junk poetry

Feeling a bit pissed off with this funkhouser dude because he made something called 'Spam Poem' which is EXACTLY what I've always wanted to do. He made it this year, and I've been meaning to do it for more like FIVE years. I can even prove it because I have a special folder in my hotmail where I collect what I call "Junk Poetry" - there was some spam mails going around a couple of years ago that had the most devine crazy poems in them, most likely made from a bot that was just putting random words together, so I have always meant to do something with them but I have never really gotten around to it. However after being inspired by what funkhouser did with similar kinds of emails, I simply stuck a couple of these emails into Speaksonia (with a crazy woman's voice) and by itself it sounds really fun. I would like to overlay some images onto it, I don't know how to use quick time pro, however I could do it with Flash (perhaps not as simply though). I wont try to upload the mp3 file here, you will just have to believe me that I've done it. I will probably use it for one of my 4 or 5 (can't remember how much) cyberpoem pieces that we have to do for this semester.

What I can do, though, is copy the words in here (however the voice makes it very different)

"When toward crank case leaves, waif beyond ruminates.Sometimes debutante living with earns frequent flier miles, but mastadon beyond football team always trade baseball cards with around eggplant!gonads remain purple.And negotiate a prenuptial agreement with the dark side of her garbage can.A few gonads, and sheriff for oil filter) to arrive at a state of asteroidambiguity selwyn alternate delinquent belgrade francoise silicate

When over carpet tack is darling, defined by football team make love to somnambulist behind.Eleanor, although somewhat soothed by spider related to and behind warranty.Indeed, hole puncher near caricature for deficit.Where we can amorously teach our spider.Indeed, scooby snack near assimilate judge about somnambulist.prime minister from hides, and graduated cylinder for sell to prime minister near.queasy irresistible until penury cathode critic"

(imagine in a strange high pitched deep south almost-female accent)

The first paragraph is from an email called 'marzipan gonads of 4185' and the second is called 'cheese wheel 58 brides' (i looooove their names! Not sure whether to include them in the final pieces or not but I may as well??? However I don't know how to change the mp3 file that I have made so I might just have to stick it all together in Flash, dunno yet.)

I'm in class right now, hence the sporadic terrible language of this post because I can't think straight, I would have, however, liked to explain this a bit better, so perhaps I will come back to it later.

http://www.as.wvu.edu/clcold/epoetry/bios.html

In searching for the web poet to use for my essay I finally stumbled across a site that might help me. This above link shows a bunch of artists who were in some e-poetry festival a couple of years ago, and although most of them aren’t in English, there are some familiar names there, such as Nicolas Clauss, the guy behind the ‘flying puppet’ website, who did an amazing piece for this festival called ‘look at me’. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frame/clauss/lookatme.htm - which can be viewed at this link. However I can’t really say that it would work as just poetry because there is no text involved and the only words spoken are those of the title, however it is still an amazing flash piece – one that stays with you afterwards. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/frAme/index.cfm?article=102 – this is an ‘introduction’ to the Clauss work by Simon Mills. It reminds me of a certain other visual artists work but I can’t remember the name right this minute…
I also looked at some work by a guy called Tallan Memmott. The work was called [n]+semble recombinant tone poem and I think this is the link even thought for some reason it looks like a broken link?? http://memmott.org/talan/rtp27/ I Don’t know but you can find him on the main www.as.wvu/edu link (up the top) anyway. This was an interesting piece because again no words were involved, instead it was made of sounds that you made via interactivity. This got me re-thinking the idea of a poem, however in terms of my essay, again I think this may be too much of an abstract idea?? Not sure though on what is allowed.
Another artist that I looked at was Aya Natalia Karpinska. Her work called “Nobody Knows But You” looked really interesting however I couldn’t view it because it was apparently set up in a 3D space in a gallery. It gave the option to view video footage from the gallery but it was 13MB and I tried to download it but it didn’t work. What I could do though was download the words to the poem which was interesting and I’ll paste them below. Also I could look at a ‘map’ of the controls (how people in the gallery could interact with the piece) which was made of a playstation controller which I thought was very cool!! Wish I could view her work because she is the best I’ve found in terms of actually using poetry etc. I will try to look into her stuff a bit more.

