web application

[meme.garden] is an Internet service that blends software art and search tool to visualize participants' interests in prevalent streams of information, encouraging browsing and interaction between users in real time, through time. Utilizing the WordNet lexical reference system from Princeton University, [meme.garden] introduces concepts of temporality, space, and empathy into a network-oriented search tool. Participants search for words which expand contextually through the use of a lexical database. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into floating synonym "seeds," each representing one underlying lexical concept. When participants "plant" their interests, each becomes a tree that "grows" over time. Each organism's leaves are linked to related streaming RSS feeds, and by interacting with their own and other participants' trees, participants create a contextual timescape in which interests can be seen growing and changing within an environment that endures.

What does a cutting-edge collaboration between music, visual, and literary artists look like and how did it evolve? This ongoing, transdisciplinary collaboration between said types of artists evolves a born digital interactive poetry application for every presentation and exhibition opportunity. Our mission as collaborators is to open up creative workflows for interactive technologies and artists interested in using them to benefit the presentation and experience of the visual, musical, or literary arts. We developed an interactive, live-streaming poetry web app that takes audience response to trigger improvisations, sensory experiences, and create an event-specific poem collectively. The user acts as collaborator by sending word selections that resonate with individual users by tapping text from a born-digital “seed poem” on their mobiles to trigger Markov chain reactions, which enables succinct recombination of massive amounts of language as source material. The app that creatively data mines +2500 TED talks as a found text corpus to send improvisational stanzas to the poet on stage as well as acting as a multimedia sound installation and interactive performance enhancer for poets. ELO2019 University College Cork #ELOcork 51 We will adapt our interactive performance web app to become a more open tool for parameterized poetry performance—to become a container, stand-alone installation as well as a tool for other literary and multimedia artists to utilize and explore using their own “seed text” and “found text corpus” for unique, interactive performances. This way one need not be a developer to perform heightened text collaboration—with the opportunity for generative input from an audience and a dynamic set of texts—or create unique, new media collaborative poetry from mobile interactivity. This new system would be attractive to contemporary poets, performing artists, and audiences seeking more engagement from readings as well as scholars curious about language processing to creative datamine subtexts. Our precedent for this adaptation is from the first iteration of our interactive poetry application, Causeway, which was exhibited in the “Louisiana Contemporary 2016” Juried Exhibition at the Odgen Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans (http://thehelisfoundation.org/what-we-fund/louisiana-contemporary/). Diamonds in Dystopia is a clustered Node.js application that is served and balanced between Google Cloud Compute and a custom OpenStack installation for interactive art. Users connect to an Express.js HTTP server that displays the original manuscript. They click on individual words that resonate with them which get passed along to a server via WebSockets. Each time a user taps a word the collection of texts, hosted on a Redis server, are searched for the top results that contain that word. Those texts are used as source material for generation through something such as a Markov chain algorithm to generate a new stanza of found text. These new stanzas are fed to the performer who can choose via a "controller" interface running on their own mobile device which to read and display on a theater view.

As N. Katherine Hayles has argued, the proliferation of digital media has radically transformed the ways in which we pay attention, privileging a kind of frantic and promiscuous “hyper attention” over the sustained “deep attention” traditionally solicited by long-form print media. “Fragile Pulse: A Meditation App” invites the reader to consider the ways that computational media may indeed cause what has been called “digital distraction” but may also be used in the context of regimes of self-care and self-quantification to increase our capacity to pay attention deeply. While tools for measuring, testing, and training for one's body and mind are widely popular (from the Fitbit to meditation apps like Headspace), the theme of self-care is generally peripheral to the electronic literature community. “Fragile Pulse” takes the form of a digital text/web application that encourages the viewer to pay attention to attention. Using data from the webcam and microphone, it quantifies the reader's bodily stillness and quietness. When the reader is still and quiet, a calmly pulsating text unfolds on the screen, guiding the reader through a meditation. However, when the program detects movement or noise above a certain threshold, signaling distraction, the screen becomes filled with “stray thoughts” generated on-the-fly via a natural language processing. Visually, these stray thoughts (shards of hyper attention) cover up the meditative text, blinking and wiggling to further emphasize their status as distractions. Echoing the way that digital/social media can foster anxiety and depression, this text generation system models the way a mind can slip from harmless distractions to anxious obsessions. Only the viewer's silence and stillness dispel these computer-generated distractions and re-launch the human-authored meditative text. This piece thus raises questions not only about attention but also about the ways that digital technologies of self-care enforce regimes of (sometimes extreme) cognitive and physical discipline.

Hayles, N. K. (2007). Hyper and deep attention: The generational divide in cognitive modes. Profession, 2007(1), 187-199.

http://www.computationalcreativity.net/iccc2019/assets/creative-submissions/iccc19-booten-fragile-pulse.pdf

This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather in all its written forms.

Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.

This work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text was added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker was published in December 2018.

This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.

Winner of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People's Choice Award 2018

Shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Digital Literature 2018

Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018

(Source: Author's Description)

Separation: an online creation and a performance based on the separation of words. The creation entitled Separation takes two forms (an online creation - for PC, tablet and smartphone – and a live performance). It is the result of a collaboration between the ALIS performing arts company (http://www.alis-fr.com/) and the i-Trace digital collective (http://i-trace.fr/). This creation (in its versions for the stage and for the Web) deals with the theme of separation (considered as both detachment and rupture). The creation is based on the ALIS company’s work on the separation of words. Indeed, the company has invented a technique called la Poésie à 2 mi-mots (two half-words poetry or cutting edge poetry), and has been developing it for the past ten years. This technique makes it possible to create sequences based on the idea that words which are halved horizontally, contain the half of other words (http://www.alis-fr.com/site/?q=node/26). These often humorous productions raise fundamental questions about the language, the writing process and the Digital. The website (in progress): http://i-trace.fr/2013/separation/alis An online version for PC and an app for tablets and smartphones will be available in 2014. In the live performance, we will use a tablet, a PC and a Kinect device. We will make the audience participate: they will propose words that we will manipulate. (Source ELO Conference 2014)

This is a point-and-click web application that is heavily inspired by poet Edgar Allen Poe by author Herm Holland. This work won Herm Holland the student prize for the New Media Writing Prize 2014.