Digital Lanugage Arts

I think Opening Sources by Ian Hatcher is an interesting spin on the intersection between technology and performance. It takes the concept of a live performance and translates it into a digital, textual experience, where the audience is the one who narrates/creates the experience. Traditionally, most performances and literature is a one way experience; the medium engages the audience. This draws an interesting comparison to the reading for this week, where the author points out a difference between theater and cinema. In cinema, the user can control the experience; whereas, in theater, the storyline is continuous - i.e., there are no breaks.

Many polls have shown that liberals view Starbucks more positively and that conservatives champion Walmarts. I decided to explore how the ratio of Starbucks to Walmarts per state aligned with political ideology to see if any interesting trends emerged. View Here

def rick():      print('e'.join('nvr'))      print('annog'[::-1])      print('forgive'[-4:])      print(('me','you')[1])      print('soup'.split('o')[1]) def roll():      print('e'.join('nvr'))      print('annog'[::-1])      print('valet'[-3:])      print(('me','you')[1])      print('letdown'.split('t')[1]) def main():      rick()      roll() if __name__ == '__main__':      main()

I think the idea of applying statistics and traditional scientific research methods to artwork is an interesting concept. A limitation to this is capturing meaning held within artwork. I think that language, as it exists, is a fluid concept - i.e., the meaning of words change over time. Unless the technique is looking specifically for semantic difference, the results to these methods will generalize the results to the point where it's meaningless. Another limitation, pointed out in one of the readings, is having a representative population. Earlier on, e.g., 1930, there is a large skew towards Western art. However, I think a valid objection is that this is a representative population. Language and art takes on meaning from culture experienced at that time. Hence, our available artwork would reflect that. Any analysis done should reflect that because it's most characteristic of that period of time.

My experiment this week was inspired by the readings. I used Unity and WebGL to create a 3D web experience. You can experience moving through the 3D space with your arrow keys below: http://aanshshah.com/dla-experiment-3d/

In this week's reading. Course in General Linguistics: Basic linguistic theory and terminologies , one of the points made was that speech itself does not contain meaning; nor is speech/sound alone capable of producing meaning. Some shared experience and history is required to give sound meaning and make it mutually understandable amongst people. For example, a bark might make sense amongst dogs, but is meaningless to humans; it exists as just a sound. I think Mez Breeze's work really speaks to this concept. In her invention of Mezangelle, she shows that arbitrarily inserting ASCII text into language is still understandable. Had she arbitrarily replaced all the text with random ASCII symbols, we would have no basis for understanding the meaning of her works. Rather, given some shared understanding and experience, we are able to interpret and piece together, given context clues, the meaning of her pieces.

If the same text were presented in a 2D format, the text would not be the same as if it were presented in 3D. When things are presented in 3D, another entire dimension is added to the experience; the space around the objects come alive. Some related keywords I came up with are: abstraction, immersion, virtual, augmented, real, dimensionality, intimate, surreal, explanatory. and utopian. In the reading for this week, Andrew Roberts asks why artists attempt to go beyond the medium they are using; I think it's exactly the same reason why 3D experiences are relevant. They create an engaging and meaningful experience for their audience. They create an abstract, immersive experience, where another dimension is added to their experience. For example, in Text Rain, people are interacting with the words. The concepts in that art piece are abstracted, and the audience is immersed in interacting with the worlds.

I thought it would be interesting to use a markov chain to generate some predictive text. For this week's experiment, I decided to gather my personal messages and see what predicative text would be generated based on those personal messages. In order to do this, I downloaded all my Facebook Messages and cleaned my conversations up. I went through all the json files and copied all the messages that I sent to a csv file. Now that I had all my messages, I implemented a markov model using Markovify (https://github.com/jsvine/markovify). Next, I used Flask to create a web server and hosted it on Amazon Web Services (specifically, Amazon Lambda - to make a serverless web application). Then, I generated a phone number using Twilio; my goal was to allow someone to text the number and get a reply back with a 200 character response of something I'd say. I used the API endpoint generated by Lambda as a webhook for the Twilio SMS API. If you text 631-318-6563, you'll get a text back

In this interactive, you can move your mouse and interact with a cone in a 3D setting. This was inspired by this week's reading from My Mother is a Computer; I think time is a continuum and can't be discrete. As Albert Einstein once said, "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once."

I thought this week's readings were pretty interesting. I particularly enjoyed reading about how poems were generated programmatically via grammar rules and hidden markov models. In  “Digital Oulipo: Programming Potential Literature,” I thought it was interesting how each component that went into programmatically producing poems were stripped into discrete elements; from that, each piece went into forming the whole. Independently, each step came together to produce the poem. Similarly, Context Free Grammars fulfill the same purpose. When I was playing bot or not, I was surprised at the quality poems that the bots were produced. The poems had preserved structure and the sentences were pretty coherent. It's truly astounding what bots can achieve nowadays.