The members of Algolit are very happy to welcome Allison Parrish for a workshop in the framework of the exhibition Data Workers in the evening before she will give a talk in Passa Porta.

This two-part workshop examines the physical gesture and material artifacts of the act of writing, as seen through the lens of computation and digital media. Taking contemporary and historical practices in asemic poetry, experimental typography and automatic writing as inspiration, participants will use the Python programming language to prototype speculative writing technologies that challenge conventional reading practices and notions of sense-making.
The goal of the workshop is twofold. First, to introduce asemic and automatic writing practices as historical and contemporary practices and invite participants to expand on these practices with computation; second, using asemic and automatic writing as a lens, encourage discussion around the rhetoric and materiality of language in digital and computational contexts.

About Allison:

Allison Parrish is a computer programmer, poet, educator and game designer whose teaching and practice address the unusual phenomena that blossom when language and computers meet, with a focus on artificial intelligence and computational creativity. She is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where she earned her master’s degree in 2008.

Named "Best Maker of Poetry Bots" by the Village Voice in 2016, Allison’s computer-generated poetry has recently been published in Ninth Letter and Vetch. She is the author of "@Everyword: The Book" (Instar, 2015), which collects the output of her popular long-term automated writing project that tweeted every word in the English language. The word game "Rewordable," designed by Allison in collaboration with Adam Simon and Tim Szetela, was published by Penguin Random House in August
2017 after a successful round of Kickstarter funding. Her first full-length book of computer-generated poetry, "Articulations," was published by Counterpath in 2018.

Allison Parrish also gives a lecture the evening before in Passa Porta. has been invited to the ’Data Workers’ exhibition with the support of: Ugent, DHuF - Digital Humanities Flanders, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles/Arts Numériques, Arts² and Constant.