I’ve been using poetica for the past couple of weeks for drafting up my blogposts and have to say I’m pretty much loving it. Here’s why…

It takes me a long time to write a blogpost about a project I’ve just done, the words I want to use and the order to put them in doesn’t come easily. What normally happens is I start at around 1pm-2pm after putting it off for as long as possible. Then I keep going until the kids finish school and become too distracting.

They aren’t distracting, I’ve just decided that they are as an excuse to stop writing for a while. During the kids bath time and bedtime stories all the perfect words for the blogpost swim through my head in  exactly the right order. Only to be gone again when I sit back down at the laptop.

I’ll bash the blogpost out until about 11pm, give it a once over (which takes about an hour to add all the links in and make last minute changes) then hit the publish button and tweet about it just after midnight, when there’s no-one around. Then I go to bed exhausted and happy to have gotten it out of my system.

The second problem I have is separating or distilling down a post to what needs to be said from all my ramblings, something I’m still not doing in this post, this is a direct to wordpress ramble post. I’ll often write notes to myself during the “1st draft” which is often then my only draft, and struggle to turn those notes into part of the post.

So I’ve been trying to change my process for a while now, and for some reason poetica seems to be doing a good job of helping me with that. In the case of my second problem, poetica’s great for separating out content from notes. I can quickly type out my first draft (like you’re supposed to) and then highlight and underline words, phrases, whole concepts that I’m unsure about or getting stuck on and make a quick note in the margin that I need to go back and do something about it.

The screenshot at the top of this post (of my previous blogpost) only shows a couple of notes to myself, as I wanted to get a shot with a lot going on in it, they’re the ones in blue. But honestly after my first run through the margins were pretty full with my own comments. Which of course was great as they weren’t in the text as I normally have them, which tended to muddle things up.

Then as I revise the writing I can slowly remove those notes to myself until I’ve “fixed” everything.

Then there’s my other problem of writing and hitting publish right away, with poetica I’m finding it easier to let my writing “stew” for a few days while I think about it and then go back to it. The thing that’s encouraging me to do that at the moment is the ability to make a post public so anyone on the site can have a read of the horribly rough first draft with all my notes.

I like sticking my code up on GitHub because I believe in “coding in public” as much as possible, not quite sure why just seems like a good stance to take. Being able to do that with writing feels good too. Now clearly I’m not a writer where people want to get “early access” to what I’ve written, this ain’t no “rough cuts” of a new book or anything. But I can easily see occasions where someone may want to give either everyone or a few people early access to what they’re writing about.

The screenshot at the top shows notes and edit suggestion from a couple of friends, along with the ability to accept or reject the suggestions and clear or reply to  the notes (by adding another note). I’d be willing to pay anonymous users to proofread my copy, I’m not by any means putting the drafts up there for free proofreading, but I think I’d still throw it open to the whole public rather than just inviting a few friends to help review and edit.

Well at least for general blogposts anyway, I currently have another blogpost sitting there which is going to be part of a series. I want to get them all written in poetica before publishing. It’s going to take me a while but I’ll get there, but having them sitting out there in public (“public” to members of the site anyway, ask me for invites as a have a couple sitting in my account) somehow makes me feel better than having them sitting around on my laptop.

Essentially as a tool for getting me to write more and betterer it’s currently hitting all the right buttons.

So I stripped the DRM off Warren Ellis’s Gun Machine, crunched the text and threw it into the Markov Chain engine. You can see the results here: http://revdancatt.github.io/CAT782-remixing-ellis/

As I already have the code set up pretty well for consuming new text it’s fun to put different things in and see what comes out. I promise I’ll stick the code up on github once I’ve cleaned it up a bit more. In the meantime this is all heading somewhere, kinda.

Something I found interesting is that it seems easier to find short snappy tweetable results from Sk1n (that I’ve remixed previously) than Gun Machine. Which of course isn’t a measure of quality.

Gun Machine’s story whips along at a frenetic pace (and is wonderful) the sentences feel like good solid strongly bonded elements. Meanwhile Channel Sk1n and other books by Jeff Noon have a more relaxed narrative but each sentence seems faster, more easily sampled, looped, and remixed.

