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Spinning - Revolver - Agnes (reflection)

The Revolver was the final project collaboration for Software Art Text and Performing Robots.

Original Concept

Initially, Reine and I wanted to create a robot that could explore rotations and patterns. The original concept was to have two metal balls moving in circular fashion creating shapes on a sandy surface. At the same time, a projector on the ceiling would map the path of the balls and draw figures on the sand. Unfortunately, due to the creative constrains, we had to simplify our project. We scratched the idea of mapping and decided to focus on rotations and life cycles. 

Design and Development

I worked on the text, audio, and visuals for the final presentation.

Text The text used for the project was generated in four steps. First, I wrote two sentences: one related to life and one related to death. Then, I used Wordnik, an online English dictionary, to process the initial sentences I had written and find definitions and phrases for nouns and adjectives. These were written to two different textual databases. Next, I used the Markov Chain generator to create cyclical sentences using sequence probability and databases as input. Finally, I ran the generator several times until I had several paragraphs I could use for my final poem.

Audio We decided the robot would not recite any of the lines in the poem. Instead, the audio would serve as a narrative, a reflection of cycles, beginnings and endings, and life as a whole. I used an online text-to-speech website to record the voices of Agnes and George. I wanted to make the poem as real and as human as I possibly could. The poem spoke about religion, love, fear, life, and death, and I needed robots that could feel and show emotion. Using both male and female voices helped. People were able to relate to both sides. In addition to that, I added several voices towards the end. The multiplicity of voices and the increase in movement of the robotic metal balls matched the end of the poem and the state of being dead. 

Image For the visuals, I used open frameworks and a wall projection. The sketch consisted of blue and yellow circles being drawn over and over again on a fading black background. I tried to match the colors of Agnes to the colors of life. It was very important for me to tell a story with the image, thus I modified variables as the poem progressed. In the final version, circles increase in size and change in color as life moves to death. In the end, all the circles disappear from the screen. 

Reflection

I think the collaboration between Performing Robots and Software Art Text was incredible. It was so much work for all the students in both classes, but ultimately everything paid off and all performances were amazing. As I mentioned in class, having the collaboration was very eye opening and great practice for what we may encounter in the future when working with other people on different projects. However, I would recommend having more time to work on the concept before diving head in the construction of the robot and the software. 

In terms of my work, I still believe there is more to be done and I want to continue improving the little details :) Overall, a great semester!

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Spinning - Revolver - Agnes (text)

A circle, shaped like a plane curve everywhere. Something, such as a ring, equidistant from a given fixed point: the center. A circle, a continous reproduction bounded as life; The sphere of the present: representing everyday life. A biography. At infinite. Continuing for a lifetime, lifelong, life process. Continuing without beginning or end; existing outside of time.

Make one's circle, a source of one's life. Especially a person's life. Make one's circle, something till death. An ageless: personal flame, eternal flame, eternal moonwalk. Led a good life. Not desperately or urgently. Ran for the sense of one's life. Human existing for the life of artist: painted with the beautiful, beautiful sin. Being without beginning. Specific, characteristic manner of living: lifelong, lifelong. Related a source of sight. Beginningly beautiful, stunningly endless.

God. Endless God. I couldn't remember his name. Not my life. Someone's life. I couldn't remember his life for dear life. Absolutely not. Not for any reason whatsoever. I couldn't remember his lifetime. For dear life! A biography. A human existence, the particular course, the circle of life. Liveliness or vitality that is full circuit in end or existence. I couldn't remember his name.

Desperately or urgently, I ran for the characteristic state to regain course. A person's living point or end, enclosed at itself. At surround; enclose. At surround; enclose.   An interruption of the spiritual environment. The time between birth and death. The afterlife. The truths. The interval between birth and death. The continuing point of nature. The interval of time between one's birth and the present. She led a good, long life. She can't remember his name.

The act of dying: The heroine's death A planar region bounded by a circle. A vicious circle. A circle gainer. The act of dying: The process that finishes at its starting point. Fleeting glimpse, fleeting friendships, fleeting opportunities. The act of dying: the termination and the extinction. Fleeting continuously represented as a ring. A circle, circle, circle.

Passing. Be the death's door near death. Be the center. A circle around. The destroyer of life. The circle of life. Move in a circle. A full circle. To die, to death. Death of him. Wrongful death of him. Be the cause of being dead. The extinction. The extinction of life. The act of dying. The state of being dead.

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Spinning - Revolver - Agnes (images)

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#!

I AM THAT I AM

#!/usr/bin/python

def permutations(elements):      if len(elements)==0:           yield elements      else:           for result in permutations(element[1:]):                for i in range(len(elements)):                     yield result[:i] + elements[0:1] + result[i:]

print ‘’.join(list(permutations(’AEIOU’)))

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With Those We Love Alive

With Those We Love Alive is a game where the main character visits a monstrous world.The main plot revolves around a crafter that goes to live in a palace in service of an Empress. At first, the magical world is an exciting place to explore, however it soon becomes dull. The player is trapped just waiting for something to happen and the only way to move the game forward is to sleep.

The job of the player in the palace is to make ornaments and weapons for the Empress. Some examples of the materials used in the game are: angel-leather, blood wood, and lake crystals. The materials are truly creepy. I chose the weirdest ones to make the game even more interesting. 

There are some violent and terrible situations that happen in between the crafting that show the true nature of the world the player is in. But apparently, it is incredibly normal that no one fights the oppression and evil anymore. There is no hope.

