third-person narrative

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Description (in English)

GENERATION[S] expands upon a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort, and incorporates GORGE, a never-ending tract spewing verse approximations, poetic paroxysms on food, consumption, decadence and desire, a hack of Montfort’s elegant poetry generator Taroko Gorge. There was only one rule in creating GENERATION[S]: No new texts. All the texts in this book were previously published in some way. The texts the generators produce are intertwined with the generators’ source code, and these two types of texts are in turn interrupted by excerpts from the meta narrative that went into their creation. Most of the sentences in the fiction generators started off as Tweets, which were then pulled into Facebook. Some led to comments that led to responses that led to new texts. All these stages of intermediation are represented in the print book iteration of GENERATION[S]. 

(Source: Author's website)

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Description (in English)

Artist-Statement: 

In this piece, I use my childhood doll as an interface for engaging with text projected on a screen. The text is inspired by the types of behaviors a child attributes to her doll or imaginary friend, such as "It wasn't me! Lala was the one who broke the vase." The doll has a sensor inside of her that can detect position, which I use to control the speed of text filling up the screen.

Technical notes

I used open-source code from Jared Tarbell's site <http://levitated.net/&gt; as the basis for the text display. After I figured out how to read values from an accelerometer into Flash (thanks Dustin Dupree!), I found a way to control the speed of the text based on the position of the sensor. Simple up-down motion wasn't so exciting, and I hit upon the idea of shaking the doll to "shake" the words out onto the screen - so I needed to capture the rate of change of the sensor's position (thanks Daniel Howe!). mouse-triggered demo page: http://www.technekai.com/lala/lalamouse.html

Contributors note

Jared Tarbell: open-source code