Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR – a sort of short story – in the Wild issue of Branch Magazine

Pookie strikes again. A sort-of short-story-like prose-esque version of Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR appears in Branch Magazine’s Wild issue, guest-edited by Alison Strumberger, launched 1 April 2011 (no joke).

Branch Magazine - Wild

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR is a narrative documentation of the adventures Ingrid Bachmann’s hermit crab Pookie and I had during June of 2009. Pookie is not the wildest of animals, but he is pretty social, for a hermit crab. Pookie’s full name is Pookie 14. Pookie is the star of a Python story generator, and my latest book, GENERATION[S]. For backstory on this story on this story, visit: http://luckysoap.com/statements/storygenerations.html

Branch Magazine is a national quarterly online magazine devoted to exploring the rifts and overlaps of visual and literary arts while showcasing emerging and professional Canadian artists and creators. Branch features contemporary literature, art and design and aims to produce a compelling panoply of art in different media. Each issue is prompted by a particular theme and, depending on how artists interpret the subject, Branch strives to present how artistic minds may bring together a magpie’s nest arranged by its clash and compatibility

GENERATION[S] Book Launch and Performance Event at Cabaret Fledermaus, Vienna, December 14, 2010

My new code narrative book, GENERATION[S], and all the other awesome books in TRAUMAWIEN Edition Schema 2, will launch at Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna, Tuesday the 14th of December. Or, Dezember, as they spell December in Vienna. Or, Vien, as they spell Vienna in Vienna. I love being part of a production I can’t even read the PR for! I can’t wait to return to Vienna, where all the buildings look like cakes. And I really can’t wait to see the Cabaret Feldermaus. The original was opened in 1907. The interior was designed by Josef Hoffmann. Several other well-known artists of the Viennese Art Nouveau, including Gustav Klimt, contributed to the design of the stage and furniture, as well as posters, postcards, pins and cutlery. Those days are over, alas. The TRAUMAWIEN launch event will be held in the new Cabaret Feldermaus, founded in 1967, and basically unchanged since, despite it’s recent transformation into a disco club. In different places in Europe “disco” means different things. In this case, I sincerely hope there’s a disco ball, to mirror the glittering mosaics of the Feldermaus of old.

In any case, it seems fitting that GENERATION[S] will launch in a venue that has seen many generations come and go. The paradoxes of this setting also seem to be in keeping with those embraced by GENERATION[S] Vienna-based publisher TRAUMAWIEN. As TRAUMAWIEN editor Luc Gross writes, “TRAUMAWIEN considers the paradox of transferring late-breaking digital aesthetics into book form, as new media narrative snapshots of literary genres otherwise quickly lost in the immense output produced by web every second.”

GENERATION[S] is one such snapshot: a book collecting sentences written in Twitter, pulled into Facebook, commented upon, rewritten, retweeted, recommented, rewritten, collated into arrays, parsed by Python scripts, output as short stories in terminal windows, copied and pasted into a Word doc, spaced, placed and paginated, transformed into a book by TRAUMAWIEN’s brilliant designer Julian Palacz. In the book, the digital process are reordered. The output stories come first. They are interspersed with Facebook screenshots showing the first instances of certain of the sentences they contain. The source code follows the stories it generates. Download instructions are offered. One sentence at a time. Wash, rinse, repeat.

For more info on GENERATION[S], TRAUMAWIEN and all the other awesome books launching in Edition Schema 2 visit: http://www.traumawien.at/preview/

Purchase GENERATION[S] online: http://www.amazon.com/Generation-s-J-R-Carpenter/dp/3950291032/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_2

TRAUMAWIEN Schema 2 Launch Poster

Präsentation der Edition Schema 2
J. R. Carpenter, Montreal
Ivan Monroy Lopez, Mexico City
Audun Mortensen, Oslo

Präsentation der Edition Hybrid 1
Philip Hautmann, Wien

Coups
Barbara Anna Husar, Wien
Olivia Kaiser, Wien
Brian Larosche, Oslo

Tanzmusik
Schellackplatten – Otto Jekel
othon.jekel.at

Dienstag, 14. Dezember 2010, 19 Uhr OPEN END!
Cabaret Fledermaus
Spiegelgasse 2, 1010 Wien

http://traumawien.at/

Further Adventures of Pookie & JR Appear on the Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website

Pookie is a a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Montreal artist Ingrid Bachmann’s imagination. And, for a hermit crab, Pookie sure gets around. Bachmann and Pookie collaborated on The Digital Crustaceans project at StudioXX, Montréal, Québec in 2002. That project lives online here: http://www.digitalhermit.ca/. Bachmann and Pookie collaborated again on Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web at Gallery Articule, Main Gallery, Montréal, Québec, April 4 – May 4 2003.

