I was going to do my catchup project updates in reverse chronological order, but I just spent the day working on the ABSML parser, so I thought I’d write a little update.
A few months ago, Steve and I were informed that Turbulence awarded us a grant to finish ABSML – the markup language that started as Fartsy – the Artist Statement Generator, then evolved to ASSML – Artist Statement (extra S for Savings) Markup Language, then had a short stint as DPML, or Dynamic Prose Markup Language, and is now ABSML (pronounced “abysmal”), which can stand for a number of things, but probably most officially, “A BullShit Markup Langauge”, which is fitting on many levels. I have written about it previously here and briefly here.
This happened after ABSML was used to power James Chimpton, and had inquiries from a few other organizations to use it as a kind of spam-blocker-buster for political activism. I have mixed feelings about bringing something into the world that could also be used by spammers with less honorable intentions, but as the language is evolving, I’m starting to see that it is moving away from something that could be used in such a way.
After talking with Angela Ferraiolo today, it’s clear to me that this will be an application that requires more interaction. It shouldn’t be so much click and go, automatic text generator. Rather, it should involve some human decision making at the time of parsing. This makes it much more interesting for performance, and I’m sure the results will be richer. So kudos to Angela for giving us a new way to think about ABSML and breaking us out of the rut that we had been in for about a year now.
Aspiring artists take note – after the break is a grant application was written by a master of the form – the incomparable Steve Lambert.
Steve Lambert
slambert@eyebeam.org
602 Grand St. #3
Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://visitsteve.com
http://whytheyhate.us
http://antiadvertisingagency.com
http://www.addart.eyebeam.org
Steve Lambert was born to a former Franciscan Monk and a Dominican Nun who practiced a variation of Liberation Theology, then abandoned organized religion and left the church a year before his birth. Despite never graduating from high school, Steve went on to study sociology, film, and music before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a Master of Fine Arts degree at University of California in 2006. After years of doing street-level interventions, he founded the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. In the past, Steve has worked as a furniture installer, radio host, record store clerk, ballet dancer, parking lot attendant, undercover store investigator, theatre house manager, delivery truck driver, upright bass player in country western band, school teacher, landscaper, and lecturer among other things. He currently claims artist and professor on his taxes.
Steve’s projects and art works have shown throughout the United States, as well as Cuba, Canada, Holland, and Barcelona. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, El Pas, and Newsweek Magazine.
Steve is currently a senior fellow at Eyebeam’s Open R&D Lab in New York where he is developing software that will block ads on websites and replace them with art.
Jeff Crouse
jeff@eyebeam.org
47 Maujer Street apt 2D
Brooklyn? NY? 11211
http://jeffcrouse.info
http://www.doublehappinessjeans.com/
http://you3b.com
http://www.realtimeart.com/switchboard/
Jeff Crouse is a digital artist and programmer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He creates art that uses live data sources. Jeff received has a bachelor’s degree from NYU’s Gallatin School and a Masters of Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in Information Design and Technology. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam.
Collaborating with Stephanie Rothenberg, Jeff created the first sweatshop to be built in Second Life. Another project, Earthify, is an online application that maps a set of geographical data onto Google Earth for easier Earth-based browsing. Jeff is the developer of Switchboard, a Java library for Processing that allows artists and designers to easily use a variety of web and network data sources such as Flickr, Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon in their work.
Jeff is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology and is working on a WordPress plugin that will collectively prevent anything from ever being deleted from the web.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
DYNAMIC PROSE MARKUP LANGUAGE
Dynamic Prose Markup Language (or DPML) is a new markup language that we have been developing for the past year in the Eyebeam OpenLab. Surely you are already familiar with HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language, and XML or eXtensible Markup Language. These languages allow us to write code that make up the web as we know it today. But like it or not, the internet is boring and dumb.
Dynamic Prose Markup Language is different because it’s a language which writes itself, thereby making the internet interesting and smart. DPML could be considered a text generator, but it’s much more sophisticated than that. How does it work you ask?
DPML inserts text into sentence templates. As we learned in elementary English, all sentences can be broken into component parts. For example:
<Greeting> <noun>, are you ready to <verb>?
could become:
Good evening, Iowa City are you ready to rock?
or
Hey, McEnroe are you ready to serve?
DPML includes a variety of tags in place of these parts of speech and sentence components. In the right combination, the tags create prose which, while based on formulas and code, do not appear formulaic.
TAGS
To introduce variety, DPML uses the internet to compose it’s prose. For example, if one were to use the <synonym> or <antonym> tag, DPML uses online dictionaries to find synonyms and antonyms, in the correct part of speech, and insert them into the document. Perhaps you want to name someone topical in your generated document? With the <person> tag DPML will scour a website for name, choose one at random, and include it in your document.
For example
<person url=”http://www.nytimes.com/national/”>
will rip a name from the national headlines and insert it into your document.
This is a sample of a few tags and sentences they fit into. DPML can also be programmed to order these sentences into paragraphs, and randomly order the paragraphs, all before the document is delivered. These steps insure that the formula used to generate the text will be indiscernable to the reader.
