new book and book tour!

Posted on October 10, 2018 by ranjit

My bot pentametron and I made a book! Encomials: Sonnets from Pentametron is out now from Counterpath Press, as part of the Using Electricity series edited by Nick Montfort. It’s a collection of sonnets made up entirely of texts collected automatically from Twitter over the last five years or so.

Along with Nick and two other authors from the series, we’ll be doing a mini-northeast book tour next week. Pick up a copy at one of the readings, or you can order it from the distributor (and probably Amazon soon).

Monday, October 15, 7pm
McNally Jackson Books
76 N 4th St, Brooklyn, NY

Tuesday, October 16, 6:30pm
RISD
College Building, Old Library (Room 521)
2 College Street, Providence, RI

Wednesday, October 17, 6pm
MIT Press Bookstore
301 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA

Thursday, October 18, 7pm
Babycastles
145 W 14th St, New York, NY

tapestry bonus: peter the morkie!

Posted on July 12, 2018 by ranjit

Here’s my dog Peter sitting on a test swatch of the tapestry.

the tapestry of the search for terrestrial intelligence

Posted on July 10, 2018 by ranjit

The Tapestry of the Search for Terrestrial Intelligence is my piece for the show Life at the Edges, on view through September 30 at Science Gallery Dublin.

In 1977, the two Voyager space probes were launched, each carrying a golden record with music, sounds, and voices from Earth — just in case. The records also feature over a hundred digital images encoded as sounds. If an alien civilization picked up one of the Voyager probes a million years from now, what would they make of the information on the record? They probably wouldn’t think they way we do. They might try to taste the disk, or try to find meaning in the way it feels when they rub their fingers on the grooves. Or they might try to decode the ancient, degraded images onto a forty-meter-long tapestry.

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