Books and Text
Bitmap Bees
Bitmap bees are agents for drilling down to the bits in digital images and other digital materials. The project is part of my exploration of what goes on inside the machine when it’s doing things. I present this little collection of programs and hardware as an experimental book form in its embryonic stage though it may become something else entirely. This particular stage may be called Queen Bee. It comprises machine generated text about research into bitmap bees and facial recognition, a garden path and a bitmap.
iter 50000
Handmade with love – for a machine learning to write by reading Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The pamphlet contains results from 50000 iterations of a recurrent neural network [rnn] at work. You can see the progress of its understanding by comparing early iterations with later results.
iteration:
- repetition of a mathematical or computational procedure applied to the result of a previous application, typically as a means of obtaining successively closer approximations to the solution of a problem
- *An audiobook version is also available – listen here.
GRID [light]
The machine generated text may be a commentary on the interpretation of text as light on a matrix. [Python] This illustrated book formed part of an installation concerned with the emotive properties of grids. It takes its lead from Rosalind Krauss and other writers.
Leeds Festival of Writing
Live coding using Python and Markov chains to create a machine learning to write haikus with audience input. Collaboration with tech wizard, Neil Hopkins.
Interrupteur
Emma Bolland was writer in residence at Sheffield University 2019 where she spent a “number of days installed in the foyer of Jessops West, facilitating a space for writing, speaking, reading, text-based performance and installation, and other interventionist surprises.”
I was a guest artist for a busy day writing with visitors, robots and other machines. From the website:
For #Interrupteur Jan will be bringing drawbots, other electronic devices, code, and drawing materials to generate texts that retain the qualities of an original artefact made in real time, even as they are translated and reimagined in the digital realm. Join us in passing handwritten text through a variety of digital interfaces to investigate how it is transformed through translation – what is lost and what may be gained. The difference between the stuff of the agents and the loss of control involved in this activity makes the process an unpredictable and mysterious one.
Braille, Code, Text
A selection of work 2018 -2019
