Exquisite Corpser
For the Reading and Writing Electronic Text final, I created a program inspired in the Exquisite Corpse method, invented by the Surrealist movement around 1020.
The program works by continuously collecting anonymous thoughts coming from twitter, conforming an endless exquisite corpse. When the program is started, it requests the name of a city as the seed. It then determines the prevalent mood of that city by searching through the 1000 most recent tweets originated on it and looking for keywords in a list organized according to Robert Plutchik’s list of basic emotions. That determines the word used for the first phrase.
From then on, the program looks for the last verb or adverb in the previous tweet and generates a new search using that word and a random word from the group of the prevalent emotion, generating a connection between one thought and the next, but giving room for randomness to play its role on finding interesting relationships.
For the final presentation, Hello Word!, held in Tisch Building’s ground floor, the text generated by the program was collectively read by many of the guests.
Video/Audio of the reading is coming thanks to Sofy who kindly recorded the event.
And here is the python code.