Artist's Statement "The Infinite Road Trip"

For this project, we were assigned to write a generative narrative. There were 2 options to choose between: A Twitter Bot or a modification of the generative poem "Taroko Gorge". I was originally thinking of making a Twitter Bot that would scan for tweets in a fashion of finding posts that finished and began with the same word. I determined that a Twitter Bot would be challenging for me to program, and managing to sift out enough tweets could be a bit of a struggle. I decided to not do a Twitter Bot as I felt making a bot would require a good deal of time. I settled on the option of modifying Taroko Gorge. My idea for this was not really a poem but to tell an everlasting story.

I decided to rewrite the poem to tell what is rushing through my mind on car trips. Since I have ADD, I often times have trouble with paying attention and getting distracted, and making car trips feel drawn out. I decided to start off on my first draft. On the day of the peer reviews, I decided to scrap the first attempt, as I determined changing a poem generator to a story generator would require plenty of tangling with code. Another notable part to add to my frustrations was that the project was ultimately wrapping/overlapping too much. Since the peer reviewers liked the concept I decided to reattempt the project. Another notable problem was that it was hard for me to tell which pools would be shared. For this, I took a good look at a sample run of the project and determined the order everything would go in. (Here's a link that will direct you to my first draft, which took about 3.5 hours to complete. To view it in action, you will need to download it and open it in a web browser such as Google Chrome or Firefox.) This iteration took about 4 hours, but it felt far more organized and unlike the other projects, each thing I put down could feel connected. Also, when I was making the problem, I did have to tamper with more than the word pools in order to eliminate certain portions (intermittently adding 'The' and 's' to lines). However, this project ultimately came together well

One of the problems with the final product was making it sound like it was not repeating the same story again and again. However, since each iteration happens directly after the other, each story can be viewed as a sequel to each other. This is meant to simulate the feeling of being completely bored when riding in a car. I hope you like the finished project!

You may find the finished project here (since I am not exactly certain how to host this, if you download it, you can open it using firefox or chrome. Please let me know if this gives you grief.): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6YdXItfl0B_SjFQWGlleG0waDg 


Jacob Bacci