This is internet poetry – “found poetry”. Rules: Google for your chosen title: “When will it end?” Click a random search result, pick one phrase from the text. This is the next line of the poem. Click a random hyperlink on this page, pick a phrase from this text –> next line. It’s not allowed…
Tag: Art
Sources of Heat, Life, and Everything
Same procedure as every summer: Science and tech blogging comes to a halt, and the daring ‘internet artist’ is summoned. But also unorthodox avant-garde art is rooted in down-to-earth engineering. In summer elkement leaves the programmer’s cave (a bit) and sees the sun. The local elkemental microcosmos is a fully functional biosphere-2-like ecosystem with lots…
The Subtle Power of the Top Snippet. A New Sub-Genre of Google Poetry.
New game, new rules! I have tried to make the rules tougher! Here is some context and history. Search for your site on Google: site:elkement.wordpress.com Pick the first search result in the language of your site[*] Pick a chain of words, a contiguous snippet from this Google search result (use only the snippet on the…
Things You Find in Your Hydraulic Schematic
Building an ice storage powered heat pump system is a DIY adventure – for a Leonardo da Vinci of plumbing, electrical engineering, carpentry, masonry, and computer technology. But that holistic approach is already demonstrated clearly in our hydraulic schematics. Actually, here it is even more daring and bold: There is Plutonium – Pu – everywhere…
Bing Says We Are Weird. I Prove It. Using Search Term Poetry.
Bing has done so repeatedly: In order to learn more about this fundamental confusion I investigated my Bing search terms. [This blog has now entered the phase of traditionally light summer entertainment.] Rules: Raw material: Search terms shown in Bing Web Master Tools for any of my / our websites. Each line is a search…
Spam Poetry: “Cris-Crossing the Universe”
I have tried my hands at different kinds of experimental internet poetry, and all of the poems turned out to have a dystopic touch or tantalizing hints to some fundamental philosophical truth. Perhaps this says something about 1) The Internet or 2) about my subconsciousness. Since I have reduced blogging frequency, the number of spam…
Blinded by the Light: Links Not Considered Click-Worthy
I promised more experimental internet poetry — here it is! The problem: Spam comments have petered out, their number seems to scale with posting frequency. The quality of search terms for this blog has improved, and most terms are technical and dull. I turned to untapped raw material – finally I know what last year’s…
Google-Mediated Self-Poetry – Holiday Edition
A new sub-genre of my experimental internet poetry! Is Google able to capture the essence of this blog? Rules: Search your own site on Google, using site:[your site]. This ‘poem’ is based on results from site:elkement.wordpress.com. Open the first search result in a new tab. Pick one phrase from this page (your own content) and…
Travelling Like Spam Poetry
We have an anniversary. In the summer of 2005, the Chief Engineer and I set out to visit every Austrian village whose names started with the letter Z. It was a straight-forward idea given that we lived in a z-village. Our universe of websites contains the virtual equivalent – z-village.net, a German website chronicling the…
What the Internet Asks of Me
… via search terms submitted by blog visitors, of course! This is a cross-over of search term poetry and using search terms for serious investigations: A collection of phrases from 2015 WordPress statistics, plus comments [in italics and bold]. As usual, phrases are unedited except from truncations at beginning and end, and I have added…
Virtual Book Spine Poetry (Edition 2014 + 2015/6)
I am going to merge two overdue posts: 1) the 2014 edition of my yearly book reviews, a tradition I started last year, and 2) my next experimental poem, in a new experimental genre. I owe to the inventors of Book Spine Poetry – and I’d like to challenge this: You can’t do that with ebooks….
Google Translational Poetry – Austrian Christmas Edition
I am at the nadir of my online reputation – my Google page impressions plummeted by a factor of about 100. This is very liberating, and I start enjoying the irony of being considered a notorious link scammer. Now I will harvest Google for any weird purpose whatsoever. For poetry nobody will read. The title says it all. I…
Imaginative Poetry. Inspired by the Second Name of Collected Space.
First, some terminology: Sammelraum is a life-form (allegedly – maybe it is an art bot). The German word means Staging Area in the military sense, Storage Space, or Collection Space … so perhaps collected ‘pure’ space as such, or space for collections. Second Name is a series of unworldly images created by that life-form. Random…
Being Creative with What Is Available
This is a quote from Simon Dale’s website who has built several eco-friendly ‘Hobbit’ houses. It reminded me of the cave house built into lava bubbles by Lanzarote’s most famous artist César Manrique: Being creative with what is available has an appeal beyond economical necessities. As a teenage hobby astronomer I built a mounting for…
Poetry of Anything. Now I Know This Is Called Flarf!