WHY?
Yes, at this point you might be wondering; what’s the point of creating a new markup language to generate text on the fly?
At first it was just a fun project that got out of hand. Having read our share of obtuse artist statements we wanted to make an Artist Statement Generator that would blab on for a couple paragraphs about “notions of the material/non-material dialectic” or “facilitating the energized application of theoretical understandings.” We were pretty sure we could do this with a computer. And almost as sure that if we did, it would be funny. Basically we were making a bullshit generator for our own laughs. We wanted it to be more than that, but it just wasn’t.
Then Sam Gould from Red76 came by and asked if he could use DPML for his “Befriend a Recruiter” project. He realized DPML could quickly create letters of interest for military recruiters from bogus potential enlistees, thus keeping the recruiters busy writing follow up emails to people who had no interest in joining the military.
Later, Neighborhood Public Radio visited and asked if DPML could be used in their pirate radio project, “American Life” at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. At the time of this writing we are adapting the software for a radio program called “Inside the Artist’s Studio” hosted by a robotic Chimpanzee named James Chimpton. Chimpton’s brain is DPML programming sent to a text-to-speech generator which voices the robot. The result is rather absurd — a clothed robotic monkey, interviewing artists in the Biennial about their work, in a robotic english accent.
WHAT THE TURBULENCE COMMISSION WILL PAY FOR
After a year of development, the Turbulence commission can help us release DPML for public use and open source development. We would use the $4000 in funds in multiple ways. The funding would allow us to hire programming assistants to develop an API so that DPML can be used in other applications. The Turbulence Commission could also allow us to offset the cost of building a front-end so the application can be used via the web. And funding could allow time for us to better research how others might want to use DPML and change it accordingly. As an open-source project , we would open the DPML standard up to the public by holding calls for recommendations (like a shadow W3C). These recommendations would then be implemented into a standardized parser.
While beginning as fun side project, Dynamic Prose Markup Language has turned into a viable and useful tool for our collaborative art works. We hope that with help and the additional profile of a Turbulence Commission, the project can be made available for other artists in their projects having ramifications beyond our knowledge.
Thanks for your time. If you have any questions, please let us know. Good luck with your decisions and we look forward to hearing from you…
Update your address books, Fartsy is now ASSML is now DPML is now ABSML
I was going to do my catchup project updates in reverse chronological order, but I just spent the day working on the ABSML parser, so I thought I’d write a little update.
A few months ago, Steve and I were informed that Turbulence awarded us a grant to finish ABSML – the markup language that started as Fartsy – the Artist Statement Generator, then evolved to ASSML – Artist Statement (extra S for Savings) Markup Language, then had a short stint as DPML, or Dynamic Prose Markup Language, and is now ABSML (pronounced “abysmal”), which can stand for a number of things, but probably most officially, “A BullShit Markup Langauge”, which is fitting on many levels. I have written about it previously here and briefly here.
This happened after ABSML was used to power James Chimpton, and had inquiries from a few other organizations to use it as a kind of spam-blocker-buster for political activism. I have mixed feelings about bringing something into the world that could also be used by spammers with less honorable intentions, but as the language is evolving, I’m starting to see that it is moving away from something that could be used in such a way.
After talking with Angela Ferraiolo today, it’s clear to me that this will be an application that requires more interaction. It shouldn’t be so much click and go, automatic text generator. Rather, it should involve some human decision making at the time of parsing. This makes it much more interesting for performance, and I’m sure the results will be richer. So kudos to Angela for giving us a new way to think about ABSML and breaking us out of the rut that we had been in for about a year now.
Aspiring artists take note – after the break is a grant application was written by a master of the form – the incomparable Steve Lambert.
Steve Lambert
slambert@eyebeam.org
602 Grand St. #3
Brooklyn, NY 11211
http://visitsteve.com
http://whytheyhate.us
http://antiadvertisingagency.com
http://www.addart.eyebeam.org
Steve Lambert was born to a former Franciscan Monk and a Dominican Nun who practiced a variation of Liberation Theology, then abandoned organized religion and left the church a year before his birth. Despite never graduating from high school, Steve went on to study sociology, film, and music before receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000 and a Master of Fine Arts degree at University of California in 2006. After years of doing street-level interventions, he founded the Anti-Advertising Agency in 2004. In the past, Steve has worked as a furniture installer, radio host, record store clerk, ballet dancer, parking lot attendant, undercover store investigator, theatre house manager, delivery truck driver, upright bass player in country western band, school teacher, landscaper, and lecturer among other things. He currently claims artist and professor on his taxes.
Steve’s projects and art works have shown throughout the United States, as well as Cuba, Canada, Holland, and Barcelona. Writings about his work have appeared in multiple publications such as the New York Times, Punk Planet, El Pas, and Newsweek Magazine.
Steve is currently a senior fellow at Eyebeam’s Open R&D Lab in New York where he is developing software that will block ads on websites and replace them with art.
