The Second View of a Blackbird Nov 2, 04:43 AM
This piece consists of texts pulled from the Web based on a Google search for the second section of the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird . The collected texts were concatenated and subjected to Markov chain rearrangment. For each section on each page, the depth of the Markov analysis used starts at two and increments to thirteen. This creates a progress per page from greater to lesser degrees of randomization. By the end of the page, the section usually consists of an uninterrupted quote from the source text. As well as being read linearly, the pages can be laid out next to one another and viewed as a grid.
This piece is an attempt to explore the reproductive capabilites of a closed, individualized associative system (Stevens’ poem) when pushed into the context of an open, collective associative system (the Web). The consequences of this collision come in a cloud of narrative fragments that, although often highly disparate, are re-presented in an attempt to evoke novel cognitive integration. Through this process, I’m trying to subvert the vast, but associatively limited multi-linearity of hyperlinked web text and approach text-information on the Web as a nebulous entity of thought whose density and malleability lay the groundwork for entirely new modes of language encounter. Narratives imposed by web browsing sofware can be re-articulated through knowledge of the orginaztional systems they employ along with alternative methods of search and access.
Queneau – Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
The search term I used accidentally had a typo (that wasn’t corrected): “I was of three minds,Like a treeIn which there are three blackbirds.”