Update: 12-9-12 : Please note, Trial and Live mode are in maintenance
The Book:
What is my country is a Living Room ?
What about the Print-On-Demand BOOK?
How many languages has the poem been translated into?
How much does the book cost?
Where can I buy it?
Where can I find and try Google Scribe?
You said you kept pressing only the spacebar to generate the sentences of the poem but it doesn’t seem working like that.
So you wrote just a few letters or a few words at the beginning of each sentence?
How many sentences there are in the poem?
What does the endorsement written by Christiane Paul say? (published on the back cover of the book)
The Internet Project:
What about the Pay-Per-View Internet project?
Is the online piece looping always the same version of the poem?
Can I access the Archive?
Can I have a look at the online piece for free?
Is the FREE TRIAL, generated live?
How often are new versions of the poem stored into the Archive?
How many poems are stored in the Archive?
The Payment System:
What kind of subscriptions are available?
How much does it cost to sign up?
Why don’t you offer a monthly or a year subscription?
On what device does the project work correctly?
The author:
Who are you?
Do you sell any other project for a few € ?
What about People From Mars?
What is my country is a Living Room ?
It’s an art project by Carlo Zanni done in 2011 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification that takes the form of a Print-On-Demand book and a Pay-Per-View Internet project.
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What about the Print-On-Demand BOOK?
my country is a Living Room is a project by artist Carlo Zanni who made extensive and radical use of Google Scribe to write a short poem on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification.
The poem was written in English using Google Scribe, an online editor that auto-completes suggestions as you type. Only the words and letters printed in bold at the beginning of each sentence have been consciously written.
For instance, in the first sentence the only words written on purpose were: “I wok”, while the rest was automatically suggested by the online software and accepted pressing several times -one for each word- the space bar.
And so on, phrase by phrase, this visionary and dystopian poem wrote itself unveiling -in a constant stream of consciousness feeling- some inconvenient truths framing a sleeping, resigned, happy nation.
The poem has been translated by Google Translate to fifty seven languages with no editing (all the translations are available in the book).
The book is a 150 pages, hard cover with dust jacket Print on Demand book powered by lulu.com.
The back cover hosts an endorsement by Christiane Paul (Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum and Associate Professor of Media Studies, The New School)
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How many languages has the poem been translated into?
57 languages, through Google Translate, with no editing:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian (Alpha), Azerbaijani (Alpha), Arabic, Basque (Alpha), Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian (Alpha), German, Greek, Haitian Creole (Alpha), Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu (Alpha), Vietnamese, Welsh and Yiddish.
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How much does the book cost?
18.99 € + Shipping.
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Where can I buy it?
You can buy it from LULU.com, just click this button:
(you are required to sign up at LULU before purchasing, it takes a minute)
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Where can I find and try Google Scribe?
It was formerly hosted here http://scribe.googlelabs.com/, but now it seems Google embedded into Blogger
http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2011/08/introducing-google-scribe-in-blogger.html
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You said you kept pressing only the spacebar to generate the sentences of the poem but it doesn’t seem working like that.
Back in April 2011 when I made the poem, you could simply write a letter and start pressing the spacebar to see the sentences appear.
In June, I guess, they made a change and you had to keep pressing ctrl+J (PC) or cmd+J (MAC) to turn on and off the scribe feature allowing the system to keep suggesting words after words.
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So you wrote just a few letters or a few words at the beginning of each sentence?
Yes, then I kept pressing the space bar, always accepting the first suggestion.
For instance the second sentence reads: “Today I am going to be a part of the products.” Where “Tod” was written by me and all the rest was suggested by the Google software.
The tenth sentence reads: “My country dies in the end of the day and night to make sure that the new system is a way to get the best of the best in the world of the living room. ” Where “My country dies” was written by me and all the rest was suggested by the Google software.
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How many sentences there are in the poem?
14 sentences.
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What does the endorsement written by Christiane Paul say?(published on the back cover of the book)
«Using the Google Scribe autocompletion tool, Carlo Zanni’s my country is a Living Room ingeniously updates the long tradition of experiments with automated writing and poetry generators. Cleverly framing his automated poem within the tension between the public and private, national and local—the country and the living room—Zanni manages to produce a sublime text that transforms the annoyances of autocompletion and automated translation into uncharted territory for creativity. my country is a Living Room may very well be the most poetic content that Google ever produced, and its release seems particularly timely as the company announced the closure of its Labs, from which Scribe originated.»
