chance

(Re)Playing The Lottery is a dynamic reinterpretation of Shirley Jackson's famous short story, "The Lottery." It presents a scenario in which the interactor is a a citizen of the small town on the day of the fateful lottery, and must move through the story by making various choices which result in random outcomes - no matter how many times the story is played, past results are no guide to future outcome. Just as the story hinges on the chance selection of a marked ballot from a box, this piece employs chance selection as its central mechanic, demonstrating one way in which interactive media can help readers inhabit and interrogate existing texts from multiple perspectives. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Our deeply ingrained need to trust language enables Feed to generate an endless simulacrum of social commentary cum mythopoeic narrative spontaneously from largely random associations of charged words. It presents cultural observation through the blind eye of chance. The blank passing moment becomes the creator of mythos. It allows us the opportunity to turn ambiguity into poetry, absurdity into satire, unexpected fortuitous alignments into insight. Feed chronicles the mechanisms of the chronicle rather than its subjects. It removes “realism” from the equation, flirting with the meaningless and parading arbitrary associations before the reader under the banners of archetype and metaphor. Feed historicizes, editorializes, moralizes, sings, dances, and wears funny hats, all in the name of “analyzing” its own inventions.

(Source: Author's description for ELO_AI Conference)

Soothcircuit is a large-scale work of Web poetry that relies on interactive mechanisms inspired by the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle book. The work echoes the I Ching’s purpose of providing not so much glimpses into the future as insights into different situations. Each reader’s individual interaction with the work will produce a different combination of aphoristic stanzas. Each unique result can be approached as both a traditional poem and as a reflection upon the reader’s unique personal circumstances -- an oracular“analysis of the reader's current situation. If the reader addresses a question to the Soothcircuit, the reading can also be viewed as an (indirect) answer to the question.

Applying ancient oracle traditions to modern poetry puts a new slant on reader interpretation. Poetry often implicitly invites multiple alternative interpretations from readers. Many contemporary poets and critics contend that there is no fixed meaning inherent in any poem, but rather a “personalized” meaning is created by each reader as she brings her own experiences and biases to bear upon the text. Traditional oracle books present often prosaic lines of text to the reader as the result of a chance selection process and then explicitly require that these texts be interpreted in light of the reader’s personal situation. Soothcircuit combines an oracle’s explicit demand for custom interpretation with poetry's implicit need for subjective reading.

(Source: Author's description at Incubation3 conference site, trAce Archive)

With Fibonacci's Daughter the challenge was to capture the Fibonacci precepts--elements of predictability in natural forms--in a narrative. His mathematical sequence of numbers and golden sector were sources for narrative shape, structural organization, and design motif. I wanted the story to have a sense of spiraling both in and out at the same time--disappearing at the center and diffusing at the margins. The structure is based on the Fibonacci golden mean; the spatial access is through a shopping mall that is a golden square. Backgrounds, images, and motifs are drawn from Fibonacci's work. The story has, as well, a shadow of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "Rappacini's Daughter," in a certain altered perception of pattern. Borges lurks.

(Source: Author's note at The New River)

about nothing, places, memories, and thoughts: robert creeley (1926-2005) and patricia tomaszek in a cut and mixed poem-dialogue

This work leverages the unique potential of digital media to bring together a death-voice (Robert Creeley) and a life-voice (Patricia Tomaszek). Each time the user clicks the mouse, both poets create - reading back and forth - a computer-generated poem that blends surprise and repetition to create a range of unique (dis)harmonies. In total, 98 selected lines from the authors recordings serve as the raw material from which vast a # of 8-10 line poems - the average length of both poets' works - are created. Simple algorithmic rules determine each outcome; a number of openings and closings are pre-selected while the body of each composition is generated computationally via a probabilistic grammar. The work began with a series of response poems, penned by the author, to the poems of Robert Creeley. These poems where then recorded with each line as a separate sound sample. Crucial lines from Creeley that inspired the responsive writing process were then subjected to the same 'cut-up' procedure. The final set of lines, restricted by the availability of Creeley's audio recordings, were selected on the basis of their cohesion with the selected themes: places, memories, thoughts, identity, loss, absence, and nothingness.