---Word Circuits ----Information about CyberMountain Colloquium and the corresponding MOO

Captions from television: random narratives

Been thinking recently about some issues I've faced in my latest attempt- 95 captions from television which have been arranged by chance and edited into a narrative. I may only delete things, not insert new things- except minor characters, hash-marks, single letters etc... So the phrase "ready... set... go!" and "open this lady's safe" become "ready this safe", or "set his lad safe" or "go pen his ass"- and the phrases go on to become pornographic...

  Jim Rosenberg has convinced me on spatial hypertext poetry, so I will choose four phrases no less than 5 phrases apart (by chance) and format them with varying faces/weights/styles.

  The poem is interesting, not consistantly intelligible, but sometimes there are beautiful things, often there are humorous things that emerge. I'm not writing anything- instead I am editing things a Perl script has given me. With all this editing, I often wonder "How could a computer help me here? How could I write a script to do interesting things to this textual data? What are the things I want to do that would take up loads of time doing very repeditive, simple tasks that a computer would excell at?" And this made me think of cybermountain and tp21cl.

  I need a "word processor"- not what we heathens call a word processor, but some kind of mysterious "word instrument" machine that I can put words into, breathe in simple instructions (which can easily be stored, retrieved, modified, or added to) and be given language changed exactly by my breath. This starts to sound very "chancy" with little authorial "control" but that's what the instructions do- one must learn to play the instrument- the instrument might be like a synthesizer in that different voices can be programmed into it, each which must be played a little (or in this case a lot) differently to get the desired effect.

  One example of the song this instrument might produce is the selective editing I am doing with these captions (if my playing was that kind of playing).

  This probably sounds crackpot, and it is, to a degree. What I am really looking for is an easily extensible scripting language built for wordhackers- Perl is very close- it is a scripting language designed for the extraction and reporting of textual data. There has got to be a way to design a scripting language for the extraction, presentation and manipulation of text as language.