I found this assignment really eye opening in a lot of ways. For starters, it really challenged what I knew to be poetry. When I think about poetry, I think of a highly refined word choice, generally some structure to it (syllables per line, divided by stanzas or verses, etc.), and it being a purely text-based medium. The tools available to me in Chuck lent themselves to broadening my horizon. For starters, word2vec allowed me to easily find the words that are similar to a given word. In Serenity, I was able to randomly generate the words that filled up each line of the “stress line”. This meant that randomness and AI-based similarity methods were responsible for the words and orderings that constituted the ‘stress lines’. Those lines weren’t structured in a traditional way. They had different syllable counts. Were not uniform. Every time I ran the poem I would get a different poem (assuming I don’t set a random seed). That felt special to me. In addition, the structure of the poem defied conventional formats. I had a ‘sea’ of stress lines that were interrupted by islands of serenity. These weren’t stanzas. It wasn’t even free verse because the length between islands was random and influenced by values I set within the code. In addition, chuck’s music capabilities added a whole new dimension to poetry. A younger Afnaan would have blindly called any music attached to poetry a song. I didn’t make songs for this etude. I merely added some sonic elements to poems. There wasn’t any singing. But the noise helped accentuate the meaning of my poems. Poetry is a free art form. Chucking helped me understand that.
Poem 1: "The Subject of Paint"
Click here to watch "The Subject of Paint"
This poem is an ode to Frank Bowling. Frank Bowling was a famous Guyanese artist. My older brother told me about him and a line he stated in response to those who would always try to contextualize and reduce his work to being part of larger intellectual movements. The almost nonsensical line was: “the subject of painting is paint”. I found that line 1. quite hard to understand but also 2. quite powerful. I then used Chuck to create an ode to Frank Bowling where I began each stanza with “The subject of painting is paint” and then use Word2Vec to pick a random word that’s similar to “paint” to be the subject word of the next line. This random generation of the next line led to a lot of insights about what the subject of various concepts are! I used a ModalBar to generate a sound with each word, with a consistent sound for each equivalent of ‘painting’ and ‘paint’ to set the subjects of the lines apart from one another. In addition, I used a Sound Buffer to play a “huh” sound effect at the end of each line to force the viewer to appreciate the confusion that should result from seemingly simple statements that should make sense.
Poem 2: "Serenity"
I wanted to be more unhinged with my next poem. This poem, Serenity, uses two prompts to get a single word that brings the user ‘calm’ and ‘stress’. I generated a vast number of ‘stress lines’ to make a text-based ocean of stress. Each stress line has a pre-set number of words, but I use Word2Vec to garner a large list of words similar to the one that brings the user stress. This saves me from having to ask the user for everything that brings them stress. I then pack these stress-inducing words together, randomly, capitalize some, and create a deluge of stress. At random points, this sea of stress is interrupted with islands of serenity, where the center of the island is the word that brings the user calm. The center is surrounded by two rings of words, the most similar words to the calm word. There is a constant calming chorus sound playing, because life always has beautiful and redeeming elements to it. When the stress sea is enveloping the screen, I spork a different chuck file (a modified version of the example Moog2.ck) to play an unnerving assortment of beeps and boops. These noises are random and make one feel unsettled, like stress. When the islands are printing, the beeps stop, leaving one to appreciate the calming chorus.
I would like to acknowledge the Chuck starter code, specifically Moog2.ck which I modified and sporked for the serenity poem.