reflections on e-poetry 2009

Returned from Barcelona last night. it was a great experience to meet with other writers / designers / video artists / academics who are concerned with the intersection of text, language and technology. although disciplinary boundaries for digital poetics are hard to define (perhaps for the best), the festival content suggested that work in this field can contribute to many channels of semiotic and literary theory. Viewing works from around the world, shared intentions begin to arise. The most compelling works had a performative element that brought the author and the reader together, through the machine, rather than naming the machine explicitly as author.

Very much enjoyed work by Rui Torres (http://telepoesis.net/), Eugenio Tisselli (http://www.motorhueso.net/), and a collaboration between Ricardo Dominguez (http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html) and Amy Sara Carroll (http://www.uiowa.edu/~iareview/tirweb/feature/carroll/interview.html) called THE PARTICKL-E (illuminated nanoscripts and gestures for iPod nanos and the streets).

More detailed notes to come!

Published:
June 3, 2009 – 12:42 pm
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By marisa
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Events

How to Hear a Sentence will be performed at E-Poetry 2009 in Barcelona on May 25. Check out www.e-poetry2009.com for more information on the festival and a full schedule. e-poetry_logo1

Published:
May 22, 2009 – 4:17 pm
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Setup

project setup

I’ve set us up a version control system for working with the code. We’re using Subversion to manage the code, and Trac to browse the source and manage tickets.

Project URIs:

http://trac.hthas.omnib.in
http://svn.hthas.omnib.in

To check out the code from the command line, run the following command:


svn checkout http://svn.hthas.omnib.in {your project directory}

While browsing the code is open to anyone, contributions are restricted. If you would like to join the project and contribute code, please contact us.

Inferences, Hypotheses?

You know, I was thinking about the idea of inferences, and searching for “inference applications”, and I came across a paper on hypothesis generation.

Maybe we could keep in mind that instead of generating facts, we could generate hypotheses — little frameworks for the kinds of investigative frameworks merged ideas allow for.

Published:
April 11, 2009 – 3:40 pm
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By marisa
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brainstorm

Our databases – our ontologies and knowledge repositories – are nothing but a collection of perspectives on the world – a collection of information organized according to agendas. A vulnerable civilization requires that we record and structure ideas from the perspective of the individual, the economy, politics, science, the social, the cultural, etc.. And it is important that these documentations be organized in a way that can be computed. If our information is machine readable, then we are free to put it through processes and analyses that are too difficult or complex for a human agent to accomplish in a lifetime. Our project’s development is based on such documentary and archival practices, and as we make our collection dynamic and organizable, we are advancing the utility of knowledge infrastructures and intellectual technologies in helping distribute socially responsible ideas in the world.

Likewiseverifyingsentenceslike“catshavefur”isalsoclearlyasemantictask. In
contrast, verifyingthat twocats depictedincolor areinfact thesameincolor is not asemantictask, as
thejudgment canbemadebasedonthecolor informationinthepictureandwithout referencetosemantic
informationabout theobjects.

or,whoknows

Published:
April 10, 2009 – 5:15 pm
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By marisa
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the original proposal (for V1)

This performative reading will be mediated by a computer program, which is written to visually interpret certain terms in our texts as they occur in the duration of the event. The purpose of the project is to explore, in real time, the relationship between cognition, memory, and preexisting knowledge in the act of communication, playing with tools of artificial intelligence that strive to approximate the process by which we transmit and receive. From two original and relevant texts of our own devising, we have selected 25 terms and sent them to each other. We have not read the other’s source text, in order to work from the blind inference characteristic of encountering new language fr the first time. Placed side by side, these lists produce 25 pairs – we will each create 25 sentences, placing each each word pair in a context suggested by the combination of words and our personal associations with them. We are also giving the pair of words to a program called ConcpetNet, a way to access a kind of collective source of associations and inferred meaning, which will come up with its own common sense link between the words in each pair.

As our key terms occur in the reading, the program will trigger our individually composed sentences to appear on screen, along with the machine-generated sentences.  In this way, the program is outputting a variety of contexts from our input. These contexts come from the texts themselves, our prior knowledge, and will tend to represent the social assumptions and political desires that we carry with us into the creation of meaning in real time. The new sentences will rise from the bottom of the screen and we will choose from amongst those possible sentences. The chosen sentences will remain and accumulate into a new, spontaneously generated, 25-sentence composition over the course of the reading. The project points to the notion that both humans and technology tend to infer meaning based on contexts from an array of preexisting options, which vary always in subjectivity.

Published:
April 10, 2009 – 4:25 pm
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Poster

lecture poster

lecture poster

Published:
January 9, 2009 – 2:23 pm
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By marisa
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