“TRANS.MISSION [A Dialogue]” by J.R. Carpenter

This generative poem focuses our attention on several technologies used for transmitting and receiving messages, the perils of transatlantic crossings in the North Atlantic ocean, the missions sent to survey and map the land, and the need for communication to occur successfully across physical and historical distances. The poem is generated from 72 variables and a rich word data set for each (see lines 37-109 in the source code) to produce more versions than anyone should really need to calculate because the total number is beyond the scale of thorough human readability, as proven by Raymond Queneau in 1961. The trick is to “try again” and read multiple generated versions— which happens automatically every 80,000 miliseconds (about 1:33) or you can refresh the page— and intuit the ideas, structures, tensions, relations, and variations each version gestures towards.

J.R. Carpenter’s poem is very coherent, thriving in its permutations to reconfigure multiple human experiences, anxieties, needs for communication, and technologies across time and space.

Featured in ELO 2012 Media Art Show