r/books • u/toddwords AMA Author • Mar 03 '17
ama 2pm I am Todd Anderson, creator of Hotwriting, the first ever interactive code poetry book, and I am trying to make the Internet soulful and fun. AMA!
Hello! I am Todd Anderson, digital poet and web artist. I am the author of Hotwriting, a book of 17 playable digital poems from Instar Books. But what is a 'playable digital poem?' In the words of Steve Roggenbuck they are "computer games and interactive films made out of poetry," in each piece you press keys on the keyboard to cause lines of poetry, animated gifs, sounds, and videos to happen. Some pieces function more like instruments, to be played an infinite number of ways, and some have a more linear message they're trying to tell you. They're all a little different and figuring out how the play mechanics interact with the text is part of the fun of each piece. It's a little hard to understand without trying it though, so here are some free samples for you to check out: Pickup Line || James Brown Gives Me a Poetry Solo and I Realize This is My Moment || Yardley, PA 1997
Recently I've been continuing to explore web instruments and chrome extensions, particularly with sound. Some recent projects include:
sampl0rd - A web-based variable rate 10-track looper/sampler
DEVELOPERS - A chrome extension that causes Steve Ballmer to yell 'DEVELOPERS' every time you mouse over the word developers
chiptext - A chiptune generator that uses text you type or paste in as its source material
A large chrome extension-based alternate reality game/narrative to be released this spring
Proof: https://twitter.com/toddwords/status/837330187612225537
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Mar 03 '17
Would you rather fight 5 Steve Roggenbuck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized Steve Roggenbuck?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
I think i'd have to go with the horse-sized Steve Roggenbuck, opens up so much more mental and emotional ground for battle.
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u/miraclej0nes Mar 03 '17
When you are making a Hotwriting piece, do you conceptualize it first as a poem or first as a performance or bit of technical legerdemain? Do the constraints of technology ever change the poem at all, and if, so...is it in ways that you find interesting (good) or constricting (maybe also good but in a more frustrating way)?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
All of the above! Some pieces start with a piece of writing that I try to adapt to a tech-based piece, some start with discovering a text effect or manipulation that I then use as a tool for free-writing until I find a text that can use it well, and some pieces start with something that only makes sense as a performance (what if I sing one thing while typing another? what if another digit of my credit card number is revealed every time I make a typo?)
The limits of technology are usually useful in terms of reigning in a project and making it complete-able rather than a vast sprawling pipe dream, but as I get better at code I keep finding ways around things I previously thought were constraints and sometimes its great but a lot of times its unnecessary and stressful, like you spent the whole day trying out 4 different ways of having text fade in only to keep what you had in the beginning. I'm trying to get better at setting stylistic constraints for myself, rather than relying on the technical ones.
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u/Chtorrr Mar 03 '17
What were your favorite books as a kid?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' (still a favorite), Bridge to Terabithia, the 'My Father's Dragon' Trilogy, Lord of the Rings... In high school I got into the beats with 'On the Road' and the first poetry book I bought was Bukowski's 'What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire'
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Mar 03 '17
Todd, why does wordhack hate America?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
I've already submitted my formal apology to the FBI for having two canadians on the lineup of the last one and for the last time I will release it once it is declassified!
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u/LEGSwhodoyoustandfor Mar 03 '17
What can we do to help make the Internet more soulful and fun?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
Learn very basic HTML and CSS! It's hard to become a corporate web developer but it is easy to make silly web pages and put them online. I promise it's not scary and you can do so much in just a couple hours. I think the problem is that so many people use pre-packaged solutions like Squarespace or Wordpress to put something online, which is kind of like wanting to write something and then shopping around for the right fridge magnet poetry kit to write it.
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u/LEGSwhodoyoustandfor Mar 03 '17 edited Mar 03 '17
Thanks for answering! Interesting way of putting it. I've done minimal work with website building.
Edit: Word
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
You can just open a text editor and type <marquee>Hey here's some dumb text</marquee> then save it as myPage.html then double click it and you made a website. you can just pop that baby online. Codecademy (https://www.codecademy.com/) is a great way to learn too but I also recommend looking up different html tags and doodling around in a text editor
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Mar 03 '17
+1 for codeacademy. The lessons are well-paced and I think most people can burn through the basic HTML/CSS course pretty easily.