Jeff Crouse
jeff@eyebeam.org
47 Maujer Street apt 2D
Brooklyn? NY? 11211
http://jeffcrouse.info
http://www.doublehappinessjeans.com/
http://you3b.com
http://www.realtimeart.com/switchboard/
Jeff Crouse is a digital artist and programmer currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He creates art that uses live data sources. Jeff received has a bachelor’s degree from NYU’s Gallatin School and a Masters of Science from Georgia Institute of Technology in Information Design and Technology. His work has been shown at the Sundance Film Festival, the Come Out and Play Festival in Amsterdam.
Collaborating with Stephanie Rothenberg, Jeff created the first sweatshop to be built in Second Life. Another project, Earthify, is an online application that maps a set of geographical data onto Google Earth for easier Earth-based browsing. Jeff is the developer of Switchboard, a Java library for Processing that allows artists and designers to easily use a variety of web and network data sources such as Flickr, Yahoo!, Google, and Amazon in their work.
Jeff is currently a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology and is working on a WordPress plugin that will collectively prevent anything from ever being deleted from the web.
PROJECT PROPOSAL
DYNAMIC PROSE MARKUP LANGUAGE
Dynamic Prose Markup Language (or DPML) is a new markup language that we have been developing for the past year in the Eyebeam OpenLab. Surely you are already familiar with HTML or Hyper Text Markup Language, and XML or eXtensible Markup Language. These languages allow us to write code that make up the web as we know it today. But like it or not, the internet is boring and dumb.
Dynamic Prose Markup Language is different because it’s a language which writes itself, thereby making the internet interesting and smart. DPML could be considered a text generator, but it’s much more sophisticated than that. How does it work you ask?
DPML inserts text into sentence templates. As we learned in elementary English, all sentences can be broken into component parts. For example:
<Greeting> <noun>, are you ready to <verb>?
could become:
Good evening, Iowa City are you ready to rock?
or
Hey, McEnroe are you ready to serve?
DPML includes a variety of tags in place of these parts of speech and sentence components. In the right combination, the tags create prose which, while based on formulas and code, do not appear formulaic.
TAGS
To introduce variety, DPML uses the internet to compose it’s prose. For example, if one were to use the <synonym> or <antonym> tag, DPML uses online dictionaries to find synonyms and antonyms, in the correct part of speech, and insert them into the document. Perhaps you want to name someone topical in your generated document? With the <person> tag DPML will scour a website for name, choose one at random, and include it in your document.
For example
<person url=”http://www.nytimes.com/national/”>
will rip a name from the national headlines and insert it into your document.
This is a sample of a few tags and sentences they fit into. DPML can also be programmed to order these sentences into paragraphs, and randomly order the paragraphs, all before the document is delivered. These steps insure that the formula used to generate the text will be indiscernable to the reader.
WHY?
Yes, at this point you might be wondering; what’s the point of creating a new markup language to generate text on the fly?
At first it was just a fun project that got out of hand. Having read our share of obtuse artist statements we wanted to make an Artist Statement Generator that would blab on for a couple paragraphs about “notions of the material/non-material dialectic” or “facilitating the energized application of theoretical understandings.” We were pretty sure we could do this with a computer. And almost as sure that if we did, it would be funny. Basically we were making a bullshit generator for our own laughs. We wanted it to be more than that, but it just wasn’t.
Then Sam Gould from Red76 came by and asked if he could use DPML for his “Befriend a Recruiter” project. He realized DPML could quickly create letters of interest for military recruiters from bogus potential enlistees, thus keeping the recruiters busy writing follow up emails to people who had no interest in joining the military.
Later, Neighborhood Public Radio visited and asked if DPML could be used in their pirate radio project, “American Life” at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. At the time of this writing we are adapting the software for a radio program called “Inside the Artist’s Studio” hosted by a robotic Chimpanzee named James Chimpton. Chimpton’s brain is DPML programming sent to a text-to-speech generator which voices the robot. The result is rather absurd — a clothed robotic monkey, interviewing artists in the Biennial about their work, in a robotic english accent.
WHAT THE TURBULENCE COMMISSION WILL PAY FOR
After a year of development, the Turbulence commission can help us release DPML for public use and open source development. We would use the $4000 in funds in multiple ways. The funding would allow us to hire programming assistants to develop an API so that DPML can be used in other applications. The Turbulence Commission could also allow us to offset the cost of building a front-end so the application can be used via the web. And funding could allow time for us to better research how others might want to use DPML and change it accordingly. As an open-source project , we would open the DPML standard up to the public by holding calls for recommendations (like a shadow W3C). These recommendations would then be implemented into a standardized parser.
While beginning as fun side project, Dynamic Prose Markup Language has turned into a viable and useful tool for our collaborative art works. We hope that with help and the additional profile of a Turbulence Commission, the project can be made available for other artists in their projects having ramifications beyond our knowledge.
Thanks for your time. If you have any questions, please let us know. Good luck with your decisions and we look forward to hearing from you…
Jeff Crouse and Steve Lambert