Katie Haegele of LaLaTheory writes a bi-weekly column for the Philadelphia Inquirer titled DigitaLit. I like to republish her articles here because of their unique combination of writing, reading and digital art. Here’s this week’s article (I added the links.)

The words go round and round and they come out here

Have you ever seen voice-recognition software at work?

Once it’s running on your computer, you start talking, and your words appear on the screen as though a phantom stenographer were typing them, or like a player piano that makes text instead of music.

Kurt Newman is a person who makes music – an improvisational guitarist, actually – and one day he watched with fascination as one of his professors used a voice-recognition program to write a paper. He wondered: What would a program like that do with guitar music?

Maybe it would treat it as a voice, and attempt to make sense of the sounds as words of English.

He decided to find out, and the resulting experiment was just the kind of collaboration he and his wife, poet Michelle Detorie, had been trying to find.

Detorie, who lives with Newman in Goleta, Calif., is a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts literary fellow. Her big interest is in divination – the ancient practice of reading signs in nature to answer questions or predict the future.

“Divination is an attempt to learn or ‘figure out’ something by interpreting omens or some sort of data: tea leaves, ashes, entrails, the movements of animals, weather, and other things,” Detorie explained in an e-mail interview. Astrology is a kind of divination; so is feng shui.

Detorie was initially interested in divination practiced by women, and wrote a series of poems on the subject.

One form that particularly captured her imagination was daphnomancy, in which a diviner burns branches of a laurel tree and interprets the sounds made as they crackle on the fire.

For some time Detorie and Newman had wanted to bring their music and poetry together, but nothing they’d thought of seemed right. They didn’t want the music to be just a backdrop for the text, nor did they want poetry that interpreted the music in some obvious way.

Perhaps using this artificial-intelligence tool as a kind of divining rod was the answer.

So Newman found one of the less expensive programs on the market, ViaVoice, and bought it on eBay for about $20.

“Michelle and I figured that the cheaper the software, the more likely it was to produce weird, and thus artistically interesting, glitches,” Newman said, also in an e-mail.

Then they primed it by feeding it language.

“You read passages into the computer, you feed the software documents,” Detorie said. “For the dictation process, I tried reading in funny voices. Kurt tried playing his guitar into the machine, but it didn’t really work for whole passages. For documents, I fed it all sorts of stuff – glossaries from art and biology textbooks, poems, articles from Wikipedia. I wanted to sort of stuff it with interesting vocabulary and different types of grammatical structures.”

When the software was ready, Newman and Detorie sat in front of their computer, and Newman began playing his guitar. As he made music, the machine spat out “incomprehensible chunks of text,” Detorie said – real words of English that looked like word salad, rather than sentences with semantic meaning.

Then she stepped into the role of diviner. As the text was being generated she looked for patterns and meaning and altered, amended, and shaped it into lines of poetry.

Detorie and Newman even treated some of their sessions like real acts of fortune-telling, asking questions of the process and looking for answers in the text.

“Most were questions we found on the Internet, like, ‘My daughter is always crying; what is the problem?’ Mostly we just picked questions that we liked.”

The spontaneously constructed poems, perhaps unsurprisingly, are noteworthy for their language, which has a strong musical quality.

“Owl on a low howl in a catacombed cave,” goes the lilting first line of the poem “an alliance of grammar.”

So far, the daphnomancy project has been performed live in Austin, Texas. Detorie also collected a number of the poems and arranged them into a chapbook, which she sells on the online art marketplace etsy.com. That, incidentally, was how I discovered the project, plinking around on the site one day as I shopped for a birthday present.

You wouldn’t call that divination, I guess – just good luck, and an ear tuned to whatever in the universe I might be able to overhear.

 

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Katie Haegele lives in Montgomery County. 

You can read some of her poems, essays, and other writing on her Web site, The La-La Theory (www.thelalatheory.com).

Multimedia: The more the merrier

Collaborations of writers, artists, musicians and programmers yield lively work. Born Magazine is a source

This week, as I watched some animated poems and “played” a piece of interactive fiction, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the more sophisticated pieces took more than one person to build. Artistic collaboration is nothing new, of course, but within the emerging world of digital literature it seems to be more important than ever.

Is the new media changing the way artists work?

Chris Joseph might not go that far. But as a writer who works in a variety of digital media, he’s well aware that joining forces with other artists can yield some very interesting results.

Joseph is Digital Writer in Residence at the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. His multimedia project Animalamina (www.animalamina.com) is an unusual and delightful piece of interactive poetry for children. He created it in collaboration with 12 visual artists.

“I think collaboration is very common, and almost essential, for a full multimedia project,” Joseph says. “Very few people have the full range of skills required – writing, music, art, programming.”

Taking his inspiration from the classic storybook teaching tool of ABCs, Joseph first composed poems featuring animals representing each letter of the alphabet. There are buzzing bumblebees, for instance, and “very very vultures being (very) rude.”

He envisioned the project as a traditional print piece, but worried he wouldn’t have much to add to the already well-trodden ground of ABC books. Digital art, by contrast, was hopping with possibilities, especially for his intended audience of kids 5 to 11 – people who understand interactions with computers much better than their parents do.

He described his idea to his visual artist friends and asked them for submissions. The artists, working in different media, contributed pictures that Joseph then animated in Flash. The resulting piece is a dynamic set of interactive, interconnected poetry animations set to sleek electronic music that Joseph composed.

One of the most striking aspects of the piece is the breadth of styles represented. The backdrop of one scene is a panoramic photograph of a view from a mountaintop; the user spins the image around using the cursor in order to see the view from all angles. The piece representing the letter C features animated cats that began life as charming paintings by Clare Drapper, bright, splashy creatures wearing loony expressions that put me in mind of the pets in George Booth’s New Yorker cartoons.

Simply put, Animalamina wouldn’t be nearly as interesting without multiple contributors.

“I think I’ve been pretty fortunate so far in my collaborating partners. All the Animalamina artists were friends, including a couple who I’ve only ever known online, which was more important to me than any kind of assessment of ‘quality,’ and I love the variety of styles that resulted. But I think it suggests a basic problem, which is finding and funding collaborators to work on multimedia projects,” Joseph said.

This is the very problem Born Magazine (www.bornmagazine.com) exists to solve.

Created in 1996 in Seattle as a print publication that facilitated linkups between artists and writers, Born went online the following year. Today it features collaborations between creators of traditional literature and artists who work in digital media.

The current issue includes an unnerving poem called “He Wants to Take Your Picture,” written by Susan Brown and brought to life by the art/design team Synthetic Infatuation. As retro-cute images slide around and tell their own story, the poem is recited by a robot voice that doesn’t get the inflection of American English even remotely right – you know it, it’s the terrifying “Agnes” voice from your Mac’s VoiceOver program. The piece is as much performance art or film as it is a print poem.

Scott Benish, the magazine’s online curator, explains that some of Born’s collaborations are set in motion by Born editors, who select a poem or short prose piece from the submissions they’ve received and pass it on to a visual artist, who then interprets it in “interactive media.” Other times a team works together throughout the process, blending words and visuals from their project’s inception.

“Design – visuals, interactivity and audio – has the potential to really enhance the understanding of the piece, or even completely change the interpretation of a piece, which can be interesting or unfortunate, depending on the point of view of the writer,” Benish said.

A potential pitfall? There had to be one; without risk there is no art. In other words, stay tuned. This literature is evolving every day.
Katie Haegele is a writer who lives in Montgomery County. Visit her at www.thelalatheory.com.
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http://www.philly.com/inquirer/entertainment/books/20070930_Multimedia__The_more_the_merrier.html

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