This generative poem app for mobile devices was originally designed for iOS, but upon being rejected for inclusion in the Apple Store was adapted to Android and successfully published in the Google Play store. Its primary interest lies in the different kinds of input it is able to process in its generating algorithms, such as address books, location, WiFi hotspots. Its title and description are indicative of its goals and strategies.
AndorDada is a road poem. You stroll through town and your immediate area generates a poem. You walk further through town or ride on a bus and the poem changes according to your location in town. andorDada is an endless poem; andorDada is adaptive locative Dada. It reads, writes out and interprets the subconscious social structure of a town.
Two key ideas worth elaborating upon are Dadaism and Situationist psychogeography. The Dada movement’s rejection of bourgeois rationality and aestheticism led to poetic experimentation in characteristics of language freed from the constraints of grammatical structure or logic, and opening the door to aleatory techniques. The Situationist study of psychogeography sought to discover some of the hidden logic of urban spaces and how they shape consciousness, creating practices such as the dérive to explore some of these undercurrents.
Just as in the early and mid 20th century Dadaist and Situationist practices sought to wake people up from the gross commercialism and bourgeois ideology that language and urban spaces were being used for, these ideas have reemerged in the contemporary contexts of computation, wireless networks, mobile, and locative media. Consider how the presence of free WiFi hotspots is an invisible (but detectable) attractor for people seeking access to the Internet. People use mobile GPS mapping software on their smartphones to locate cafés, bars, restaurants, and other kinds of goods and services near them— a networked psychogeography of urban spaces that is ready to be co-opted for artistic purposes.
This Android app uses these networks as a data set, generating works that expose some of the subconscious identity of urban spaces. This is a work worth reading wherever you go: to read its changes and as a kind of litmus test for the networked identity of a place.
Featured in ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature, ELO 2013: Chercher le Texte Virtual Gallery
