Grand Text Auto

March is a time of many talks! Tiltfactor director Mary Flanagan spoke at the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series at the University of California Berkeley. The audience represented those interested in art, dance, post colonial studies, gender studies, game design, and even peace studies. It was fantastic to meet you all!

We had a great panel at SXSW Interactive on March 11, exploring several radical ways in which langauge and computing are intersecting. It was “Hacking Language: Bots, IF and Esolangs.” I moderated; the main speakers were Allison Parrish a.k.a. @aparrish; Daniel Temkin
DBA @rottytooth; and Emily Short, alias @emshort.

I kicked things off by showing some simple combinatorial text generators, including the modifiable “Stochastic Texts” from my Memory Slam reimplementation and my super-simple startup name generator, Upstart. No slides from me, just links and a bit of quick modification to show how easily one can work with literary langauge and a Web generator.