Hi there, and welcome to the first edition of the Trans-Dimensional Pressure Cooker Conspiracy newsletter! This is a space to chart the progress of the weird and wonderful exploratory meanderings of Martin Pichlmair and Charlene Putney, two creators who live and work together in Copenhagen, Denmark.
We have an iOS narrative word puzzle game called VITRIOL that’s coming out in a few months and we’re really excited to share it with the world. But from where did the first seeds of this game spring? From our experiments with randomness!
One of the things that brings us joy in our experiments is the element of surprise: when the work we create tells us something we haven’t heard before, teaches us something we didn’t already know, or even seems to have some kind of life of its own.
Initially, our experiments were in the realm of the Twitter bot. Martin made an easy-to-use tool called Ephemerald based on Tracery, and our forays into randomness began with Household Constellations, which generates constellations based on mundane objects.
We then went on to make an eclectic recipe generator called Five Sparrows on a Vampire, and a haiku fortune cookie bot called Haikookie. Try it, you might like it!
From there, we went on to make a game called Revolvelle based on medieval volvelles (which will be the subject of a later newsletter). Then we made a project called Tiphareth where we trained Open AI’s text generating model GPT-2 and remixed the results with human curation to craft new inspiring tarot card meanings for Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot. You can download our whole major arcana here.
All of these experiments fired up our hunger for pulling order out of chaos, and for using our work to ask questions of the universe (and then listening carefully for answers). If you’d like to read more about them, Martin has written an academic paper right here.
Now, despite the pandemic, we keep on making weird things (though a lot of our current experiments are food and home decor related!) and pulling meaning and purpose from our work. After all, alchemy is the art of transforming lead into gold, and our goal is transmuting the “lead” of this world into “gold” in various ways.
In our next newsletter, we’ll discuss how alchemy inspires us & how it has influenced our upcoming game VITRIOL. In the meantime, if you have any exciting experiments to share with us, we’d love to hear about them!