Algorithmic Poetry

About

/ Five-week Live* Online class begins 26. April, ends 24. May

/ Every Monday, 8pm-10pm, CET

/ Small class of participants

Course Description

The class aims to merge three different universes: code, literature, and machine learning. We will descend into this Bermuda Triangle of disciplines with a poetic, speculative, and conceptual approach, as well as a technical perspective.

What is the difference between writing with code and writing with text? Is code a new material? What is electronic literature and code poetry? How far the-rabbit-hole can computers take us?

At the beginning of our voyage, we will gain a poetic perspective on how to write code by submerging ourselves into the technical and speculative aspects of creative programming. We will then explore the conceptual cornerstones to think about literary texts as perception distorting machines. And finally, we will dwell into the dark territory of pre-trained Machine Learning models to enhance our imagination and generate new forms of writing textual organisms.

In summary, this poetic interpretation of computational logic in creative coding and machine learning will allow us to review concepts and engage with tools to convey new meanings to our writing experiences.

In this course, you will be introduced to:

Web-friendly platforms like p5.js, ml5.js, and Github. We will also address basic programming concepts, web-based interaction, JavaScript snippets, Python snippets, code poetry, electronic literature, and pre-trained machine learning models.

After this month-long program, each participant will have a wide array of concepts and techniques to continue exploring poetic code writing with machine learning alongside their own digital art practice.

Each class will consist of two parts:

Part 1: We will conceptually review a topic while also analyze art pieces that focus on that subject. We will explore and discuss methods, perspectives, and approaches to gather information and inspiration for our work.

Part 2: We will discuss reading material and review code exercises to emulate and transform the art pieces observed into our own project development.