Programming for Digital Art and Literature

READINGS

Course Texts

• Virtual Muse: Experiments in Computer Poetry. Charles Hartman, 1996. ISBN: 0805819878 [*REQUIRED*]

Hartman describes how programming has helped him probe poetry's aesthetic possibilities. He discusses the nature of poetry itself and his experiences with primitive computer-generated poetry programs and traces the development of more advanced hardware and software. The central question, Hartman says, "isn't exactly whether a poet or a computer writes the poem, but what kinds of collaboration might be interesting." He examines the effects of randomness, arbitrariness, and contingency on poetic composition...

• The Oulipo Compendium. Harry Matthews, Ed. 1998. ISBN: 0947757961

• Exercises in Style. Raymond Queneau, 1981. ISBN: 0811207897

• Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine. Bringsjord and Ferrucci, 1999 ISBN: 0805819878.

• Speech and Language Processing. Jurafsky and Martin, 2006. ISBN: 0131873210

• Creative Code - John Maeda

• Aaron's Code - H. Cohen & P. McCorduck

• Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art - I. Greenberg

• Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists - Reas & Fry

• Six Selections by the Oulipo (from New Media Reader) - N. Wardrip-Fruin

• Indeterminacy & Sentences - John Cage

• Post-script on Societies of Control - Gilles Deleuze

Agile & Refactoring

• Hacking and Refactoring by Eric S. Raymond

Summary

'The open-source movement and agile programming may be converging. While reading Martin Fowler's excellent book "Refactoring", I realized development by refactoring is a sharp description of the normal style of open-source hackers...'

• Martin Fowler's refactoring site

• Fowler's original refactoring book

• SE-Radio Refactoring pt1 (mp3)

• SE-Radio Refactoring pt2 (mp3)

• The Agile Manifesto

Recent Items

• The House That Jack Built - Jack Burnham's Concept of "Software" as a Metaphor for Art - E.A. Shanken

• Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of Brutus, A Storytelling Machine. - Bringsjord & Ferrucci.

• the Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems - J. Burnham

• An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning - Yudkowsky

• Animation, interpolation & Tweening - Penner

• Hacking and Painting - P. Graham

• Why extends is evil - A. Holub

Resources

• TREC 2005 Spam Public Corpora

• The Webb Spam Corpus

Articles

• 'What is Digital/Electronic Writing?' by Brian Kim Stefans. [original link]

• A Review of the Electronic Literature Collection - Edward Picot

'The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 1 (ELC1 for short) contains some extremely powerful, beautiful, clever, amusing and moving pieces of work, but it isn't entirely without flaws...'

• Scott Rettberg - CURATING AMBIGUITY: The Electronic Literature Collection, Volume One

In autumn 2006 the Electronic Literature Organization released the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. One, including selected works in New Media forms such as Hypertext Fiction, Kinetic Poetry, generative and combinatory forms, Network Writing, Codework, 3D, and Narrative Animations.

--Six Selections by the Oulipo - from the New Media Reader (pdf)

--The Garden of Forking Paths - Jorge Luis Borges

• Noah Wardfrip Fruin blogs on 'Reading Processes' (Hartman, Mac Low, Oulipo, Cage, etc.)

Reading Processes #1

Reading Processes #2: Hartman’s 'Virtual Muse'

Reading Processes #3: 'Radical Artifice' (Perloff, Cage, etc.

• 'Indeterminancy' - John Cage, Notes/About

• Notes Toward a Reading of Jackson Mac Low: 1 2 3 4

• Reading Potential: The Oulipo and the Meaning of Algorithms - Mark Wolff

• Paragraphs on Conceptual Art by Sol Lewitt

• Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings by Yoko Ono - Selections