It’s a bit like Gun Machine is the melody and bassline, while Channel Sk1n is the samples, synth stabs and one shots. Lord knows what would happen if I threw them together, actually I should probably try that.

The idea of using the Markov Chains is to mix things up. A remix of Gun Machine will use just the words written by Ellis and not a single new one. These tiny word atoms also remain in roughly the order Ellis put them in, but sometimes new structures similar in style and tone to the original are formed. My task is to then have a root around the output looking for these small, newly formed gems.

As I blogged before I’m a terrible writer and so turn to code to attempt to skirt around that, by using other people’s work and algorithms to somehow generate something new. This approach works when the samplers are talented (i.e. the Beastie Boys) and not so much when they aren’t (i.e. me). It’s like I’m looking for cheats and shortcuts, you never know maybe I’ll learn something in the process.

One of these cheats or “inspiration tools” I’ve played withis the N+7 algorithm. You take each noun, find it in the dictionary, look at the 7th noun after that one and replace the first noun with the new one.

Here’s an example of a straight up Markov mix from Gun Machine…

“Fifteen minutes later, he threw it into her eyes, seemed to take out his phone and answered it with lightning pingback. As I’ve been ordered to conduct this investigation, without a clue that his leanness was turning a blind eye to calculate her alertness.”

Here it is again in N+7

“Fifteen misapprehensions later, he threw it into her eye-openers, seemed to take out his photocopy and answered it with lilt pingback. As I’ve been ordered to confederacy this invite, without a coach-and-four that his leanness was turnstile a blizzard eye-opener to calculate her alertness.”

We’ve stepped out of the Gun Machine world, new words are coming in cross contaminating and building different bonds to the original. I’m not saying that this is an improvement mind, and obviously I’m not suggesting any of this is new, but it is new for me.

N+15 with a small dictionary gives us this:

“Fifteen modifications later, he threw it into her fantasies, seemed to take out his pillar and answered it with lightning pingback. As I’ve been ordered to consequence this jail, without a collapse that his leanness was turning a blind fantasy to calculate her alertness.”

Novel remixing on the Grid.

I’ve been playing a lot with MPC-type sample/beat pads, grids of soft pads that light up and play samples as you hit/tap them… I mean obviously there’s a lot more to it than that and I’m as bad at creating music as I am writing.

Music tools are all over the place, word tools though really not so much. I know there are experiments out there – but not many. In my ideal world there’d be more for words, even better my as yet unwritten novel remixing tool would exist, more on that in a moment.

The problem with taking a whole novel and shuffling the words around is the narrative gets chopped up too. The characters are still there, Nola Blue, Alice (both of them^[1]) and Tallow, but they can easily jump from one scene to the next – wormholes through the pages from front to back, and back again. Time is lost and the narrative confused.

But, say I want to make a new novel by remixing from several sources. I take five books, Gun Machine, Channel Sk1n, Automated Alice, Alice in Wonderland and The Big Sleep. Instead of taking all the text and throwing it into a bucket I divide each into roughly equal chapters and just mix those up. More than that though, to create a new Chapter 2, I take all the words from the original Chapter twos^[2] and then add the words from the chapters each side of them, one and three. It looks like this…

…So I’m remixing the orginals, but in a more controlled fashion. The narrative of the remix will tillkind of follow the narrative of the orginal books, just. We won’t be throwing something in from the end of one book into the start of another. New characters will get introduced at roughly the same time, and the story will shift gradually from the start to the end.

A quick flashback to “The Kibin Magic Kettle Experiment”

But I’m still not a writer, so now over to crowd sourcing. Last year I tried an experiment, it was terrible and didn’t work, for reason I’ll get into in a moment.

I wanted to see if I could use proofreading sites that promise to fix your copy and so on (although now I think I would try paying someone on Fiverr: I will meticulously proofread and edit 1500 words of English text for $5 which is an option just to see what happens) to play Chinese Whispers on a story.

