This is an app by a guy named [? Joerg Piringer ?]..
He's Austrian.
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I think if I bought that, I'd probably
be around the house for three days.
It's so amazing.
I don't know if you're familiar with this.
It's called a Pentametron.
Pentametron is a Twitter bot, which
means it's not really a person, it's
just a program that scrapes all of Twitter.
And what it does is, by algorithm,
it extracts lines of iambic pentameter and then posts
them as it finds them in sort of an ongoing basis.
Or if you were to follow Pentametron,
you'd see a line, a line, a line, a line, as it finds them.
But then what it also does, on a separate website,
is it takes the further step of looking for rhymes,
and then puts them together to form sonnets.
Shakespearean sonnets in this case.
JanusNode is pretty interesting, if you
have any interest or knowledge of Oulipo
and sort of transformative operations.
Basically what it does is it takes any text as an input,
and then allows you to set rules on how
it is going to alter that text, and then
it systematically alters that text for you.
This is a Canadian curator, actually,
by trade, who also has a series of sidewalk chalk pieces
that are site specific.
In this particular case, this one says a door,
and it's in front of a door.
This one says, actually, Azalea, but it's done in a way
that it ends up looking as if flowers are growing where
they are now, or ought to.
Denise Duhamel has this beautiful piece.
It reads one way with the blinds closed
and another way with the blinds open,
so you have this mechanism that allows you to change the slats.
And I have to explain this a lot.
Roy Arenella is a guy, he's probably
one of the most genuine human beings
I've ever had the privilege to know and to correspond with.
He's a photographer by trade, but he's a mail artist.
He opted out of the gallery system
25 years ago for various frustrated reasons,
and he became a mail artist.
And the kind of mail art that Roy practices is very unique,
in my experience.
Mail art is a huge, thriving international community,
that if anybody is ever stumped for inspiration,
I totally recommend you join for a while.
The only rule of mail artists, you
have to send mail art to get mail art.
But if you do any kind of web search on it,
you'll find access into an absolute volcano
of creativity coming into your mailbox, all day, every day.
It's an amazing community.
But what [? Ray ?] does, there's a kind of mail art,
it's actually a kind of stamp collecting,
it's called maximalist philately.
And what these people try to do is
they try to match the postmark to the stamp, to the envelope,
to the person, and they try to make everything
as absolutely personal as possible.
But Roy does that, he kind of takes it a step further,
because he takes a photo that becomes the postcard,
and then he will match the stamps
with the content of the postcard,
with the message that he's sending,
to make a piece that is as maximally
personal a connection to him and the person that he's
sending them to as is possible on that piece.
And if there's a better definition
of poetry in the world, I do not know what it is.
And that is all I have for this part.
I'd like to take about five minutes
where everybody can kind of stand up, wiggle their butt.
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