konsonant is my new app (for iOS and Mac) as well as a free mp3 release.

check it out at my site

Play with letters and sounds, build acoustic machines, control morphing clouds and experiment with the alphabet!

Enjoy the sounds and shapes of letters by line drawing, physics simulations or acoustic networks in the four sound games included in the app.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Call for papers

Technical submissions are invited across the broad range of areas covered by Computational Aesthetics. Specific technical areas include, but are not limited to:
- computational analysis and modeling of creative behavior (AI, A life);
- artistic image transformation techniques (colors, edges, patterns, dithering);
- image style and salience analysis (paintings, photographs, others);
- visualization (perceptual or aesthetics based);
- sketching, simplification techniques (artistic, cognitive);
- composition, visual balance, layout;
- non-photorealistic and illustrative rendering addressing computational aesthetics;
- empirically based metrics of aesthetical attributes;
- applied visual perception (color appearance, spatial vision, and other aspects);
- measuring and describing aesthetics; and
- computational tools for artists.

Deadlines
Submission deadline: March 14, 2012
Short track (new review for SIGGRAPH declines): April 3, 2012
Acceptance notification: April 23, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: May 1, 2012
Conference: June 4-6, 2012

Call for Artworks :The Aesthetics of Code as Material

As a special supplement to the general conference call, the Art track for CAe 2012 seeks works by artists exploring the relations between code, form and image. This call for artworks is specifically interested in works that have contributed to the shift in focus from static to dynamic models and toward systems of processuality.
Papers and Posters exploring this art track theme in critical, cultural and philosophical terms are also welcome. These should follow the submission requirements and deadlines of the general conference call. Proposals in the following areas are encouraged:
- Generative systems, image, form and audiovisuality,
- Digital fabrication and Parameterisation,
- Kinetic behaviors, Interactive and adaptive architectures,
- Interfaces, instruments and improvisation.
- The list is indicative, not exhaustive.

Deadlines
Expression of Interest and outline of art works: March 29th, 2012
Acceptance notification: April 23, 2012
Camera-ready deadline: May 1, 2012
Conference: June 4-6, 2012

More on http://cae-sbim-npar-2012.inrialpes.fr/cae/

In her editorial introducing the issue, Jill Jones rightly points to the issue’s presumptive focus on electronica and electronic music, specifically “the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound.” The poetry in this issue runs the gamut from highly experimental works to extended meditations on musical memories and forms. It’s absorbing, intriguing and puzzling – and this is just as it should be.

The spoken word tracks selected by our audio editor Emilie Zoey Baker are similarly pre-occupied with the bleeps, hisses and clicks we associate nowadays with electronic music. From Philip Norton’s bizarro Yes I Dream of Electric Sheep to Sean M. Whelan and Isnod’s Dream Machines, the works selected here paint an aural kaleidoscope that fizzes and pops, echoing electronic art from the works of Phillip K. Dick through to Kraftwerk. Check out the individual tracks or stream the hour-plus mix of electronica as one. Headphones highly recommended!

When it comes to the selected works of multimedia or ‘electronic literature’, however, we are faced with a series of disruptions that more often than not question rather than reflect the theme of the issue. Benjamin Laird’s Sound-less-scape and nothing left in, for example, present the reader (viewer? player?) with opportunities for interaction but remain stubbornly mute, like a silent rave. Joshua Mei Ling Dubrau’s Et Tu demonstrates the jump-cut nature of screen-capture technology when applied to text, while Konrad McCarthy’s TV Life strips bare the artifice of the audio-visual in a montage of movements.

The publication of these pieces – some HTML-based, others video – inevitably raises the question of genre and form. Is this literature? Is it even e-literature? As Tim Wrights asks in his review of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 2, ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ I’d like to think, instead, of overlapping spaces – some of which may be electronic, others organic. Beverliey Braune’s Supra-text Sequences essay offers one glimpse into such a world.

When it comes to the work of Jason Nelson, one might instead ask where the electronic world actually stops. I’m really excited to be able to publish three of Jason’s work in this issue, because in many respects his work attempts to break through the imposition imposed by the computer screen to offer a neural landscape that is deeply textured and interactive. Depth: Text and Playthings addresses this tension directly, by stating bluntly ‘Your screen is horribly flat’.

Elsewhere, Nelson’s work is playful and self-referential. Branching: branch branch is a work where the traditional branching structure of file folders clashes comically with a goofy soundtrack that is perhaps more amenable to a 1980s computer game. Meanwhile, With love, from a failed planet presents a phantasmagoria of late-capitalist logos. In addition to these pieces, I’m pleased to present an interview with Jason in which he reflects on his creative practices as an electronic literature artist.

