computer poetry

Over at Jim Carpenter's blog, he has a series building on why aesthetic language generation (ALG) is difficult. There are plenty of discussions on the nature of working with aesthetic text generation systems from a writer/reader perspective, but very little on the challenges and questions raised in the actual construction of these systems (outside of the purely technical discussions within fields like Computational Linguistics). Jim has constructed a large scale electronic text composition system entitled "Erica T. Carter" and knows first hand the issues involved. Anyone interested in this area should keep an eye on his posts.

The performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery Friday on Oct 28, 2005 was great. I was a bit nervous from the rehersal the night before. I had incorporated the rhyming code i’ve been working on into the template generation system and we made some last minute tweeks at the rehersal which were causing some occasional runtime errors. Running of the software over again would usually produce the desired result. The system generated two texts for the performance, one a more abstract piece, the second a set of rhyming couplets. During testing and rehersal, the abstract piece always seemed much stronger than the rhyming couplets… but at the performance, the abstract piece came out kind of clunky, a bit too long, but the rhyming couplets were just right, humorous and strangley abstract and contextually relevant at the same time…. Unfortunately, after the performance, the texts were lost in the digital ether.

This GTR performance took place in February 2005 at the playwright Tom Cone's house. It was a for for the Songroom event which featured interdisciplanary collaborative performances between various artists and technologists.

A recording of the rehearsal session can be found here.

This track features Andrew Klobucar working a version of GTR's lyrical text generation software the output of which was immediately performed by the singer Vivian Houle, whose voice was simultaneously transformed by Stefan Smulovitz 's real time granular synthesis software KENAXIS.

This GTR performance took place in February 2005 at the playwright Tom Cone's house. It was a rehearsal for the Songroom event which featured interdisciplanary collaborative performances between various artists and technologists.

This track features Andrew Klobucar working a version of GTR's lyrical text generation software the output of which was immediately performed by the singer Vivian Houle, whose voice was simultaneously transformed by Stefan Smulovitz 's real time granular synthesis software KENAXIS .

Perl

Below are links to information about the language, books on learning and using Perl, links to various distributions for download and a long list of various Perl modules one can download to add functionality to their programs. Experiment and have fun !