Projects
Some things I’ve built, in descending order of practicality.
VIRENS and VIRENS 101
VIRENS is Latin for “greening”: the present participle, the act of flourishing. The name argues against productivity optimized for speed, and toward a system optimized for emergence. Protect the human components of scholarly work and automate the repetitive processes: take the invention, leave the drudgery. Six recursive moves – capture, classify, route, distill, connect, publish – run across a suite of macOS applications and scripted tooling; constraint structures govern when limits arrive, and writing accumulates value by being connected rather than by being finished. VIRENS 101 rebuilds the same architecture for a first-year composition course on index cards and a word processor at about thirty dollars of per-student investment. Virescit in ruinis eruditionis nostrae spes.
An Algorithmic Poem
The poem is a bit of a parlor trick dependent on presence: I’ll read it aloud to you and ask you to select a single line that in some way captures your attention. Then identify which stanzas the line appears in. If you tell me which stanzas, I’ll tell you which line you picked. The poem, in its small effect, operates as a computer, or at the very least a calculator.
The Functionless Meaning of Dialogue
Three generations convene in an amphitheater that forbids writing – a student, a teacher, and the teacher’s teacher – on a problem: the teacher cannot read the student’s words without revising. The teacher’s patron offers as a technical solution an automaton that can neither lie, remember, nor be placed under contract. Whose written labor prices text, then, and who keeps the difference? A blank verse dialogue about conversion instruments, profoundly resistant to staging.