I feel this will be kind of a continuation of the discussion from Dwarf fortress, where is the poetry created, can algorithms and computer code create poetry, or is it something only humans can do?
What?
Marie (don’t know the blog URL, or I would have linked it) in my elit class, presented two twitter bots, pentametron & poem.exe. The idea (as I understood it) was to look at these similar, but different twitter bots, and think about the idea of machine made poetry, algorithms writing, and who is doing the poetry bit.
What do they do?
The bots are different in how they work, the first one, Pentametron, rhymes sentences, its excellent in doing just that. It probably uses the twitter api to get lots of tweets, then runs them tough a phonetic database, and getting witch sentence rhymes with what. This do me is cool, the idea of doing this would never occur to me. Now to read it, you should look at the account on twitter, following it is not as good, as the tweets are posted at different times, and if just one pops up in your feed, it would make no sense.
Is it cool, yes, is it poetry, yes, is it the algorithm creating poetry or is it the algorithm in itself created by a human that is the poetry, I don’t know. Now we are entering the realm of dwarf fortress, and its algorithm’s, and what is poetry/elit.
Before we go further into that, let’s look at the other bot.
@poem.exe, is a bot that takes poems from a collection, then it takes random lines from different poems, look at the poem, does it have a theme? It looks for key words, does several sentences contain the word “fall” then its themed, and it published the poem. I think this I funny, and imaginative, the poems do not always work, but when they do, at least in my opinion, they are inseparable from “real” poems. It lacks rhythm, and that is the main “flaw” of poem.exe, the poems may work in theme, but not in rhythm. Now I may be in the minority when saying that this is poetry, but for me the poetry is created when the reader feels something, and if that happens in “random” generation of poems, for me that is art.
What is art is a huuuge discussion, and I will not go into it, for I am neither qualified, interested, or have the time, but, in my understanding, many talk about art in connection with emotion.
Ok, now where is the art, the poetry?
In the way code art, and digital art, I think the creation of these bots, and the code that creates them, is poetry, or art in some kind. Furthermore, I think the algorithms create poems, and just because the computer cannot feel, or imbue the poems with feeling, it does not mean that the reader cannot feel, something, at least be entertained by the bot.
In the same way that dwarf fortress creates complex worlds with huge amounts of characters and events, that is a work of literature. In my opinion is literature, even if a human can create a “better” more sensible world, maybe, that does not reduce the work of the bot, or algorithm. But all that is more my opinion, but I think its fair to say, that if the poetry, or story or whatever, can be mistaken for a work created by a human, is it that different? And I wish that Marie, in her presentation, switched the human poem for the bot created poem, and got us to look at them for a while, then ask if we could see the difference, then reveal that the bot created what we thought was a human work.
Daniel klausen 