Application

Description (in English)

Mary Flanagan, State University of New York, Buffalo (USA)"[raveling]"

[raveling] is a poetry performance piece for machines and human about memory and communication which posits verbal communication and text as iterative rituals that can mutate and change over time, distance, and repetition.

Prior to the piece I produced a poem with my computer. This performance was a stream-of-consciousness spoken word event and was translated by the machine. My computer synthesized the words it recognized and I saved these words into a rough poem.

In performance I read this synthesized computer/human poem to the public and to computer #1. This first computer/performer will listen to the poem and after listening, read back the composition as it recognized aloud to the audience and to the second computer/performer. The second computer/performer will listen to the poem composed by the first computer and read back the poem it recognized aloud to the audience. Each computer and human has its own voice and vocal qualities including timbre, speed, etc. They work together to bring meaning to the piece.

This interpretation/reinterpretation creative loop is accompanied with text images on each computer that can be projected. The words twisting around will be projected so that the audience can listen and view the interaction.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

Description (in English)

"noth'rs" is composed from transliteral morphs & based on: - Marcel Proust 'Du Coté de chez Swann' & the English translation by Montcrieff & Kilmartin - Jean Genet 'Miracle de la rose' & the English of Bernard Frechtman, - with additional texts from Virginia Woolf 'To the Lighthouse,' and Li Ruzhen 'Flowers in the Mirror' ('Jinghua Yuan' translated by Lin Tai-yi). - plus 'Sixteen Flowers' by Caroline Bergvall.

Technical notes

r e a d i n g n o t h ' r s

"noth'rs' is a navigable constellation of nodal texts (in both French and English) and transliteral morphs between those texts. The controls available are as follows:

- The 'Show Film' option takes about 12-14 minutes for a complete run though. You can interrupt it with 'Command + .'

- After choosing the 'Read' option, if you press and hold down the shiftkey you can skip the longish opening sequences.

- If you press and hold the Option (or Alt) key down while reading, a 'help' card is displayed outlining the various controls available.

- UP and DOWN move through one of many transliteral circuits, each with four natural-language nodes.

- LEFT either discovers a (Bergvall) graft or spins to a new circuit.

- RIGHT gives access to the corresponding language for a particular text at the neighbouring upwards node.

- HOME for a sequenced, clean exit (you can also just use Command+Q to quit at any time.

- The 16 one-line 'flower' texts composed by Caroline Bergvall, appear at quasi-indeterminate points when an 'left' key is pressed. Each of these are seen once and once only during any single session.

- (OTHERWISE UNDOCUMENTED) f you are at a nodal text, it is possible to click on key words (italic words are always 'key'; others must be found by guessing) in the nodal text (if they are active they will highlight once you click them). If you click on such a word, this will reconfigure the current constellation so that the forward (UP) key will take you to another node where the keyword is morphed and moved to a corresponding/related key word in a related node. If you hold down the shift key while clicking a key word (be patient) the text will morph automatically to such a related node.

- Please note: in this new version of "noth'rs" these 'key words' are like 'key points' in graphic morphing. They are picked out in the morphs by being in italic text and you can watch them both morphing and migrating to their destination positions.

- Please note also: while navigating between nodal texts, you should hear the attempts of the speech synthesizer to pronounce the transitional phases. These should be louder when the text is most chaotic and should fade away as a nodal text is approached and reached.

Severely cut-back and earlier versions of "noth'rs' appeared on the CD ROM which accompanies Performance Research 'On Line', Volume 4, Number 2 (Summer 1999), edited by Ric Allsopp & Scott deLahunta); and on the web at "Riding the Meridian" http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/cayley.html. An initial performance version was shown at Digital Arts and Culture 1999, Atlanta Georgia, 28-31 Oct, 1999.

 (Source: Project site at shadoof.net)

Description (in English)

Common Ground: One Night in a Three-story House is the story of a poor suburban family told interactively through text.

(Source: 2002 ELO State of the Arts gallery)

A three-chapter game (with an epilogue) in which you're a different character in each chapter. The twist is that each chapter covers roughly the same space of time, and you interact with the other two characters, to varying degrees, when you're in each pair of shoes. The gameplay is a bit restrictive--the game doesn't allow for a lot of variation--but the characters themselves are well developed and the interactions feel reasonably realistic. The game even does a passable job of recording the actions you take when you're one character and playing them back when you're a different character, observing the antics of the first. Very short--20-30 minutes to play through at most--but worth playing; it largely eschews puzzles in favor of character interaction in a way that little IF attempts.