Nelson’s work offers one possible ‘entry-point’ into the world of e-lit. The work of Mez Breeze offers another. Sally Evans’ essay entitled ‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry demonstrates that electronic literature can be just as much about ‘texts’ as traditional literature. Mez’s work is justifiably renowned in e-lit circles as innovative and highly complex. In an online world where more and more of us are exposed to the vagaries of computer code, Mezangelle chews up that code, parses it with human language and spits out art. Adam Fieled’s essay on Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (a work that is itself highly amenable to remediation as a hypertext) shows that the worlds of literary practise and literary criticism remain inextricably entwined.

In terms of my own personal experience of electronic literature, Mez’s work was amongst the first that I viewed (scanned? played?). Over the course of this year, working as a post-doctoral researcher on the ELMCIP project, I’ve also been met a wide range of scholars and practitioners working in the field of e-lit. For this reason, I’ve included in this issue two interviews with my colleagues at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden. Both Talan Memmott and Maria Engberg have inspired me to re-think my attitudes to the digital realm.

This brings me back to the question of Cordite’s place within that realm. As Benjamin Laird demonstrates in his overview entitled Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social, Cordite is by no means alone in its attempts to engage with online communities. In fact, pretty much every Australian literature journal is undergoing a process of morphing and reinvention. I’d like to think that, in the future, Cordite will evolve to include more works of electronic literature that actually engage with the medium in which the journal ‘lives’.

This is not to suggest that the thousand-odd poems we have published on the site over the past decade or not ‘alive’, or that text-based works are somehow inferior to HTML, Flash-based or interactive works. Nevertheless, I hope that these tiny steps we have taken towards the electr(on)ification of Cordite will inspire others to create engaging, accessible art that takes advantage of the multitude of possibilities made available when viewing (reading? parsing?) information using a networked computer.”

- David Prater, Cordite’s Managing Editor

From January 5th through the 7th at the Washington State Convention Center in Room 609, visitors will have the opportunity to view/read/interact with: e-literature from the Electronic Literature Collection Volumes One and Two; historically significant works such as those by bpNichol and those published by Eastgate; locative works such as Kate Armstrong’s “Ping;” formally experimental works such as David Jhave Johnson’s “softies;” multimodal narratives such as Christine Wilks’ “Underbelly;” literary games such as Ian Bogost’s “A Slow Year“; and mobile works such as Mark Amerika’s “Immobilité.” These are just some of many different modes of e-literature that will be on display. The complete list of works is available on the exhibit website.

Also, on Friday January 6th from 8pm to 10.30pm, there will be an MLA off-site reading of electronic literature at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave  Seattle, WA 98122-2419). If you are in Seattle in early January, please make sure you stop by as it’s a rare treat indeed to have the opportunity to hear these extraordinarily innovative writers read together: Nick Montfort, Stephanie Strickland, Marjorie Luesebrink, Jim Andrews, Erin Costello and Aaron Angello, Mark Marino, Talan Memmott, John Cayley, Ian Bogost, Brian Kim Stefans, and Kate Armstrong.

• N-gram generations (word-based and character-based) * Diastic readings * Cut-ups * n+7s * template generations * codework transformations
• metaphysical speculation, startling juxtapositions, profane ranting, unpopular political perspectives, and moments of great (though possibly incomprehensible) beauty
• our favorite poems from the past several years of the group blog Gnoetry Daily
• creative Foreword by C.T. Funkhouser (of “Prehistoric Digital Poetry” fame)

All for the low low price of FREE. Get the pdf file, and follow our continuing adventures on Gnoetry Daily and our Chapbooks page!

Since I don’t want to post an ad without any additional content, I’ll now consider the question: how should we refer to the act of generating text poetry using computer tools and algorithms?

This becomes a question because there are at least four traditions of computer poetry generation:

• The Poetic tradition – people like Jackson Mac Low and Charles Hartman, who are primarily interested in writing good poetry. They may use the term aleatory and draw from the Surrealist, Language, Flarf, and Conceptual traditions.
• The Oulipo tradition – influenced by the French academics/practitioners who are interested in novel constraints and methods of automation. They may use the term combinatory and potential, and frame the use of corpora as a constraint (i.e. only using a certain set of words.)
• The Programming tradition – recreational “hackers” and professional programmers whose goal is developing interesting programs, e.g. the developers of Travesty, Dissociated Press, Racter, and JanusNode, as well as computing pioneers such as Lutz and Stratchey. They may use the term stochastic, and focus on the types of algorithms and interface affordances involved.
• The Research tradition – both scientific and literary theoretic academics who are exploring issues in language and cognition. Scientific approaches may use terms such as poetry generation (following the more general “natural language generation”) and may think of poetry generators as a long-term project towards modeling the creative process by determining which parts can be automated. Literary theoretic approaches may use terms such as appropriation and uncreative.

