We still start with open projector but, for this particular #wordHack, every presenter gets a block of five minutes
Because it's the 5th anniversary and stuff
I bought an anthology!
These files will go online soonish
April and Dan are going to perform improv spoken word poetry, with cello. Take random nouns: barnyard, soup, pottery and tea party. Chickens.
"There were three times that I was going to tell you that I loved you...first time...at 86th st...coming out from soup"
"Second time...at a pottery barn...barnyard, you could call it? And we found a mug that said World's Best Dad. You laughed and said maybe we should get those sheets? And I said maybe I should tell you I loved you" #wordHack
ellipses addl
I guess fernando goes next
A love letter from an AI to #wordHack itself. Close your eyes and let the romance wash over you
Dear word hag,
[sax, piano]
It's your birthday
And to me it
Seems like yesterday
That we met on that beautiful night
And ever since
Every third thursday
I come see you
And you've grown so much
You susprise me every time
Make me say things like
Huh
Wow
So cool
What
Aahh
No way
Shut up
Why
I don't get it
Oh #wordHack
Once you are gone
What will be the point
Of even getting up
Or breathing
Or making art
But I'm not worried.
I know.
Word hag will go on forever
Word hag
You make everything right
It's gonna be ok
...it's going too fast for me now, sorry
If you feel the same way
Come meet me
At the intersection
Of language
And computation
Love
Me
P.s.
I love it when todd goes
Aahh
You're in #wordHack on a thursday night
Make some noise with your hands and faces
Here's @aparrish
compasses (short version)
Generated using the phonetic vectors originally made for her earlier anthology Articulations, but now she's generating words that do not exist, like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's dada poetry
Involves a neural network with four RNNs
Means you can give it random sequences of characters and get a pronunciation, or adding noise to real words to get similar sounding nonsense words
#wordHack
http://sync.abue.io to get the chapbook
Compasses is about things in sets of four, such as the cardinal directions, and interpolating to get the "missing" elements
Times of day:
Noon
Threwe
Three
This
Six
Nick
Nine
Tim Szetela
Made the board game Rewordable with Allison Parrish (I was a playtester!)
2 projects
5 #wordHack s
Up Down Left Right takes texts, like Alice in Wonderland, and draws maps using the direction words. This was at the June 15 2015 #wordHack
Then in 2016 sometime, presented Rewordable (actually twice, once 2015 I think)
There's a cool animation of how the composition of the deck changed over time
Actually three times, again after the Kickstarter
And tonight, a new edition of Up Down Left Right
It looks more cellular now and there's a lil' block navigating the maze as it's revealed
Ivan Anderson's presentation is an abbreviated version of the one I wrote up on Email Pro a couple months ago https://mastodon.babycastles.com/@LogicalDash/101961680587283038
Cara Warner
http://procgenitor.com
procgenitor@gmail.com
The Pantheon Generator
Generates gods that feel related to one another. Each with their own unique domains
I'm pretty sure I wrote up this one the first time around too
Well, I can't seem to find it
There were three attempts, and the one that worked treated each potential domain a god could have as a chromosome, and generated a family tree
It'll be in the anthology
Andrew Bader
Your World of Text
I think this one was actually popular? You get an infinitely large canvas and you can type anywhere and see others typing
The further out you go, the weirder it gets. People leave puzzles for each other.
Someone used it in her wedding ceremony!
This afternoon, andrew made a new project
You can answer others' questions by checking boxes
A lot of boxes
Shaped like the question.
Ricky Morales
Working on AltSalt, a digital literature publisher for iOS and Android
We see a story from the periodical Carrier Pigeon 19, about a history professor who has a stroke. The animation of the words tries to emulate that
There can be video, in which case you "turn the page" to advance it by an amount proportionate to the length of your drag, and maybe the text moves the same amount
Then we see A Modern Ghost, the flagship story for AltSalt.
Ranjit Bhatnagar
Made Pentametron, Todd's go to example of what #wordHack is about. Grabs tweets that happen to be in iambic pentameter. Then when it gets two that rhyme, it posts both
The Pentametron book, Encomials, assembles these into longer pieces. There's an algorithm for this that I didn't catch
Ranjit's new thing is all the times someone says "Holy shit!" in 50 Shades of Grey, with a couple words of context on either side. It was a side effect of an attempt to find oulipo in the book. https://oulipo.social got a namedrop
Jenny Goldstick and some actors, Izra and AJ, who are going to improvise...something... possibly an interpretation of an adventure game about heartbreak that Jenny made
The game is on the projector. A silhouette rides a bike past several houses and we get the title, This is my memory of my first heartbreak (which I can't quite piece back together)
There are technical difficulties and I can't really hear the actors! #wordHack
Todd Anderson closes the night with a demo of the anthology
Credits Claire Donato for the consistency of the event. Todd lived out of state for two years of it and couldn't really book anybody
There's an essay about it in the anthology. Anyway, then Todd performs this poem about the fireflies in Yardley, PA in 1997. Gosh I think it's implemented in Flash. It's very nostalgic