So. I. Have. Forgotten. To. Save. Last Quarter’s Search Terms. I hope you missed my poetry already. What could I do to compensate for that? Inventing an allegedly new genre. Poetry of Anything. The rules are similar as for Search Term Poetry or Spam Poetry: Use continuous, unedited snippets from questionable internet sources. Pick snippets…
The Destiny of the Universe
… not what the title implies but Spam Poetry, harvested from about 530 spam comments on this blog. I keep to my usually dystopian-postmodern genre. Imagine somebody with a British accent reading it, and mentally insert black and white images inspired by Philip K. Dick‘s short stories. Don’t expect to understand it, it is like…
Crowdsourcing Poetry (Again)
This is Search Term Poetry created from terms harvested in the second quarter. I even owe the post’s title to a valuable searcher. As usual, all lines are taken from search terms in WordPress Stats – no editing allowed except for truncation at the beginning and the end of phrases. But I could not resist…
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and Strange Loops: Nostalgia and Random Thoughts
I am curious – who read the book, too? Did you like it? I read it nearly 30 years ago and I would also tag it one of the most influential books I read as a teenager. [This might grow into a meandering and lengthy post with different (meta-)levels – given the subject of the post I…
Search Term Poetry – Spring Edition
Dear Google, you do still encrypt your search results. As a security enthusiast I should like this but I rather suspect you want me to use your AdWords tools. Please stop showing me ads for your “starter package” on all social networks, and give me the raw material for my poetry back. For now I…
Non-Linear Art. (Should Actually Be: Random Thoughts on Fluid Dynamics)
In my favorite ancient classical mechanics textbook I found an unexpected statement. I think 1960s textbooks weren’t expected to be garnished with geek humor or philosophical references as much as seems to be the default today – therefore Feynman’s books were so refreshing. Natural phenomena featured by visual artists are typically those described by non-linear…
Generation X. (I Resist Adding a More Zeitgeisty Header.)
Yes, this is really about Douglas Coupland’s landmark book. Generation X comprises people born between early 1960s and early 1980s. Thus I am perfectly average Gen X, and I re-read this book once in a while. As for the content I cannot do better than the blurb: Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a…
Search Term Poetry Sans Google
Times have been rough for search poets since Google has decided to encrypt search results. But you could also argue that search terms should be more non-mainstream, hip, and sophisticated now as submitted by users preferring non-mainstream search engines. So this is Google-less search term poetry, created from terms harvested in Q4 2013. As usual, lines…
Poetry from the Virtual Scrapyard Anniversary: I Subconsciously Think about This Element
Today is an anniversary: The first Search Term Poem has seen the light of day one year ago on my Facebook timeline – this was my debut as a search term poet on WordPress on 12-12-12. I have created tons of artifacts from the virtual scrapyard since then. Spammers had enough time to hone their skills since…
Breaking News on Search Term Poetry (Good, Bad, Ugly)
This is a break from quantum physics – you deserve it! Based on your questions – no un-follows so far fortunately – I will follow-up with attempting again to pick the right metaphors for 1026 dimensional spaces and tons of enormous vectors. But there is more (enigmatic) to this universe than quantum field theory – such…
The Science of Search Term Poetry
In the break after the second session on Quantum Field Theory I am showing off light edutainment with a scientific touch. Every quarter I save the search terms as displayed in WordPress Stats for highly sophisticated statistical, psychological and linguistic analysis. That is, I do create a Search Term Poem. Rules are as follows: Every…
What? A Spooky Spam Poem of Danger, Fear, Hope.
It is time to purge the spam queue again! Spam commenters are still gloomy and plagued with existential questions and answers. I am very proud of the simple and powerful title. What? was a complete spam comment. I even clicked the associated link as it felt so genuine. What? there is no danger If you…
Decoding Myself: Searching for Hidden Clues in My Blog Posts’ Titles
I am inventing a new experimental genre: Header Poetry. I tag this post with Spam Poetry and Search Term Poetry as – theoretically – my headers could show up as search terms or skillfully drafted spam comments. As an innovator in poetry based on recycled material I need to do this – in order to…
Existential Spam Poem: The Soul of This Bag
I follow the call to arms by fellow spam poet Michelle(*)(**). Every time she blogs about spam poetry, I have a spam poem in my drafts folder – so I think I need to release the current one now. This time I defined the following goals: there should be a topic and a narrative, and…
Remarks Written by Brain-Dead Visitors
Dear reader, enclosed you find my latest spam poem. Each line is verbatim from a spam comment (including typos). The meme pool had comprised about 400 spam comments collected in the past three weeks. This time I forced myself to compile the poem extremely fast, scrolling through these comments in Data-from-Star-Trek-style and letting my subconsciousness…
Missing Policies for the Mad Tea Party and What to Learn from The Jabberwocky
I am trying to re-gain control over the blog award nomination process, or I pretend to do so. postmoderndonkey had called it a Mad Tea Party of a nomination process – and right he was. You may accuse me of making this blog the strange attractor of a self-referential loop of weird referrals to itself…
elkemental Force 