April 28, 2004
Public Override Void: On Poetry Engines and Prosthetic Imaginations
A public conversation with Jim Carpenter, Bob Perelman, Jean-Michel Rabaté, and Nick Montfort, Thursday, April 29, 2004; 6:30-8:30pm at the Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut St, Philadelphia.
Slought Foundation presents “Public Override Void,” a vault installation
featuring Jim Carpenter’s Electronic Text Composition (ETC) project, on
display from April 17-May 20, 2004. The exhibit is curated by Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté. The opening reception on Thursday
April 29, 2004 from 6:30-8:30pm has been organized in conjunction with a
live presentation by Carpenter and a public conversation between Bob
Perelman, Nick Montfort, and Jean-Michel Rabaté (50 min). The
installation includes self-service poetry stations and wall panels of
code, and takes its name (“Public Override Void”) from an actual string
of code embedded in the 25,000 line software program. [And yes, it sounds
similar to “Static Void,” a book of sonnets produced using Gnoetry 0.1, but
that’s a different poetry engine. -nm] The Electronic Text
Composition Project’s Poetry Engine is a suite of software components
that allow a user to generate aesthetic texts. Drawing word associations
from its language database of 85 million sentences, the Engine’s grammar
uses a probability-based approach to constructing syntactic constituents,
which it aggregates into utterances, which it in turn aggregates into
compositions. More information on the public conversation is available online.
April 28th, 2004 at 4:33 pm
‘self-service poetry’, ‘prosthetic imaginations’, very nice, gotta start using those phrases
March 21st, 2006 at 12:55 am
[…] Carpenter’s poetry generation project has surfaced here and there, for instance, at a Slought foundation exhibit and even […]