As a quirk of Kibin quickly iterating over business models I snagged a year’s subscription account of proofreading, I could put one article into their system at a time which had a turn around of 24-48 hours. I figured much like photocopying an image and putting that back through the copying machine I could end up with something different after shoving a story through the machine 100 times.

I took this story: The Magic Kettle [github] and mangled it up via Google Translate a couple of times – the end result still had the main narative but the grammar and everything else was pretty shot, but not so much that it no longer made any sense though.

I wondered if the story would get restored close to its original source, or if it’d wonder off on tangents and become something else through the process of other people’s proofreading personality and bias. I set myself a couple of quick rules, well one mainly – I’d accept all suggested corrections.

The experiment didn’t go well. Not because of the proofreading – the first couple of editors cleaned the story up fairly well, the third took all the life out of it and the fourth put some back in – but rather because the Kibin site made it hard to accept the suggestions. On top of that, I thought GitHub would be a good place to put the results so people would be able to use the tools there to see the differences (diffs) between version.

The combination of Kibin usability, GitHub not really doing large blocks of text well^[3] and the story obviously just going round in circles after the 4th edit^[4] all made me feel that the effort I would have to put in wasn’t going to be worth it.

I’d probably do things slightly different if I was going to do it again now.

Pulling it all together.

I like the idea of “Making Things Fast“, however I seem to end up making things slowly – which is why I’ve decided just to say “to hell with it” and write up projects as I go along.

I’m going to play with the idea of pulling text into a remixing machine in the same way you can with audio tools. Until I can throw, say, 5 books into the new words-machine, chop them up into chunks and specify which chunks to remix together, much like the diagram I drew above.

I’ll then get the computer to generate version after version after version which I’ll review and somehow attempt to pick the “best” bits. See if there’s any hope for the narrative or, you know, anything usable in there at all.

If the approach yields useful prose, then maybe I can string it all together and take it to the proofreading site, Mechanical Turk and/or Fiverr. Human machines to force a bit of grammar and structure, and possibly find out if people can spot patterns and make sense of the garbled output. People are supposed to be good at that, right?

Then I’ll write about it some more.

And probably get it printed and bound, because that makes it real.

Footnotes

[1] Alice from Alice in Wonderland and Alice from Automated Alice (who is in turn kinda Alice from Wonderland)

[2] we actually double up the main chapter to statistically increase the chances of picking words from that chapter, i.e. chapter [1, 2, 2, 3] but we still blend from the previous chapter and into the next.

[3] It doesn’t do line breaks very well on plain text, which means it’s pretty much unreadable. But if I put the linebreaks in and a change made a single word roll over to the next line pretty much the whole block of text would count as a “diff”. Good for code that’s supposed to live on short lines, bad for blocks of text.

[4] By the 4th edit the original story was back into place, apart from one or two changes that came in right at the 1st edit. I could see that the grammar was going to be shuffled around but it was very unlikely that someone was going to make a change to the storyline. Maybe if I had more patience and stuck it out something weird may have happened but unless I introduced a catalyst for change it seemed unlikely.

Afterthoughts

I probaly need to mention something about remixing already exisiting in literature, beyond Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Taking a character and dropping them into something else is different than taking a sample. A character is some IP that the author can use again and again – you can’t just pick them up and reuse them however you like in quite the same was as a 3 second drum loop.

But, people do do this, with fanfic and slash, even to the extent that 50 Shades was a remix of sorts of the Twilight books. But then in the same way that music artist sometimes re-record vocals and samples to avoid copywrite, the world of 50 Shades was rewritten away from Twilight. White label vs offical release.

So while it does happen, it’s different to what I’m trying to do here which is sampling and remixing in the music spirit rather than extending or rewriting a character or creation.

Colophon

This post was written last week in poetica where it was left to stew for a few days with edit notes and suggestions from Blaine and Bogan. I’ll will write this up soon.

Camera

The camera on my iPhone broken about a month ago. My first instinct was to rush out and get a replacement phone, I’m a camera person, I have 22 photo/image/video apps on my iPhone, none of which I can now use. But instead I thought I’d leave it and see how it played out. I figured it’d make me use my “proper” camera more as I’m too prone to whipping out and iPhone and snapping with that.