Pookie and I hung out quite a lot the summer of 2009 and a number of projects emerged as a result. We were in a show together at Arnolfini in Bristol in May, 2010, and have a book coming out any moment now from TRAUMAWIEN.

Our latest adventure – an entry on the Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR has just been added to the Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website edited by Judy Malloy.

Pookie Goes to the Beach, Ingrid Bachmann

[screenshot from The Digital Crustaceans project, Ingrid Bachmann, 2002]

The Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website is resource for teachers and students of new media writing, who are exploring what authoring tools to use, for new media writers and poets, who are interested in how their colleagues approach their work, and for readers, who want to understand how new media writers and poets create their work, the Authoring Software project is an ongoing collection of statements about authoring tools and software. It also looks at the relationship between interface and content in new media writing and at how the innovative use of authoring tools and the creation of new authoring tools have expanded digital writing/hypertext writing/net narrative practice in this vibrant contemporary creative writing field.

Begun in conjunction with the 2008 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, this resource was also a part of the Computers and
Writing 2009 Online Sessions hosted by UC Davis.

Visit Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR on the Electronic Literature Authoring Software Website.

Story Generation(s) Launching at PW10, Arnolfini, Bristol

Sotry Generation(s) - J. R. CarpenterI am pleased to announce the launch of Story Generation(s) at PW10 Performance Writing Weekend at Arnolfini, Bristol, May 8-9, 2010. Story Generation(s) are a series of short fictions generated by Python scripts adapted (with permission) from two 1k story generators written by Nick Montfort: http://grandtextauto.org/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/ .

I began tinkering with these story generators in June 2009. There are currently three stories in the series: Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, I’ve Died and Gone to Devon and Auto-Autobiography. This will be their first public exhibition.

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR documents my adventures with Ingrid Bachmann’s hermit crab Pookie, also known as Pookie 14, during June of 2009. Of Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, Nick Montfort writes:

“J. R. Carpenter, author of Words the Dog Knows, Entre Ville, The Cape, and other fine works of e-lit, print, and xerography, has delightfully re-purposed one of my 1k story generators to have it tell stories involving her and a hermit crab named Pookie. The program has grown to about 2k, but it uses the same simple (and surprisingly effective) method as my first generator does: It simply removes all but 5-9 sentences from a sequence, eliding some of what’s been written. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is.” Nick Montfort, http://nickm.com/post/2009/07/story-generation-with-pookie-and-jr/

In July 2009, NYC-based artist/programmer Ravi Rajakumar ported the Python script into Javascript to create this web browser friendly version of the Chronicles of Pookie & JR: http://luckysoap.com/pookieandjr/index.html

Here’s a screenshot from the Rajakumar iteration:

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR

DOWNLOAD PookieAndJR.py

I’ve Died and Gone to Devon re-purposes the same Python script as Excerpts from theChronicles of Pookie & JR to tell (and retell) the story of an arrival and first impression of Devon. Most of the sentences in this story were adapted from Twitter posts written during a five-week visit to Devon, August – September, 2009.
Here is one example of a story generated byI’ve Died and Gone to Devon:

I’ve died and gone to Devon.

In North America, roads this narrow wouldn’t even count as driveways.

If this is the wrong side of the road, I don’t care what’s right.

If this is the driveway, then I can’t wait to see the house.

We can’t hear the river from the house, but we can see it.

Everybody insists we’re by the seaside. I can smell but not see the sea.

Flotsam on a tidal river is a strange mixture of oak leaves and seaweed.

This is an achingly beautiful place to come across a little death.

DOWNLOAD Devon.py

Auto-Autobiography adapts a different Python story generator script by Montfort to generate a quasi-autobiographical story by segments. This script chooses sentences from pools of stock autobiographical statements: “I was born…” I come from…” “In retrospect…” This format was suggested to me by a passage from Anne-Marie MacDonald’s novel, As The Crow Flies:

“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you come from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from a plane crash. From a war that brought your parents together.”
Anne-Marie MacDonald, As The Crow Flies, Toronto: Knopf, 2003, page 36.