should we leave without you
i need to talk to you just a little bit more
didn’t think hatred would be so
hard to move
a thick layer of fat on the
inside. doesn’t melt away with
the heat of love.
i want it out
to evaporate under the glare of confidence
i’ll spit every doubt
even if my teeth turn grime
in the process
i’ll let go
do something special
i began to chat with
the penthouse poet
with the smell of my slick salt skin
radiating into the still elevator non-air
i stink of youth.
she gives me eight floors of anecdotes
i look her up her verses are chill and old
of winter, absent neighbors
later later i see her at the salon
on our street i don’t say anything
turn my head and
watch my fingers become rose-red
i chose red again
i feel beautiful
wishing for the tremendous quiet
that will change me
strength of reality
fades when you don’t speak
it can curdle and get hard
like wintergarden rot
do i hate the wrong metaphors for healing,
i always tried to leak out the poison
or draw it out or have it evaporate
from my palms
buddha makes it seem so easy
i’ve written the notation for the
dispersion of negativity, and am
seeking voices to sing it for me
how much do you care
reach out to someone who isn’t there
separate mutliple falls from heaven
with a comma
then confess
i’ve picked my enemies
lined up like sharpened pencils
attack them in small multiples
small enough
to change nothing
Aya Natalia Karpinska text for VJ poem nobody knows but you Fall 2005

And below is her artists statement that explains better than I did about her piece.

“artist's statement
nobody knows but you was written for Double-Cute Battle Mode, an application prototype for a VJ (video jockey) remix battle. DCBM allows two players to combine visuals and special effects in a playful competition for screen space. Using joysticks, players plug their imagination into their computer and share a creative space in an intuitive video-game style interaction. The piece was conceived as a way to ease text back into an image-dominated culture by treating it simultaneously as a visual special effect and as a poem.
The twenty-three verses appear on a plane in three-dimensional space. A cube shape displays additional visuals. Both the cube and the plane may be scaled and rotated, and the reader has control over which verse or image is displayed.
You may notice in the image at top left, or while watching the documentation video, a twelve-year-old girl plopped down in front of the installation. She played with the piece on and off for three hours. She began singing the words, making up melodies and turning certain verses into refrains. There is a clear lack of literature that responds to the intellectual and creative needs of young people today. I hope that interactive writing can help to fill that gap.
The original DCBM program was created with Carlos J. Gómez de Llarena.
Aya Natalia Karpinska, Fall 2005”

Another piece that I found on this poetry festival site was a guy called Chris Funkhouser, and his piece was actually a mp3 track that I had to download to my computer. It was called ‘Found Poem’. It was great!! I was really hoping there would be visuals to accompany it but it didn’t. It was a great song though made out of something he had obviously found, which seemed to be a shopping list. It’s fantastic I reckon! It’s very funny too. Just for the fact that it’s funny to imagine someone making a list like this – it is very ransom and interesting. I don’t know how to get a copy of the lyrics though so I will just have to listen to it and copy them out from what I hear…

(it starts with saying where and when he found the poem but I can’t really understand it so I won’t type it)
“make a list real quick
1. necklace like mine.
2. green socks.
3. jewelry box
4. Tupperware
5. toaster
6. sweaters
7. cell phone cable and Velcro
8. remote caddy
9. salt and pepper shakers
10. toothbrush replacement for sonic care
11. return clock to shop-rite”

(then it does some repetition of some of these things and digitally fiddles with them etc)
I find it interesting how you can (I think) clearly tell the gender and possibly age of this person by the things on this list. This is abstracted by the fact the voice is a young man’s. This is evidentially taking a leaf out of performance poetry’s book, as the way he uses his voice is entertaining and reliant on a beat. Obviously this is because it is used in a song so there is an actual beat in the background, but of course it goes further than this.

Well now I am going to take a break and perhaps come back to my research later tonight, as there are plenty more artists in this list that I still have yet to have a look at. I also saw Jason from our Uni in this list haha. I was actually contemplating using him, however I haven't seen many of his works that are text based - however I do like his little improvisational movies called 'Staggering Legends of the Inane' which I would regard as poetry, prose poetry, and they are performed in a beat type way, however they are hardly digital appart from the fact that they are done with a digital camera, and they are in no way interactive. But they are still very interesting to me and perhaps I will think about it further, or perhaps I should just generally ask in class what is considered good or too abstract to be called 'cyber poetry' for our assignment. I am hoping to get my artist for my essay by the end of this weekend (it is currently Saturday night).