Guess that didn’t really happen though as I’ve just done my monthly backup of Flickr photos and apparently I’ve shot the lowest number of photos since the great depression of last yet.

I went to London yesterday and forgot to take my X100, which I try to take with me whenever I go out and ended up with no photo taking ability what-so-ever. I’ve read things where people go, “oh I left my phone behind for a whole day/weekend/week/month, and it felt great”, this didn’t, it felt completely weird. The iPhone feels pretty useless, turns out I do think of it as a camera with extra twitter/wikipedia checking abilities.

Podcast

I’ve been getting more interested in the idea of podcasting, or at least trying it to see what the state of the tools are atm. But I know it’s definitely just another thing I don’t have time for. I’ve found podcasts tend to fall into two categories; good with a fairly tight format worked out, or bad and rambling. I know for a fact that mine would fall into the bad and rambling.

Although I’m pretty sure that’s not a good reason not to do it.

A good reason instead is not having the time, if it were to have a title it’d probably be “Things I’ve failed to get done these week”, where I catalog how all my good intentions have turned to dust.

Again though, I know I just don’t have the time, I’m already thinking “well, maybe I’ll get up at 6am on Sunday and spend the 1st 3 hours of the day editing it together” like that’s every going to happen. I barely find the time to write blogposts and I’m pretty sure that’s easier.

Blogging

Talking of which, I’ve been getting back into reading other people’s blogs. Or maybe other people have gotten back into writing blogs. Anyway, something seems to be happening amongst the people I follow in there appears to be a slow return and dusting off of blogs. I’m adding them back into Reeder as I find them.

Tom Armitage’s I’m enjoying, his interests music/games intersects mine and he finds the good stuff first :) I’m following the struggles of Warren Ellis claiming to being really out of practice with blogging and internet comms in general, all the while producing more posts, podcasts, links to interesting stuff, vines, photos, newsletters and books in a week than I manage in two months (especially the books part).

Matt Webb posted after a hiatus of 10 months: I have no idea what I’m doing and even the venerable Tom Coates has updated his blog a couple of times, even giving plasticbag.org a facelift.

Again, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m looking more, or something else that means I’m seeing people blog more. I have a hunch around people getting tired of both twitter being short and not owning their own content, along with seeing sites like Medium crop up that answer the twitter-length problem, but not the owning their own content part.

That and the are you writing for yourself or an audience.

Or worse, thought-leader, shudder.

Anyway, enough, I have a garden that needs tending to.

I made a realisation recently, I hate idle computers. Or rather I made this realisation a long time ago, but I’ve only just gotten round to writing it.

And the reason why I’ve only just gotten round to writing it is because I’ve always wanted my blog posts to be about something, preferable something where I can put the source code up on GitHub.

But then I’ve also been thinking that sometimes I just want to write about nothing much at all, and this should be ok. I’ve mentioned this before: “The blog post in which nothing much happens“  but still haven’t really got the whole thing down.

And the reason for that is that although I love the concept of writing I don’t really enjoy it that much and I’m not particularly good at it.

I’d much rather the computer wrote for me.

It was the same with art. When I started art college I wasn’t particularly good at drawing in the traditional sense, or painting or in fact getting anything down on paper or canvas that looked like the thing it was supposed to be. Art college did however have computers.

I’d much rather the computers did art for me.

So it came to pass that I’d try programming the computer to create art for me. Recently I’ve been doing the same for writing. Turns out that this probably takes more time than actually doing it properly, especially considering I’ve been programming and writing code for the last 30 years but am yet to produce a book or piece of art.

It does feel as if everything is kind of pulling together though.

Back to the idle computers. Computers are supposed to serve, compute, do stuff. At the same time in my experiments I don’t need the computer to instantly create art or writing (poems, stories etc)… being happy for computers to not give you instant feedback gives you a lot of freedom when coding. You can go over loops millions of times, build up tables of yes/no decisions. You can get it to output 1000s of results which can then read back in again to analyse. Your algorithms can be long, and convoluted but easy to understand (as opposed to the good fast ones that normally depend on some clever trick that’s easy to forget when you look back at it again two years later… and oh so often do my project hang around for easily longer than two years).

