I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my interactive digital erasure poetry platform THE INFINITE WOMAN, now live at theinfinitewoman.com. Play around with it and let me know what you think! It’s a cross-platform web app compatible with all devices (and all internet browsers except Safari — so if you have an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook, you’ll need to use Chrome, Firefox, or Explorer instead). 🔮🖥️💅📱🌫️✨
As a feminist critique and artistic intervention, the project remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel THE INFINITE WOMAN (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy book THE SECOND SEX (1949).
An n-gram algorithm procedurally generates infinitely scrolling sentences that recombine and recontextualize the two source texts’ vocabulary and syntactic patterns.
Users can select sentences from the infinitely scrolling text to send to the canvas workspace, where they can erase words and rearrange sentences.
Meanwhile, fog slowly erases the screen – materializing “the misty mirror of the eternal feminine” (Marshall/Beauvoir).
The platform was designed and implemented by Alayna Panlilio, Ryan Power, Josh Terry, Alex Yang, and Jeffrey Zhang at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2019, with my creative direction.
