Short form scholarship on born digital poetry and poetics.
These two bots use Markov chain generators to produce tweets, but distinguish themselves from other bots by responding to input from those who interact with them via Twitter. (Click on the images below to visit their pages). “Markov Chain Me” is like a curved mirror that shows you a generated version of your Twitter identity. … Read more
If you have been reading my daily entries on bots, and have explored the resource that compiles them, you may have noticed the great variety, sophistication, and artistry that characterizes this emergent genre. With these daily postings, I have tried to take a snapshot of a vibrant moment for this artistic and literary practice, knowing … Read more
Every three hours, this bot tweets approximately 100 characters (about 20 words) of language written by William Blake, but not exactly. The tweets are recognizably Blake’s, but there’s something odd about them, as if he was performing some kind of automatic writing or Surrealist automatism to compose those texts. He wasn’t, but in a way … Read more
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z (Articles used in alphabetical listing) # “3 Proposals for Bottle Imps” by William Poundstone “4 Square” by Jody Zellen “5 Haitis” by Simon Kerr “6-string Aria” by Bill Marsh … Read more
This app uses your Facebook feed as a data set to perform a Markov Chain analysis and generate new status updates from it. In other words, it uses your status updates as a lexicon to assemble a few sentences that echo your style, interests, concerns, and topics. Written in HTML and JavaScript, this little app … Read more
This page is a resource for my presentation “E-Poetry as Code & Data Remix” for Repurposing in Electronic Literature at the DIG Gallery in Košice, Slovakia on Saturday, November 2, 2013. The presentation itself is available in the embedded video below: Resources to be discussed: bpNichol, First Screening (1984) Annie Abrahams, A(l)one (1999) Jim Andrews, Arteroids (2001) … Read more
The bot is an e-lit genre that goes as far back as 1966 with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, a chatterbot that engaged users in conversation through text entered and displayed in a computer terminal. This concept informed interactive fiction from the 1980s and has breathed life into video game characters ever since. Poetically, bots are also … Read more
This set of Twitter accounts have a little literary and other kinds of fun with, around, and in spite of Ian Bogost’s Twitter account: @ibogost (depicted below). A leading scholar and creator of video games, he has garnered a large Twitter following by voicing his opinions on his areas of expertise and interest, as well … Read more
This Twitter bot generates tweets using two data sets: the text of the MIT Press book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and any tweets with the #10print hashtag. The generator uses a Markov chain process to analyze a text and determine the probability of any word following another to generate a new string of words … Read more