Shake/Speare

Cutup of Shakespeare's opera omnia


  • Media arts, Net-art, Generative hypertext
  • Torino (IT) - May 2003

Shake/Speare is a semantic reading system that shakes William Shakespeare's opera omnia and creates brief fragments of text to be read discontinuously jumping from a word to another. Shakespeare composed thousands of pages, Shake/Speare shakes them to build a neurotic hypertextual web-browsing that, starting from a random page, leads the user through the complete collection of shakespearian works.


Technical details

Shake/Speare is a PHP-based application that uses Google APIs to point at Shapespeare’s Opera Omnia online, grab portions of his works and mix them in cut-ups with other author’s text, criticism essays, biographies or forum posts. This cutup process creates generatively an infinite collection of brand-new texts that are based on the idea of serendipity and recombinant options.
All the terms clicked during the browsing are saved in the lexicon that progressively increases and shows the most significant words met during the browsing and ranked by number of clicks-through.

Role


  • Concept generation
  • Web development
  • Graphic identity

Credits

Paolo Gerbaudo



Gallery

  • Shake/Speare
  • Shake/Speare