andordada

By Beat Suter and René Bauer

AndOrDada is a road poem. The reader strolls through town and her immediate area generates a poem. She walks further through town or rides a bus and the poem changes according to her location in town. AndOrDada is an endless poem; AndOrDada is adaptive locative Dada. It reads, writes out and interprets the subconscious social structure of a town. The AndOrDada software works as an adaptive poetry-tool with locative levels. It generates new scenes and environments in the tradition of the situationists. It captures wlan waves in the immediate area of the reader and converts the wlan-waves into poetic objects. The software not only manages to generate subjects and objects, as a crucial addition for the poetic value of the project it manages to create verbs from the captured hotspots. AndOrDada features three distinct modes: The first mode manages to create a story; the second mode generates a narrative with your friends which are being retrieved from the address book; and the third mode shows a lyric approach and creates a dadaistique poem. The version for iPhone was rejected by Apple in 2009. An adapted Android version is available since May 2012 via http://www.and-or.ch/andordada/.

AndOrDada is a smartphone application for Android that generates narrative and poetical text by interpreting data crossing wireless networks. That the work is positioned on a smartphone, and how it interprets the data is quite unique as a form of electronic literature. AndOrDada is not simply a geo-locative mechanism or augmented reality tool, but a mobile poetry engine that responds to the surrounding environment to generate readable, albeit abstract text. As such, the work brings up questions of authorship, surveillance, and use value.