Get Your Motor Running
Today, we check out your first try at composing a generative text with nothing but vocabulary arrays and random seed texts.
Whossa whassa?
Don’t worry. We’ll go through it in class. Baby steps.
Wu
Thhose of you who posted your lists of words get to see the results of your labor effortlessly reprocessed by Machines. Oh yeah.
And if you didn’t do it… damn. You are so busted. You couldn’t post a minimum of 50 semi-random words to your blog? Daaaammmn.
Just to recap: we’re at week 5 here. We can call the first two weeks “prep time,” but prep is over! It is now time to Generate!
If you didn’t do the assignment this week, you must still do it for next week. However now you must come up with a minimum of 75 words in each of two lists. And if you did the assignment with the absolute bare minimum of 25 words, I’d like you to try it again after seeing the results up on the big screen. In front of everybody. Something to consider from an authorial perspective: what is the smallest vocabulary size that gives you an interesting result? How many times is it interseting? Weh or why not?
oulipo
Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (100 million billion poems) by Raymond Queneau
Ten interchangable sonnets, each with fourteen lines:
10^14 = a very large number…
Here’s a nice graphical implimentation:
http://www.bevrowe.info/Poems/QueneauRandom.htm
Haiku
The next generator we’re going to work on is a haiku generator. To begin, start coming up with lists of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, listed with their number of syllables. Further specific instructions will be delivered on a need to know basis….
Eliza
For those who like to read ahead, the next-after-next generator you’ll be modifying will be Eliza. If you want to see what that’s all about, look up some implimentations of Joseph Weizenbaum’s (in)famous chatterbot on the web.
Tom Hater
Once again, Dan has been commanding the machines to do his bidding. Have they obeyed him? You be the judge….
http://phxom.matterwave.net/index.php?s=code_as_poetry
Reading
You should read the Florian Crammer sections on Oulipo. I’ll get you those page numbers in class.
Homework
If you didn’t do the name generator this week:
You must post two lists of words, with a minimum 75 words in each list (150 words total, minimum) for next week’s class.
If you haven’t done the I Ching:
You still have to do that, don’t you?
If you haven’t posted in your blog this month:
Please. Get some sleep, will ya?