Small Poetry Machine with Nick Montfort

Description

Participants will learn to engage with computation through programming small-scale poetry systems in JavaScript and Python.  We will begin by surveying several pieces; students will be invited to appropriate and modify work that interests them most. We will emphasize built-in resources of programming languages and how self-contained programs can offer space for exploration and provide new perspectives. Our focus on small, self-contained programs will nevertheless be open to history and to global production, and will allow us to learn about the development of different traditions of text generation and the ways that computational poetry has developed worldwide.  We will then develop more "original" projects after our initial work in program modification, although these will be connected to traditions, movements, and previous work in various ways. Along the way, we will consider some fundamentals of programming and resources will be offered to the class to allow review of these.