The small, not like careened around the bend, nearing the burnt, it was a bloody stars day for sighing heavily in the christened crash sighing
Maw bit ate a clefting parchment and fell into a cuddle, leaving home it was a raining night as "animal" talk to me
The tight, blackened careened around the bend, nearing the burning holes, it was a stampingly day for nevertheless in the dusky aeons
Tell like cold, and with decided warbling over.
The lines of the poem above were created using Fields of Dream, a literary game where participants can do one or both of the following two things. They can write fill-in-the-blank texts, called dreamfields, that are then left as templates on the site for someone else to populate, with their own words. Or participants can blindly combine their own words with the words of the template, so within the dreamfields, that have been set up and left by previous users. The participant is blindly combining words because they do not know what the dreamfield they are inserting their own words into actually looks like. A template never exists for long, ten dreamfields are always available and by creating a new one, an existing one is erased, similar to a dream that may be forgotten upon waking up. It soon becomes obvious that there is no randomness within fields of dream; fields of dream explains “we are anti-randomness. Or rather, any randomness should come from [the participant's] mind, not from the server's pseudorandom number generator”, or aleatory computer generated procedures. For example, you may enter any word or part of speech when it asks for a noun - “There is no provision for editing what you have submitted; we are anti-editing, just write what you feel like writing at the moment and throw your words together with someone else's.” So while the participants inserted words may be completely "random", the template within which they are working is somewhat deterministic. The radomness is always determined, not by what a participant writes in - but by way of the syntactic structure of the lines. Compare the first and third lines of my poem. The project is collaboration between Nick Montfort and Rachel Stevens. Click here to play Fields of Dream.
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2 comments:
I see you have quite an interest in the random! Have you read the book - Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid?
Its very good :)
Well actually I cannot claim to have a particular interest in "the random", nor do not want my blog to be exclusively concerned with that idea - it just so happened (a "random" occurence) that those two consecutive posts both dealt with the idea. I guess because I wanted to write about both these projects, the idea inevitably came into my disussion of each and probably looks like an extended piece of writing about "the random".
However in saying that I am quite interested in the idea of proceduralism in writing, particularly motivated proeceduralism which definately involves chance operations in interesting ways. So that is probably where my specific interest within the larger concept of randomness lies. I am also interested in 60s/70s through to contemporary, performance art and happenings, and performance scripts from artists associated with Fluxus. Roughly the idea of control/deterministic procedures, and how this brings about chance. Is it possible to determine the element of surprise present in these works? Or does proceduralism bring about surprise?
Anyway, thank you for taking time to comment on some of my posts! X
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