People can be in more than one category to different degrees, and all of these have valuable contributions to make. But because these different traditions emphasize different histories and different aspects of the activity, they are likely to continue to require different names for the activity.

But maybe the best approach is ludic; roll 6-sided dice 4 times and consult the following expression:

(((1d3)(post-,avant-,'pata-))
 ((1d6)(computational,digital,procedural,appropriative,stochastic,aleatoric))
 ((1d3)(poetic,lyric,verse))
 ((1d3)(generation,production,authoring)))

so rolls of (4, 3, 1, 2) would get you “avant-procedural poetic generation”, for example!

After a long hiatus, here are two new digital stories from webyarns.com…

“Pangram (The Quick Brown Fox)” plays with the concept of a pangram and provides a hypothetical back-story to the most widely-known example of the form.

The second story, the “ABCs of UFOs,” is the purported website of a UFO investigation team. I hope (at a time when laughs are sorely needed) that you find it humorous. Explore and enjoy.

You can find both these stories, and others, at webyarns.com

*

It is remarkable that in just ten years, since the publication of the first book on electronic literature (Loss Glazier’s Digital Poetics in 2001), e-literature has firmly established itself as a thriving field. However, all too often, readings of e-literature (or digital-born writing that makes the most of the capabilities of its medium) take the form of accounts of what appears on the screen, with little attention to the material context of the writing – whether its hardware or software. Or, conversely, such readings point to how e-literature reminds us of Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message. Instead, this panel takes up Katherine Hayles’ injunction for “media-specific analysis” of e-literature by focusing on the defining role of the interface in particular. Our argument is this: personal computers from the 1980s as much as the latest multitouch devices are finally revealing themselves not just as media but as media whose functioning depends on interfaces that frame what can and cannot be written. Further, e-literature often deliberately works against or draws attention to the strictures of digital writing interfaces and so it is an ideal site to explore this tight inter-connection between writing and writing interface. All four presentations, then, try to shift the definition of “interface” outside its conventional usage (in which interface is usually defined quite broadly as the intermediary layer between a user and a digital computer or computer program) and apply it to digital writing/media from the last twenty years to mean the layer between the reader and particular computer platforms which allows the reader to interact with a literary text.

As an example of this approach, Dene Grigar’s paper opens our panel with a detailed discussion of the exhibit “Early Authors of Electronic Literature: The Eastgate School, Voyager Artists, and Independent Productions” (now installed at the University of Washington). Grigar looks specifically at the major technological shifts in affordances and constraints provided by early computer interfaces and the ways in which e-literature writers from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s worked with and against these interfaces. For example, she discusses the command-line interface of the Apple IIe – which was released in 1983 – as an example of an interface that exemplifies an ideology wholly different from the now dominant Graphic User Interface. Thus, the command-line interface also makes possible entirely different texts and entirely different modes of thinking/creating such as that exemplified by bpNichol’s “First Screening” from 1984. Stephanie Strickland and Marjorie Luesebrink then offer a co-presentation in which they move the discussion into the 21st century by focusing on works included in the recently published Electronic Literature Collection Volume Two – an online anthology that highlights and preserves exemplary e-literature from 2001 – 2010. This collection features a stunning variety of interface choices in works of animation, generation, augmented reality, gaming, hypertext, AI-based interactive drama, interactive fiction, poetry and video.

Strickland and Luesebrink focus in particular on e-literature whose interface requires the reader’s bodily movement as a fundamental component as well as those texts whose reading calls for a knowledge of code as well as a familiarity with network forms such as the database, personal home page, Frequently Asked Questions list, blog, listserv, commercial website, wiki, or email. Thus, while they acknowledge the interface defines what is or can be written, Strickland and Luesebrink demonstrate that the interface also creates the reader.

I, Lori Emerson, will then take a slightly different approach in thatI argue recent e-literature by Judd Morrissey and Jason Nelson represents a broad movement in e-literature to draw attention to the move toward the so-called “interface free” – or, the interface that seeks to disappear altogether by becoming as “natural” as possible. It is against this troubling attempt to mask the workings of the interface and how it delimits creative production that Judd Morrissey creates “The Jew’s Daughter” – a work in which readers are invited to click on hyperlinks in the narrative text, links which do not lead anywhere so much as they unpredictably change some portion of the text. Likewise working against the clean and transparent interface of the Web, in “game, game, game and again game,” Jason Nelson’s hybrid poem-videogame self-consciously embraces a hand-drawn, hand-written interface while deliberately undoing videogame conventions through nonsensical mechanisms that ensure players never advance past level 121/2. As such, both Morrissey and Nelson intentionally incorporate interfaces that thwart readers’ access to the text so that they are forced to see how such interfaces are not natural so much as they define what and how we read and write.

