WebResources.htmlTEXTStMl-r>ԼԼ JanusNode: A Window To Janus

 

There is a wealth of computer-generated poetry (and related) resources on the Web. Because WWW sites come and go with such speed, it is futile to try to keep a resource like this up-to-date, but here's a few relevant sites that seem to be in for the long haul. [The links on this page require you to be connected to the WWW.]

First, here's a couple of the most relevant pre-defined Yahoo-searches for you to check out:

computer-generated writing

computer-generated poetry

dadaism


The best currently-maintained compilation of computer-generated writing tools, including every program I know of for the Macintosh, is maintained by Burning Press.


Perhaps the best jumping-off point for exploring poetry on the WWW is State University Of New York's Electronic Poetry Center.


JanusNodes evolved from generations of a program called McPoet, one version of which received a thoughtful and friendly write-up in the Circuits section of the New York Times on October 8, 1998. You can read the article, although you'll have to sign up for the (free) New York Times site to do so.


Wanna play Spot The Human?



Great places to start looking for interesting texts to paste into your JanusNode's Markov chaining function are U Penn's (formerly CMU's) Online Books Page and the Project Gutenberg page.


Marcel Duchamp did a lot to inspire my work on JanusNodes. I am sure would have loved them, and sorry he didn't live to see them. John Cage and William Burroughs probably would have appreciated them too.


I am a big fan of Tom Phillips' beautiful treated Victorian novel 'A Humument', which shares Janus's delight in finding new meaning in pre-constrained text. For a new-millenium (but much less-polished) twist on the idea, check out the treatment of Bill Gates' book at The Toad Head Project.


An under-appreciated means of using technology to automatically randomize texts is to use the automatic on-line translator, Babelfish. Here's an example of its power to introduce new meanings (or erode original meanings). I entered the following passage from Somerset Maugham's novel, The Moon And Sixpence:

"Each of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown to them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house. "

After a few translations, Babelfish had come up with this:

"Everyone of us is it we only in the world. It is closed in the test of the yellow copper and its box informarsi, which with its comrades the samples and the samples only having not a general value, the way, which is the relative direction vague and doubtful. We did not try pitifully to transport another those our treasures of internal, but that have we Energiericever it and therefore to go we not also to know into a unsuccessful, coastal way to the coast nevertheless, our comrades and disowned with them. We are like the people, which in the voltage in a country, of that the language he therefore much small of that, with the play those beautiful know and those deep with the things, which them say, to that the trivialities manual of the discussion they condemns its brain is with the ideas to only display that seething, the case and it it, which are the umbrella of the aunt of giardiniere in the accommodation. "


'The Complete Works Of Robot Johnson' is a project to translate the complete works of Blues legend Robert Johnson into JanusNode-executable rules, as suggested by my friend Chris Woods. To date I have only made tentative translations of a few songs, which come with your JanusNode. Check the 'Extension to Janus' page for more additions to the project in the coming months. Of course I encourage others to try their hand at coding either some of Johnson's songs, or some other lyrical oeuvre- or at improving the current Robot Johnson files. The early ones are particularly poorly-done. Let us know if you do better.


I am very interested in the use of evolutionary programming techniques as a means of automatically producing art under human aesthetic selection.


It seems certain that wholly-automatic musical generation will be perfected before wholly-automatic text generation, because the semantics of music are more forgiving than the semantics of language. Automatic musical generation is already doing pretty well. Check out David Copes' Experiments In Musical Intelligence (EMI). You can download sample compositions in the Sun (au) format here or MIDI files here, or buy a CD of EMI-generated music here. Some of it is quite fine.


To fully appreciate why the random is not really random (the greatest insight of modern history) try jumping to a random WWW link a few thousand times (I put a link to the left too so you won't have to keep coming back here.) Notice any regularities?


The coolest word tool on the web is PlumbDesign's visual thesaurus. It is poetry in itself.



Perhaps you'd like to visit Janus's sister site, the non-existent Paradox Card Company home page.


Wanna know what I do in real life? You are welcome to visit my web page.

 

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