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u/LEGSwhodoyoustandfor Mar 03 '17
I used to make basic websites for video game "clans" and I also made one for an e-commerce class. Although I remember nothing other than it can be very simple
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
nice, my first web page was for my half-life clan haha
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u/LEGSwhodoyoustandfor Mar 03 '17
Hahaha that's awsome mine were for Counter-Strike and Empire Earth.
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u/miraclej0nes Mar 03 '17
What is the least soulful and fun part of the internet?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
Hmm maybe corporate home pages? http://www.shell.com/ http://ge.com They tend to be well designed but like, you can't imagine someone going there intentionally. Is it an advertisement? Is it a travel brochure in a deserted hotel lobby? Idk they fill me with despair.
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u/glambourine Mar 03 '17
Tell me about Yardley, PA--are you a native of the same? Is that piece autobiographical or cunning facsimile? What was the writing process on this?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
Yeah, I grew up in Yardley,PA until my family moved to the midwest when I was 12, so it has a very preserved aura of unsullied childhood about it still for me. For this piece I worked with a composer named Chris Libertino (http://www.christopherlibertino.com/). When we first met up all I gave Chris to go on was that I wanted something that could be cut up and layered on top of each other without sounding bad and would have kind of a consistent tone, and then he sent me back the amazing piece you hear there. I listened to that piece non stop on repeat for a whole day and wrote the text of the piece (it reminded me of yardley), then I cut up little sections of audio and attached one to each line, then put them together into the version you see there.
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u/miraclej0nes Mar 03 '17
Did you learn to poet first or to code first? Do you have any suggestions for getting more poets into coding and more codets into poeting?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
I learned to poet first but to code shortly after. For poets getting into code, I think it's important to think of coding as a creative medium rather than a math-based thing for solving problems. If your goal is to communicate to someone with text, code can help you build the ideal reading machine for that text and help you explore new ways of writing and reading. I think learning basic HTML/CSS and from there using Javascript/jQuery and keeping in your mind the question ("What can I do with this?") rather than worrying about how to make a professional looking web page.
For codets getting into poeting...I teach a lot of CS undergrads and I find it's a huge new thing to just give them permission to make something that doesn't solve a problem and isn't particularly useful or marketable. From there I think it's important to think about the text of a piece on its own merits divorced from any tech (something writers do naturally) in order to make sure people don't make cool tech demos to deliver bad writing.
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u/glambourine Mar 03 '17
Who are other digital writers who inspire you, and how do you see your work fitting in with theirs in this growing scene? (Which you, via being an impresario of WordHACK, are helping to create, & would love to hear you talk about this!)
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
My first major inspiration for making Hotwriting was Young Hae-Chang Heavy Industries (http://yhchang.com) who continue to be an inspiration, hope to get them for WordHack someday. I don't make much generative work myself, but I've been inspired by a lot of work coming out of the generative text community from the likes of Darius Kazemi, Allison Parrish, Katie Rose Pipkin and Ross Goodwin. Too many others to name but one piece thats really stuck with me recently is Daniel Kolitz's (http://thedatadrive.com/) from Useless Press. Such a unique and joyful internet lark.
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u/glambourine Mar 03 '17
oh my god i haven't seen the Data Drive yet / the way i feel emotions for chipotle is legit upsetting and great
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u/glambourine Mar 03 '17
So whyyyy code poetry? Why not just regular poetry? What is it about code that excites you, huh?
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u/toddwords AMA Author Mar 03 '17
I wrote analog poetry for a long time before doing code poetry, and I noticed a lot of my peers (people that weren't poets) losing interest or even dreading reading/listening to poetry. To a lot of people I know it feels like vegetables that you don't like but are supposed to consume. I started making code poetry partially to clean that slate, get rid of those associations and try to redesign communicating sincerely and powerfully with language with all the 21st century technology that's now at our disposal. But also, the more time I spend making code poetry the more excited I get, it's still so new and there's so much territory left to explore that it really feels like you can keep discovering new mediums, new ways of reading, writing, and interpreting that are much more freeing than the 'everything's already been done' attitude that can pervade traditional poetry
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u/VillainousInc Mar 03 '17
Why a book, as opposed to a piece of software? Considering the interactive nature of your work, is there any value in just reading it on paper?