‘We met in the border town of Berwick-Upon-Tweed, built a computer program from repurposed old code and self-authored new code, tweaked and tuned it to the ballad text of Walter Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and set it to write new ballads in the same form and language. We are asking of the program no more than was expected of the ballads’ first singers; in recording the results, we are as editorial as Scott. The program, as with all poetry, lives in the border zone between success and failure, to teach us something about language, something about poetry, and everything about what it means to create.’ – from ‘The Computer Writes a New Old Language’, New Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border

Commissioned from open submission, Harry Josephine Giles & Martin O’Leary have used a neural network to produce poems that return to the vernacular language found in the ballads and poetry of nineteenth century Scotland and Northern England.

Harry Josephine Giles is a poet and performer and Martin O’Leary is a digital artist and designer: they came together from their different disciplines and perspectives over a shared interest in online texts, twitterbots, procedural generation and computer poetry.

Dialecty, conceived by Maria Fusco with The Common Guild, considers the uses of vernacular forms of speech and writing, exploring how dialect words, grammar and syntax challenge and improve traditional orthodoxies of critical writing.

Publication in December 2018 at a launch event celebrating the Dialecty series:

‘Sometimes Here Has No Walls’
Saturday 8 December 2018, 15:00 – 18:00
The Common Guild
21 Woodlands Terrace
Glasgow, G3 6DF

along with:
Skrubolz Garbillkore
Robert Herbert McClean
ISBN 978 1 906012 94 6
It Disappears In Blue and Red and Gold
Helen Nisbet
ISBN 978 1 906012 93 9
Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship
Lisa Robertson
ISBN 978 1 906012 97 7
Enn Gramaten
Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams
ISBN 978 1 906012 95 3
Notes on Just Back from Los Angeles: A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer
Adam Pendleton
ISBN 978 1 906012 96 0