Thanks everyone, it's been a great two years.

Physical interface for Markov Live! Click for larger version.

Oulipo Keyboard (Only E configuration). Click for larger version.

The photo above depicts my portable generative poetry device in its current form. The LCD screen is attached to a small perfboard Arduino (click after the jump for photos), which is in turn attached to a Bodhilabs 2AA to 5v step-up circuit. So now I have bona fide standalone generative poetry device! The most difficult remaining task is figuring out what kind of box to put it in.

Right now, the device has a vocabulary of around 35 words; these words can be combined in a number of different patterns, as defined by a simple context-free grammar. I have about 10k of flash left on the chip, so there's plenty of room for adding new words and patterns. I want to make some adjustments to the random selection so that only small subsets of words are used to generate text at any one time.

More photos after the jump.

Above is a portion of a screenshot from one of my thesis devices. I'm calling it the Entropic Text Editor.

How it works: an analog value is read from a repurposed expression pedal. (This one, specifically.) The position of the pedal is fed into a text editing application, which is programmed to intercept the user's keystrokes. A randomization algorithm is applied to the user's input, on a character by character basis, as the keystrokes occur; the further the pedal is pressed down, the more random the text gets.

The Entropic Text Editor is the simplest implementation of what I see as a class of devices: prepared (augmented and/or constrained) computer keyboards. The hands are free to engage in the familiar act of typing, but another channel of information is added that modifies how the typing works. The artifacts that result from the Entropic Text Editor incorporate not just the literal content of the text, but also a history of the user's gestures.

Here's a PDF exported from a session with the Entropic Text Editor, during which I transcribed Jabberwocky. I coaxed the pedal to the maximum value up until the end of the second stanza, then gradually eased off until the end of the fourth; the fifth stanza is full out, pedal-to-the-metal randomness, and the last stanza has no randomness at all.

See below the cut for images from prototype versions of the software.

This is the Analog Text Display, an experiment in alternate text display and encoding technologies. It makes text visible not as digital characters, but as voltages, which are displayed by an analog voltmeter. The letter 'a' corresponds to a voltage a little over 0v, while the letter 'z' corresponds to 5v; the other letters are arranged alphabetically between the two. Any punctuation (including whitespace) causes the meter to go to 0v.

The Display reads data from an external source (via serial). Each of the six meters represents a distinct letter. As the display fills up, letters "scroll" off the display to the left.

Closer shot of the voltmeters. Click for a larger view.

In making the Analog Text Display, I was trying to imagine different ways to mediate the interfaces between text, display, and user. The ASCII and Unicode encodings that computers use to represent text internally are by no means inherent (see Tom Jennings' annotated history of character codes); the two-dimensional written page—and its electronic analog, the screen—is only one possible way of visually communicating text. (See, among others, fingerspelling and semaphores.) The Analog Text Display gives one possible answer to the question: How might computer displays have developed differently?

More photos and video after the jump.

My critical responses to Cave of Time (an early Choose Your Own Adventure book by Edward Packard) are now available. Every Path Through the Cave of Time is a collection of 54 text files, each of which provides the full text of a traversal through the book. (Every possible traversal is included.) Cave of Time: The Computer Game is an alternative version of the book that emphasizes gameplay: you're rewarded for finding every path through the book, and given bonus points for finding the shortest and longest paths.

My interest in this area lies in the observation that portable electronic devices have an interesting way of intervening in space: listening to an iPod, for example, can drastically transform the experience of walking down a city street. My question is: can text do the same thing?

In a sense, text already does this: you can read a book anywhere. I'm hoping that the generative nature of the text that my device creates will lead to a greater sense of serendipity and specificity to the particular moment: this juxtaposition of words and place is unique, and will never happen in quite the same way again.

Inspirations:

Buddha Machine
Transistor radios
Andreas Pavel's narrative concerning the invention of the portable cassette player:

"I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains," he recalled. "The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation."

Jenny Holzer (especially her twitter feed)
Aram Saroyan's minimalist poetry
Nick Montfort's Implementation (photos)
Ketai Lit (see also)
Jackson Mac Low's PFR-3 Poems (Representative Works, p. 209)

The working title is Generate/Modulate. It's essentially an interactive Markov chain generator, based on word probabilities. As the source text (Genesis 1 from the KJV in the video above) is parsed, the program makes a list of all two-word collocations and every word that can follow that collocation; for example, the collocation in the can be followed by any of the tokens in this list: image, open, midst, seas, earth, etc. Pressing the "A" button on the controller looks at the last two words on the screen and displays the word most likely to follow them. If more than one word is possible, the word is displayed in blue, and you can use the joystick to move between alternatives. If only one word is possible, it's displayed in red. Pressing "A" again will generate the next word in the chain, using the most recently generated word plus along with the word that directly precedes it.

A wordy explanation, but I'm actually kind of happy with the intuitiveness of the interaction. You're building a text that retains the semantic and rhythmic characteristics of the original, but with unexpected syntax and lexical juxtapositions. The interface constantly presents you with choices that are immediately meaningful, but also strongly suggest the shape of future choices. It's kinda fun to watch, too.

The Xbox 360 controller isn't what the final interface will look like, of course—I was just using it to prototype the software and the interaction as quickly as possible. I've had a couple of ideas relating to the final interface. Here's my favorite so far:

Pardon my lack of drumming skills. I'm... not a drummer.