In my ideal world the computer has no idle time, it would be chunking away at something or other. Then when you’re ready it presents you with a fine selection of what it considers it’s best work, which you get to review and either keep, put back into the system or tweak your algorithms in response to see what happens next.

So anyway, I have a few of these things going on and I keep waiting to finish them before I write about them and I’ve decided that kind of sucks and I should just let my thoughts spill out.

But you know, maybe no as rambling at this post.

Well that’ll teach me to tweet too soon about something I’m playing with, or at least give away my sources ;) The other day I found this rather wonderful post on tumblr: i am the path along unseen heather, and figured I’d have a go. I posted a quick result on twitter…

I am the eyes never looked towards daylight (“snowball poems” generated from @jeffnoon’sChannel Sk1n, more infos: nossidge.tumblr.com/post/466051631…)

— Rev Dan Catt (@revdancatt) April 26, 2013

You can now also read about here: Automated constrained poetry, made from Markov Chains and Project Gutenberg, which I guess is for the best as there’ll actually be (hopefully) some comments over there, rather than here ’cause I broke commenting when I last updated the template and haven’t been bothered to fix it yet.

If it isn’t already obvious Snowball poems increase in length by one character each line. The effect is more obvious with a monospace font.

Seeing as I already have Markoved up text from Jeff Noon’s books, which you can read more about here: Notes on remixing Noon, generative text and Markov chains, I figured it wouldn’t take much to scan it for pairs of words, each slightly longer than the previous.

Channel Sk1n

I
go
out
this
giant
iconic
monster
standing

I
am
the
same
woman
moving
through
location

I
am
the
eyes
never
looked
towards
daylight

Automated Alice

I
am
the
hill
which
looked
through
clouding

I
am
the
time
Alice
forced
herself
together

I
by
the
only
other
things
already
hurrying

Vurt

I
am
the
real
words
coming
through
doorways

I
am
the
hair
still
living
bullets
punching

I
am
not
like
these
little
message
scrawled

Pollen

I
am
not
very
still
making
flowers
entangle

I
do
you
over
their
leaves
against
possible
knowledge

It is kinda fun, but does seem to get a touch self centered after a while, the results by their nature tend to start with “I” and obviously work up from there. One or two I can handle, more than that it it starts to get a bit much.

But yeah, anyway, next time: write blog post first, then tweet about it. Which means I’d better keep quiet about my N+7 experiments!

Meanwhile it all started with this tweet…

So we’re like “Hey Guardian, do this thing” & they’re like “huh?” & we’re “nggghh” & then the Daily Mail does it dailymail.co.uk/stats

— Rev Dan Catt (@revdancatt) April 26, 2013

…about the new Daily Mail’s stats page “By The Numbers”, which seemed worth expanding on over a lunchtime.

I think we can all generally agree that the page is ugly as sin, that substituting “controversial” for “down-voted” and keeping a high score table for commenters is terrible. That showing the most read for the top four sections of the site News, Showbiz, Femail and Sport is the “Sidebar of shame” in all but horizontal format and the maps (which now appear to have vanished) colourful but as good as useless.

However, it does have one big advantage over the much better designed, far more informative, detailed, beautiful, contextually useful and long tail surfacing dashboard of the Guardian, mainly in that it actually exists and is live.

Always be shipping.

Ship early, ship often.

Getting stuff out the door can be one of the hardest things to. You could have the best [widget-page-x], which has been refined, user tested, gone through several rounds of committee approval, input from the whole organisation, the latest in current best practice web design (possibly twice due to how these thing change) and it doesn’t mean a thing if it isn’t public and no-one can use it.

Now the back story, a.k.a. why I’m a little sensitive.

I joined the Guardian at an exciting time, it was shifting to a “Digital First” mindset, leading the way with news APIs, openness, understanding community & social media, pioneering live blogs and had a bunch of interesting problems to solve.

I was brought into the Guardian fold by Mike Bracken who was drawing in a team of people I’ll modestly describe as knowing what the fuck they were doing.

