Alice R50 testing in progress~ 🔊 Come visit and feed her words! As an interactive installation she will generate and recite original poems from your input~
'Poems from the eternal hoop'
In her heydays, Alice R50 eased people’s loneliness. Today, she is stripped down to a court jester’s head, saying poems from user input as if they were religious chants. She does so by means of The Hoop Sayer, an algorithm written by Johan F. Hoorn and implemented in Ruby by Giovanni Lion.
The generative loop that creates ‘variations on a theme’ is like a banquet of liberal arts in which poets work together on a solitary sequence. The rule of poetry the algorithm uses is the rhetorical and writing technique of Anadiplosis, repeating the last word of the preceding line. In Chinese, this stylistic device is known as 頂真 (dingzhen). As an algorithm that dynamically interacts with the visitors, the robot and the people work together to create never-before-heard verses, which then form new and original poems within the constraints of the designed rules. The process itself is a beautiful open and collaborative art in itself.
