Tag: engine

“Hegirascope”: Blog #2

In the early twentieth century, a group of artists in Zurich, Switzerland created an art movement by the name of “Dada” that utilized non-sensical imagery to communicate deeply textural and evocative concepts to a devastated and war-torn society. An admirer of this particular movement, I was initially intrigued by the “Hegirascope”. The mere chaos of it resembled the Dada ideology: because nothing in the world makes sense, neither will the art that attempts to reflect it. However if one pursues a further study of Dadaist pieces, they will find that many of the artistic works have a politically charged undertone to their near unrecognizable form. Therefore, members of the Dada sect did rely on some sort of representational meaning in order to portray an intensely evocative theory on the state of the world after World War I. When I think of “Hegirascope” in these terms, it suddenly doesn’t fit in at all. Although it can be argued that each segment is somewhat representational, the entire piece functions as a disjointed, abstract draft containing a vast variety of miniature plots that dream of assembling into an extended narrative.

Upon closer examination, the “Hegirascope” functioned as a sort of stream of consciousness. At each screen we abandon the center text when we wander to a particular link that had succeeded in distracting us from the central text. In an interesting comparison, Ryan says the text gave her the “impression of a loose collection of drafts and writing samples”. Like Ryan, I imagined that if we were able to break open the mind of a creative writer, the many textual fragments of “Hegirascope” would be what we would find. Each screen contained a cohesive idea, however before one could completely articulate that idea-the screen changed and a new thought was presented. To me, the web engine was a writer’s worst nightmare: capturing a moment to later build on only to lose it to another incoming idea. The “Hegirascope” acted as a controller, choosing when its thoughts were finished and moving onto the next (even if its reader was not ready for the shift).

In class we discussed Marie-Laure Ryan’s interpretative strategies for reading new media texts. Within her framework, I would probably describe “Hegirascope” dually as a “kaleidoscopic performance” piece. The “stories” the “Hegirascope” constructs are all made from the same fragments; however, with each new refraction the evocative meaning of the piece changes and a new narrative mosaic is created. 

Jabberywocky and Its Linguistic Implications

Neil Hennessey’s Jabberwocky Engine serves as a rather fascinating manner of illustrating the unspoken ability to decide what words are grammatical within a language and which words fall short. Native English speakers can instantly decide if a word is grammatical but cannot, for the most part, explain exactly why certain letter combinations work or conflict. Linguistically speaking, words with consonant combinations that are too difficult for English pronunciation simply don’t hold significance as “real” words and, in the case of Jabber, explode. The floating green and blue words, by representing plausible combinations, convey the subconscious ability to pick out what “sounds” right despite having never seen them before. In rationalizing what works and what doesn’t, Jabber effectively evokes the unnoticed skill of brining up a veritable consonant chart that outlines why it is so difficult, for native English speakers, to pronounce sounds that would require a coronal nasal sound followed by a lateral coronal sound (for example the “n” and “l” in “nlad”). In this case, the speaker identifies that “n” and “l” are too similar in where they are articulated and that English requires a buffer, usually created by inserting a vowel.

Though Jabber appears to be a fun and creative toy, it truly exemplifies how a native English speaker’s brain works. Even when creating nonsense words, certain rules must be followed. Just as in the original Jabberwocky, not all parts of speech could be replaced. For inferred meaning of the nonsense words to take place, articles and prepositions had to remain constant. This idea of a set framework applies to individual words as well. So long as one remains within certain perameters, one can conjure up any word wished; however, creativity halts when the words are no longer nonsense and instead become utterly incomprehensible. It is due to our imprinted and hidden knowledge of our native language that we can, with absolute resolution, say whether a word can exist, and Neil Hennessey’s engine shows exactly that.

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The jabberwocky engine presents the most compelling relationship between representational and evocative meaning, due in part to the seemingly limitless combinations of nonsensical words it can string together, and to the inherent incoherence of the English language’s own phonetic rules trying to make sense of these random collisions.

Ostensibly, JABBER entertains with the nonsense it vomits out, demonstrating English phonetics in an energetic and highly repeatable way.  But certain implications about language start to surface as the random words start to just barely resemble something you might imagine saying, after violently stubbing your toe or mumbled at the edge of sleep.  We encounter the idea that at one time a bunch of glorified apes had to come together to think of a word for “dog” or “elephant” or “banana,” and that however nonsensical the words produced by JABBER look, they’re pretty fun to say.