YouTube Collage
Poetics are, in my view, inextricable from structure. In the case of written poetry, the rules of language—or their absence—are always being played with. Rather than obedient prose, poetry toys with language’s rules to express its meaning. It’s this playful relationship with rules that makes computational poetics so full of possibility. Computers are the ultimate structured machine.
Inspired by the corecore movement, I continued my exploration of divination, meaning-making from randomness, and web-scraping, by writing a program that collages YouTube videos with low (generally under 20) views. They are completely random. I made no curatorial choices.
I found that by layering these videos on top of each other soupy, fragments of tenderness and humanity poke through. A sense of experience. Of lived life. Of aura being fed to an unfeeling machine. Below are a few outputs from the program.
I built this project in Python. Check it out on GitHub. My other projects in this series are CSZ0B (a singing robot) and a prophetic website.