Switchboard Projects
As part of my Masters Thesis, I will be making two projects that use the Switchboard library. They are meant to illustrate both the uses of the library, and some of the strategies and values that I have uncovered in my thesis survey of data-driven art.
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Interactive Frank
Interactive Frank is an narrative generator that uses web services to construct a story based on input from the user. The user types in a sentence, and Interactive Frank takes over, scouring the web for another sentence that follows a sentence with the last three words. Frank can also find streaming audio to accompany the generated narrative based on a word analysis, and it can read the narrative using an online text-to-speech generator.
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Kinkos Disgruntled Customer Dialog Generator
An example of the sentence() Switchboard service.
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EigenTV
As pieces of the Semantic Web continue to trickle into everyday usage, procedurally generated art will reap the rewards of the huge machine-understandable knowledge and content base that the Web is becoming. The goal of EigenTV (name inspired by EigenRadio) is to create the first artistic/entertainment-minded Web agents using Semantic Web-inspired methods. EigenTV is a 24/7 stream of procedurally aggregated audio, video, and text, broadcast in Windows Media format. The video will be made up of found video and images, and the audio will be a combination of streaming audio, found sound bytes, and text-to-speech. The result will a audio and visual collage, organized around a theme (discussed below), generated in real-time, as the user watches. Unlike EigenRadio, EigenTV will have more than one algorithm to produce content. The broadcast will be split into time slots, like (or, as a parody of) traditional television networks. Initially, there will be three time slots. Each represents one possible strategy for creating EigenTV algorithms, or "shows".
