Nathan Walker
Action Score Generator
Nathan Walker
Action Score Generator
“Nathan Walker's new book is a splendid tome, 600 poems, a poem per page, each centered in upper case type. Each poem has six lines and the whole text is generated from a random JavaScript code that is featured on Walker's website...What I particularly like about this book - apart from its splendid materiality and bulk - is the fact that there's a lightness to the whole project, a sense of fun about the processes involved and an understanding that while such processes can pose interesting questions about the nature of production, it can be taken and enjoyed on a more immediate level...There's the potential here for a relation between text on the page, text on the screen and text in performance, which feels wonderfully active and stimulating, not something you could say about all 'avant-garde' projects these days.”
—Steve Spence Stride Magazine
Action Score Generator
ISBN 0957182767624pp, 9 x 6 x 1.5 inch
paperback
Published by If p then q
Click to view the Action Score Generator here
The Action Score Generator is a website that produces event scores for performance. The material objects, locations and activities within each score are based on the performance archives of Nathan Walker between 2009-2014 and work towards shuffling and redistributing the archival record to create an anarchive.
The website produces a score using a JavaScript code. The code produces a text of six words in length for six seconds. Every six seconds the six word text is replaced by another six word text and so on and so, the six word texts disappear. In this sense these texts also perform, as instructions and as poems.
The Action Score Generator was also published as a book by Manchester based published If p then q. The print version is a sixty-minute performance by a machine writing ten six second texts every minute using only six words at a time. They are ordered as they were produced and remain unedited. The book also features an afterword by Mark Leahy entitled ‘An Action Movie (for NW)’.
The Action Score Generator was exhibited as part of the Poetry Library, London as part of the exhibition Conceptual Poetics.
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The website produces a score using a JavaScript code. The code produces a text of six words in length for six seconds. Every six seconds the six word text is replaced by another six word text and so on and so, the six word texts disappear. In this sense these texts also perform, as instructions and as poems.
The Action Score Generator was also published as a book by Manchester based published If p then q. The print version is a sixty-minute performance by a machine writing ten six second texts every minute using only six words at a time. They are ordered as they were produced and remain unedited. The book also features an afterword by Mark Leahy entitled ‘An Action Movie (for NW)’.
The Action Score Generator was exhibited as part of the Poetry Library, London as part of the exhibition Conceptual Poetics.
“And the words go by quickly, certainly I can’t carry out what they suggest, another set of six appears before I have processed the one before me. I can quickly read, recognise, internally sound, parse the words, but they don’t give me time for them to set into a clear command or to form into a stable image of an action. There’s always more, and each one is enough, as another intertitle flickers past in this silent text action movie”
— Mark Leahy from ‘An Action Movie (for NW)’