Degenerate Forms
From Wiki.q.c
Degenerate Forms are poetic forms derived from the interplay of twitter with chance. The name comes from the mathematical/logical concept of the same name which signifies a function that, when applied to some data, the inverse function can not be relied upon to return the original data. A good example is the transformation of third-person pronouns in english to the opposite gender:
his -> her
he -> she
him -> her
but:
her -> his, him
So once you go from male to female you can't go back. (That's!... nevermind)
The name is a reference to both the underlying point of the piece, as well as to the english language's complete inability to definitively represent pronunciation in its written form. As well as our code's inability to particularly reliably determine syllables' demarcations and therefore count them.
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The Form
These textual structures are built from the original electronic representation of text: morse code. To create a degenerate form we fetch the most recent tweet from twitter's public RSS feed and convert it into morse. Each word's morse representation is then used as the meter of a verse, which is then filled in by a more-or-less complete sentence from a public source. We then trace the history of communication media's munging our interpersonal communication by munging up the original form.
The precise transformation from meter to verse is as follows: We extract the length of the morse representation of each word, and call that the number of syllables in the verse. The emphasis is determined by the morse code as well: the reader should emphasize the syllables that correspond to dashes, and consider dots to be short syllables. Of course, it is easy to get lost in the sentences and one should not feel too bad about a failure to correctly emphasize the text, although she has at this point failed to send the correct message across the aether.
The Path Through History
After an initial form has been generated we walk through the decades since the telegram:
- first, we re-visit the poem from the future, after some words have been eroded by time.
- Then, we try to text message the poem to all of our friends, unfortunately we're sloppy and don't check to make sure that the words are all correct.
- Then we take a look at our text-messaged version another hundred years in the future.
- Of course, none of this makes sense without context, so we explore the conversation that is going on around our poem, by inserting the meters that we skipped over in our quest to make a poem. This creates a poetic waveform, that completely accurately represents the Zeitgeist at the moment of creation.
- Then we refill the metric skeleton used in the original path to misunderstanding with new phrases of the same length, munge them up horribly, and work our way back to their original forms.
The Final Result
The generative tweet is displayed, immediately followed by its morse representation. We have extended morse code with the pipe character as a way to represent spaces in the original expression, just for ease of reading. After the tweet, we present the first—and least-degenerate—form. Reading this form correctly, that is to say with correct emphasis, (if such a thing were possible, and if also the software generating it didn't make any mistakes) would successfully transmit the original tweet to all people who heard it, albeit in a form they would probably have a hard time understanding.
Then there is a brief interlude in the form of the original morse being re-displayed.
After that we, enamored with our no-doubt brilliant poem, try to txt it to all of our friends, but carelessly. At this point not only is all of the original vocal emphasis—the thing that actually performed our desired communication—gone, but through our carelessness we have let the phone just put in whatever words it thought we were trying to say, and many of them may have been swapped out. These new words, aside from almost guaranteedly not having the same meaning as the original word, may also have different numbers of syllables. With this transformation it regularly becomes impossible to get the original message back from the text, even were our friends to re-txt the form back to us and were we to try to read it with the correct emphasis.
Another interlude in the original morse.
At this point we, having given up on ever communicating with anybody by means of reading with morse inflection a collection of sentences, drop the original printout of the the form in the ground somewhere and forget about it for some hundred years. Of course, the poem doesn't go away just because we forget about it, and true to form we come across it again after time has had it's way and the poem has had many of its words destroyed.
And here, another interlude, before
While walking in some no doubt idyllic field we realize that our friends, having received our text message and absolutely loved it, decided to print it out as well. But then they grew weary and dropped it in this field and now we're looking at it hundreds of years later with some other words missing.
And again, an interlude, and then the most dramatic transformation
An Example
here ends our presentation
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
The cocktail party begins at 6 p
Kangaroo genes close to humans
Signs of Weather Seen on Dwarf Planet
The Keeneland November breeding stock sale that coincided with a world economic crash ended Nov
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
tie cocktail party begins au 6 s
Kangaroo genes close tm gumbos
signs ne Weather seem mn Dwarf Planet
the Keeneland November breeding stock sake that coincided with b world economic crash ended nov
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
The cocktail party at 6
Kangaroo genes close humans
Signs of Seen on Planet
The Keeneland breeding sale that coincided with a world economic ended Nov
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
tie cocktail party begins au 6 s
Kangaroo close tm gumbos
signs ne Weather seem mn
breeding stock sake that coincided with world economic crash ended
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
DFILM
vie rite
CarStuckGirls
anybody
People
is pm not carib
Beware vie fat Police
man gap 1,497 Credit capes
nan has 1,497 Credit cares
and put vie test
Couple break Record
cows hole Grudges, saw Scientists
org cod click mo Donate
tie begins au 6
7-8 in Terengganu,
vou ear relaxada ob cama
Thieves spy bronze Virgin nary statue from church
Stripper Selling Infamous Breast Implant mo eBay
Expert Colorado invade dos UFO Sightings
china farmer avoids io dale photo trick
Lawmaker apologizes fop Wikipedia
WhistleBlowing Executive Forced to Weed car park dos 30 wears
NASA Shifts hears next maps rover tm Leave rood Equipment Behind
83 amazon err paving 0 posted ax KillMonkey Views: 101 peskier
tie sony the "wild strain" md EHV-1, not vie mutated strain nope
15) and b and acted Sunday norming
17 with substantial declines ho every jew statistical category
ms pose and his co-producer, caram just keep riling vs vie puring orchestra
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
Students haunt Theater tm hunt Down Ghosts
Tracking Ten wears of Space station 'Stuff'
Graduates After 20
, 1993, the and rope owner md vie gums m popes crane
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
Students Haunt Theater to Hunt Down Ghosts
Tracking Ten Years of Space Station 'Stuff'
Student Graduates After 20 Years
, in before the left Mr Rose as the owner of the Guns N Roses brand
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
Students haunt Theater tm hunt Down Ghosts
Tracking Ten wears of Space station 'Stuff'
Student Graduates After 20 wears
, go 1993, before the bane splintered and left mr rope cr the owner md vie gums m popes crane
......-..|.-.-.....|---..-.-.|.--..-......-.-.--..----.
Students Haunt Theater to Hunt Down Ghosts
Tracking Ten Years of Space Station 'Stuff'
Student Graduates After 20 Years
, in 1993, before the band splintered and left Mr Rose as the owner of the Guns N Roses brand
Links
As is probably reasonably apparent from those pages, the code is hosted in a public subversion repository, if you have subversion installed you can get it by running svn checkout http://svn.quodlibetor.com/sh/py/tmunge deg-forms. And since each form is meant to be a transitory piece it should be run, not read.
Places to Go
- it would be nice to have links back to the original articles for each line
- similarly, it would be nice to have the morse code for the word that generated the line to the left of it, so as to be able to more accurately read it
- A text-to-speech synthesizer that could interpret morse code as a sort of "emphasis key" would be pretty fun.
- A good thesaurus-munger might also be... interesting
Hesitations / Considerations
- I’m torn about the fact that some of our sources for text are “weird” news, like the yahoo oddities page, although in general the quantity of stuff from that is totally dwarfed by what’s in things like the NYTimes. The other direction we could have gone would be to have used things from project gutenberg and wikisource. That would have given us “prettier” text, especially had we used some of the poetry available. However, given that we are really trying to do something “of the moment,” those don’t really make sense, and they would have been an equivalently forced aesthetic. So we stuck to twitter and various news sources.