Finally, Mark Sample provides a close-reading of one work in particular that in fact takes advantage of the “interface free” multitouch display: released just in the last year, “Strange Rain” is an experiment in digital storytelling for Apple iOS devices (the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) designed by new media artist Erik Loyer. As dark storm clouds shroud the screen of the iOS device, the player can take advantage of the way in which the multi-touch interface is supposedly “interface-free” – the player can touch and tap its surface, causing what Loyer describes as “twisting columns of rain” to splash down upon the player’s first-person perspective. In the app’s “whispers” and “story” modes “Strange Rain” unites two longstanding tropes of e-literature: the car crash – the most famous occurring in Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1990); and falling letters – words that descend on the screen or even in large-scale installation pieces such as Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (1999). Sample argues “Strange Rain” transcends the familiar tropes of car crashes and falling text, reconfiguring the interface as a means to transform confusion into certainty, and paradoxically, intimacy into alienation.

“Some blame generations of teachers for being afraid of verse, while others decry the trivialisation of poetry via such things as online poetry generators. All of these suggestions have some validity, probably operating in combination, and it has to be said that we are the poorer for it.”

So my request is: can someone point me to an article that more fully argues this point about online poetry generators trivializing poetry? I’m sure there must be articles about this out there, but for some reason a google search for “poetry generators trivialize poetry” isn’t helping me. My main purpose isn’t to ridicule this argument, but to understand it better and hopefully to ensure that it’s not true in my own work.

Second, an announcement. We’ve been furiously trivializing poetry on Gnoetry Daily recently, using our culture-impoverishing poetry generators to explore topics such as the September 11 attacks, the Christian Bible, software for phonemically analyzing text for poetry generation, infinite Socratic dialogues, and the ontological and epistemological value of programming. We use a combination of word- and character-based n-gram generators, template generators, diastic readings, n+7s, cut-ups, codework transformations, and more, with a variety of levels of interactivity and editing. We’ve been joined by some new poets and generators recently, and we’d love to hear what you think about our work.

I didn’t mean to bleg and spam and run, so I’ll finish with the only thing I know that can make up for it… MATH! Yeah, you heard me, math! I’ve been working on using set theory and algorithm notation as a basis for developing a taxonomy of computer poetry generators, and I’m starting with Theo Lutz’s classic 1959 “Stochastische Texte” algorithm as a case study for analysis. After the cut is the latest version of what I have so far. If you don’t like it… either tell me who’s been talking trash about poetry generators, or check out what’s been going on at Gnoetry Daily!

The approach I’m going to take is to define an algorithm for computer poetry generation that is general enough to cover both rule-based generation as well as markov chained n-gram generation, including things like diastics, erasures, and Oulipo n+7s and “combinatorial” generators. Then, each individual approach will be described in terms of the general algorithm, and this will serve as a basis for exploring the differences (and therefore taxonomic categories) of the individual approaches.

Let Words be a set of words, characters, strings, or more complex linguistic entities. The term “words” is used in the mathematical sense of sequences defined on an alphabet. The elements of Words will typically be linguistic words and punctuation, but in some generators they will be characters, sets of text, or parts of speech.

Let Poem be a sequence w₁, w₂, …, w_|p| where w_x ∈ Words. Poem may be composed of subsequences of Stanzas and/or Lines; alternately stanzas and lines may be indicated by punctuation such as end-of-line characters. Linguistic words in a Poem may be separated by spaces which are part of the set Words, or it may be assumed that spaces will be inserted as needed for human processing.

Let initialize be a method for determining the initial elements of Poem.

Let editable be a method for determining which elements of Poem may be replaced during revisions.

Let Replacements be a subset of Words. These are the linguistic entities that will be used during revisions.

Let replace be a method for editing a Poem during revision.

The methods used by initialize, editable, and replace will vary: they could be table listings, random selections from a set, algorithms, or decisions made by a human calling on their expertise and experience.

Then we can define a Basic Generation Algorithm.

