Hello, World

The Infinite Adventure Machine (prototype 01) (by David Benqué)

“While fully automatic story generation remains an unsolved problem for computer science, this project explores the links between imagination and computation. Tales and myths; the core narratives of human culture, have been transmitted for generations through various technologies and media. What new forms might they take through digital formats and Artificial Intelligence?

“Based on the work of Vladimir Propp, who reduced the structure of russian folk-tales to 31 basic functions, TIAM aims to question the limitations and implications of attempts at programming language and narrative.

“Because the program is unable to deliver a finished story, rather only a crude synopsis and illustrations, users have to improvise, filling the gaps with their imagination and making up for the technology’s shortcomings.”

Dear future child: we’re going to have so much fun when you arrive. Promise.  

In other words, get out of your comfort zone and do something less boring instead. 

viafrank:

by Nicole Lavelle for her show at Stumptown Coffee in Portland.

“Because it is the triumph of a lack of planning –both for good and bad. It’s chaos –and whether you say that with a gasp of despair or glee or both is up to you. Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.”

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—China Miéville

I’m heading to Latvia today to run poetry/performance workshops, feature at a local poetry festival, survey the local slam scene and deliver a lecture on the relationship between my city and my poetry. I get to spend the time with poet, performer and novelist Aoife Mannix, and I’ll be travelling with my brand new second-hand Bronica ETRSI. Looking forward to a few days out of the country… 

“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to go beyond the limitations of the author, it will continue to have a meaning only when it is read by a single person and passes through his mental circuits. Only the ability to be read by a given individual proves that what is written shares in the power of writing, a power based on something that goes beyond the individual. The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say “I read, therefore it writes.””

- from Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. (via viafrank)