Octavia

What: "Octavia" is an experimental epistolary interactive fiction that can be completed in about 5 minutes.

How: I took the complete texts of Billy Budd by Herman Melville (1924) and Anarchism and Other Essays by Emma Goldman (1910) and ran them continuously through a Markov chain sentence remixer. From hundreds of iterations, I then curated fragments and phrases that I found interesting, and revised them to fit into an octave poem form. You and I write the letter together, and Melville, Goldman, Markov, Twine, and myself write the poem for you.

Why: This work was created for the Gaming Like It's 1924 jam, in celebration of Billy Budd entering the public domain. Mixing Melville and Goldman was mostly about personal taste, but the hybrid of images and ideas from these sources together suggested a sort of lost dream of political and sexual liberation from another century, or a parallel world, which is what inspired the text of the letter.

The music is an original composition. More of my work can be found on my website and my Twitter.