l.o. 02: generative art

‘variations on a definition’ by poet and programmer allison parrish is a series of poems that were produced by breaking words down into numbers that correspond to their constituent sounds using a stats-based model of the english language. the program then automatically mixes and recombines these numbers to blur and corrupt the original phonetic features of the words used in the poems.

I admire how this project makes use of algorithmically-defined representation to highlight the malleability of language over space and time, especially in the context of the social internet and postmodern poetics. it’s a precise and elegant way to confuse language, which falls in line with parrish’s research on contemporary use of language at NYU.