Electronic Poetry: Writing with Rules and Computation is an experimental writing workshop that introduces participants to the practice of procedural poetry writing—poems made by rules, constraints, appropriation, and chance—with digital tools freely available on the Internet. The workshop will focus on teaching students how to use Tracery, a computer language created by Kate Compton, that makes it easy to create expressive text generators with no prior knowledge of computer programming. Over the course of the workshop, students will be able to experiment with writing poems using this technique—creating a prototype for something that could be later developed on a larger scale. Mainstream attention on computer-generated text focuses on its supposed ability to supplant the professional writer, but here students will learn otherwise: computer-generated text can be useful, but it's far more interesting as a creative and poetic tool.
No previous coding experience necessary, all levels welcome.
Presented as part of the exhibition New Talent at the Wallach Art Gallery.
Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computational creativity. She is a Teacher at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master's degree in 2008.
Named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by the Village Voice in 2016, Allison's computer-generated poetry has recently been published in Ninth Letter and Vetch. She is the author of "@Everyword: The Book" (Instar, 2015), which collects the output of her popular long-term automated writing project that tweeted every word in the English language. The word game "Rewordable," designed by Allison in collaboration with Adam Simon and Tim Szetela, was published by Penguin Random House in August 2017 after a successful round of Kickstarter funding. Her first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, "Articulations," will be published by Counterpath in 2018. Allison is originally from West Bountiful, Utah and currently lives in Brooklyn.
