Writing Machines

website, workshop 2019 - 2020

A web-based project that is inspired by Christopher Strachey’s love letter algorithm written in 1952 - thought of as the very first piece of digital literature. ‘Writing Machines’ is a tool that explores how poetic writing can be generated based on a framework of sentence structures and word pools. The word pools are either pre-populated or can be co-written by several people. The endless possibilities of word combinations allow for new types of reading and the possibility to randomize the writing process. 

The first text generators were designed for a technology & poetic writing workshop, and since then have been evolved to various other text generators based on famous quotes and poems, as well as twitter bots. These two text generators have been commissioned by O,Miami 2020:

Letter to Miami is a generative letter to Miami

Miami Roads is based on ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost but with very Miami locations

with code by Paul Angus