| 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. |