigo, the kind you might experience in a dream if you've fallen asleep after too much caffeine. Best I can say is: Make a map.

If you cannot navigate the newly-obscure vocabulary, I encourage you to browse the source text. If nothing else, reading the Inform7 source (esp. as (N+9)) is a remarkable poetic experience.

And thanks to the generous hosting donation from Mark Sample, we are now able to play Zork N plus 9 directly from our browser: Zork N plus 9

Next up: Oulipo-ly, a board game; or Monopoly (N+7)

Just kidding.

Maybe.

-SRT

Camel Tail: Generating Narrative in Metal

It's been 30 years, Metallica; what is the story you are trying to tell?

Camel Tail is a generative poem using every line from Metallica's 9 major studio albums, and is my attempt to find an overall narrative within Metallica's prolific work.

I was pleased to discover that often the lines become arranged in mutually relevant ways. At times, the verses share rhyme and meter, with the resultant stanzas grouped thematically, even though the songs could be written decades apart. Out of their original context, the lines become more personal, and seem to speak of hate bred through pain and loss. The scenes seem more grey without the pounding rhythm. The man behind the words becomes more contemplative, almost pitiful.

And other times it doesn't make any sense at all.

You can find it online here: Camel Tail

All words were written by Metallica (please don't sue me).
All lines are rearranged at random by your browser.
All lyrics are sic from http://www.encycmet.com/ (except for gross misspellings which I corrected here and there).

The javascript is based off Nick Montfort's generative poetry.

-SRT