Plinko Poetry is a new interface for electronic poetic expression, by Inessah Selditz and Deqing Sun, two Master’s students at NYUs Interactive Telecommunications Program. The installation draws source text from current @nytimes and @FoxNews tweets and creates a new corpus of ever changing poetic text based on the zeitgeist of current headlines.
The interface of Plinko Poetry uses Python and Processing to scrape and display alternate scrolling lines of current tweets from the New York Times and Fox News. When a user drops a chip, it randomly hits pegs on the way down. The word under each peg that is hit is highlighted, with the untouched pegs automatically darkened. Plinko Poetry uses openFrameworks camera color tracking to determine which pegs have been encountered.
When the chip comes to a stop, the user is left with a trail of blackout poetry which is then live tweeted to @PlinkoPoetry.
Plinko Poetry will be on display at the ITP Show: May 14th-15th
