Play the works:
a binary augur: every word a voice edition
About the works:
edge speciesInstructions:
Click and hold to move, scroll to zoom in and out of the digital poem on the 3D plane. Relaunch to regenerate.
Description:
The last known video of one of the last known thylacines is forever haunting. Nervously this beautiful creature paces behind a wire fence, as if it intuitively understands the others of its kind might soon be gone. When that thylacine was captured and forced into captivity, its kind would've been considered an Edge Species. The word "edge" is critical, as it succinctly describes a species trajectory and directly implies the immediate peril.
Within this digital poem there are 60 such edge species. Each species name emerges on the top of a block, all contained within a generative maze. The names then fall from the block's edge, stretched downwards towards the empty space beneath a 3D plane. A new pattern is formed each time the work is re-launched, new names appear, the pattern changes, the blocks move.
The 3D plane itself represents the perilous slice of ecosystem history in which we currently live. And a low, droning soundtrack loops and loops, as the edge species names fall and fall. Glitches intersect with the names, eliciting the notion that no species is apart, away from others. They are all interconnected, however distant or close to the edge.
a binary augur: first edition
Instructions:
Hover and click to read and hear. Relaunch to generate an entirely new work.
Description:
Sometimes simple seeming works are deceivingly complex. "a binary augur" is an entirely generative digital poem. Nearly everything about the work is generated at launch. And when the work is relaunched, an entirely new work is built. The titles, hover sub-titles, hover sounds, spoken poetry, colours of the grid, placement, everything is randomly generated. Even the computer voices are randomly generated and the poetic text they speak is randomly re-combined from three different arrays.
Behind the complicated code and generative engine are 40 different predictions. These are human written fictional approximations of AI created predictions, slogans for uncertain futures. Imagine an AI engine built to predict minor events, local interactions, immediate intersections. This artificial engine uses data from any and all sources and can "see" brief moments from nearby futures. It begins with a setting: "above a wobbly ceiling fan clicking against fibreboard" or " 'inside the attic of an abandoned leprosy hospital". Then it identifies a subject/actor: "robotic gutter sweeps and a hungry murder of crow" or "worried apple farmers with hands like cracked rock". Lastly, the AI prediction engine, the “binary augur" identifies an action: "plots with a colony of butterflies to alter the elderly" or "preach to the hungry crowds outside about plumbing".
As the code (and the code only) of this work was written in collaboration with AI, numerous experiments were explored in adding more random features. Most of those experiments resulted in broken code, conflicts with JavaScript functions or simply couldn't be implemented. However, some of those experiments, admittedly a small percentage, resulted in interesting and even engaging new randomisation approaches.
"a binary augur: every word a new voice" is a second version that adds an almost impossible element. Each word is a new computer voice, switching between dozens of different computer-generated text-to-speech vocalizations.