This works well, as can be seen at the Government Digital Service (GSD), having recently won the Design Museum’s annual “Designs of the Year” award for GOV.UK. The GDS is where Mike moved to after the Guardian to do a similar task: bringing together dedicated and talented people to focus on a worthwhile goal and letting them get on with it.

Anyway, one of the things I was involved with was looking at and understanding the data, how do people consume the news, when do they, what sharing is involved, what can we tell about the news by observing all the signals that build up around it.

Deep diving.

And then, not only how can we as the organisation gain insight from the data, but if we find it useful then surely the public will too, because generally as a whole they are smarter than us. Sure you may have to strip some absolute numbers off your data but why not.

How can we use the data to not just show the current news but also put that news in the bigger picture. The Guardian has a huge “long-tail” of news and understanding now recent stories fit into that is kinda useful for everyone concerned. An example would be a story of a scandal in the Catholic Church (picking something at random), sure the story is the most recent event but also forms part of a much larger story that’s been going on for far longer.

It starts with Data Dashboards but it can be so much more.

But, yeah, it starts with Data Dashboards.

The Flip, Flop

So, right then, as I mentioned in my blog post “Leaving the Guardian, creativity vs mild depression, the quantified self and running.” the Technology Department at the Guardian Flipped (or Flopped), Mike went off to do wonderful at the GDS and everything went (for me) a bit wrong.

The arrival of multiple layers of about a bazzilion project and product managers, project death by a thousand meetings, things shifting to a top-down managerial style and subsequently my co-workers also coincidentally quitting put pay to the best laid plans.

And as much as I love skunkworks, there is a limit.

So I’m impressed with the Mail Online’s stats dash board, not because it’s awesome, not because I think it’s particularly good, but because they got sign-off and got the damn thing out the door. And now they can iterate.

It may not be pretty, but it’s public and live, which is more than can be said for a lot of things I worked towards.

Or in short as I expressed in my tweet “nggghh”

I’d already played with making a London Integers publication as an excuse to play with the BERG Cloud LP tools, it was some code that was readily to hand and not so worthy that I needed to worry about it being proper, good or right. Yet at the same time I knew it was trivial, mainly an elaborate joke and I didn’t want to put BERG in the position of having to approve (and being seen to have approved) something so utterly pointless, particularly when there was a lot of focus on just what the Little Printer was for across the interwebz.

On the other hand, putting on my pretend “Artisanal Integers are very important” mock serious hat, the Little Printer is an obvious delivery channel for such important numbers. Sometimes you just have to run with the joke.

The BERG update allowed me to push it live and take full responsibility for its ridiculousness.

You can subscribe to it here: http://remote.bergcloud.com/publications/112

And so it came to pass that the lovely BERG people featured it in BERG Cloud newsletter #6, serendipitously along with the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York (Publication #111, natch) which uses Brooklyn Integers.

Two Artisanal Integer driven publications right next to each other, what are the chances?^[1] :)

Now I’m just thinking what next for a publication (I have a few plans) and physical stuff if I can get my hands on the Devkit- in the meantime, a Raspberry Pi has been ordered in anticipation.

Footnotes

[1] The chances are of course quite high for various reasons I’ll probably blog about in the near-ish future.

This post was edited in Poetica (with help from Blaine Cook and James Weiner) which I think I’m really rather liking for this kind of thing, or at least want to keep using for this kind of thing because it seems incredibly handy for it, (although I’m possibly not using quite for it’s intended purpose). Anyway, I will also make another blog post about this once I’ve done it a bit more.

This morning Modesty and I went for an early walk up Carding Mill Valley to see the waterfall. We figured that although it’s not a particularly large waterfall, now with the snow melting it would be a good time to go visit it (I shifted some work from today to this Monday which got freed up, yay for freelancing).

Despite the slight rain we decided to carry on and make for the top which was still covered in snow. I figured I’d record it as I had the recorder already out from the waterfall, it was very windy. So anyway, here’s us trudging along to the top for about 10 minutes.

