Event Title

Pattern and Randomness in Code and Poetry

Presenter Information

Amanda Hill, University of Central Florida
Laura Moeller

Location

NSC-183

Start Date

3-11-2017 11:15 AM

End Date

3-11-2017 12:15 PM

Description

For this panel discussion we will discuss two e-poetry projects that piece together moments of pattern and randomness to create new digital poetic works. In addition to presenting these projects for discussion, we hope to engage the audience in an embodied understanding of how pattern and randomness operate in projects such as these. To do this, we will spend a portion of the session conducting an interactive experiment in human computation where the audience members engage in the building of a new poem. Audience members will write multiple lines of poetry and will use these to create a new poetic work using processes of code randomization. The embodied experience will mirror the process through which the poems in the presented projects are generated. We hope this will give the audience an understanding of how poetry and code can work together to create new works and inspire them to consider more deeply the intersection of pattern and randomness. To help exemplify the process of coding randomization into new poetic works, we will showcase the poem "Wayfarer's Song" and the Dada Poetry Generator.

"Wayfarer's Song" is a poem-program which generates a Villanelle poem from a set of randomly chosen, pre-written verses. The poem exemplifies the interplay of pattern and randomness by juxtaposing arbitrary arrangement with the poetic pattern of Villanelle, which is characterized by repetition and even flow. Katherine Hayles states that "through the development of information technologies [...] the interplay of pattern and randomness became a feature of everyday life," and has shaped human as well as textual bodies. Melding literary form (pattern) and coded algorithms (randomness), "Wayfarer's Song" exemplifies Hayles' argument and shows how pattern and randomness complement one another in a complex dialectic.

The Dada Poetry Generator is an online machine that engages users in creating a poem from several "found" texts" - a news article, a passage from a book, and an excerpt from a website. It invites readers to make new inferences about the texts which are currently in front of them. Because each iteration of the machine will generate a different arrangement of the texts, the context and meaning of the poem can change each time the code runs. In deforming and decontextualizing these texts, the users will encounter symbolic randomness. This seeming nonsense is an opportunity for further exploration and meaning-making. The three texts a user chooses will relate to each other in different ways. If the texts the reader chooses cover different topics or come from different realms of the reader's life, the Dada Poetry Generator additionally provides a way to make a connection to various branches of daily life (eg. home, work, school) which create the user's "world of experience." O'Gorman suggests nonsense "can take us across cultural and cognitive fields." By connecting texts from different areas of our lives, we make leaps from one subject to another and are afforded the opportunity to find common themes and patterns that are emerging in our daily lives and our society.