random

A Travel Guide is a location-based, mobile-centric application for creating poetic texts in the style of the travel guide. The project has as its goal to give visitors an alternate reading of place, through the serendipitous juxtaposition of their current location with evocative procedural text. As more people visit the site, more travel guides will be generated, until eventually the surface of the planet has been blanketed with travel guides. The guides are generated randomly and so not traditionally “accurate.” You may need to try harder than usual to apply the information contained in these guides to the locations in question.The guides are generated from a database of sentences from Wikivoyage (“the free worldwide travel guide that anyone can edit”). The generation algorithm randomly selects sentences from similarly-named sections across all WikiVoyage pages, rejecting sentences that contain proper nouns. The text created by this procedure has the familiar cadence of travel guides, but describe no place—or every place—in particular. A Travel Guide is a 2014 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence.org website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation, now celebrating 50 years of the creative spirit of emerging artists. (Source: http://elo2016.com/festival/allison-parrish/)

1/2/3 is an elliptical videopoem based on Russian minimalist poet Vsevolod Nekrasov’s “Utopia” and footage from Mozhaysky region of Moscow. Each time three random photos containing a space where a text could appear are shown at three interactive screens. Being touched each photo transforms to video where one out of ten lines of Nekrasov’s poem appears. The viewer never knows which of these evasively poetic lines were documented or added with digital tools. (ELO 2015 catalog)

This bot mines the Twitter stream for phrases starting with “when,” extracts the clauses, and joins each phrase with a randomly selected animated GIF in a Tumblr. Here’s a more detailed description from Parrish’s blog: A “#whatshouldwecallme-style tumblr” is one in which animated GIFs are paired with a title expressing a circumstance or mood—usually a clause beginning with “when.” I wrote a Python script to make these kinds of posts automatically. Here’s what it does: (1) Search Twitter for tweets containing the word “when.” (2) Extract the “when” clause from such tweets. (3) Use Pattern to identify “when” clauses with suitable syntax (i.e., clauses in which a subject directly follows “when”; plus some other heuristic fudging) (4) Post the “when” clause as the title of a tumblr post, along with an animated GIF randomly chosen from the imgur gallery. This is both a critique and homage of the #whatshouldwecallme tumblr and the meme it inspired. Memes are powerfully infectious prompts for creativity, and they are particularly interesting (from a poetic perspective) when they lead to constraint-based experimentation with language. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

This is a generative poem you can visit for years and continue to find things to surprise and delight. It is structured around a text— aptly named as “a strand” (as in a fiber or rope made of letters or characters)— which is shaped by “aspects,” which are programmed structures that shape and transform the strands through color, animation, scheduling, formatting, and other transformations possible in DHTML. Considering there are 10 “strands” (plus a “user-fed strand”) each of which can be shaped by 36 different “aspects,” each of which can have multiple controls and toggles, you don’t have to do the math to realize that this is a work of staggering generative possibilities. Combined with a few randomization and combinatorial touches, this is a work that will always welcome you with fresh moments, inviting you to play with its structures. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

"Opuscula" is a different interactive electronic poem which you may explore in several ways. Inside the poem you will find four different poems with various nodes of connections to each other: An interactive poem, a ParaPoem, and two poems to be read in linear form. The interactive Poem is an animated sequence of moving and floating words illustrated by graphical effects on the screen. You as the reader will interact with the poem, by clicking on words as they appear on the screen through your reading. When you click these words and lines, random text lines conceptually connected to the word/line you clicked will be sent to create your own poem, the ParaPoem, in a transparent field at the bottom of the screen. These lines are also links which (dependent on the meaning of the line) randomly may take you to a stanza belonging to one of the two linear poems (behind the interactive and the ParaPoem's interface), to a quote, or to a word definition which all will give new meaning to the link you clicked and the poems you read. The Parapoem will be different each time you create it and can be read alone, or as a part of the other poems.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment" is a collective experiment in database video and random access narrative. The installation is the work of many artists, each responsible for thirty seconds of video attempting to engage with paradoxes of digital culture and 21st. This is a collaborative project with Edgar Endress and the Students of the Art and Visual Technology Department at George Mason University. 

Artist Statement:(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment is a collective experiment in database video and random access narrative. The installation is the work of many artists, each responsible for thirty seconds of video attempting to engage with paradoxes of digital culture and 21st. century communications. The installation consists of a database containing the media contributions of each artist. A computer randomly retrieves video and audio and juxtaposes the media fragments in ten-second intervals on three projected screens and three stereo output systems. The process provides an endlessly randomized deconstruction and reconstruction of narrative and associative imagery in which meaning simultaneously forms and dissolves and the usual stabilities of conventional video making and viewing are put in flux. 

(Dis)Location, (Dis)Connection, (Dis)Embodiment is a collective work conceptualized by Mark Cooley and Edgar Endress and features the students of the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Arts show)

"OneSmallStep: a MySpace LuvStory" is an unfolding automated jam—a conscious sampling and randomized regurgitation of MySpace.com media archeology wherein desire, fantasy and fetish form a composted feast for the withered and lonely senses in an eternally habitual loop of voyeuristic consumption, spectacular regurgitation, virtual intimacy and identity production/consumption. 

Artist Statement

We are not ourselves. We cut and paste as we are cut and pasted. We are the remix of images and sounds that never existed outside of this mediated dream. And we are happy to exist this way. "OneSmallStep: a MySpace LuvStory" is an unfolding automated jam - a conscious sampling and randomized regurgitation of MySpace.com media archeology wherein desire, fantasy and fetish form a composted feast for the withered and lonely senses in an eternally habitual loop of voyeuristic consumption, spectacular regurgitation, virtual intimacy and identity production/consumption. With each launch, "OneSmallStep" runs continuously while randomly remixing content from a database that is periodically updated.

(Source: 2008 ELO Media Art show)

In English and Spanish, by Chris Joseph in collaboration with artist Maria Colino, Dadaventuras is an experiment in aleatory narrative, using comic book conventions to generate stories from 8 distinct but overlapping perspectives.The language of our narrative is hybrid (from the greek 'hybris', outrage or violation): composed of parts from different languages, in this case our own blend of 'spanglish'. This intentionally recalls the Dadaists use of nonsense to express dissatisfaction with a world society that continued its insane addiction to war. The user can also write their own text to use as the basis for the generated narratives, or use one of 8 classic texts, or turn the text off completely and make the story up in their head.

(Source: Authors' description)

Blue Hyacinth is a stir fry text by Jim Andrews and Pauline Masurel. Masurel wrote the texts. Andrews did the programming and invented the stir fry form. The stir fry form consists of n texts. In Blue Hyacinth, there are four texts (n=4), each of which is a different shade of blue. You can view the text of a given color by clicking the square of that color. Each of the four texts somehow involve the blue hyacinth. Each of the four texts is partitioned into 30 parts. When the reader mouses over (or touches, if on a mobile device) part x of text y, that part is replaced with part x of text y+1. So the four texts begin to form a new text. There are several more stir fry texts and essays about them at vispo.com/StirFryTexts.