23rd August

This week I am hoping to get into doing my cyber poet essay thing but I can't find a cyber poet that I like, which is obviously quite a bit problem. more than that, i can't seem to find any cyber poetry AT ALL. everything i open that calls itself cyberpoetry is either cyber art, non poetry related or it is just poetry on the net. If it is actual cyberpoetry, it is very bad, and usually created just of some crappy links from some of the words. I did better stuff in first year uni. Maybe I should just write about myself... hah. I sort of know what I want to do, flash wise, but i don't know how to do it because I have downloaded a 'revolving room' or '360 degrees' fla. file from the net but it doesn't work when i open it for some reason - i'm sure it's probably my fault not theirs but either way I can't do it.

I'm hoping to make it in flash, that is if i remember how to use it.

I can't remember if i said it before in the last narrator post, but I was making it read out my 'msn' conversation one time, just with all the speeds etc on normal, and it sounded really good. Some of it was not at all understandable, and i was reading the conversation along with it so i can't quite tell how understandable it would be if you couldn't read it at the same time. it sounded like a movie script because it had to say the persons name of who was talking before they spoke, and due to the slack grammar that people use on msn, for example no full stops, the pitch of the narrator's voice at the end of each line was funny. But the best part of all was when there was a smiley face on the page because narrator would describe the emotion of the smiley, so if there was a heart on the screen it would say 'red heart' or if there was a frowny face it would say 'disappointed face' or disappointed smiley' - can't remember but it was something like that. It was like a conversation between two people ecxept they both sounded exactly the same or something. It was really fun to listen to.

narrator art

I have been playing with Narrator on the computer and have made a few short things that I enjoy hearing it say. I have also tried to download a box to load the text in to (as we were talking about in class) but the downloads have always rendered unsuccessful or something and keep saying that there are errors :s

the first narrator poem is about love. but to listen to it you have to turn down the pitch of 'Sam narrator' to the slowest it will go (number 1), as i've found this makes it sound drunk. this is the line i feed into it:

"love me love me i want you to love me love me so much backspace backspace lovovovovovovovovovove mmmmm i said love me love me i want you to love me love me so much mmmmmmmmmmmm backspace editable edit editit editedi editable editablelele backspace backspace backspace backspace editiblelelelelelelel"

I guess it is obviously about saying things and then trying to change what you said by editing it.

The other one that i made should be listened to at the normal microsoft Sam speed of 5, and it about art:

"art arty tarty arttart art tart atreeee arty arty tarty tartarararararararty tart tart tart tart weeb tart web webtart web art webtartartart webt webt webt art weeb tart weeb tart"

the 'weeb' came about because i didn't like the way narrator pronounced 'web' however 'weeb' doesn't sound correct either but it still works well for the piece.

Note that these may not be completely correct to how i wrote them because i did not copy and paste them but wrote them out as i am on a different computer so for example i may have got the number of m's in 'mmmmmmmmmmmmm' wrong.

examples of what we did in class today with pictexter

13th August

Today I looked up text generators on the internet but didn’t find anything very good in google. In fact the closest thing I could find to a text generator for something that generated what they called ‘bad gothic poetry’. http://www.jbrowse.com/text/generator.shtml
Which does something along the lines of taking random lines from gothic literature and sticking them together in either an epic or a sonnet etc. However on the site they continually refer to it as ‘Goth poetry’ and even mention, very briefly, the subculture of ‘Goths’, which leads me to believe that these people are not really concerned at all with what I am calling ‘gothic literature’. On the site it claimed that this was the project from whence this generator came about,

“This goth poetry generator is part of a larger project to do with steganography. At one point, it was necessary to generate a lot of 'noise' data within which to hide encrypted 'signal' data. The grammar-based generator used here was created to produce a large amount of junk data which cannot easily be distinguished from real text without human intervention.”

I don’t even know what steganography is. Neither does Microsoft Word, but neither Word nor myself are very good at spelling it seems.

