searchSonata 181

"Johannes Auer is an artist from Stuttgart, Germany. René Bauer is a game developer, lecturer in game design at Zürcher Hochschuleder Künste, developer of http://www.nic-las.com/, and manager of the gamelab.zhdk.ch. Beat Suter is an author, publisher of edition cyberfiction, lecturer in game design at Zürcher Hochschuleder Künste and manager of the gamelab.zhdk.chh."

"This generative poem is largely inspired by Kurt Schwitters and his Dadaist sound poetry such as Ursonate (1922-1932). Free from the constraint of meaning, a sound poet is able to use language structured into units other than pre-established words to explore articulation, rhythm, sound combinations, rhyme, musicality, line lengths, the cultural associations of particular sounds, phonetics, and more.

The poem generates sound poems by processing words entered by the user generated and search engine results with the FIPS 181 Automated Password Generator algorithm, which produces a pronounceable encrypted set of sounds. The web version has a machine read the syllables aloud, but this has also been used to generate scores for live performances, as seen in the documentation page.

I'm fascinated by how a word or phrase is 'read' by the poem into such a different set of sounds transformed by contradictory human desires: to reveal (by searching and finding) and to conceal (through encryption and passwords)." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Three