If you’re in an RSS reader (well done you) here’s the direct link: https://soundcloud.com/revdancatt/carding-mill-valley-with-1

Now and again I throw Alien Skin’s “Snap Art” photoshop filter at screen-grabs of computer generated images. I’m not quite sure why, I think it may be instinct (I’ve done it before with World of Warcraft and with a Digital/Physical Flip-Flop).

The Snap Art filter is designed to make a photograph look like it was hand painted, their website says:

“Snap Art turns your photograph into a beautiful work of art that looks completely handmade. Improved realism in version 3 keeps your subject natural and recognizable. The result is a finished piece worthy of printing on canvas and hanging in a gallery. Using Snap Art just requires a creative idea, not hand-eye coordination or technical training.”

Yeah, sod all that technical training and learning how to paint when you can just push a button, replacing what used to be (and yes I know, still is) a highly technical skill with an algorithm. And it’s a pretty damn fine algorithm too, you get swirls of paint in roughly all the right places.

It makes it feel as though the artist rocked up to some spot, set up an easel and got painting. It’s faking a real artist in a real place doing real painting.

Which is why I feel that if the process is “fake” and the painting is fake (and the artist is fake) then maybe the location should be fake too.

I like the little artefacts of fakeness, the on-screen controls of the compass, feedback tab, options and copyright notice. That the algorithm sets about “painting” them with the same aplomb as it does a tree or a cloud.

But then that means we can play in different ways. All these images are from screen grabs of the Here.com website, which is using Nokia 3D maps. It’s technology sampling the real world, digitising it, then representing it back in a realistic as possible fashion. But it’s not always very good at it, trees seem to cause it problems, turning into weird green blobs bulging up from sidewalks. There’s also the downloading process, it displays low resolution textures and models before higher-res versions pop into existence.

I took the screen shot below before the system had managed to load in blocks of Toronto, squares of buildings missing instead just bland stretched patches of map tiles in their place…

…these are paintings of a fiction of a fiction.

The purple “lake” in the background of Milan where again the models of the buildings haven’t loaded in. The square infront of the cathedral and the building in the bottom right hand corner have only half of their higher resolution textures loaded in. The back-half of the cathedral is still the low-poly version of the model while the front-half has streamed some extra ones in already.

Computers painting synthetic landscapes.

I wanted to throw down some notes about the work/play I’ve been doing around remixing Jeff Noon’s books. Also I promised to explain what the above image was all about.

It all starts way back when I first fell in love with Mark V Shaney, who I discovered via an article written by Penn Jillette: “I Spent an Interesting Evening Recently with a Grain of Salt”. Mark is, or was I guess, a bot that posted rambling messages to the net.singles UseNet group.

He did this by consuming all of the messages posted to net.singles, and using a Markov chain to spit weird messages back out again.

Markov chain, Mark V Shaney, see, it kind of makes sense.

I’ve toyed with Markov chains before but always had trouble explaining my use of them to other people, so I drew a diagram part of which is at the start of this post.

One way I explain is by saying I’ve thrown loads of fairy tales into a system, then say “Once upon a” and ask you to predict what the next word will be. You’ll probably say “time“. You’re guessing the next word based on the previous ones and your experience with fairy tales. We then move onto “upon a time“, next word is probably “there” at which point the sentence may continue with either “was” or “were“, as in “Once upon a time there was a…” or “Once upon a time there were…”, at this point we’ve got a split and there’s nothing more ahead except forks and probability.

Google auto-completing search queries as you type is similar.

Anyway, I’ve done a similar thing using the work of Jeff Noon (for reasons I’ll get into in a moment) as the source material, you can see it here: http://revdancatt.github.com/CAT780-remixing-noon. I’ll take the following output as an example…

“The whole forest had been anesthetised, her temples wired, her senses stimulated, her eyes were not on Eva, not on Eva, not on Eva, not on anybody in that same realm, the land of dreams and nightmares.”

This started with the words “The whole” from the book Channel SK1N, if we search for those two words we can see that they appear in four different places…

…meaning the system has a 25% chance of picking either “team.”, “room“, “place” or “forest“. In our case this time it picked “forest” and off the system goes again moving onto “whole forest” as the next word pair to put back in again. It only appears once followed by “had“, “whole forest had” which in turn leads to either “the” or “been“.