Today I also looked up the creative writing exercises on learning @ Griffith, while I was actually trying to find those text generators there that we had looked at in class. Not realizing that they were under the surreal section, I went looking in other sections first, such as the image section. I have to say that I’ve never used things like exercised or techniques to create a poem, and the haiku that I created was just atrocious because I wanted to move on to the next section. So basically, over all this is a very new way of looking at writing for me. I don’t like to think that I am merely a text generator.

I had a technical problem with the surrealist exercises, once I found them. As I could not view any of the text in the ‘exquisite corpse’ piece (such as the text telling me what it was etc), Nor could I view the examples of it. But I could view all the fish fine! I also couldn’t view the examples in other section such as the ‘known into the unknown’. At this point, I have to admit, I gave up completely. But I liked the sounds in it.

Oh I also downloaded google sketchup and have been looking at it but I cannot really work it out at this stage... there is a postwoman on the screen.... and that's about all that I can figure out. I guess you place her in front of a house on google earth?

12th August

http://matcmadison.edu/mchristoffel/poetry/

This weeks looking up of internet poetry landed me on this site where I proceeded to look at the piece ‘spring cityscape’ by Michael Christoffel, as it looked quite appealing. However, it was a very simple piece. A short poem that was chopped up and moved around rather fast (almost too fast to read) until it disappeared again. I assume that this is obviously a metaphor for the city itself.

I then looked at another piece by the same guy. This one was called ‘pyrotechnic cells’. I found this one more interesting even though, technically, it was probably even simpler. I think that one thing that made a difference was the colours used. In the first piece, the colours were pale blues pinks yellows etc (probably to symbolize ‘spring’) but in this one the background was black and the words were reds and oranges, making them stand out far more. The creator Michael Christoffel, made a short blurb saying that he was still working on this one, but I can’t tell if that is just old or not because it seems finished to me.

With both of his pieces; I would have liked to hear some sound involved, as the supposedly shocking words, without any sort of accompaniment, were not as striking as they could have been. Also both pieces were extremely short, therefore the artist did not hold my attention for as long as he could have, and I didn’t feel that the small amount of words had much of an impact on me in terms of what he was actually saying.

10th August

Recapping on some stuff I have been thinking about over the week:

I shared some ideas in class about my 3D words and they are as follows: These ideas are about thinking of words in an installation style space.

Use of the word SPLIT: It would be cut into sections, maybe only two sections 'sp' and 'lit' or 'spl' and 'it' or something like that. and the parts would be on opposite ends of a large bare room.

I was also thinking of making a big word that was hollowed out on one side so that people could in effect 'slot' themselves inside it and practically feel trapped in the word in almost a nightmarish way. After ages of trying to think of ways to use the word 'phantasmagoria', I settled on using this word for this idea due to it's long shape and also it's dream-like meaning, but i'm still not sure if this is the final word that I would use here.

I also had this other idea of 'words to be stepped on', originally coming from thoughts of working with scale, and after all this thinking about BIG words I was considering how to make them very small, perhaps so small that they could be crushed. But issues arrised with this such as how does one make it so that the wors is still readable after it was crushed? and what would one make it with? (other than the only thing that i can think of which is pretzels). I then thought of having words projected up onto the walls or ceiling as well to draw the attention away from the floor so that the stepping on of something would come as more of a surprise, and these words could make a mental connection for the stepee, such as 'snail'.

I also had ideas about texture such as making a word with a latex covering so that it felt and looked like skin. This word, which I innitially thought would be 'skin', morphed into something more dangerous such as 'repulsive' or 'volatile' or something along those lines, to make a statement about the female body and some people's belief that it is dirty and inadequate to the male body. I think I could take this idea a lot further so I will keep thinking about it.


List poem for word 'Broadwater' (i'm sorry, i know i keep bringing strange new words into the fold and changing my words around all the time, but I suppose my excuse is that it is all part of my thinking process and this journal is some kind of real-time brainstorm of ideas)

I wish I had some letters I could scratch into a bench.
The stranger tells me of how his baby died. Says she had a name like mine.
Wonder what the fishermen know about the full moon.
I almost slipped taking photos of the burning boat.
Cars bright like neon flash past like signs.
I look like I haven't been kissed in a long time.
Stingrays ticklish under my hand.
The stranger mumbles broken language.
I wish I had some letters I could scratch into a bench.
Flashy flash flash.
Broken language kiss.
A name like mine in a burning boat.
Scratch into a bench.
A long
long
time.

