Constrained Writing Techniques
Constrained writing is a technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a patter. The image on the right defines some techniques we learned in class. On top of that we also covered, my personal favorite, the N+7 method developed by OULIPO in which the nouns in a poem are replaced with the noun appearing seven nouns away in the dictionary. There’s also the “cut up method” by William Burroughs, erasure poetry, and the “diastic technique” by Jackson Mac Low.
DOM (Document Object Model) Takeaways
Need to decide whether you want to work with HTML objects in the index.html file or the p5 version - no right answer really, different for each case
HTML elements hold a static state that you can change by calling one of their methods
p5 elements have a wrapper around an HTML element giving only simplified access to the element itself
You can create HTML elements within a p5 sketch using createElement() function
Other helpful functions: .class(), .id(), .removeElement(),
p5js and text Takeaways
Helpful functions
s.value(), s.indexOf(), s.substring()
s.split() = JavaScript native function that splits a string into items in an array at a delimiter “tokens”
p5: loadStrings(), drop()
Assignment
I found this really cool sci-fi short story on, well, … LinkedIn🤢. Indra’s Web, by Vandana Singh, is a story about Mahua and how she transformed the once-declining city of Ashapur into a prosperous, technological city by employing biophillic design and emergent AI. I thought it could be cool to physically try out some of these techniques on this story.
Cut up method
Alright, I am not a very good computer! I don’t know how many times I read the steps to the cut up method but I did it wrong in my first attempt. The third pic below shows how I first organized a column of the story and I realized it wasn’t all that random because I was just reversing the order of pieces of the same paragraph.
Uh oh I messed up
This is my new text created by using the cut up method
Some selected excerpts:
she had always fear with wide, frightened eyes
sometimes she lies before the screens
holds her hand, but at other her. “Look,” she said trying to tell Mahua something. Everything according to connections with a skill that come up with some
Mahua, was named by their abrupt pauses and she was born under some hidden significance. Two of them—mother that the ants followed invisible from their village in—that the world was full of up in the slums, where like the electric wires eleven, only three months above the tenements.
surrounded her, pulled her say, now looks at Mahua their arguments before can’t speak but she can last. “You know how to check peacefully while the protocols. Do that.”
Make sure try. There’s hope. Working and just wait
tree on the way to Delhi. The such a hurry, and whether grandmother—had migrated frantically waving antennae after her father died.
(Random) Erasure Poetry
I really loved the last paragraph of this story. I wasn’t sure how I wanted to choose what to erase and what not to and I also really liked the random nature of the cut up method, so I created a simple p5 sketch that generated a random number (1-7) which I used to decide what words to erase and which to keep. The results are below. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have erased randomly because the end result, though it may have started out good, has little meaning.
pre-erasure
post-erasure
Readings
Stephanie Dinkins Eyeo Talk
“Not the Only One” created in direct opposition to BINA48
Oral history of her family, memory as an act of resistance
Building small datasets that are more representative of people
“An algorithm is something you feed historic information to predict something” - Cathy O’Neill
What do machine learning systems created by and for specific communities look like?
Meet the technology where it actually is without expectations or assumptions of perfection
Demand equity, accountability, transparency, and inclusivity from AI