1.   initialize(Poem)

2.   for each revision
3.      for each word in Poem
4.         if editable(word)
5.            replace(word)

In line 1 the initial version of the poem is created. At this point the poem might still be made up of template words that will not be used for a final poem.
Line 2 iterates over a poem for a number of revisions. Line 3 iterates through the parts of the poem. As a sequence, Poem is ordered, but that ordering is not necessarily followed when revising: for example, the middle of a poem might be revised before the beginning.
In Lines 4 and 5, an editable part of Poem is identified and revised.

We will use Lutz’s algorithm as a case study. Theo Lutz was a German scholar who wrote an article in 1959 talking about a generator that produced lines using templates and words from Kafka’s “The Castle”. Sample output given in the article is:

NOT EVERY LOOK IS NEAR. NO VILLAGE IS LATE.
A CASTLE IS FREE AND EVERY FARMER IS FAR.
EVERY STRANGER IS FAR. A DAY IS LATE.
EVERY HOUSE IS DARK. AN EYE IS DEEP

So Lutz’s algorithm can be expressed in terms of the General Algorithm in the following way.

Logical Operators = {A, AN, EVERY, NO, NOT EVERY}

Subjects = {COUNT, STRANGER, LOOK, CHURCH, CASTLE, PICTURE, EYE, VILLAGE, TOWER, FARMER, WAY, GUEST, DAY, HOUSE, TABLE, LABOURER}

Predicates = {OPEN, SILENT, STRONG, GOOD, NARROW, NEAR, NEW, QUIET, FAR, DEEP, LATE, DARK, FREE, LARGE, OLD, ANGRY}

Logical Constants = {AND, OR, THEREFORE, .}

Let Template Elements be a set of strings { logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, logical_constant_slot, . }

Let Words = Logical Operators ∪ Subjects ∪ Predicates ∪ Logical Constants ∪ Template Elements

Let the sequence Poem be a function from {1, 2, …, 10} to Words

So a poem is going to be made up of ten parts, where each part will be one of the Words.

Let initialize be the function from Poem to the set Template Elements that defines the following sequence: (logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, logical_constant_slot, logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, .)

Let editable be an indicator function on Poem where

Ieditable(x) =	{	0 if x ∈ {IS, .}
		1 for all other x

Let replace be the following algorithm:

Given stochastic select: a method of randomly choosing an element of a set.

Given the set Words and a w ∈ Poem, replace w with:

case w of
  logical_operator_slot:   stochastic select from Logical Operators
  subject_slot:            stochastic select from Subjects
  predicate_slot:          stochastic select from Predicates
  logical_constant_slot:   stochastic select from Logical Constants

So a poem is going to be initialized into a sequence of slot symbols representing a template. Every slot except for the word “IS” and for the period will be editable. During generation, the slots will be replaced by an appropriate subset of Words: the first slot symbol will be replaced by a Logical Operator, the second by a Subject, etc.

Now we may trace through the General Algorithm.

initialize(Poem)

The initialize function defines Poem as: (logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, logical_constant_slot, logical_operator_slot, subject_slot, IS, predicate_slot, .).

for each revision
   for each text in Poem

There will only be one revision: replacing the template “slots” with the appropriate texts. The algorithm does this by iterating through the text elements of the poem.

      if editable(text)
         replace(text)

The editable indicator function replaces every slot, and leaves unchanged the two IS elements and the period. The replace algorithm changes each slot in the sequence into a word, which it selects from the approriate subset of Words.

For example, when the algorithm begins to generate a poem:

• The editable will determine that logical_operator_slot is editable, after which replace will determine that it should be replaced by an element of Logical Operators, and stochastically select an element of that set, such as “EVERY”.
• In the next iteration through the Poem sequence, editable will determine that subject_slot is editable, and replace will determine that subject_slot should be replaced by an element of Subjects, such as “VILLAGE”.
• In the next iteration, editable will determine that “IS” is not editable, and leave it unchanged.
• In the next iteration, editable will determine that predicate_slot is editable, and replace will determine that subject_slot should be replaced by an element of Predicates, such as “DARK”.

and so on.

This is modeled above by considering a Poem as a single line, where Poems can be continually generated; however Poem could also be modeled as an infinite set.

Jason Nelson's Scrape Scraperteeth

All,

Excuse my long, long absence. But I’m back to play. I’m hoping we can re-energize this community of ours. So any ideas would be more than lovely. But first some news!

Brian Stefans has curated a series of Digital Poems/Fictions. One pagers he calls them for the San Francisco Gallery of modern art. Many of the authors/writers/readers here are included.  So Explore below and do write some comments, so they know we are reading.

http://blog.sfmoma.org/authors/columnists/bstefans/

Send in the ideas to get NetPoetic running stronger!

cheers, Jason