randomness

Poetry is Just Words in the Wrong Order (2015) proposes an unconventional way of creating and presenting poetry based on improvisation, language/sound experimentation, fragmentation and randomness. Poetry as a social practice is here developed in an anti-narrative manner. Built with custom code, a computer chooses random phrases from a predetermined Twitter hashtag (e.g. #Syria) and a database of verses which are selected by the two artists (e.g. verses from poems by Arab women writing in English). The phrases and the verses from the two sources are combined partly randomly and partly following a given pattern. At the same time, sound events are being produced by estimating the number of the letters of every incoming word as well as the total volume of the incoming data. When the project is presented live, the three artists build and improvise on the poem that is created by the computer. (Source: Adapted from authors’ text)

An interactive e-poem.

Try our useful online tool to find new meaning in your life. Give it a spin and see which dictum, watchword, slogan, epigram, mantra, motto, pitch, patter or spiel fortune favours for you!

A Revolution of Words invites the speculative reader to Spin the Revolution and thus a play on words becomes a game of chance where meaning is at stake.

Concept and words by runran, UI design and codework by crissxross, graphics curated by runran.

The last collaboration for R3M1XW0RX between its founder Randy Adams (aka runran) and Christine Wilks (aka crissxross).

In memory of Randy Adams (1951-2014).

Shirley Bassey Mixed Up' is an experimental illustrated 14-page biography, following her early years up to the present day.
The illustrations are network generated, built dynamically from Internet searches. By specifying different Yahoo searches and playing with the customisation options, you can influence the look of each illustration.

By pulling in data from the Internet and manipulating/ transforming it within a story, this work can be described as a networked narrative. But the structure is basically a traditional (linear) 14-page story built on top of a generative composition tool, that uses Internet search data as its input.

What is it?
a traditional linear story
a networked narrative
a generative composition tool, controlled by the user, but containing controlled randomness.
By adding unexpected and uncontrolled elements to the story we are influencing and changing the presentation of the story, how it's experienced and what we take away from it. In effect we are shaping the story, even making a new story, changing fact into fiction, sometimes disrupting the story.

As the networked elements are dynamic and largely unpredictable, every experience of the story is unique. Your version of the story is packaged into booklet form, for you to print and keep.

Why did I do it?
The biography was inspired by an incident on a TV awards show last year, where Bassey was publically humiliated. I felt sad to see this happen, and wanted to know more about what led up to this.
To somehow connect to a wider body of knowledge, to give it more context, make it more relevant and less subjective or controlled by me, to make the story more open
I wanted the story to be partly written by the network
I wanted people to contribute to the story
I wanted people to use my generative drawing tool, to create their own mini masterpieces.

(source: http://davemiller.org/projects/bassey_mixed_up/learn_more.php)

This multiplatform digital work references an event connected with the history of Košice and its tobacco factory from 1851 which employed mostly women workers. Some decades later, when St. Elizabeth's Cathedral was being renovated, the women workers donated a candle chandelier. The chandelier itself was repurposed twice – from the original candles, to gas lighting and with the advent of electricity, was turned upside down. In the installation, images of the chandelier from the cathedral are randomly generated and projected onto a screen in a flux of forms. Simultaneously the words connected with this story appear projected on the walls of the room, and phonetic sounds from Slovakian, Hungarian and German are generatively mixed in to create the soundscape of languages that were once spoken in the very same place by women workers.

(Re)Playing The Lottery is a dynamic reinterpretation of Shirley Jackson's famous short story, "The Lottery." It presents a scenario in which the interactor is a a citizen of the small town on the day of the fateful lottery, and must move through the story by making various choices which result in random outcomes - no matter how many times the story is played, past results are no guide to future outcome. Just as the story hinges on the chance selection of a marked ballot from a box, this piece employs chance selection as its central mechanic, demonstrating one way in which interactive media can help readers inhabit and interrogate existing texts from multiple perspectives. (Source: ELO Conference 2014)

Pedro Barbosa’s pioneering work introduced computer-generated literature (CGL) in Portugal in 1975. Having worked with Abraham A. Moles at the University of Strasbourg, Barbosa published three theoretical-practical volumes of his programming experiences with the FORTRAN and BASIC languages. These volumes deal with combinatorics and randomness, developing algorithms able to ally computing and literary production, bearing in mind a perspective of computational text theory.
According to the author, A Literatura Cibernética 1: Autopoemas Gerados por Computador [Cybernetic Literature 1: Computer-Generated Autopoems] is an “esboço de uma teoria, toda uma prática, dois métodos e dois programas, que irão facultar a qualquer leitor, interessado e imaginoso, a confecção de poemas automáticos à razão de 5200 versos por hora: no espaço intraorgânico de qualquer computador!” [outline of a theory, an entire practice, two methods and two programs, which will provide any interested and imaginative reader with the possibility of making automatic poems at the rate of 5200 verses per hour: in the intraorganic space of any computer!] (1977: 8) These “auto-texts,” or “computer-generated autopoems,” hitherto open up a new field of literary theory in the Portuguese context – the direct junction of literature and computation, of writer and programmer. Barbosa’s autopoems were programmed in FORTRAN, ALGOL and NEAT during 1975-76 (Permuta program, Iserve subprogram, and Texal program, Aletor subprogram), using an Elliot/NCR 4130 (a machine introduced in the 1960s in the UK), in collaboration with Azevedo Machado, engineer at the Laboratório de Cálculo Automático [Laboratory of Automatic Calculus] (LACA), at the Faculty of Sciences from the University of Porto.

[Source: Álvaro Seiça, "A Luminous Beam: Reading the Portuguese Electronic Literature Collection" (2015)]