homage

It was only after I began working with Robert Coover in the Brown Literary Arts program in 1998 that I remembered my father commenting years earlier on Coover's book Pinocchio in Venice. As a foremost Scholar of the Pinocchio story and its appearances throughout history in literature and media, he was impressed with Coover's handling of the archive. My father went on to write about Coover's treatment in a co-authored book, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern: Perils of a Puppet in the United States. RC_AI consists of texts composed by myself and Dr. Thomas J. Morrissey, my father, along with several generative algorithms and loose grammars in collaboration with a substantial portion of Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice. The panoramic text is a printed array (approximately 380,000 pixels long - or 422 feet) of variable content generated by parsing through approximately 1/2 of Coover's novel using the author's name as a search string. RC_AI was created specifically for ELO_AI: Archive and Innovate the Electronic Literature Organization conference and arts program. The overall event was in part a celebration of Robert Coover who will soon retire from teaching. RC_AI was performed in the auditorium of List Art Center at Brown University with my father on June 4, 2010. For RC_AI, I utilized tesseract, an open-source tool for optical character recognition, and then created a system for text processing using python's natural language toolkit. As this is my first experiment with both tools, the implementation is basic: the former accounts for bad spelling, the latter for poor grammar (as though the puppet sold his schoolbooks for a tree of ass ears). 

And's work is intended as a new-media tribute to Emmett Williams, one of the first concrete poets and a leading member of the Fluxus conceptual art movement (its adherents included Yoko Ono and the electronic-art pioneer Nam June Paik).

The poem pays homage to Williams's own "The Voy Age," a 1975 piece composed of 100 word squares that diminish in size as the work proceeds. By the final page, the grid is so small that it appears to be a period.

(Source: Matthew Mirapaul, The New York Times)

A poetry generator for the imaginary city. Tokyo Garage is a remix of Nick Montfort's "Taroko Gorge" -- a nature poem generator built in javascript. Rettberg modified the code and substituted all of the language of Montfort's work to create this poetry generator, which plays with received stereotypes of the Tokyo metropolis and of urbanity in general. A machinimatic reading was prepared for the DAC 2009 conference, including a clown reading the poem to an imaginary audience.