Using blog corpora from The Blog Authorship Corpus and the Political Blog Corpora, I have begun developing a simple blog-post generator for Enpersonator, the identity-creating software part of Automenon, an artwork in progress with Sofy Yuditskaya.
See Enpersonator in action here: http://soniayuditskaya.tumblr.com/
Enpersonator is in development here: http://github.com/virgildisgr4ce/Enpersonator. It requires the Python Tumblr library, which requires Django for its utilities. The Markov Generator is modified from Adam Parrish’s.
The current version uses all 5 of the blogs in the Political Blog Corpora, comprising 133,953 tokens. Not too shabby, but still not enough to avoid lots of wholesale reproductions.
If you’re using a *nix or BSD-based operating system and trying to use traceroute at home behind a NAT router, you probably have problems with intermediate routers timing out, i.e.:
3 * * * 4 * * * 5 * * * 6 * * *
Furthermore, you may have also noticed that Windows’ tracert program doesn’t have this problem. The Unix traceroute program uses a bunch of UDP packets on a bunch of client ports to do its magic, whereas tracert uses ICMP packets, which I guess would have to be port forwarded on your router normally. Regardless, the solution is to use:
traceroute -I targethost.com
This forces traceroute to use ICMP packets the way the Windows program does. Amazing! I’m sure there’s a downside to this approach, but so far it works like a charm.
This morning as I transitioned from somnolence to hypnagogia to wakefulness, it suddenly occurred to me to make my “14-unit love psyberpoem” a semi-recombinatory text-adventure game.
And here it is! Download the python script (v. 1.0)(rename it to .py…thanks for nothing, WordPress), or clone it from the git repo. If you have python installed (OS X and Unix users already do), just jump into a shell and type
python eros.py
…in the directory you downloaded the script and enjoy! Otherwise… install python 
I will try to find a way to implement the script interactively in a web browser.
Sketches of possible sculptural forms (these are roughly 8-10″ in height). The first four are my favorites:
Sound prototyping: A short composition of 4-7 sine wave oscillators harmonizing and disharmonizing:
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Two videos of synth design approaches: 8-bit R2R DAC and Schmidt trigger oscillator.
Lux Vocis is an interactive installation piece that draws laser portraits of a participant’s voice. Check out this demo at the ITP 2009 Winter Show:
Read the full NIME Conference Paper!
Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous. More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.
The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer. The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron. With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.
CHRONOTRONIC WONDER TRANSDUCER is a miniature discollective of musick artists and poet-inventors. Using a variety of means and methods, from hand-made electronics to custom-designed software, to conjure electromechanical invocations to dead gods and summon sound from the deep void of silence. CWT’s lineup includes:
Plastic tarp rain-sheds put up under the scaffolding next to the Tisch building on Broadway. The tarps really affect the space of the sidewalk-scaffolding corridor in an interesting way, making it feel more intentional and … agreeable.
These proposals all incorporate a mechanical mark-making method (hah) as well as a
Proposal: This laser drawing machine uses an enclosed system of a low-powered green laser and voice-coil actuated mirrors to draw figures on a stationary or scrolling sheet of thermal fax paper, generating patterns of varying style and complexity. The patterns are generated algorithmically from the collapsed soundtracks of various experimental films.
