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Requires Flash >> LAUNCH
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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. | |