Category: Blog

Movie Lines bot / 48 lines

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Building on the bot-structure I built for the @life_by_desree bot, I built a quick bot that tweets alphabetised movie lines from the Cornell Movie Dialog Corpus, called @al_film_betical.

I started working with this corpus in 2016, with the project Scriptych. Part of the project involved building vector embeddings for words from Hollywood movies; as a side part of the project I started to play with alphabetising movie lines from the films in the Cornell Movie Dialog Corpus. Some of the outcomes were oddly poetic, for example this section beginning with “Oh dear”:

Oh dear God. Its all right...a bad dream, just a nasty old dream.
Oh dear God...
Oh dear God...
Oh dear girl, your extracurricular activities are of no consequence to me. I don't give a damn who you sleep with. I'm concerned about David.
Oh dear! But then where did the motorcyclists come from?
Oh dear! George, this is gonna kill Tony. He's waited his whole life for this break.
Oh dear, I didn't really mean to...
Oh dear, I feel like doing a bit of work.
Oh dear, are you actually laughing?
Oh dear, why is life so complicated? Sometimes I really wish I could be someone else.
Oh dear, yes. You were an excellent student, before all that clarinet nonsense. You loved Chopin. You used to call it "heaven music." "Teach me some heaven music," you used to say.
Oh dear- -you're geting that downtrodden look again-
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear.
Oh dear. Have I made a blunder?
Oh dear. He wasn't friendly during the filming?
Oh dear. I have made you nervous.
Oh dear. I'll never work in this town again?
Oh dear. If one must have a clinical name.
Oh dear....easy honey...

Or this list of things that people forgot:

You forget what I went through to give ya the best.
You forget where I work?
You forget yourself!
You forget yourself, Homer. This here's my daughter! You got your own mess to deal with--ain't that right?
You forget, I dislike YOU at least as much as him.
You forgetting the gag line, Killaine. The police don't take anything for granted.
You forgetting who sat next to you for a thousand missions. I know how you drive.
You forgot "sexy".
You forgot her degree in literature. She's a writer. She published a novel last year under a pen name. Do you want to know what it's about?
You forgot something.
You forgot something...
You forgot the "Now I'm going to tell you what the hell is going on" step. See usually that comes before the, "It's over" Step. And it always, always comes before the "You can go" Step. What is over?
You forgot the Hula!
You forgot the mangoes, didn't you?
You forgot the milk.
You forgot the tent?
You forgot this.
You forgot to be there.
You forgot to say 'Simon says."
You forgot to tell me what a City Sealer has to do.
You forgot to wash my purple shirt. I told you a hundred times it was Purple Day at school today.
You forgot your keys!

I liked some of the outcomes so much that I took the section which begins with the word ‘Love’ and used it as poem at my own wedding (romantically titled 48 Lines about Love, alphabetically ordered), which was read out loud in inimitable style by my good friend Craig Nunes:

48 Lines about Love, alphabetically ordered

Love a cup of tea. With lemon.
Love and happiness for ever.
Love at first sight?
Love demands it.
Love doesn't have to be right. It just has to be love.
Love gives you wings. It makes you fly. I don't even call it love. I call it Geronimo.
Love him… Yes, it is true. That's the hard part for me… I knew him better than anyone … I knew him best.
Love holds you to me. And we are in danger, not you.
Love is different for different people.
Love is funny.
Love is just another name for sex. Love is sexy and sex is lovely -- I don't care what you call it, an android can't have it.
Love is… love is… love is…
Love it!
Love it.
Love it. Which way?
Love me oodles and oodles?
Love me.
Love me… keep me safe…
Love me?
Love that name.
Love this car! Is it new?
Love to, sir, but no can do. No spare room. Period.
Love to--
Love to.
Love to.
Love was never our problem.
Love ya, Margie.
Love ya.
Love you too.
Love you too..
Love you! …Well, why don't we turn in?
Love you, Dil.
Love you, man.
Love you, too.
Love! You don't love anybody! Me or anybody else! You want to be loved - that's all you want! 
Love! I'm made of love!
Love! What do you know about love?
Love's a killer, isn't it?
Love's the same as it always was. It's people who change.
Love, Sire!
Love, secret, and uh, sex. But not in that order, necessarily, right?
Love, you can still write to each other.
Love.
Love.
Love.
Love.
Love.
Love. Passion. Obsession, all those things you told me to wait for. Well, they've arrived.