A block diagram of the Text Drum and its supporting technologies (larger version):

And finally, another photo of the prototypes. (full size)

Behold the first physical prototype of the Text Drum. I turned the practice pad in the lower right-hand corner of the photograph into a drum trigger by outfitting it with a piezo sensor (I followed these instructions, though I used the bottom of a can of Danish butter cookies instead of a disc of galvanized steel). The pad worked so well that I decided I needed a second sensor, so I glued a second piezo to the side of a block of wood I scavenged from the shop.

Both the pad and the block are connected to my Arduino, which sends data from the piezos (using code adapted from todbot's tutorial) over serial to the Semantic Anomalizer (pictured on the screen, in the process of mutating Pride and Prejudice).

Overall, I'm pleased: I'm getting reliable, well-timed readings from the drum triggers, and using them along with the software I've been prototyping was gratifying. As I mentioned above, playing with the prototype made it obvious that more than one trigger was needed; I programmed the second trigger (the wood block) to insert a line break into the text, which adds a few new expressive and structural possibilities.

Problems: I cut the foam inside of the practice pad kind of unevenly, and the metal that the piezo is attached to is kind of warped. As a result, the response of the trigger is kind of uneven over its surface. The trigger works reliably; it just doesn't give reliable data about how hard it has been hit. Right now, I don't need that data—I just want a digital trigger. But this is definitely an avenue for future improvement.

Also, I'm not sure how well my original idea for the interface will work—i.e., a mapping between your rhythmic accuracy and the amount of randomness in the order of the words that the program outputs. For the most part, I just enjoyed hitting stuff and making words come out. I'm not sure if subtly varying your timing is the best way to be expressive with this thing. More experimentation is needed.

Activity: Freedom Fighter. Constraint: "yesterday"

My skill as a freedom fighter is unmatched. Why, I freed the repressed peoples of like seventeen countries just yesterday. Day before that? Nineteen countries, and a Southern state. I won't tell you which one. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Activity: Pig Farmer. Constraint: "as the volcano erupted"

I take care of my pigs better than anyone. I've rescued them from hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, and tornadoes the likes of which would make my fellow pig farmers tremble in their muck-covered boots. Once, when I was a pig farmer in Hawaii, I saved a pig from certain doom on the slopes of Mauna Kea... as the volcano erupted, I held that sow in my arms, and she whispered into my ear: "I love you..."

Activity: Limousine Driver. Constraint: "having only lost three toes"

I take dangerous jobs that other limousine drivers would never consider—jobs they'd never even hear about. I'm exclusive. I've driven limos in war-torn nations, in the deepest darkest jungles, across burning deserts, through the bleak Antarctic wastes. Once I drove Michael Jordan all the way up the Amazon. Michael, having lost only three toes (to the ravenous piranha) during the course of the trip, proclaimed me the best limousine driver ever.

For my Living Art midterm project, I'm building an audio version of the Text Drum, a device I'm building for my thesis. Here's how it works: you "play" a series of words from an audio recording by hitting a drum. If you keep a steady beat, the samples play in the order they occur in the source file. If you syncopate or fall out of step with the rhythm, the order of the words gets jumbled; the more out of synch you get, the more random the order of the words seems.

I have a software prototype ready, which I'll present in class tomorrow. A Processing sketch waits for input from the keyboard, compares it against prescheduled actions, and sends the "score" (how close you got to the beat) to ChucK using OSC.

Download an MP3 excerpted from a short performance with the drum here.

The source audio is sixty or so words excerpted from an audiobook I had sitting around. The text in question is Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Download an MP3 of the excerpt here.

My midterm project will be one of the devices I need to prototype for my thesis. I call this one the Text Drum:

Here's how it's supposed to work. The Text Drum allows you to "play" a source text. Playing a perfectly steady rhythm will output the source text (word by word) in its original order. As you syncopate the beat, however, the words will be scrambled, with an amount of entropy proportional to your distance from the beat.

The implementation will consist of a hardware component and a software component. The hardware presents the main technical stumbling block, since I have no idea how to build something like this. Piezos may be involved. The software will consist of some kind of receiver for reading data from the controller, which will send the data to my Semantic Anomalizer—a WebKit-based text editor that responds to OSC (more details here).

Depending on time, I may end up presenting a prototype that includes only the software portion, with the drum emulated by key strokes. We'll see.

Our first group assignment in Game Design was to create a board game. Frank gave us constraints to help spur the creative process: ours were dice and secret teams. We came up with a game we're calling The Grind. Loosely based on The Wire, The Grind is (to take an excerpt from the rules)...

a tabletop game about hidden identities, taking risks, and dealing drugs. Players act out an urban cat-and-mouse game between drug dealers and undercover police—and the snitch, who seeks to exploit them both. Will you grind, or will you be ground? Roll your own destiny in this exciting strategy game!

The central idea of the game is that all four players have different "roles," each of which potentially has different win conditions. At the beginning of the game, however, no one knows who has been assigned which role (hence "secret teams").

The fun of the game lies in trying to figure out what role the other players are playing, based on their behavior. The game's tension lies in deciding when to stop behaving ambiguously and reveal your identity. This can make you vulnerable, but it's often the only path to victory.

Download the game's rules in PDF format here.

If you want to try playing the game on your own (with three friends, naturally), you can download the game's map as a PDF here. This PDF has the obverse sides of the game's role cards; you'll need to cut them out and write one of each of the following on the blank side: cop, snitch, dealer, and dealer. (See the rules for more specific information.)

The Grind was designed by Neilson Abeel, Charles Amis, Shlomit Lehavi, and myself.

Pictures of our process after the jump.