Primstaven Procedural Writing Game

PRE-PROCESS

1. A rune of the primstav (indicating time of year)
2. An epoch -- a time period in history
3. An emotion
4. An initial location

You should use these to guide or inspire your writing process.

Sorting procedure: each participant will pull a number from a hat with numbers 1-12 (primstav), 1-12 (epoch), 1-12 (emotion), 1-12 (location).

PROCESS

1. Travel by lookup table (below)
   Your travel through the afternoon of writing will be determined by a procedural lookup table. You are at a numbered location. Every half hour you will change locations. To find your next location, at the stroke of the half hour count the same number of letters as your location from the start of your text to find the letter of the column to find your next location. For instance, if you are at location #5 and the first sentence of your text begins “I remember” then you would look down the column marked “m” in row 5 to find the number of your next location.
    
2. I remember
   Begin your first text in your first location with the phrase “I remember” -- and try to frame a memory of your own to the location you are in, using the rune, epoch, and emotion as further inspiration for your text.
    
3. Format your text
   At the top of each text, write the location #, your epoch, and the time of day at the top of the entry.
    
4. I steal your end for my beginning
   You will be given a sheet of stickers. Before looking up your next location, write the last sentence from your notebook on a sticker and adhere it to a visible surface on the location you have been writing about. When you arrive at the new location, find a sticker with a sentence left behind by one of the other writers. Use that as the first sentence of your text.
    

POST-PROCESS

End of the afternoon typing session
At the end of the process, you will type your entries into a shared Google doc.

Note: The text was left, for the most part, un-edited in order to maintain the sense of its spontaneous generation rather than its labored refinement. Presented here is the raw output.

Then, over the course of the next week, we will develop different electronic literary works using the texts we have created. These may include:

A) Re-Reading Machine
A coded procedural operation based on Brendan Howell’s reading machine

B) Hypertext Remixes
Select at least 10 of the texts, including some of your own and some by others. Link them together into a simple web mulltilinear hypertext narrative.

C) Generator
Using a simple poetry generator program, substitute phrases from the common text pool to remix new generators.

D) Google Map Locative Narrative
We will put all of the texts onto a google map to creative a narrative map of the writing experience.

E) Mash-up Shuffleboard
We will use a simple program to layer texts with one another.

Lookup Table

The lookup table used in both the 2010 Exquisition and the Colonization of Memory. Exquisitors used this table to determine where they were supposed to proceed next.