Totalitarian interface

'140 characters is not an arbitrary number: it is a specific constriction.'

Silence

The best I can do in lieu of silence is

:___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

(a colon preceding 139 characters of trapped air)

Less control

Attempts at control of output enact a struggle of attention between the subworld and the poetic line. Knowability of process hinders output and opresses space. Force of capture is undermined by organisation of quarry.

Lines

The output refers to 'poetry' specifically 'sonnet', as it is arranged in 14 lines. Rather than the syllable, the character is the primary unit of composition, but the line is still the larger level of composition. Here, as in Twitter, the lines recede from the most recently posted, at the top, to the least recent at the bottom. So there is awareness of the order of composition, yet the content of the posts can be deliberately structured to work from top to bottom, the reverse order of their Twitter publication.

My original use of Twitter allowed for the randomness of everyday life including its disparate thoughts and activities to influence content, every post a performance of this subworld.

Can this still happen in a more controlled input?

Styles

The three main typographic styles that show up in Twitter are upper case, lower case and underlined. Underlining only applies to hypertext, tags or the names of other uses in the original post, but can appear more general or enigmatic post-process.

There are Twitter specific language conventions such as the @ symbol as the initial character of another user's name, RT to stand for re-tweet, the # symbol as the initial character of a tag.

The only ways to underline text is to begin a word with http://, @ or#. To ensure underlining in a line of output, every word has to begin with one of these prefices.

Spaces

There is certainly a difference betweeen a character and a space. Twitter, like many web text applications, cannot hold more than one space in a row except for the 'unused' space at the end of a shorter post, and this limit upon use of space is reflected in the output of the process. However, 'unused' space allows for a line of the output (a line derived from posts of 130 characters or less) to be all or mainly space.

Yet, a line with all space can not be guaranteed because Twitter does not allow a blank post.

Posts that do not contain any words of 10 or more characters guarantee at least one space in the output.

Where this space occurs or these spaces occur can not be guaranteed, but if the space occurs in between words, the space and the characters on either side of it assume special significance in the output due to their aesthetic:

assume sig

me signifi

To ensure a post includes at least one specific instance of a space with particular words on either side, the words can be:

the same three-character (or less) word repeated:

eg. got got got got etc. will always include 'got got' in its output:

got got go

ot got got

[although this doesn't follow with repeated words of between 4 and 7 characters. In those cases the appearance of at least one space with specific characters on either side of it can be guaranteed - e.g. an input of four four four four etc. ensures an outcome that includes the space/character combination r f]

The following combinations of alternating words ensure that two kinds of spaces will be included:

one-two-one-two etc. e.g. a no a no
(includes a no and no a)

two-two-two-two etc. e.g. an in an i
(includes an in and in an)

one-three-one-three etc. e.g. got a got
(includes got a and a got)

two-three-two-three and one-four-one-four combinations ensure that either one or other space will appear.

Bigger combinations up to those that include seven-character words guarantee in the output space/character combinations for either one or other type of space.

Combinations including words of more than seven characters do not guarantee a middle space, eg. me significance me significance me etc. might come up as:

_significa

In all the above examples, exact output can not be guaranteed, but certain appearances can be. The possibilities can be known and mapped out before the Twitter post is published, but not the exact outcome. This rule can be used for other kinds of desired combinations that don't include spaces, but the use of space, as with much poetry, is of special significance.

Longer repetitions

When 10-character repetitions are effected in the input of the process, the output will certainly include all characters, but usually as a simply deciphered anagram. For example:

RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of RIGOUR of

The capitalisation is deliberate to help the eye interpret the possible resulting anagram. Here are all possible otcomes of the above:

RIGOUR of
IGOUR of R
GOUR of RI
OUR of RIG
UR of RIGO
R of RIGOU
_of RIGOUR
of RIGOUR
f RIGOUR o
_RIGOUR of

As can be seen, many different words and phrases are created depending on which line is selected in the chance procedure. The anagram is not necessarily all that clear. For example, OUR of RIG is quite a strong phrase that we do not automatically reconfiger as RIGOUR of.

Simple repetitions

I had now created a tool which I need to learn to use effectively. I have started to think about the types of line that can be created, and how I can influence the content of lines.

Repetition throughout a post is a way of controlling the outcome of the line. The more condensed/frequent the repetition, the more the output is controlled. As we have seen, a single character repeated without spaces ensures certainty of output.

If we fluctuate between two characters, we create a line that includes several words. For example:

asasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasasas

There are only 2 possible 10-character lines we can cut from the above post:

asasasasas

and

sasasasasa

yet both possibilities, apart from invisible suggested words, will include the words: a s as sa asa sas asas sasa and perhaps asasa and sasas.

Control

Now that I had invented my own process, I was aware that I had control over the input of the process. However, the only way to be certain of the content of a particular line of the sonnet was to repeat the same character, filling the original post without spaces.

This sonnet is a celebration of such certainty of control.

Time

I am attracted to the real-time aspect of Twitter, both in that it allows instant publication of words from anywhere, via text message, but also because it timestamps each post. On a Twitter page, top = most recent. I developed my Twitter character sonnet to include this time-emphasis. Each line is taken from an adjacent Twitter post, and the top and bottom are stamped to indicate the time frame the words were written.

The ten characters chosen from each post are determined by a chance operation that ensures any ten can appear, including the 'unused' spaces of the 140 character per post allocation.

I created several sonnets from my most recent Twitter posts, collected here

Character sonnet

Thinking up procedures that work with the neverending stream of text generated by a twitter profile, I realised that the (apparently arbitrary) designation of 140 characters per twitter post can be arranged into a kind of character sonnet, where instead of 10 syllables per line, the 14-line stanza contains 10 characters per line:

and and an
d and and
and and an
d and and
and and an
d and and
and and an
d and and
and and an
d and and
and and an
d and and
and and an
d and and
and and an

(courier is the best standard font to display a character sonnet, as each character is given an equal width)