Procedural art and code
Projects that involve computer-mediated generation of art, writing, or other artistic forms. Many of my projects began as entries in National Novel Generation Month, in which practitioners are challenged to write software to generate playful, thoughtful, or nonsense computer-generated novels.
2014
Seraphs: A mysterious codex
A computer-generated book based on the Voynich Manuscript. Featured at MIT Libraries as part of Author Function, a 2018 exhibit on computer-generated books.
2022
A letter groove
Produces cut-up images in the style of artists' books out of rare and interesting manuscripts. Each run generates unique compositions from historic texts.
2025
The numbers, one to 50 thousand
A generated book containing the numbers one to fifty thousand as extracted from scanned books on the Internet Archive. An entry in National Novel Generation Month 2025.
2023
The figure 10 in gold
An animated digital poem for Taper #10: Powers of Ten, inspired by Charles Demuth's Precisionist painting of William Carlos Williams's poem "The Great Figure."
2015
Random chance: Computer-imagined surrealist montages
Generated compositions that resemble photomontages in the style of early surrealists. The program combines public domain images into unexpected juxtapositions.
2020
Color problems
A generator based on the works of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939), who hoped her original color analyses would inspire others to study "whatever originals may be at hand." A collaboration with Mel Dollison.
2016
The days left forebodings and water: Generated blackout poetry
Creates artwork in the style of Newspaper Blackout Poetry using natural language processing and optical character recognition. Featured on Waxy.org in 2016.
2017
A physical book: Undigitization
Makes a digitized book "physical" by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity are applied to the letterforms.
2021
A pickler for the nowing ones
A translator and generator to produce text in the style of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1802) by noted eccentric Timothy Dexter. An entry in National Novel Generation Month 2021.
2017
No solitude in the caves of spring
An alliterative poem by a neural net: "Ants and all ages are all about—active as buds are bound by black, bubbles burn by maple blackbird body..."
2015
Saga III: Recreating the first computer-written teleplay
A reimagining of a 1961 computer program that generated the screenplay to a Western, filmed by CBS television. Source code and history of the project. Invited contribution to the Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems.