minimalism

A work of hypertext implemented in Inform.

The game is part of a collaborative art piece, also entitled "The Space Under the Window", by Kristin Looney (of Looney Labs) – each piece had to have this title, but was otherwise unconstrained.This game uses an entirely different structure than that of traditional IF, veering away from score-based puzzles and one set goal. At the beginning, a short descriptive scene is displayed. Instead of entering commands, the player selects one of the words from the text, and the scene is altered - often subtly, for example, an addition of a few words or a shift in atmosphere. There are multiple paths along the narrative, and several endings ranging in mood.The Space Under the Window was a finalist in the 1997 XYZZY Awards for Best Use of Medium and Best Writing. It has inspired parodies such as The Chicken Under The Window by Lucian P. Smith, at ChickenComp 1998(Wikipedia)

This kinetic concrete poem, along with its companion piece “Paddle”, is a minimalist statement of how meaningful the movement of words can be. Using three words with simple animation, Hennessy is able to build a narrative of the formation of a puddle and what happens after. The timing and spacing of the downward flow of language in this poem sets up a variation in the final part of the poem, as we get a little bit of upwards movement, combined with an insight on the shared etymology (or orthography) of the first and final words in the poem.

(Source: Leonardo Flores, I ♥ E-Poetry)

Howe’s new piece, “Automatype,” which can be seen as either ambient text art, a weird game of solitaire for the computer, or an absorbing ongoing puzzle for a human viewer, is an apt demonstration of some of the powers of “RiTa,” as it uses algorithms to find the bridges between English words, Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon-style — not bridges of garbled nonsense but composed of normative English. You will spend either 10 seconds or 5 minutes staring at this thing; you will also see either a bunch of random words, or occasionally, if not always, engaging samples of minimalist poetry.

(Source: The ELO 2012 Media Art Show.)

Frequency is a poetry generator written in Ruby, and part of a larger constrained writing process. The lines of all the poems in Frequency are constrained by the fact that I used only 200 of the most common English words in them. The poems generated by Frequency are built from a pool of 2000 lines I wrote. The process of writing the lines was not aided by the machine and was painstaking work. I wrote a set of ten lines beginning with each word, only using the other words in this list in the rest of the line. It is perhaps not unsurprisingly difficult to make meaningful expressions with such a limited vocabulary, but in the end I was surprised by how flexible these base units of our language can be. The poetry generator itself runs from a command line interface, and can algorithmically assemble poems according to a number of different rhyme scheme, syllabic, and spatial criteria. For the the 2009 Grand Text Auto Exhibition at the Krannert Center at the University of Illinois, I developed a routine within the generator that could produce a large collection of poems with one command, and then produced a set of 2000 variants of Frequency poems that will cycle for a long period in a web-browser-based installation demonstrating some poetry produced by the program.

(Source: Author's description)