Patch Bay: Computational Poetry, Tools for Playing with Language

This workshop, led by Alicia Guo at Gray Area, introduces computational poetry, a practice that treats language as a material that can be examined, shaped, and animated through computation. It covers the history of computational poetry and the artists and writers who have used rules, algorithms, and code as core methods. Participants recreate a few computational poetry works and use them to learn tools for working with language in code, including RiTa and Nounsing. From there, attendees adapt, combine, or break these techniques to build a computational poem of their own, such as an endlessly generating poem, a text that changes over time, or a strange language.