The notion of autobiographical veracity is undermined in Auto-Autobiography, by leaving key gender signifiers such as Mother/Father to computational chance.
Here is one example of a story generated by Auto-Autobiography:

Here is my story:

I was born in wedlock – for some reason, this surprises me.

I come from a war that brought my parents together.

My mother had a long memory and a short fuse.

I live in a wonderful house.

I work hard at not having to work too hard.

I wish I’d said that differently.

My best friend kept insisting I learn to play guitar.

In retrospect, she read way too many Russian novels.

I love it when we lie in bed plotting the downfall of our enemies.

Next year, let’s forget every single thing we learned this year.

In future, we will know many beginnings and no ends.

DOWNLOAD autobio.py

Viewing Instructions:

Download the python file to your desktop and unzip. On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a Terminal Window, typing “cd Desktop”, and typing “python filename.py”. Hint: look for Terminal in your Utilities folder. These Python story generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6.5. Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press ENTER a new version of the story will appear.

The Saga of Pookie & JR Continues

Back in June I adapted Nick Montfort’s 1k Python story generator to document my adventures with Ingrid Bachmann’s hermit crab Pookie in The Chronicles of Pookie & JR: http://luckysoap.com/lapsuslinguae/2009/06/excerpts-from-the-chronicles-of-pookie-jr/

Nick went on to post about it on his blog, Post Position: http://nickm.com/post/2009/07/story-generation-with-pookie-and-jr/ As Nick astutely notes,

Sometimes the reader is left to wonder who the hermit is.

Now NYC-based artist/programmer Ravi Rajakumar has ported the Python script into Javascript to create this web browser friendly version of the Chronicles of Pookie & JR: http://luckysoap.com/pookieandjr/index.html

Here’s a screenshot from the Rajakumar iteration:

Every time you click “To be continued…” a new version of the story is generated.
. . . . .

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR

Last week I was hanging out with Nick Montfort in Montreal. He’s been working on a series of 1k story generators written in Python. I’ve never paid any attention to Python before, because it doesn’t output to the web. To download and run Nick’s 1k story generators in a terminal window, visit: http://grandtextauto.org/2008/11/30/three-1k-story-generators/

This week I’m hanging out with Ingrid Bachmann’s hermit crab Pookie. Pookie is a biological, digital, quasi-fictional manifestation of Ingrid Bachmann’s imagination. Pookie already has a website: www.digitalhermit.ca. And I’ve already written about past collaborations between Bachmann and Pookie: Digital Crustaceans v.0.2: Homesteading on the Web. But I’ve never spent any time alone with a hermit crab before. I started chronicling my adventures with Pookie as sentences written on a blackboard, and then started feeding those sentences into one of Nick’s story generators written Python. The generator uses a sequence of (specially written) sentences; all but 5-9 sentences are removed and the remaining text is presented as the story.

To read Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR, download this file to your desktop and unzip: PookieAndJR.py On a Mac or Linux system, you can run the story generator by opening a terminal Window, typing “cd Desktop”, and typing “python story2.py”. The generator runs on Windows, too, but you will probably need to install Python first: version 2.6. Once Python is installed you can double click on the file and it will automatically launch and run in the terminal window. Every time you press Return a new version of the story will appear. Here are a few examples:

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Previously, Pookie and JR had only ever met at parties.
Pookie hides in his cup when JR is in her cups.
JR is patient; Pookie has to crawl before he can walk.
Pookie is actually pretty social, for a hermit crab.
Every three days or so, JR waters the ferns.
Live and let live, Pookie’s nonchalant attitude seems to suggest.
When Pookie digs in the night, he makes quite a racket.
Late one night, Pookie and JR listen to a chained dog’s howls.
JR hasn’t been sleeping much lately.
To be continued…

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
JR has a friend over for drinks and forgets to introduce Pookie.
Pookie only plays in his water dish when he has an audience.
JR changes Pookie’s water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
Pookie has turned JR off of shellfish for life.
The cafe across the street is only noisy until eleven or so.
Do you hear that? JR asks Pookie.
JR hasn’t been sleeping much lately.
JR is in hiding.
To be continued…

Excerpts from the Chronicles of Pookie & JR:
Pookie slowly comes out of his shell, so to speak.
Pookie has many shells to choose from.
JR changes Pookie’s water. Pookie makes a mess of his feeding dish.
JR crumbles Pookie’s hermit crab food pellets into bite-sized bits.
When Pookie digs in the night, he makes quite a racket.
Pookie keeps his thoughts to himself.
To be continued…
. . . . .