Gap - A Navigable Poem

Gap - A Navigable Poem - A Screenshot

Gap is a navigable poem that explores American masculinity.

What defines a "man" in America? Clothes? Job description? Dominance, through physical force or weaponry? Culturally acceptable addictions (eg. beer, coffee, gambling, porn)? From where are we choosing to learn about masculinity? From our parents? From our churches? From TV? Who gets to tell us what makes an acceptable/ideal man?

Gap explores these issues via navigable text. Within the poem, the reader controls a letter "A," a supposed Alpha male, a boat that can navigate the waters filling the gap between what is and what is not a man. This water gap through which the reader navigates is represented by an intentional text river, white space that is typically re-aligned in text to aid in readability, that runs between two mountains of words that comprise the poem. By sailing through this text river, the reader's "A" completes words and phrases as the poem is read from bottom to the top.

When discovering what defines manhood, not everything is clear. The world of the poem is dark, unknown, and the reader's torch illuminates a limited view of the entire text. In fact, the reader will never be able to discover every word written. No one male knows everything it takes to be a "Man."

As gender gaps slowly close in America, it is hard for a man to know his place concretely. While socially men may be (at least at some point) equal to women, naturally and biologically we are markedly different, and that's okay. Women amaze me at their ability to celebrate their womanhood.

Men scare me.

To read this poem:
- download the entire .zip file from here: Gap.zip
- Open the file Gap.exe.
- Control the "A" boat with the arrow keys (up, left, right; there is no going back).

At this point, this poem is only for Windows. It was written in .python and therefore I'll technically be able to create linux and (ugh) Mac versions; I just haven't yet.

Enjoy!

SRT

BUILD UP - A Playable Poem

BUILD UP is a playable poem about work, family, and the walls we build between them in just 8 hours per weekday.

BUILD UP is based on the classic game Breakout; or rather, it is an anti- version of the game, wherein you build up rather than break out, and is based on JavaScript by Nick Young (those web-nostalgic will love his link!).

Unfortunately, this poem only works in Chrome and Safari (looks smashing in Safari, actually). It will not work in Firefox or IE (sorry).

Click the alarm clock to begin, and use your mouse to play.

You may play it here: BUILD UP

Enjoy!

-SRT

And Sensibility Sense - A Novel of Cut-Up-Dialogue

And Sensibility Sense is a randomly generated novel based on Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Actually, it's pretty much the same novel, though each time the page is loaded, the dialogue within the novel is randomly selected from an array of all the dialogue in the original novel.

Let me give you an example:

From the original text of Sense and Sensibility (Chapter 9):

Sir John called on them as soon as the next interval of fair weather that morning allowed him to get out of doors; and Marianne's accident being related to him, he was eagerly asked whether he knew any gentleman of the name of Willoughby at Allenham. 

"Willoughby!" cried Sir John; "what, is HE in the country? That is good news however; I will ride over tomorrow, and ask him to dinner on Thursday."

"You know him then," said Mrs. Dashwood.

"Know him! to be sure I do. Why, he is down here every year."

"And what sort of a young man is he?"

"As good a kind of fellow as ever lived, I assure you. A very decent shot, and there is not a bolder rider in England."

Now here is the same excerpt from one run of And Sensibility Sense (Chapter 9):

Sir John called on them as soon as the next interval of fair weather that morning allowed him to get out of doors; and Marianne's accident being related to him, he was eagerly asked whether he knew any gentleman of the name of Willoughby at Allenham.

‘I sent you up the young man. Did not I do right?‚-And I suppose you had no great difficulty‚-You did not find him very unwilling to accept your proposal?’ cried Sir John; ‘I think, Edward,’

‘Colonel Brandon!’ said Mrs. Dashwood.

‘A very simple one‚-to be of use to Mr. Ferrars.’

‘you know that all this is an invention of your own, and that there is no such person in existence.’

‘I could meet him no other way. Eliza had confessed to me, though most reluctantly, the name of her lover; and when he returned to town, which was within a fortnight after myself, we met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.’

An exploration of unintentional narrative, each reading will be quite unique, as the rearrangement possibilities are, while not endless, certainly more than I'm willing to calculate.

As Burroughs would have recommended the scissors, I recommend the javascript. Steal this work, and create your own.

Once again, here is the link: thefwordsrt.appspot.com/andsensibilitysense.html

Enjoy!
-SRT

Conway's Game of Good and Evil

Conway's Game of Good and Evil

Taking John Conway's Game of Life and infusing the words "GOOD" and "EVIL" within the void, a page (world) of ever-evolving text appears.

If you're unfamiliar with cellular automata or Conway's Game of Life, it essentially places a certain set of rules on displayed objects that determine whether or not they'll live or die in the next "step" of the program depending on how many "neighbors" each object has.

The Game of Life program has me hypnotized and amazed every time I open it. It's available for a variety of platforms and languages, but if you haven't seen it before, check out this page: Emergent Universe - Game of Life.

Textual Automata

I've altered the code found here to grab letters from an array, in this case the letters from GOOD and EVIL, and display those letters instead of simple pixels. What results is a fascinating, living, breathing, dying, evolving text that explores many ideas inherent in life.

As the text evolves, you get typical Game of Life patterns (blinkers, boats, gliders, spaceships, &c). In addition, you get a story that begins with a VOID, and fills this VOID with GOD, LOVE, and even EVE. Allow the story to self-evolve, and you may come across the VILE, the DEVIL, maybe an IDOL or two.

Moving beyond a story of creation, the text becomes populated with DOVEs, DOGs, even an occassional EEL. As the story progresses further, these concepts may be replaced by an attraction to GOLD or OIL.

These words LIVE, EVOLVE, and DIE like any other life as we know it. By adding equal parts GOOD and EVIL to the system, I find it fascinating to see the products of the blend of the two.

Stable Configuration

This program is available for Windows and can be downloaded here: Game_of_Good_and_Evil.exe

If you'd like to build the program yourself, the C++ code is here: Game_of_Good_and_Evil.rtf

Run the program and watch it evolve into a stable pattern. Run it again, and the void will be filled with a different pattern (they're created at random). Run it to read it or run it to stare. If nothing else, run it to create worlds.

-SRT

UNWELCOME - a Screenshot Poem

Original Screenshot - Metroid, NES

Experimenting with sprite poems, I decided to see what an entire screenshot would look like. For this piece, I chose a screenshot from the initial scene of Metroid for the NES.

Replacing each pixel in the screenshot with a color-corresponding letter infuses the word "unwelcome" throughout the scene where Samus first arrives in the game-world.

Unwelcome is the hostile world to her. Unwelcome is she to a world into which she was not invited. Unwelcome is she in a 1986 8-bit sci-fi video game where she hides her identity until after the game is over, so not to offend or excite the target market.

The resultant poem seems less like ASCII art and more like a cross stitch pattern. Each pixel is carefully mapped and its color referenced as one letter in the word "unwelcome."

This project was done entirely in a text editor, with a monospaced Courier to maintain an even character width. As such, it is copy-able and paste-able into any other text editor. It is not an image. It is a string of letters, one pervasive word.

Here is the poem as plain text: UNWELCOME_bw.pdf

Here is the poem in color: UNWELCOME_color.pdf

(Downloading and opening looks much better than previewing on Google docs.)

Zoom in. Zoom out. Forests and trees and such.

SRT

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