Anyway, Movielinesbot is quite simple – it takes the 304446 lines of alphabetised movie lines and tweets them one at a time. At the time of writing, it’s currently up to the “His name is…” section.

All of the code is on Github – see the Movielinesbot and the original 48 lines repositories if you want to play with this code. The bot is @al_film_betical. Credits to the Cornell Movie Dialogs Corpus, which is a great resource. 🙂

Teaching: open access

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In April last year I started working as core tutor of the Situated Design MA at the Master Institute of Visual Cultures, AKV St Joost.

It’s been an intense year – under the directorship of Úna Henry, there is a new module structure for students, in which students from Situtated Design, Visual Arts and Post-Conteporary Practice, and Ecological Futures can all participate in the same elective modules, spreading different modes of practice and perspectives with one another as they go.

I’ve been running two modules:

Scripted Design

Scripted Design (September-December), which focuses on using Oulipian constraints to creative processes and make films. Much of the methodology is based on my PhD, Scripted performances: designing performative architectures through digital and absurd machines.

Parallel Worlds

Parallel Worlds (February-May), which takes tools and techniques from theatre, counterfactuals, psychological operations, fiction, television and film production, propaganda, and situationism to enable artists and designers to create compelling worlds around their existing practice.
?️parallel.olliepalmer.com

Both courses are open access, and run from their own websites, so anybody can follow the course, try the exercises, and use them in their own practice or teaching. The courses are both run by websites which are open source, so anyone can copy, adapt, and use them as they see fit. All of the code used to write and publish the courses is on Github.

Scripted Design >> sd.olliepalmer.com / GitHub
Parallel Worlds >> parallel.olliepalmer.com / GitHub

Take a look, participate, copy, adapt, suggest improvements!

Landscape Mode

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Students of the Scripted Design course I run at MIVC are putting on a show at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media on 17 December, in which they will showcase their work from the course: a series of rules-based videos, and films which compile videos made every day throughout the course into one video artefact.

The show has been curated by Yusuf Deniz, Bregje Horsten, and Leonardo Landoni.

Do come along! 17 December, V2_ Rotterdam, 18-21h.

For more information about the course, see sd.olliepalmer.com

NaNoGenMo 2019: Directory Directory

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I decided to participate in NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generation Month) this year with a project called Directory Directory – an online directory of fictional companies, all located within the Alphaville-Zulutown region. It’s organised like an old phone book, by service type, and each company has a name, slogan, address, and phone number.

Some day in the future I’ll update the directory to have more information, and use more advanced grammar, and maybe even be printable. But the project was a nice excuse to learn some new things (the Tracery library for python is fun to play with; it’s also the first time I’ve built a workflow to build a whole generative website).

Some services
Companies offering Anemic Sling services

You can see the project at directory.olliepalmer.com, and play with the code that wrote it at GitHub. Enjoy!

Des’ree Bot

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This week, I made a silly Twitter bot. It was mostly an attempt to make a tutorial about making Twitter bots using Dreamhost servers, but ended up being a bot who periodically tweets lines from Des’ree’s 1998 hit Life.

The bot itself is inspired by the africa by totobot, which simply tweets a random line from the song every few minutes. It is actually so irritating that I’ve stopped following it myself, as I found my days permeated by twee earworms about preferring toast to ghosts, or the desire to fly around the world in a beautiful balloon. 

The codebase is on Github – you can use it to build bots yourself if you use Dreamhost, or adapt the code slightly if you use another host (or have your own server). 

You can also follow the bot at @life_by_desree, if you dare.

Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

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I am sure it’s been done before, possibly hundreds of billions of times, but as a small coding exercise whilst writing my PhD I wrote a little piece of code which renders random iterations of Raymond Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems on a web page. I re-found it whilst working on another project. Here it is:

See the Pen A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Ollie Palmer (@olliepalmer) on CodePen.

The code is available on CodePen and Github.

Residency at V2_

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I’m happy to announce that I am one of the nine resident artists at V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media as part of their Summer Sessions programme this year. I’ll be developing a sound project that I am quite excited about – more details to follow soon.

Rules of the Game

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This weekend I took part in the annual Sci Fi London 48 hour film challenge, in which participants have to write, shoot, and edit a sci-fi film in 48 hours.

My film had to include the following elements:

Title: Rules of the Game
A prop and action: A character opens a sealed padded envelope and pulls out a card.
A line of dialogue: The count for this stuff is off the chart, probably best you don’t get it on your skin.

