Repl Electric - The Stars

Livecoding is a performance where a programmer creates a piece of art or music in front of a live audience. The performances often rely heavily on generative approaches as the programmer-musician codes complex music and visuals on the fly.

Programming in front of a live audience is pretty far over on the daring side of activities you can do on a stage. It takes a somewhat rare combination of visual, music, and programming skills to pull it off.

Repl Electric is a livecoding artist who works with the Overtone and Shadertone  libraries using the Clojure programming language. He has some upcoming live performances listed on his site, as well as recordings of previous performances.

Blood and Cowardice
&
God’s Thoughts in Nebuchadnezzar

These aren’t quite NaNoGenMo 2015 novels. While a few people have already posted their first novels, these two are technically based on code that Martin O'Leary wrote in October.

Vocab-mashup is a Python script that takes two source texts and uses the structure of one and the vocabulary of the other while respecting parts-of-speech. In this case, Pride and Prejudice crossed with Treasure Island gives us Blood and Cowardice, the rip-roaring tale of what happens when a poor man of large luck moves into Morgan Road; and God’s Thoughts in Nebuchadnezzar, which tells the story of what happens when God follows a Great Fire down a Fire-Tower, or what happens when you mash Alice up with The King James Bible.

Baroque Encodings: A Degenerative Novel

Baroque Encodings, by d-baker, is an entry from NaNoGenMo 2014. It uses two strategies: the first chapter is written by taking sentences from existing novels, swapping some words out, and stringing them together. The next chapter is made by feeding the first chapter into a Markov-chain-like algorithm, which is then in turn fed into the same algorithm to create the third chapter, and so on. The novel slowly degenerates, but in a way that focuses its output rather than the more common dissolution into noise. 

The final chapter repeats the themes built up in previous chapters, in a post-singularity tale of nature transubstantiated into the machine. The characters spontaneously generated by the text end up taking on a life of their own. The arrival of the prototype in the first chapter inexorably leads to the world of ocean-colored nanotechnologies soaked in metaphor of the final chapter.

https://github.com/d-baker/NaNoGenMo-2014

NaNoGenMo 2015 Starts Today

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone makes.

https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015

Twitter Hashtag

The Seeker (2014)

The Seeker by thricedotted, is, I think, my favorite work from NaNoGenMo 2014. It’s the autobiography of an AI trying to learn about human behavior by reading WikiHow. Step by step, it traces the story of the algorithm, fumbling and dreaming of the alien behaviors it is trying to comprehend.

The book is carefully structured, with the repetition of the Work, Scan, Imagine loop gradually building towards a conclusion. While each individual page is relies on a sense of ambiguous apophenia, its position in the structure hints at the story of an AI struggling to come to terms with humanity. 

The congruence between the algorithm and the fictional story that frames it is one reason why this works so well, I think. There’s enough transparency that we can anticipate the gradual learning process, giving each page a place in the progression. This is a documentation of an algorithm, more literally than usual.

While you’re unlikely to find it a page turner, when I read it I do feel as if the machine author’s final statement is a fitting conclusion to the work as a whole.

https://github.com/thricedotted/theseeker/

https://github.com/thricedotted/theseeker/raw/master/the_seeker.pdf

Rant

NaNoGenMo 2015 is almost here. There’s a lot of resources for text generation available, but here’s one more that is fairly complete in itself.

Rant is a language for procedurally generating text, created by Nicholas Fleck. It’s got a lot of built-in support for various kinds of variation. Even if you don’t want to use it directly it’s got a lot of ideas to be inspired by, and the C# code is MIT-licensed.

https://github.com/TheBerkin/Rant

ProcJam is coming, and that probably means that there are a bunch of you who are trying to figure out how to create meshes in Unity from scratch. 

Well, this video should help with that. While it is specifically focused on extruding a shape along a spline to create a new mesh, many of the technical details are important considerations for creating any mesh in Unity.

This stuff is also useful for people who aren’t using Unity, though some of the technical details will be different if you use, say, a right-handed environment.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9RK6O2kOKo)

language after the writing machine

There’s a dark side to procedural generation. A way to use it for evil rather than good. Spambots.

everest pipkin was recently on an Indiecade panel with some other developers, each talking about something that matters. In this case, spambots.

As it turns out, spambots have a lot to say about language, human interaction, and living in the age of machines that talk to machines. The accidental poetry that attempts to evade the robotic guardians at our gates ends up creating dadaist juxtapositions that mean more to us than they intended.

https://medium.com/@everestpipkin/language-after-the-writing-machine-f3bff4f73408

NaNoGenMo 2015

It’s almost that time of year again! The official github repository and information clearing house for National Novel Generation Month 2015 has been created, and there are already a bunch of of people who have posted their intent to participate. Come on and join them!

Like in past years, there’s an ongoing thread of text generation resources people have found, so even if you’re not participating (though you really should!) there’s a bunch of useful links to be found.

NaNoGenMo 2015 begins on November 1st, and the repository is here: https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2015

Tracery

Kate Compton’s contribution to last year’s ProcJam grew into a full-fledged JavaScript library with its own interactive tutorials. If you want to try out a recursive templating approach to generating text, this is a good place to start. 

The design intent was to make it easy to use, like Twine. It’s not quite at that stage, but it is an accessible way to begin playing around with procedurally generating text. If you’re looking for a way to participate in ProcJam or NaNoGenMo, this might be a good starting point.

The library: https://github.com/galaxykate/tracery
Interactive tutorial: http://www.crystalcodepalace.com/traceryTut.html
Research paper: https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/INT/INT7/paper/viewFile/9266/9216