(Source: Review by Duncan Stevens, BAF's guide to the IF Archive)

 

Description (in English)

This suite of Letterist sound poems for the iOS platform offers several environments and behaviors for the letters that inhabit them.The interfaces go from simple to complex, and Piringer uses phrases with the verbs “draw, control, build, create, and connect” to guide the reader to interact and play with the letters and tools offered. (Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

I ♥ E-Poetry entry
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Description (in English)

Gnoetry is an on-going experiment in human/computer collaborative poetry composition.Gnoetry synthesizes language randomly based on its analysis of existing texts. Any machine-readable text or texts, in any language, can serve as the basis of the Gnoetic process. Gnoetry generates sentences that mimic the local statistical properties of the source texts. This language is filtered subject to additional constraints (syllable counts, rhyming, etc.) to produce a poem.For our early work with Gnoetry, we have used classic out-of-copyright texts like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (obtained from the wonderful Project Gutenberg), as well as other sources such as rap lyrics, the complete lyrics of Bob Dylan and Reuters newswire stories.A key aspect of the Gnoetry software is the ability of a human operator to intervene in the language generation cycle, helping to "guide" the artistic process and to produce a result that is a true collaboration of equals.

(Source: Gnoetry page on Beard of Bees)

Description (in English)

Terminal Time is a history "engine:" a machine which combines historical events, ideological rhetoric, familiar forms of TV documentary, consumer polls and artificial intelligence algorithms to create hybrid cinematic experiences for mass audiences that are different every single time. History as it was meant to be told! History is in your hands! Through an audience response-measuring device (applause-meter) connected to a computer, viewing audiences respond to periodic questions reminiscent of marketing polls. These questions occur every 6 minutes during the story. The loudest applause determines the winning answer. Your answers to these questions allow the computer program to create historical narratives that mirror and even exaggerate your biases and desires. Just clap, watch and enjoy. At long last, Terminal Time gives you the history you deserve! The Terminal Time engine uses the past 1,000 years of world history as "fuel" for creating these custom-made historical documentaries. Each program generated by the machine can be either projected on a screen or broadcast on television monitors. (Although the video and sound are constructed in the computer, the signal is compatible with standard video technology.) Each program lasts approximately 30 minutes.

(Source: Artists' description from the Terminal Time site)

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Technical notes

The Terminal Time project runs on a Macintosh G3, with at least 128 MB RAM, ultra wide scsi hard drive and external connector. All programs and the entire AV library it draws upon are stored on a 36 gigabyte external drive. It also uses a 2 channel powered mixer and uni-directional microphone interface to its applause metering system. It requires only a standard data projector or video converter and sound system to play in any venue.

The Terminal Time Artificial Intelligence architecture is based on 3 major components: knowledge base, ideological goal trees, and story experts. The knowledge base is a vast knowledge web, which utilizes the top 3000 terms from the Cyc Corporation's upper Cyc ontology, as well as several thousand custom classifications. Ideological goal trees are utilized to choose and join historical events found in the database in accordance with viewer responses. Story experts utilize narrative conventions to plan, compose and evaluate final story texts.

Once the narrative generation system renders the final narration. Video and audio tracks are selected to illustrate the 6 minute story segment. This search is based on weighted keyword indexing on each video "clip." Each clip may contain as many as 10 keywords from over 300 used in the database. Once video and audio clips are selected, they are joined into a storyboard in Terminal Time's multimedia architecture.

Lastly, the multimedia architecture renders the final story, cutting and splicing video audio and narration tracks in real-time to show to the audience.

(Source: Technical notes from Terminal Time site)

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Description (in English)

Content=No Cache is about the loss inscription. It talks about error messages. Its point of departure is a curious tag “content = no cache”. Placed in the html code it updates the contents of any on line page, erasing what was written before. It announces a new condition of writing. From now on it does not inscribe anymore. It just describes. Like Error Messages. Content=No Cache, deals with the letter new dimension and inquires the paradoxes of on line writing, through a collaborative of error messages submitted by its users.

(source: author)

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