Here is the outcome. It’s a 5-minute film about an ambitious inventor named Larry Hammer in the midst of an experiment. The film-making had all of the constraints you’d imagine (no budget, limited time, one person) but it was great fun to make. I hope you enjoy it!

I did the writing, shooting, directing, editing, starring, and soundtrack (à la Tommy Wiseau?). I also had some generous script advice from Amy Butt and Pippa Palmer, for which I’d like to express thanks.

Scripted performances: digital and absurd machines

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I’m very excited to be giving a lecture as part of the Bartlett’s Constructing Realities lecture series next week. If you are in London, please do pop in on the 15th February. It will also be the first chance I’ve had to see the Bartlett’s shiny new campus.

Constructing Realities Lecture Series, Spring 2018

Scripted performances: digital and absurd machines

‘Scripts’ in architecture are usually associated with computer-based design programming. However, this narrow usage belies a rich vein of concepts intrinsic to architecture and authorship. This lecture poses the script as a useful critical and methodological tool within architectural design, absorbing and reinterpreting ideas from behavioural psychology, computation, dance, immersive theatre, the Absurd, and the Oulipo. The lecture is illustrated through a series of projects completed during Palmer’s residency at the Palais de Tokyo and PhD by Design at the Bartlett spanning dance, film, installation, and data manipulation.

Biography

Ollie Palmer is an artist and designer based in the Netherlands. He holds an AHRC-funded PhD by design from the Bartlett and was artist in residence at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2015-16. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at the V&A Museum, Opera Garnier de Paris, Seoul Museum of Art, and the Royal Institute of British Architects. He co-authored the winning proposal for the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2018, and sits on the project’s curatorial advisory committee. He formerly taught within the Bartlett’s Interactive Design Lab and at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. He currently teaches at TU Delft.

www.olliepalmer.com

More information: Bartlett event website / Facebook event page

PhD

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I am pleased to announce that after four and a half years, I have been awarded a PhD by Design from the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL. My examiners were Dr Kevin Walker at the Royal College of Art, and Dr. Penelope Haralambidou from the Bartlett, and the thesis was supervised by Professors Stephen Gage and Peg Rawes.

Many thanks to all who helped my work get to this stage, and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Palais de Tokyo for providing the funding and framework for the research to take place.

Scripted performances: designing performative architectures through digital and absurd machines

Abstract

‘Scripting’ in architecture is usually associated with computer-based design programming. However, this narrow usage belies a rich vein of concepts intrinsic to architecture and authorship. This thesis frames scripting as a critical mode of computation, performance, and design process. It does this through seven projects that explore relationships between technology, society, and the philosophical absurd. Works include films, performances, programmes and installations produced independently and collaboratively with experts from scientific and artistic fields.

This thesis asks: how might an expanded definition of ‘scripting’ act as a critical methodology for performative architectural design?; how can this methodology mediate between, and comment on, technology and society?; and what is the relationship between scripting, authorship and agency? Computational scripting has been explored in depth by a number of practitioners and theorists; performative scripting has been examined within the context of theatre and artistic practice; this study adopts an expansive definition of scripting that embraces each of these approaches whilst simultaneously proposing scripting as a critical design methodology. Furthermore, the thesis introduces the philosophical ‘absurd’ as a framework for critiquing emergent technologies and their impact on society.

In Chapter 1 two projects (Ant Ballet, Godot Machine) are discussed as modes of diagramming absurd theatrical scripts. The ‘framing’ of these projects provides direction for further work within the thesis. Chapter 2 introduces two dance pieces (Nybble, Scriptych) which represent scripted performances and a novel computer-scripted feedback mechanism. Both are diagrammatic modes of presenting contemporary computing mechanisms. Chapter 3 then discusses two experimental computationally-scripted absurd films exploring the practices and impact of contemporary technology companies (86400, 24fps Psycho). Chapter 4 introduces a film (Network/Intersect) created through a novel design process imposing strict rules on the creation of work. It concludes by naming this practice ‘reflexive scripted design’, proposing it as the thesis’ original contribution to knowledge.

View at UCL / View online

Note: I want to publish as much of the work as possible. Watch this space for updates.

Update, February 2022: my thesis is now available online at phd.olliepalmer.com. I’ve updated the links in the article above to point directly to the chapters in the online version of the thesis.