‘War Bop HUMBABA’
By Peter Dukes
Please view the piece in fullscreen here.
‘War Bop HUMBABA’ uses a JS algorithm, named HUMBABA, and the open source p5.js and rita.js. HUMBABA reads in a given poem-text (here, the seven stanzas of ‘War Bop’) and re-writes it beside that source, producing an echo or doubling, and applying typographic interventions determined by relations between successive words. As it re-writes, it mishears and mistakes, but it is listening (it is programmed to search for replacement words by sound), and is asked to match the counted syllables, as I hear them, in the source word. If it does not find a replacement that matches in this way, it leaves the source word unchanged. As it does this it also listens for words that match (in both the source and its double—the HUMBABA poem) to a given set of commentaries or glosses. If it finds such a match, it displays that word below, and from that word can be found (by touch) the commentary.
