RE: FLUXLIST: Headline Haiku

Allan Revich Sat, 29 Apr 2006 09:23:37 -0700

Thanks for the ‘props’ Kamen.

I suppose it would be both possible and quite interesting to automate the Headline Haiku generation process. But...

Although I am fairly literate with computing technology, writing such a script would be beyond my current programming skills. And...

I enjoy the creative friction that occurs for me at the intersection of randomness and human mediated action with each haiku. Granted, there would be as much creative friction in writing the automated script as in writing each Haiku, but I fear that I would lose the daily pleasure of writing the haikus.

Allan

From: owner-[email protected] [mailto:owner-[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kamen Nedev
Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 3:35 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: FLUXLIST: Headline Haiku

These are really cool, Allan.

I remember a similar series I did for a week last summer: but using the image captions of a daily newspaper during a week. The results were rather hilarious (hilarious in Spanish, that is).

I wonder if one could build or embed a kind of RSS-parsing script into a website, and automate the process. It can be tricky (the results won't always work), but I suppose it is not impossible to implement the classic haiku structure in some _javascript_, pull in the headlines from, say, Google News (or, even better: ArtForum!), parsing them to determine line lenghts, and then selecting the right ones, and have a neat line of daily headline haikus greeting the visitors to your site... Still, there's intervals which only a human (that's you, that is) can see.

Best,

Kamen