Event Title
Folly is an Endless Maze
Location
CB1-303
Start Date
4-11-2017 3:15 PM
End Date
4-11-2017 4:15 PM
Description
This presentation is a project demo of a unique poetry game called Folly is an Endless Maze that was created as a culminating project for ""Data Mining and Digital Poetics,"" a graduate course at the University of Florida offered in Spring of 2015. This project was an interdisciplinary collaborative effort between three computer scientists and two humanists to reinterpret the poetry of Romantic poet and printmaker, William Blake. This project would not have been possible without an interdisciplinary collaboration of ideating, designing, coding, and beta-testing. The team took inspiration from the @autoblake Twitter bot, a Markov-chain text generator created by Roger Whitson and used data mining, HTML5, and JavaScript to design an interactive user experience.
We also drew inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari's theories of detterritorialization and reterritorialization from the text A Thousand Plateaus, as a way to think through the ways we challenge traditional linear texts and conventional roles of readers and writers. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the taking, "disembedding," and re-appropriating of a cultural-spatial text and transposing it into a different platform can challenge the hegemonic power the text can carry. Folly is an Endless Maze challenges dominant notions of the reading and writing experience by allowing the reader to become an active participant in the meaning-making process.
The aim of this project was to create a non-linear and interactive representation of the experience of reading Blake's famously dense and intertextually-rich poetry. The title of the game is derived from the poem "The Voice of the Ancient Bard," part of the Songs of Innocence and Experience collection, which is often critically considered for its ambiguity as both and neither pertaining to innocence or experience. The aesthetics of the game mirror this ambiguity: both brightly colored yet dimly lit.
In Folly is An Endless Maze, the reader becomes a player in a first person shooter perspective game, navigating the text of Blake's poetry in a self-propagating labyrinth. The player moves through the maze and creates a nonsensical poem that is generated on the right by selecting directions in a 3D acrostic on the left. The game space also has multiple levels with different images to view. Each iteration of the game is randomized and unique so that no two poems are alike. This game challenges traditional notions of reading and writing as the players become producers of their own unique texts.
The text and images which make up the game are sourced from the William Blake Archive, a web archive that collects the cultural heritage of William Blake from multiple sources around the world and displays them in one digital space. We envision this project as one possible way of introducing the visionary, illuminated works of William Blake to unfamiliar audiences.
Folly is an Endless Maze
CB1-303
This presentation is a project demo of a unique poetry game called Folly is an Endless Maze that was created as a culminating project for "Data Mining and Digital Poetics," a graduate course at the University of Florida offered in Spring of 2015.
