THE FREQUENCY PROJECT
I'm interested in and inspired by the Oulipo and the constraints that they use to develop poetry and fiction. The poetry generator is the first release of a larger constrained writing project, which will aslo include a 2000-node novel. The novel is based on the lines of the poem, with a couple of other constraint components. I am using the 100 most common flickr tags and downloading and using 20 Creative Commons licensed photos marked with each tag. The prose texts also each include a single word from a sequence of the most commonly used English words beginning in order from the word “frequency.” The prose texts respond in some way to both the photo and the line of the poem they correspond to, at the same time as they form a coherent narrative about contemporary American life during the late age of terror.
Some things I’m interested in exploring in the Frequency project include:
- an obviously constrained writing practice that nonetheless results in a coherent narrative.
- a hypertext intended to deliver multiple fragmentary but coherent reading experiences in multiple reading sessions.
- the idea of the collective (un)conscious — will a text derived in part from the words most often used and in part from the tags that people most often choose to put on their photographs in some way reflect a collective consciousness (or not)?
- a Creative Commons fiction. I’ll be releasing the work under a CC non-commercial attribution license — the same one as I’m getting the photographs under — and I’ll encourage people to remix the work under the same license.
- a story that is also a separate but related poetry project.
- the idea of “atomistic fiction” — in some ways this is a continuation of a thread that Nick and I were exploring in Implementation — the idea of writing a novel that both “works” in whole and is composed of distinct “narrative moments” that can be isolated from each other.
- creating a work that could be delivered in different ways (and in different formations) in different platforms. The blog drafts, the poetry generator, the hypertext novel, a print book, and I’d like to be able to read it in some fashion on my mobile phone.
The first iteration of novel, which is now about 25% complete, will be released this year at the e-Poetry festival in Barcelona. 2000 short chunks of narrative turns out to be a lot of writing, so I don't anticipate the project will be complete for another year, though you will be able to read it as the story develops.