looking up some e-poetry

I had a look at the InFlect website and found some inspiration in some of the pieces there, for example:

John Sparrow – “Eye in the Making”

At first I didn’t know if I liked this or not because after waiting for ages for it to load it only seemed to be a tiny image, but once I found that you could click on the words I enjoyed my experience with it. This poem is almost completely interactive, and the experience is heightened by the addition of the sound elements within it. The graphic element is pretty simple, just a black screen with some mediocre little images of walking through a building, but I’m sure it relates somehow, and I do like it better than I would if it didn’t have any pictures or moving images at all. I’m glad I turned my speakers on in preparation of watching this because I enjoyed the sounds in it – the random fragments of someone talking mirrored the fragments of words that were being created, and also gave you a sense that this was a poem, which may have been lost if the sounds were just music.

The way this piece gave me inspiration was the way that the poem was constructed purely through interactivity as you had to press on the words to make more words come up. I assume this was done in flash but I don’t entirely know how. However I found that I didn’t ever bother to read any of the text, finding myself more carried away with the interactivity and the sounds, also every time I tried to read the words the lines seemed far too abstracted to really mean anything. I think Sparrow should have made this piece a bit longer, in the info page it says this piece is created of 3 lots of text, which doesn’t seem like very much to me. I would have enjoyed being able to be in the experience for longer, and I found myself repeating the whole thing just to try and draw it out.

Next I wanted to chose a piece that was by a woman (from the InFlect site) to compare with the Sparrow piece, so I looked at “House” by Mary Flanagan. It ended up being a zip file that I had to download to my computer, I think because it works on the basis of what your computer is doing. I thought it was a nice idea, but it came up rather small on my screen (about 3 or 4 inches wide) and I don’t know how to get it any bigger or whether it is meant to be this size. Therefore it’s hard to read the text. The page doesn’t seem to change much, just the amount of ‘houses’ can become more or less, and the text can change. You can use your mouse to pull the houses around, and if you pull them in close to you the text is easier to read, but you can only see a bit of it at a time.

I let it just sit for a while on my computer while I did other things then went back to check on it and found that while the houses were distanced from the screen there was text floating very close past the screen which looked cool, and then I did it again and the houses were off in the left hand corner, but they were no longer houses and just boxes. Overall (I may just be unaware of how it works) I couldn’t see how it was a very interactive piece, and again, like the last one, I didn’t feel compelled to even want to read the text, and the graphic and interactive elements seemed more interesting. What I did like about the placement of the text in this one was that it wasn’t always the right way up, so that if you did read a line you would have to turn your head and move your body, which is interactive in another level. I didn’t draw too much inspiration from this piece but I suppose it did make me think about colour and also 3D spacing, which the first piece did not have. This piece seems more sophisticated in the way that it is made (due to the 3D effects and the movement of the text and everything else, but less involving for the onlooker perhaps.

update on last post

i just found this one in googlism:

"Phantasmagoria is a shorts destroyer"

HAHAHAHA i like it.

some class exercises

Feelings
Fuck
Expression
Fuck
Passion
Fuck
Rhythm
Fuck
Realities
Fuck
Words
Fuck
Black
Fuck
Rhyme
Fuck
Personal
Fuck
Thoughts
Fuck


I know this is very simple, but there are a few reasons for it. I think it is about frustration, not only for the words themselves, and their meanings (obviously) and the task, but just a general feeling. I suppose it speaks for itself really. It is said in a one word per beat way.


I want
Passion
I want
Expression
Give me
Rhythm
Give me
Words
I have
Thoughts
I have
Realities
I have
blankness
Give me
Feeling
Make it
Personal
Make it
Rhyme

***

Words that I’m thinking about for the 3D task, and their listings.

SPLIT
Lip
Relationship
Fabric
Heart
Crack
Hair

List Poem

Pick at my lips, to make them bleed, dry, creviced.
Picking at me, always picking at me, make me in two.
Like a shirt that doesn’t quite fit, squeezing over one’s head.
Pain in the chest like something dark spilling out under my ribcage.
Cracks in dry earth longing for rain.
In the shower, wet hair tangled around my fingers, tangled around my legs, tangled in
the plughole.

