“Diamonds in Dystopia” is an interactive, live-streaming poetry web app that takes the audience through the sensory decisions and experience of creating a poem collectively. The audience acts as collaborator by sending word selections that resonate with individual users by tapping them on their mobiles to trigger Markov chain reactions, creatively data mining 2500+ TED talks to send an improvisational stanza and audio effects as a performance enhancer to the poet on stage. The individual taps coming from the audience also trigger synthesized audio effects at varying pitches to create a musical experience as well as contributing to the visual projection of the poem. Created by Vincent A. Cellucci (poet and CxC Art + Design Coordinator), Jesse Allison (Professor of Experimental Music), and Derick Ostenko (Professor of Digital Art), the app uses advanced coding techniques to aggregate TED Talk transcripts as found text to generate a collective conscious sound installation and interactive web app from a foundational poem that Cellucci created using the same Markov chains creative process, which enables succinct recombination of massive amounts of language as source material. The app creators are interested in creative data mining and incorporating interactive media into performances that challenge people’s perceptions and expectations for the mediums of music, digital art and design, and poetry. Why? Because we’re pushing the traditional boundaries of technology, entertainment, and design (TED).
Vincent A. Cellucci
Bound by Digital Countries
all know who you are whole-hearted
you download an episode often
hold down apostasy jobs
dancing sunlight in psychoanalysis
new dimension new struggle
street view drop in the dow jones
departs on facebook, twitter, google maps
can't afford allegiance
rates "the 20th century expressed this"
the positive forces
eliminate the common denominator
all regularities
steps toward unification
built borderless cheap even free
we farmed fish fisherman
assign values to the viewer
when streaming's easy
how we numb
used to watching
people drown
everybody today
unraveled connection
everyone elements
answer particles an hour of sea
each and every year
wasn't taken for granted
there are 14,000 planes
the amount of salmon to disappear
damns EVERYWHERE
but are there interfaces
that tell of great nature?
we often say to companies
eating themselves, evolve
it becomes a threat to spark a solution
and we keep growing
say this is what I found
attempting to reach outside
the world and make way
complicit comeback
of the collaborative
red-eye flock
don't mind stepping back for clean water
the radioactive boys of dust
threaten observers
committed organic
ubiquity of gluttons
outside interference
felt like today
a fish now two blooms
mean moon phenomena
symmetries struggle cyborgs
disarm
the certainty of domination
preferred by our elders
defines the nowhered
coded origins story
refuge-floating
opaque day-to-today biology
mode of mud
matter provided
man analyzed Eden
then analyzed
the people
the good and the grave
one garden; we script war
cross-hairs two tiny lines joined against
our utopia is our apocalypse
cripples water
people taking shelter
as if concern were an
enforced homelessness
the dream of infrastructure
limited to the global
intimately unscathed
we tool the endless pursuit
one which does not us
manufacturing a hi-tech public
sight-servers
industry synthesis
armistress
teller technology
electronics educated
the age of eyes
out of visible energies
arises art
displacing
diamonds in dystopia
the conditions that carry
fear in the patient
superb skin
liquid parts
lights in the shape of your birthday
we want the real and painstaking
to draw it out as far as planets
everyone who stopped by responded
with a crisis
solution says
I would haven
withholding petroleum
essential fuel technology
gaping social mirrors
mediated Earth
coal-fired population
who doubts today
many need its waste
death is building its answers
I'm gonna compare stars
go adaptable
25 microbes without
we do we knowledge
come on Earth
media
toxic therapy
discuss this child
too expensive to let
under evening thriving
irrigating minds:
the one prototype for change
more giving systems
sea-sized leaks
deepwater indulgence
the justice problem when
I start talking about failure
won't fix the fissures
we started for our children
up to 26 minds' depth
joined in diameter
drilling your blue stage of flame
80% hydrated victorious
spent to give and give
I throw about forever
"I want to touch it for a minute"