Big Writing

When writing goes generative, collaborative, interactive, ludic, and/or site-specific. A larger-than-ordinary poetics.

[bigwriting]

Screencap from Verbosity. "The land yields valuable letters. Harvest letters by constructing buildings over them. Construct buildings by spelling them." (Spoilers: if you're stuck, try this list of words.) (via)

[bigwriting]

Vector display Twitter client, via MAKE.

[bigwriting]

(via IndieGames.com - Title: Subtitle - an atypical, textual take on a platformer)

[concordancepoems-blog]

RAPIDLY

and roofs are talking rapidly all together there happens or a but of rapidly foes gobs the an my bruising smile; as rapidly upon the jiggled norm / life boosts herself rapidly at me through sagging nakedness until it go rapidly to bed: i will have watched certain petals rapidly wish in the corners pass loudly and gondola rapidly denizens of Omaha Altoona five other fingers snitch rapidly through mist a defunct He. spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water who step smoothly and rapidly along this pole over sea, in the afternoon. rapidly a reddish ant travels or threes which fiercely rapidly pass with their breaths) nowehere else imagine Now rapidly this (a forest has

From: McBride, Katharine Winters. A Concordance to the Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1989. Print. The Cornell Concordances.

[nossidge]

i am the path along unseen heather

Snowball (also called a Chaterism): A poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer. One of the constrained writing techniques utilised by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature).

o we all have heard people believe anything

Given the mathematical genesis of the Oulipo and the interest in the movement among other programmers, I thought that someone must have created a program to generate these, and I was surprised that I couldn’t find one even after some pretty thorough Googling. So I wrote one myself. The C++ code is here.

It takes input from a text file which contains novels from Project Gutenberg, scans for word pairs where the second word is longer by one letter, and builds up a poem using Markov chains.

i am the dawn light before anybody expected something disorderly

The poems in this post were all created by the program. They have not been edited.

i am the very great change

[bigwriting]

Animated performance of CRAPCHA (Completely Ridiculous And Phony Captcha that Hassles for Amusement).

[bigwriting]

Animated GIF of output from molleindustria's The Definition of Games.

[bigwriting]

Guitar notes translated into keystrokes. (via)

[bigwriting]

Screencap from the sadly defunct @samsabot.

[bigwriting]

A random photo from my Flickr contacts, as filtered through space claw. (via)

[bigwriting]

Jonathan Puckey's Special Box Typography.

[bigwriting]

Bettina Schneebeli's basil.js project, which appears to be augmenting each word in a text with an image found on Amazon by searching for that word. Basil.js is a scripting library, spiritually similar to Processing, for Adobe InDesign. (via)

[nybots]

What Are Bots?

Bots are contraptions that humans have set into motion across the Internet.

Bots are engines of whimsy and chaos, who will sometimes try and convince you they can make penises bigger.

Bots are scavengers who bend and glue our cast-off word-garbage into scrapbooks, hoping we’ll be impressed.

Bots are rarely perfect, and that is what makes them human.

[bigwriting]

"Doggy is a rather difficult to read font-family rendering words as dogs through the OpenType ligature feature. Depending on the length of a word the dog respectively gets longer or shorter. One letter words result in a sitting dog." Among other fonts from Languste: Baguette, Noncept, Alefbet ("a reimagination of the Phoenician alphabet").

[bigwriting]

Video of Mimi Yin's Prosaic. "The thesis put forth in Prosaic is that surprise comes not from randomness, chaos and disorder, but instead from the establishment and subsequent disruption and disintegration of a highly ordered system."

[bigwriting]

A thorough and insightful review. Includes twitter bots, parodies, microfiction, and more.

[bigwriting]

Screenshot from Times Haiku.