From time to time, the game stops to tell the player to draw a sigil on their arm, representing some particular idea or value. However, the game doesn’t mention what the drawing must look like, which demands even more thought from the player’s part. In my opinion, this truly shows the journey you are going through and the person you are becoming while playing the game.

The writing is incredibly beautiful and the soundtrack is completely immersive. It makes you feel as if you are inside the world. After playing the interactive fiction for a while, I reached the conclusion that it was a beautiful and terribly scary game. I would like to finish it sometime when I have more time!

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#3 Structure

1.

The bad. The aware. The sleep. The self-hatred. The self-esteem can fuck away. Emptiness creates boundaries. The only winter tells the worst-case love.

2.

Life. Night. Anxiety can get the right death. The good can tell the emptiness. The guilty can end the existential. The alive can hear the world sadness. The genuine can see the future.

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This third part required grammar structure to construct poems. I imported the Twitter dataset from my first assignment, processed the individual words to get their structure, and used a certain sentence structure to put them in a specific order. It took a lot of runs to get an understandable final result. 

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#2 Randoms

Source

I traveled to your silence. It felt as pale as the grey ocean waves. I fell where life could no longer be found. And I sailed without feeling alive.

Random Replacement

I traveled to your yakety-yak. It felt as exceptionalistic as the countryside Indian waves. I fell where bounce could no longer be found. And I sailed without feeling opinionative.

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This second part required me to replace words in the poem with random words. I imported 100 words from the wordnik dataset and processed them to get their structure. At the same time, I processed the source poem. If the structure of the original matched the structure of a random random word, then it was replaced. 

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#1 Synonyms

Source

Let me sail to the voice that is as lifeless as the sun. There is no death in this paradise. Nor happiness in this hell.

Synonym Replacement

Army of the Righteous canvas me to the voice that is as lifeless as the sunshine. There is no demise in this Paradise. Nor felicity in this inferno.

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This first part of the homework required me to replace words in the original poem with synonyms. For each word, I imported its synonyms from the wordnet database, then randomly replaced them.

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Am I okay yet?

Am I ok? I fell in love 47 times today Am I enough? Not that I loved serenity less but that I loved torturing myself more Why are we here? If a romantic obsession a day keeps the meaningless nature of existence away What's the point? Nobody is coming to rescue me Do you miss me? You have to rescue me from myself Is death imminent? Love can't save you Am I ok yet? I regret everything

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Datasets: @sosadtoday and @sad Filters: “love”, “regret”, and “?”

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Homework #2

For this homework, I parsed the twitter account: @sosadtoday​. I spent a lot of time trying to find either a funny, witty, or romantic twitter account that would provide me with an interesting textual database, but none caught my eye.

Suddenly, I stumbled upon this one. Instead of being funny, witty, or romantic, I found it to be a little obscure and a very sad. Some of the tweets really shook me and the amount of followers truly impressed me. Having so many people relate to this theme is one of the reasons I chose it. 

The raw material is great for a poem that needs an enormous amount of emotional feelings attached. However, I am not still completely sure if it will be the dataset I will use for my first poetic assignment. 

Challenges with parsing: I was only able to parse 20 tweets from the twitter website. I need to fix my code to have a larger dataset with variety for the poem :)

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Twitter US Airline Sentiment

The dataset analyses people’s feelings about flight problems of major U.S. airlines.The data is taken from February 2015 Twitter posts and is classified into positive, negative, and neutral categories. 

This raw material would be good for a poem because it contains a great amount of powerful words with emotional feelings attached. A combination of positive and negative tweets could potentially result into a funny contrast of airline opinions. 

https://www.kaggle.com/crowdflower/twitter-airline-sentiment/data

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Poema 20 (Pablo Neruda)

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.

Escribir, por ejemplo: “La noche está estrellada, y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.”

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos. La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería. Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche. Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oir la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella. Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla. La noche está estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos. Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca. Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles. Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cu��nto la quise. Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos. Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero. Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como ésta la tuve entre mis brazos, mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque éste sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa, y estos sean los últimos versos que yo le escribo.

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Pablo Neruda (1904) is the pen name of Ricardo Reyes, a poet born in Parral, Chile. When he was twenty years old, he published one of his most notable works Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada which features Poema 20.

Poema 20 takes place under the great, endless sky dotted with numerous stars. The speaker who recently lost the love of his life is bitterly regretting the separation. The night sky reminds him of the moments he spent with an unnamed woman. His memories are described through a series of metaphors and imagery with a lot of emphasis on loss and sadness.

As the poem unfolds, Pablo undergoes a moving on process. He knows that the love of his life will soon belong to someone else. He ends the poem saying that this particular night will be the last night he suffers pain because this will be the last poem he will write for her. This shows that he has now finally resolved to completely move on.

Pablo Neruda shows us the pain and suffering a lover experiences when he separates from his other half. The simple language makes the general audience empathize more with him. This poem is the penultimate one of the Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada collection, the collection where he shows a full cycle of a love life.

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Poema 15 (Pablo Neruda)

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente, y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca. Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca.

Como todas las cosas están llenas de mi alma emerges de las cosas, llena del alma mía. Mariposa de sueño, te pareces a mi alma, y te pareces a la palabra melancolía.

Me gustas cuando callas y estás como distante. Y estás como quejándote, mariposa en arrullo. Y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te alcanza: déjame que me calle con el silencio tuyo.

Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo. Eres como la noche, callada y constelada. Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo.

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente. Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto. Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan. Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto.

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Software Art & Performing Robots Collaboration Moodboard

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The Cubic Sphere Final