generator

By Stian Hansen, 19 August, 2019
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Abstract (in English)

WordHack Anthology brings together projects and documentation presented during the first five years of WordHack, a monthly presentation series at Babycastles in NYC centered around the intersection of language and technology. WordHack is designed to be an open meeting space for people across disciplines to see what each other are working on and thinking about, from coders interested in the creative side, to writers interested in new forms writing can take, to game makers looking for new ways to play with words, to academics researching the newly possible. 

(Source: https://toddwords.itch.io/wordhack-anthology)

Description (in English)

Shan Shui generates landscape paintings and corresponding texts, parts of which are glossed in English when the user mouses over them. The English-language reader gains a perspective on the text, but (as if reading through intense fog) can make out only one or two characters at time, losing the forest through the trees. One relationship is to work that pairs landscapes and poems, such as Ed Falco and Mary Pinto's Chemical Landscapes Digital Tales; another is to systems that generates paired images and texts, such as Talan Memmont’s Self Portraits(s) [as Other(s)]. Also relevant are John Cayley’s literary texts, some in Chinese, that provide glosses and translations.

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Description (in English)

This generator, dedicated to politicians, is good proof that Pampuch succeeded especially well in the tricky art of imitating the kind of political discourse which in Polish is called “grass-talk” or “empty talk”. The algorithm perfectly fulfills its stylistic constraints—generating a text that does not have to carry any concrete content or message.

(source: ELO 2015 Catalog)

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Description (in English)

The work plays a tension between media and treats the question of control. It is a piece of the “small uncomfortable reading poems” series.
Play music for my poem is based on 2 computers that communicate with each other. The first one contains a combinatory generator of sound that plays music for the second computer. The second computer runs a set of 4 combinatory text generators composing a unique poem in 4 stanzas. The music manages the visibility of this text and the reader controls the music generator via a game running on the first computer.

Description (in English)

I've Died and Gone to Devon re-purposes a Python script by Nick Montfort to tell (and retell) the story of an arrival and first impression of Devon. Most of the sentences in this story were adapted from Twitter posts written during a five-week visit to Devon, August - September, 2009.

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I've died and gone to Devon. In North America, roads this narrow wouldn't even count as driveways. If this is the wrong side of the road, I don't care what's right. If this is the driveway, then I can't wait to see the house. We can't hear the river from the house, but we can see it. Everybody insists we're by the seaside. I can smell but not see the sea. Flotsam on a tidal river is a strange mixture of oak leaves and seaweed. This is an achingly beautiful place to come across a little death.

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Technical notes

To view the Python version, Download the file http://luckysoap.com/stories/Devon.zip to your desktop and unzip. On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a Terminal Window, typing "cd Desktop", and typing "python filename.py". Hint: look for Terminal in your Utilities folder. On Windows, you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6.5. Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press ENTER a new version of the story will appear.