Designer Gulch
Designer Gulch is an interactive, generative poem about working in the design world. It is installed in the lobby of the Berliner Technische Kunsthochschule. A simple context-free grammar and lists of industry jargon are combined to generate random permutations of verse. Each time a person walks by, the machine spits out one or two more lines in a never-ending epic of graphic labor.
The work is a remix of Nick Montfort's poem Taroko Gorge. It is programmed in Javascript and HTML using Mozilla's Chromeless for deployment. The typeface is “Droid Sans”, created by Ascender Corp. for Google. An infra-red light barrier, hooked up to a Byron board, detects the motion of passers-by.
A non-interactive online version is available here.
