ABOUT THIS WORK:
Neil Jenkin's generative poem-engine Orbital plays with
the ideas of space, location, correspondance, and anonymity. Domain
name servers exist to translate numerical hard-to-remember IP addresses
into the familiarity of words. In this piece, a droning computer
voice endlessly lists the IP numbers of each visitor to the project,
while the generative text engine runs on two databases-- one that
contains the words to Dunlop's text, and another that lists logged
IP addresses of visitors to the engine. As Jenkins describes it,
the engine is programmed using Perl with Flash's Actionscript to
count back through the IP address list and plot the next word in
the poem in a three dimensional plane, using the first three numbers
of the IP address as its x, y and z co-ordinates. The fourth number
in the IP address determines the next word from the poem to be
displayed. |