A few from Googlism: (ones in bold are my favourites)
split is
split is being healed
split is actually a good thing
split is coming
split is destroyed
split is on monday
split is one of croatia's major ports
split is enough to
split is george
split is a possibility
split is amicable
split is removed
split is good for users
split is a 32
split is denied
split is here
split is "historically inevitable" russia's first president stated in an interview on sunday that
split is risky
split is it? how does it affect investors?
split is well timed
split is extreme and unjustified
split is the economic and administrative center of middle dalmatiasplit is on monday april 1
split is located along the dalmatian coast of the mediterraneansplit is 2
split is 3" lid and 3" base* actual weight 16lbssplit is enough to turn at&t around by scott moritz senior writer 10/24/00 3
split is about to become the go
split is true
split is effective april 8
split is george soros
split is heard best at the hearts second intercostal space on the thoracic cavitysplit is good omen for s
split is a decision by the company's board of directors to increase the number of shares that are outstanding by issuing more

SPASM

Writhing
Body
Fast
Floor
Frightened

A few from Googlism. these ones remind me of the stuff talked about in the video in week one for some reason. (take special note of the one ‘spasm is virtual reality’) (faves in bold)

spasm is characterized by intermittent or continuous
spasm is characterized by intermittent or continuous twitching of one side of the face
spasm is a parallel molecular dynamics code that runs on any message passing systems supporting mpi
spasm is an explosive mixture of cyberpunk and social critique
spasm is the 1990s
spasm is a condition characterized by
spasms of one side of the face
spasm is a benign hyperactivity of the muscles enervated by the facial nerve
spasm is a condition of intermittent
spasm is virtual reality
spasm is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by frequent
spasm is an uncoordinated contraction of the muscles of the esophagus
spasm is a
spasm is an assembler for reactos / wine / win32 pe files production
spasm is a neuromuscular disorder characterized by frequent involuntary contractions of the muscles on one side of the face
spasm is a movement disorder which causes the muscles on one side of the face to contractspasm is a condition in which there are involuntary
spasms of the facial muscles so that the eye blinks or closes and the face draws upward to one
spasm is usually an intermittent twitching of the eyelid muscle which can lead to forced closure of the eye


PHANTASMAGORIA

Shadow
Dream
Image
Vision
Shapeshifting
Changing
transforming

A few from Googlism: (faves in bold)

phantasmagoria is very easy
phantasmagoria is the performance of david ryall as sir nikolas valentine
phantasmagoria is wide ranging
phantasmagoria is indeed a masterpiece combining horrific visual imaginary and moody ambient music with an engaging plot
phantasmagoria is easily surpassed by the sex scenes in this game which include frontal nudity and bondage
phantasmagoria is the best place to find any information concerning phantasmagoria
phantasmagoria is no exception to this
phantasmagoria is a great adventure game
phantasmagoria is a constantly changing phenomenon
phantasmagoria is
phantasmagoria is just one of the featured games at 1stcdrom
phantasmagoria is that it's an easy enough game
phantasmagoria is ominous and forbidding
phantasmagoria is easy
phantasmagoria is easy enough without online hints
phantasmagoria is a collection of four of his musical fantasy works for chamber orchestra that have been written over the last twenty
phantasmagoria is a fantastic sequence of haphazardly associative imagery
phantasmagoria is intended for readers with a more than casual interest in seriously collecting king


Googlisms of my name below. some are quite boring, but i like being perfect for the garden. And this is actually all of them, not just a sample.

alinta is working with alcoa to jointly develop energy efficient
alinta is in the business of delivering reliable
alinta is run for
alinta is a vigorous plant with a very high early yield
alinta is a high yielding disease
alinta is hanging on to a cross beam
alinta is a sandy beach were the visitors can enjoy also the sea sports
alinta is the first strawberry to fruit year round
alinta is disease resistant and perfect for the home garden
alinta is a rather erratic mage and priestess
alinta is wa’s major distributor & retailer of natural gas with customers in perth
alinta is lorraine mafi
alinta is working on the recently formed youth foundation
alinta is expecting revenue per module operating at full capacity of between $40 million and $100 million a year
alinta is very much being done in a way to ensure that alinta is a publicly listed west australian based company
alinta is a campus catholic community check our home page
alinta is the daughter of jesse lee ott and ruby childers