The original sentence from Channel SK1N starting with “The whole forest…” continues “…had the feel of a stage set, a location, of something she had already seen on film.” quite different to our “The whole forest had been anesthetised, her temples wired, her senses stimulated…”.

The end result is Jeff Noonian but not Jeff Noon, it’s using all the same words that Noon uses and no more, just not in the same order. The chances of it recreating the whole original sentence are slim, 25% to pick “had”, then 50-50 of to get “the”, only 20% for the “feel” and onwards. Just a 2.5% chance to have matched the first 6 words.

As soon as you hit a super connector such as “by the”, “with a”, “on a” and so on then all bets are off.

Here’s the resulting image for our phrase…

…click through for a larger view.

Why Jeff Noon?

A couple of reasons, and not very well articulated ones at that. The first is easy, Noon’s books are being re-released as ebooks: http://www.metamorphiction.com/ which makes it particularly easy to get at the source text (ssshhh, don’t tell).

The second is a bit more complex and it’s not what I’m claiming Jeff’s work to be, but rather how I think of it. I’m not going to say “Jeff’s work is all about” but rather; it seems/feels to me as though a lot of Jeff Noon’s work has parallels to music and remix/dub attitudes. Needle in the Groove is a story that remixes itself as it progresses, a number of books remix the location of the city of Manchester… or maybe they’re a cover version of Manchester.

This comes out again in Cobralingus a fictional writing engine that “…uses the Metamorphiction process to apply the techniques of electronic dance music to the production of words, dissolving languages. In this mutated, liquid state, words are manipulated into new forms; borrowed text is sampled and transformed.”

A simple Markov chain almost certainly isn’t that but it is an interesting starting point. Music is steeped in remixes, cover versions, mashups and sampling. But this doesn’t happen in writing (probably for very specific copyright reasons), you don’t often get authors covering or remixing someone else’s story. It happens but very rarely. Where are the 7″, 12″, radio edit, club mix version of writing, held within the same medium of writing?

As Automated Alice is the story of Alice from Lewis Carroll’s book set in a future version of Manchester, a Markov chain allow us to throw the two books together and mix between them…

“‘Oh dear!’ Alice murmurs to herself. ‘Not only is this snake poisonous,’ replied the Badgerman, ‘and after all…there aren’t that many…’ that is what she did, she picked her way between Birdcaging girls and Briefcasing boys, ‘and the real Whippoorwill?’ she cried, ‘wherever have you flown to?’ And then cubism, because I couldn’t be doing with making calculations?”

“You MUST have meant some mischief, or else you’d have signed your name on a slight breeze. ‘Whippoorwill!’ cried Alice to the north of the ground. So she began very cautiously: ‘But I am getting forgetful in my time, but never had fits, my dear’, and she said to Alice, ‘Give yourself up! Give yourself up!’ Alice forced herself to her full size by this time, that Alice managed to find (frustratingly) that fully twelve pieces were missing from my jigsaw!”

…one Alice blending into the other.

Or even allow Nola from Channel SK1N to meet Alice from Automated Alice…

“Whirrrrr. Moments passing. Clikck whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Nola moved over the Dome’s image vanished as she whipped her scaly tail at the bar, flipping open the trapdoor and Alice did tap on the camera’s gaze, on the shelf, according to Chrowdingler, is known as Djinnetic Engineering, on account of her skin, her belly, her hands started to move! Suddenly Alice was curious at hearing this news, and the screen like a white sheet, nothing more. Had she been called, back then? And she slipped and almost fell.

Too close. Sweat.

Heat. The smell of my adventures!’ Alice observed to herself, ‘it’s a book beginning in C… e… y. Now what could they possibly be called? Wait a minute!’ Just then, a thousand pieces and the sounds of their pursuers dwindled away.”

A Markov chain is a blunt tool, but an interesting starting point.

Further reading:

Origins of a Dub Fiction by Jeff Noon over at Language is a Virus