daniel c. howe
Media Research Lab
New York University
719 broadway, 12th fl
new york, ny, 10003
 
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 PUBLICATIONS
 BIO / CONTACT

 
NEWS / EVENTS
No Time Machine at
Pace Gallery, NY 10/09 text.curtain in Berlin, 6/09
@ Exhibition Poesis 2009
Alphabet in Austin, Texas
No Time Machine in
Roulette in Counterpath
Press Special E-lit Issue

The Architecture of
Association opens 12/17
@ Grand Palais, Paris


New Article in the Conduit!

The Architecture of
Association at the
 Museum of Image &
Sound, Sao Paulo, Br
No Time Machine at
Axiom Arts, Boston

'Roulette' debuts! Spring
2008 New River Journal

Apr. 29, 08 Lecture @MIT
ALPHABET opens at the
Art Institute of Portland
July 2008, Portland, OR

'Open.Ended' in Translation!

'text.curtain' installation @
Reading Digital Literature
SLSA/Code Conf. 11/01/07

AUDIO:  Futures for
Digital Literature (mp3)
 w' J. Cayley, M. Joyce,
 B. Seaman, R. Coover,
 R. Simanowski, 02/2007

9.20 Talk/Performance
Mass. College of Art

POETRY COMPLEX:
Cross-Genre Writing
[Temple-Penn Poetics]


May 5-6   'cave.cubes'
Leonardo Almanac's New
Media Poetics Special Issue

Writing Coding Writing
Talk & Performance
SCI/ART Festival, NYC

Turbulence Commision


  
The Bisociation Engine (ongoing)   w' bill seaman
The Bisociation Engine (B-Engine) is a software architecture and series of interactive installations exploring mechanisms of associative thought. Drawing on research from a range of disciplines (psychology, linguistics, cognitive & computer science, etc.) the B-Engine software explores large multi-media databases to 'discover' unexpected linkages between disparate items. An initial installation of the system, (entitled 'the Architecture of Association') opened Aug. 2008 at the Museum of Image & Sound, Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Dec., it was exhibited at full-scale in the Grand Palais, Paris.

       [Paper presented at the SLSA/Code conf. Nov. 2007]
The RiTa Library     (ongoing)  
Designed to support the creation of novel works of generative literature, the RiTa library provides a unique set of tools for artists and writers working in programmable media. Combining features of natural language processing, computational stylistics, & generative systems theory, RiTa enables a range of tasks, from statistical methods, to grammar-based generation, to ontological databases (e.g., WordNet), to text-mining, to text-to-speech, to image, audio, & animation, all in real-time. RiTa has been implemented in the Java programming language as a free/open-source project that runs either in 'stand-alone' mode, or in conjunction with the popular Processing environment for digital arts programming.
No Time Machine   (2008)   w' aya karpinska    
Quiet time, dead time, free time - there seems to be less and less of it. What do we give up in the race to continually maximize our efficiency? No Time Machine explores these questions by mining the web for variations on the phrase 'I don’t have time for...' Results are analyzed algorithmically and reconstructed into a multi-voiced poetic conversation. Interwoven with this 'found poetry' are sentences that we have re-contextualized ourselves; a human-computer collaboration that expands the field of creative writing to include networked and programmable media.

    No Time Machine is a commission for New Radio & Performing Arts, Inc.
Text.Maze   (2007)       
Part performance piece and part interactive digital landscape, Text.Maze is a recombinant poetic system built upon the principles of maze construction. As each increasingly complex maze extends itself in 3-dimensional space, new text is revealed as it combines along the edges of selected paths. As the mazes grow in complexity and phrases become more self-reflexive, the work's vocabulary suggests the inability of language to bridge the often vast communicative gaps between us.

                  *special thanks to Ken Perlin and Linnea Ogden
text.maze
Video Documentation
Rites/Reason Theater 5.07
TrackMeNot   (2006)   w' helen nissenbaum    
TrackMeNot blends software tool and artware intervention in a firefox extension designed both to protect users from surreptitious data profiling and to interpose in the unbalanced power dynamic between searchers and the corporations controlling our data. Unlike most privacy tools, TrackMeNot(TMN) works not by means of concealment or encryption, but instead via noise and obfuscation. Running as a background process within the browser, TMN periodically issues algorithmically-generated decoy queries to popular search engines like Google, AOL, Yahoo!, MSN. Thus users' real searches, lost in a cloud of false data, are essentially hidden in plain view.
live.text.mix   (ongoing)  
'live.text.mix' is a generative system for performed improvisational writing, simultaneously exploring the 'remix' on multiple levels (linguistic, visual, and aural). The system accepts real-time textual input from a 'live writer', in conjunction with audio inputs from live performers (e.g., readers of the generated text, spoken word artists, vocalists, musicians, etc.) These inputs guide the text-generation component of the software while the performers manipulate and 'remix' captured samples into an evolving improvisational audio-visual work. Additionally the system provides control over visual elements to the performers via game-style joystick controllers.

