Banana Poetry, a work in progress by Croatian artists Ivan Nikolić Lesh and Ines Krasić, explores the use of mechanism/organism to generate new poetry and new linguistic creations. The consequences of computer poetry should be a poetry that is still poetry for humans, but a poetry made without humans – as poetry of artificial intelligence.

The installation is powered by an alternative energy source – fruits and vegetables. Poetry generated by electronic environment is available for visitors in audio format – they can plug their headphones directly into one of the ten fruit or vegetable cells. The ultimate form this work might adopt is to walk around in nature with a mobile form of the installation in a backpack which can be directly plugged into an orchard, so that the natural environment, serving as an energy source, could be converted into an electronic environment.

Scribbler is a program browsing the internet, reading and analyzing texts, and trying to imitate them. It can be interactively told what to read, and things that it speaks in return sound like schizophrenic babbling or trash poetry. It works on the principle of Markov chains, which is a way of predicting probability of an event recurring in the future based on the past. In this case, the events are words. The sentence is viewed as a chain of events, and while reading text, these chains intersect and form a huge network of possibilities. Its speech is made up of hopping across that network.

Banana Poetry is part of the Deviceart2006 series of exhibitions which include also Luka Frelih’s Frida V. – Free Ride Data Aquisition Vehicle; Saso Sedlacek’s Beggar robot; the Micro rhythm orchestra by Jonathan Foote; The Ludic-Society‘s Monowheel Reality Engine Device, a 3-axis micromachined accelerometer for games play with a patapyhsical twist and The new bachelor machines, crafty self-etched circuit boards made of specially etched circuit board material and decorative, electricity- and signal- conducting copper.

On November 30, dorkbotSF will be presenting a sneak preview of the Deviceart2006 exhibition.

More fruit&vegs-powered works: You Say Potatoe, I say Potato, a study of the sonic properties of Genetically Modified potatoes; an orchestra of potatoes singing for Denmark; Enough Rope; Futurefarmers’ Botanical Gameboy;