Patch Bay — Computational Poetry: Tools for Playing with Language [Workshop]

Computational Poetry: Tools for Playing with Language Workshop led by Alicia Guo This workshop will introduce participants to computational poetry, an act of treating language as a poetic material that can be examined, shaped, and animated through computation. We’ll explore the history of computational poetry and processes through artists and writers who have used rules, algorithms, and code as core methods of their work. Together, we’ll recreate a few computational poetry works and use them as a pathway to learn tools for working with language in code, including RiTa and Nounsing. Participants will then adapt, combine, or break these techniques to create a computational poem of their own, taking on the form of an endlessly generating poem, a text that changes over time, a strange language machine, or something else entirely. Workshop Prerequisites: Laptops required No coding experience necessary, though those who are more comfortable with code will have options to dive deeper About the Instructor: Alicia Guo is a computational poet, artist, and human-computer interaction researcher working to reimagine and redesign our relationships with creative technology. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Washington, working in creativity support tools and theory.