                      *performers: Nicole Terez & Aya Karpinska

live.text.mix
Video Documentation
McCormack Theater, 12.06
[meme.garden]   (2006)   w' mary flanagan et al.    
[meme.garden] blends software artwork and search interface to explore the dynamic and social nature of information as mapped though language. Users begin by entering words and phrases of particular interest which are expanded, via a lexical database, into sets of related concepts. Each set is visualized as a 'seed' which can be "planted' in the user's virtual 'garden'. Each of these seeds grows into a unique organism that evolves through repeated interactions over time. The evolution of each user's garden is also affected by the choices and interactions of other members of the [meme.garden] community. As these virtual gardens grow over time users and communities become linked in a persistent contextual biosphere...

      [meme.garden] is a commission for New Radio & Performing Arts, Inc.
Text.Curtain   (2005)  
text.curtain explores relationships between poetic text and ludic play via an interactively evolving recombinant text. Projected on a wall-size screen, text.curtain presents a physics-based ‘spring-mass’ interface that organically responds to the interactions of multiple simultaneous users. As the piece is disrupted and letters wash back and forth, a granular synthesis engine provides realtime aural feedback. Tension is created through the simultaneous desire of users to both disrupt the existing text via 'play' and to ‘read’ the piece as it evolves and recombines in response.     
more>
Cave.Cubes   (2005)  
Cave.Cubes, developed for the Brown CAVE environment, employs virtual physics and three-dimensional geometries to define writerly constraints in embodied virtual space. Like the grammars found in natural language, 3-D geometries have specific ways in which they
can connect and recombine. By leveraging these (virtual) physical grammar within a dynamic physics simulation, a set of organic constraints emerge to challenge the writer in embodied literary
space...
 
more>
Open.Ended   (2005)   w' aya karpinska
Extending poetry beyond the printed page into interactive spaces calls for novel ways of designing the poetic experience. As authors access a broadening range of technologies, new methods of augmenting the reader experience become available. A work’s entry and exit points may change across viewings, the ordering and spatialization of words may update dynamically, and the work may transform itself in ways independent of the reader. open.ended is an interactive, three-dimensional system of poems which explores such techniques.         more>
                       3d font applet :: experimental typography
Code.Re(a)d   (2004)  
Code.Re(a)d explores the potential of computer code to perform as literary 'text' in digital media work; examining potential snyergies between 'process' and 'product' via the dual nature of code as both fixed text and dynamic process. Designed to augment existing programmed works, the 'code-reader' software provides easy access to source-code from within a running program (decompiled if necessary). The software's own instruction set may then be interpreted and presented in a visually, sonically, or physically (the example applet below uses source text as both its visual and aural (sonified through a text-to-speech engine) material.
Phoneme.Machines   (2003)  
The Phoneme.Machine series presents a set of generative (reversible) algorithms via fragments of spoken language. By adding & removing 'agents', each of which follow very simple rules, users trigger speech diphones (2 sequential phonemes), the basic building blocks of speech. Diphones are triggered on collisions between agents as they follow their algorithmic trajectories. While compositions begin simply, underlying the work is a complex model that (theoretically) supports energy-free computation. These works attempt to create linguistic environments where the creative potential of generative computation is foregrounded.

the Weight.of.Words (64 Stones)   (2002)   w' tetsu kondo
The Weight of Words is a physical installation (constructed of 64 solenoid-powered stones, each capable of flipping itself up into the air) that invites users to consider alternate (physical) representations of language. The piece explores the transformation of language as it crosses from the analog to the digital and back. As text is typed at the keyboard, it is converted into its most basic informational representation, a machine-language comprised exclusively of 0s and 1s. When these fragments of language are re-embodied as physical objects, they speak to us through the sound of jumping stones...
64 Stones

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