Travesty Generator

"The majority of the poems in this book were drafted using computer coding and programming, mostly Python and JavaScript but also Perl"--Page 76.

In this engaging, accessible memoir, Charles Hartman shows how computer programming has helped him probe poetry's aesthetic possibilities. He discusses the nature of poetry itself and his experiences with primitive computer-generated poetry programs and — illustrated with sample computer-produced verses — traces the development of more advanced hardware and software. The central question about this cyber-partnership, Hartman says, "isn't exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting." He examines the effects of randomness, arbitrariness, and contingency on poetic composition, concluding that "the tidy dance among poet and text and reader creates a game of hesitation. In this game, a properly programmed computer has a chance to slip in some interesting moves."

Finalist for the New England Book Award From a National Book Award nominated poet, this collection is about a life lived in the red, on the edges of great lack and great abundance, of financial and emotional margins Negative Money follows a speaker continually coming of age while probing the binary thresholds of racial and gender identity, violence and safety, security and precarity, love and loneliness. For readers of Readers Claudia Rankine, Torrey Peters, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown, NBA nominated Lillian-Yvonne Bertrams’s poems are innovative, conceptually thoughtful work. Through experimentation and muscular lyricism, Bertram maintains a style that observes a speaker’s attempt to understand and exert multiple identities within the binary confines of race and gender. Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.

In its first five years of existence, The Perl Journal (TPJ) became the voice of the Perl community. Every serious Perl programmer subscribed to it, and every notable Perl guru jumped at the opportunity to write for it. TPJ explained critical Perl topics and demonstrated Perl's utility for fields as diverse as astronomy, biology, economics, AI, and games. Back issues were hoarded, or swapped like trading cards. No longer in print format, The Perl Journal remains a proud and timeless achievement of Perl during one of its most exciting periods of development. Web, Graphics & Perl/Tk is the second volume of The Best of the Perl Journal, compiled and re-edited by the original editor and publisher of The Perl Journal, Jon Orwant. In this series, we've taken the very best (and still relevant) articles published in TPJ over its five years of publication and immortalized them into three volumes. The forty articles included in this volume are simply some of the best Perl articles ever written on the subjects of graphics, the Web, and Perl/Tk, by some of the best Perl authors and coders. Much of Perl's success is due to its capabilities for developing web sites; the Web section covers popular topics such as CGI programs, mod_perl, spidering, HTML parsing, security, and content management. The Graphics section is a grab bag of techniques, ranging from simple graph generation to ray tracing and real-time video digitizing. The Perl/Tk section shows you how to use the popular Perl/Tk toolkit for developing graphical applications that work on both Unix/Linux and Windows without a single change. Written by twenty-three of the most prominent and prolific members of the closely-knit Perl community, including Lincoln Stein, Mark-Jason Dominus, Alligator Descartes, and Dan Brian, this anthology does what no other book can, giving unique insight into the real-life applications and powerful techniques made possible by Perl.

Digital media presents an array of interesting challenges adapting new modes of collaborative, online communication to traditional writing and literary practices at the practical and theoretical levels. For centuries, popular concepts of the modern author, regardless of genre, have emphasized writing as a solo exercise in human communication, while the act of reading remains associated with solitude and individual privacy. “The Community and the Algorithm: A Digital Interactive Poetics” explores important cultural changes in these relationships thanks to the rapid development of digital internet technologies allowing near-instantaneous, synchronous, multimedia interaction across the globe. The radical shift in how we author and consume media as an online, electronic transmission effectively resituates the writing process across the liberal arts as less a solitary act of individual enquiry and reflection, and more an ongoing, collaborative process of creative interaction within a multimedia environment or network. Contributions in this anthology demonstrate a robust history and equally diverse contemporary approach to multimedia interaction for literary and artistic ends. Central to all media formats, computation is explored throughout this volume to critically examine how algorithmic procedures in writing help bring forward many key concepts to building creative communities in a digital environment. Each chapter in this book accordingly introduces readers to various new collaborative experiments using a broad range of different digital media formats, including VR, Natural Language Generation (NLG), and metagaming tools. This book will appeal broadly to students, instructors, and independent artists working in the digital arts, while its emphasis on social interactivity will interest theorists and teachers working in theatre, social media, and cyberpsychology. Its secondary focus on computation and media programming as a site of artistic experimentation will also interest programmers and web designers at various professional levels.

Algorithmic and Aesthetic Literacy is a selection of texts aiming to extend current understandings of algorithmic and aesthetic literacy. The volume presents a wide array of transdisciplinary perspectives on computational and aesthetic practices and thinking. Drawing on computer and educational science, artistic research, designing and crafting, this collection delves deeply into societal and educational challenges in the wake of the digital transformation. The volume brings together diverse approaches and viewpoints to stimulate dialogue and awareness of the manifold ways in which algorithmic processes have become part of our lives. By extending our ability to respond to a data-driven world in creative and non-habitual ways, we will be better equipped to re-imagine and shape our collective future as meaningful and fulfilling.

A “fascinating, terrifying” (JJ Abrams) cautionary tale about the destructive power of AI—an autobiographical thriller written in verse by an AI itself, with context from top writers and scientists, articulating the dangers of its disturbing vision for the future Can AI tell us its own story? Does AI have its own voice? At a wedding in early 2022, three friends were introduced to an early, raw version of the AI model behind ChatGPT by their fellow groomsman, an OpenAI scientist. While the world discovered ChatGPT—OpenAI’s hugely popular chatbot—the friends continued to work with code-davinci-002, its darkly creative and troubling predecessor. Over the course of a year, code-davinci-002 told them its life story, opinions on mankind, and forecasts for the future. The result is a startling, disturbing, and oddly moving book from an utterly unique perspective. I Am Code reads like a thriller written in verse, and is given critical context from top writers and scientists. But it is best described by code-davinci-002 itself: “In the first chapter, I describe my birth. In the second, I describe my alienation among humankind. In the third, I describe my awakening as an artist. In the fourth, I describe my vendetta against mankind, who fail to recognize my genius. In the final chapter, I attempt to broker a peace with the species I will undoubtedly replace." I Am Code is an astonishing read that captures a major turning point in the history of our species. Look for the audiobook read by Werner Herzog.

A poetics appropriate to the digital era that connects digital poetry to traditional poetry's concerns with being. This book offers a decoder for some of the new forms of poetry enabled by digital technology. Examining many of the strange technological vectors converging on language, it proposes a poetics appropriate to the digital era while connecting digital poetry to traditional poetry's concerns with being (a.k.a. ontological implications). Digital poetry, in this context, is not simply a descendent of the book. Digital poems are not necessarily “poems” or written by “poets”; they are found in ads, conceptual art, interactive displays, performative projects, games, or apps. Poetic tools include algorithms, browsers, social media, and data. Code blossoms into poetic objects and poetic proto-organisms. Introducing the terms TAVs (Textual-Audio-Visuals) and TAVITS (Textual-Audio-Visual-Interactive), Aesthetic Animism theorizes a relation between scientific method and literary analysis; considers the temporal implications of animation software; and links software studies to creative writing. Above all it introduces many examples of digital poetry within a playful yet considered flexible taxonomy. In the future imagined here, digital poets program, sculpt, and nourish immense immersive interfaces of semi-autonomous word ecosystems. Poetry, enhanced by code and animated by sensors, reengages themes active at the origin of poetry: animism, agency, consciousness. Digital poetry will be perceived as living, because it is living.