[Purple-Blurb] Providential Digital Poetry this Wednesday

[Nick Montfort]

Dear Purple Blurb,

Our last Purple Blurb digital writing event for Spring 2010 is coming up:

  - with John Cayley and Daniel Howe, digital poets
    - presenting their Readers Project
      - in the usual room, MIT's 14E-310
        - on a *different* day than is usual: Wednesday
          - at a *different* time than is usual: 7:30-9pm

That is:

      John Cayley & Daniel Howe . The Readers Project
       MIT's 14E-310 . Wednesday April 28 . 7:30-9pm

Free and open to the public, no reservations required, as always. This 
time, we'll have a light supper buffet available after the event. I hope 
you can make it! Here's more on the presentation and the two poets who 
will be joining us:

The Readers Project is a collection of distributed, performative, 
quasi-autonomous poetic ‘Readers’ - active, procedural entities with 
distinct reading behaviors and strategies. We release these Readers onto 
inscribed surfaces that may be explicitly or implicitly, visibly or 
invisibly, constituted by their texts. Over time, the Readers will address 
themselves to a wide range of material - from conventional found texts, 
through poetic reconfigurations of appropriated (fairly-used) sources, to 
original compositions by the project’s collaborators, and so on.

Designed to support the creation of novel works of digital literature, 
Howe’s RiTa library, in which The Readers Project is implemented, provides 
a unique set of tools for artists and writers working in programmable 
media. Combining features of natural language processing, computational 
stylistics, and generative systems, RiTa enables a range of tasks, from 
statistical methods, to grammar-based generation, to linguistic database 
access (e.g., WordNet), to text-mining, to text-to-speech, to image, 
audio, & animation, all in real-time. RiTa is free and open-source and 
integrates with the popular Processing environment for digital arts 
programming.

JOHN CAYLEY

John Cayley writes digital media, particularly in the domain of poetry and 
poetics. Recent and ongoing projects include The Readers Project with 
Daniel Howe, imposition with Giles Perring, riverIsland, and what we will. 
Information on these and other works may be consulted at 
http://programmatology.shadoof.net. Cayley is a visiting professor at 
Brown University, Literary Arts Program.

DANIEL C. HOWE

Daniel C. Howe is a digital artist and researcher whose work explores the 
intersections of literature, computation, and procedural art practice. He 
recently received his PhD (on generative literary systems) from the Media 
Research Lab at NYU and was awarded a Computing Innovations fellowship 
from the National Science Foundation for 2010. He currently resides in 
Providence, RI where he teaches at Brown and RISD, and is a resident 
artist at AS220. His site: http://mrl.nyu.edu/~dhowe/

-- 
-   Nick Montfort         nickm at nickm.com     http://nickm.com
--
-   Associate Professor of Digital Media
  -  Program in Writing & Humanistic Studies, MIT
--  77 Massachusetts Avenue, 14N-233, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307