The music:
The pingpong & amnesia suite consists of five movements inspired by different parts of the poem:
I. who barreled down the highways of the past
II. through images juxtaposed, and trapped
III. pushcarts full of onions and bad music
IV. they've come to drop angelic bombs
V. who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey
When you click the start button, the five movements will play in order (they last a little less than 20 minutes), which will take you through about 20% of the whole sequence. After that, the computer picks the movements in a totally random order: you could hear part III five times in a row or never hear it again.
Allen Ginsberg composed Howl in 1955 (incorporating earlier notes and drafts) and read it aloud for the first time at San Francisco’s Six Gallery in October of that year. Lawrence Ferlinghetti published an expanded version in 1956 as Howl and Other Poems, and the work’s frank treatment of sex, drugs, madness, and homosexuality invited legal scrutiny. Shigeyoshi Murao, the manager of City Lights Bookstore, was arrested for selling the book to an undercover police officer, and Ferlinghetti was charged as its publisher. The resulting obscenity trial became a landmark victory for free expression: Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl both had redeeming social importance and was not obscene.
In the early 1980s, composer John Cage created Writing through Howl on an IBM PC (with coding by Jim Rosenberg and Andrew Culver). Writing through Howl is a series of computer-assisted mesostic poems that passed through Ginsberg’s text in search of words whose internal letters could spell out the name Allen Ginsberg. Cage had been incorporating chance procedures into his music since at least Music of Changes in 1951, where he used the I Ching to determine compositional choices. Long before that, Marcel Duchamp had created Erratum Musical in 1913, a chance-based vocal piece assembled by drawing notes from a hat.
One passage from Cage’s Writing through Howl begins:
mAdness
coLd-water
fLats
thE
braiNs
throuGh
wIth
aNd
academieS
Burning
monEy
maRijuana
niGht
(A poem in which the first letters of each line spell something is an acrostic; when the key letters run down the middle instead, it is called a mesostic. That seems like good information to have for solving crossword puzzles.)
My twenty-first-century homage to both Ginsberg and Cage goes a few steps further. In pingpong & amnesia, I have broken Howl into 2,500 chunks*. When you click the start button, the first nine chunks of the poem appear on the screen, in random order, as the music begins to play. After that, each cell of the 3x3 grid is replaced by a new chunk drawn from somewhere else in the text. This continues until all 2,500 chunks have been sequenced. If you have chosen to stream the project as a loop, it then starts over automatically.
Sometimes these juxtapositions read like a poor excuse for Mad Libs; sometimes they generate something unexpectedly profound.
Each rectangle in the grid is a different color, and those colors—also generated randomly—help shape your perception of what is on screen. Words come and go quickly, and a grid that initially seems like nonsense may suddenly give way to new poetic forms and meanings. A pause button at the bottom of the screen lets you stop the grid at any time to contemplate the "meaningful adjacencies" (to borrow a phrase from architect Michael Arad) that the algorithm has created. If you see something that moves you, click the PAUSE button and then the CAPTURE button to save the grid to your device.
*Most chunks are single words, but I decided that whenever an article appears, it would be yoked to the following word: for example, the best or an angry. Similarly, I decided to have the preposition of always join the word or words after it, so of my is treated as a single block, as is of the skull, etc.