Field Study proposal excerpt
“S is for Swarm” is an independent project dealing with themes of swarm intelligence and computational creativity. In addition to researching the emergence of these fields, the student will begin building a series of computerized poetry machines that use altered genetic algorithms as word selection parameters. An example of this is Artificial Bee Colony algorithm.
Drawing on As Poetry Recycles Neurons’ larger themes of recycling, this project aims to repurpose the repurposed: the biological that has been recycled for the technological will once again be recycled for the poetic. What garbled message will emerge from this trail of antecedents? When the beehive’s search for honey is translated first into code and then into English, what digitalized honeycombs will be built? What residue of consciousness will the hive mind whisper?
This project seeks to complicate commonly accepted dichotomies, blurring the borders between the biological and computational, the poetic and mathematic, and considering the decentralized nature of swarm intelligence, the individual and mob. The interstices between these will serve as fertile soil, where nutrients will be recycled and poetry will grow.
ABCs and 123s – weekly log and field notes
- S – Week 9 Log June 3, 2013 5/26: 5 hours of working on final paper, 1 hours of NetLogo, 2 hours on Excel 5/27: 2.25 hrs of class, 4 hours of working on final paper, 3 hours on Calculated ...
- S – Week 8 Log May 27, 2013 5/19: 4 hours of writing final project, 2 hours of library research 5/20: 2.25 hrs of class, 2 hours of reading Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the ...
- S – Week 7 Log May 19, 2013 5/12: 3 hours NetLogo, 1 hour reading Caroline Bergvall’s poetry, 2 hours with Unoriginal Genius 5/13: 1 hour of class time, 2 hours reading Calculated Poetry, 1 hour w/ N. Rose’s website/lectures, ...
- S – Week 6 Log May 13, 2013 5/5: 3 hours of reading Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetics, 1 writing Bachelardian Reverie, 1 hr of Calculated Poetics reading and writing, 3 hrs with Unoriginal Genius 5/6: 2.25 hrs of class, ...
Bachelardian Reverie
- S – Week 8 Bachelardian Reverie May 21, 2013 “…Individuals observing a rubber hand will sometimes attribute sensation to that hand rather than to their own. For example, experimental subjects will make this false attribution if they see the ...
- S – Week 7 Bachelardian Reverie May 14, 2013 “In each generation, unsurprisingly, these arguments are made on the basis of whatever happens to be the current mode of objectivity about the development of children—habits, the will, instinct theory, ...
- S – Week 6: Bachelardian Reverie April 23, 2013 Neuro, Chapter 5 “Perhaps arguments from neuroscience are merely being invoked to give such proposals a sheen of objectivity—for they are often criticized as arising from hopes rather than facts.” (Rose ...
Poetry
- S – Week 8: S/T S/T “Depending on what I meant by here and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes ...
- S – Week 7: Fabling the Quanta Fabling the Quanta “They talk of attraction and magnetism; these notions suggest a force acting between two given bodies; what is left out of account is how utterly the bodies appear ...
- S – Week 6: Notes from a Surgeon Dedicated to anyone whose feminism gets in the way of their ability to leave the house. Notes from a Surgeon 1. My education has trained me to be if not distrustful, then at ...
Term Paper Abstract
While echoing the structure of Susan Howe’s The Midnight, this paper contains two sections of lyric essays, two sections of/on poetics, and one of linguistic ellipses. In these, the author interrogates themes of generative poetry, swarm intelligence, and sense-making. Two possible frameworks for assigning meaning to objects—material and theoretical—are supplied: Philip K. Dick’s classification of “kipple” and Ian Bogost’s Latour Litanies. Within each paradigm, parts are combined to produce two vastly different wholes. Applying each framework to the craft of generative poetry, the author explores what happens poetically when these parts are entrusted with agency. This is done so through genetic algorithms and NetLogo, an agent-based modeling environment.