Christiane Paul
Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts, Whitney Museum
Associate Professor of Media Studies, The New School
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What about the Pay-Per-View Internet project?
The online version of this piece embeds the Google Scribe feature in a web page driven by a server that automatically sends keystrokes (the letters or words in bold written by me) starting the poem and then always accepting the first suggestions offered by the software.
Doing this, the poem keeps changing and its meaning morphing, as our society does. Available at a www.mycountryisalivingroom.com, people visiting the project can stare at it reading the poem taking shape in front of their eyes. Or they can browse an Archive with stored versions. The server is meant to store a new version as soon as a change appears in the poem.
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Is the online piece looping always the same version of the poem?
The live mode of the Poem doesn’t loop any stored text but writes the poem live word by word generated by Google Scribe at the time you are watching. Being Google suggestions based on the continuous filtering and mapping of millions of web pages, this poem if watched again and again for months is bound to transform itself into something else. These transformations somehow “suggested” by the collective writings of billions of people around the world.
When the server detects a change in the poem it stores it in the Archive. The server looks for new versions every four hours.
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Can I access the Archive?
Yes, you gain access to the Archive when you subscribe to the project. Visit SIGN UP to know more.
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Can I have a look at the online piece for free?
Of course, just check the FREE TRIAL, you can read 5 sentences out of 14
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Is the FREE TRIAL, generated live?
Yes.
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How often are new versions of the poem stored into the Archive?
The server makes a check every 4 hours, but as far as I know it could take a year or … a day to get a new version of the poem. I don’t have an idea nor I have a direct control on this.
The piece is like a live being, it depends on external factors (the web at large, what people write globally, and of course the google scribe algorithm)
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How many poems are stored in the Archive?
The project just started (September 2011), and up to now there are 20 versions stored into the Archive.
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What kind of subscriptions are available?
There is a TRIAL version where you access to half of the poem for free.
Three PASSes, expiring and NOT automatically renewing.
These can be purchased through Credit Card or PayPal
-A DAY pass
-A 3 DAYs pass
-A WEEKLY pass
One MEMBERSHIP, autorenewing every 10 days. This can be activated only through PayPal (you need to have a PayPal account). Of course you are free to cancel the subscription at any time.
These are for private use only.
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How much does it cost to sign up?
TRIAL: Free
ONE TIME PAYMENTS (major Credit Cards or PayPal):
1 Day: 0,99€ (live mode + archive)
3 Days: 2,50€ (live mode + archive)
7 Days: 4,99€ (live mode + archive)
SUBSCRIPTION (only through PayPal):
10 Days Membership: 6,99€ (live mode + archive). Auto-renewing every 10 days. You can cancel at any time. This is the best solution if you want the piece running in your apartment 24/7
These are for private use only.
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Why don’t you offer a monthly or a year subscription?
Because the project relies on a third party code (Google Scribe). It can work for years or stop tomorrow, and I don’t want people loose their money subscribing for a year when they see the project dying after a few days… it would mean a lot of troubles for me too 🙂
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On what device does the project work?
It works on iPad1, iPad2, PC, MACs, iPhone
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Who are you?
Carlo Zanni was born in La Spezia (Italy) in 1975. Since the early 2000’s his practice involves the use of Internet data to create time based social consciousness experiences investigating our life. He lives far from the worldliness of the art world while showing and screening his projects in venues worldwide including: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; New Museum, New York; Tent, Rotterdam; MAXXI, Rome; P.S.1, New York; Borusan Center, Istanbul; ACAF Space, Alexandria; PERFORMA 09, NY; ICA, London; Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; Science Museum, London. He founded People From Mars to experiment new distribution models for video art and new media projects. www.zanni.org
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Do you sell any other project for a few € ?
Yes, you can check Iterating My Way Into Oblivion, 2010. You get the video in a Noodle cup packaging signed and numbered containing a DVD data with a 3 Gb, .mov file (1080p) signed and numbered. From the file you can make your own DVD, Bluray, iPad etc. versions.
Edition of 1000.
Price: 90 € (approx: 125 US $ ) + Shipping
www.iteratingmywayintooblivion.com
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What about People From Mars?
The People are coming
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