aparrish@itp

Running off a battery-powered perfboard. 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.

Continue reading "A2Z/Living Art: Progress on Portable Generative Poetry" »

Posted by Adam Parrish at 02:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Analog Text Display. Click for a larger view.

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.

Continue reading "Living Art: Analog Text Display" »

Posted by Adam Parrish at 07:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm building a handheld generative poetry device.

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)

Posted by Adam Parrish at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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.

Posted by Adam Parrish at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First test print with the sphere. Click for a larger version.

The assignment this week in Living Art was to "make random." I made this:

Essentially, it's a ball that has words glued to the outside of it. When you ink it up and roll it across paper, it creates a composition: fragments of words, spread across the page in a way that is responsive to the gestures of the artist, but retains some amount of unpredictability.

The printing sphere is made out of a 4 lb Everlast medicine ball, glued to which are 20 or so words, hand-carved in Speedball "Speedy Carve" medium. The typeface is News Gothic (bolded variant).

Andy Miller took some excellent photos of my presentation of the Sphere in Living Art.

Rationale and more images after the jump.

Continue reading "Living Art: Printing text with a sphere" »

Posted by Adam Parrish at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)