Smart Fridge Poetry Magnets are an extension of their predecessors that distinguish themselves from their analogue counterparts by being able to individually access large dictionaries of words, select words based on the content of neighbouring magnets and learn a basic sense of grammar through user interactions.

Each magnet has a lexicon of words and their associated parts of speech (POS), words defined in relation to their grammatical function. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and adverbs are all parts of speech.

Magnets learn through positive interactions what parts of speech are preferred neighbours. The desired outcome of this is to explore the possibility of an emergent abstract poetry, as well as a whimsical, playful approach to agent-based learning.

The flow of interaction is as follows:

- The user selects a magnet and places it on the fridge.
- The magnet communicates with its neighbours and finds out what POS they are.
- If the user leaves the magnet on the board, it learns that its left and right neighbours’ POS are valid with respect to its own POS.
- A magnet can have its current word changed by depressing a button on the magnet. The magnet then selects a new word through a probability distribution based on the history of its left and right neighbours.
- The user then selects the next magnet to place on the fridge. This can be placed to the left or right of any words already on the fridge.

Communication between magnets is effectuated through bi-directional infrared transmitter/receivers.

PROTOTYPE TECHNOLOGY

The hardware prototypes of the Smart Fridge Poetry Magnets each consist of the following:

* A microcontroller
* A 16-character LCD display
* Infrared based transmitter/receivers on each side of the display (to communicate with neighbouring magnets)
* An SD (SecureDigital) memory card interface which enables us to load different databases of words into each magnet
* A button to change the displayed word

Project web-page: http://digitalstar.net/projects/smartpoetrymagnets/

True Blue Love is a mobile phone social networking experience, designed to explore the politics behind intimate phone-based relations.

Inspired by a trip to Tokyo, Japan, the capital city of mobile technologies, I was struck by the ability of the mobile phone to enhance polygamous activity through non-verbal and thus unnoticeable phone text messaging.

True Blue Love is a networked real-time experience which is intended to run in public, social spaces. Possible scenarios would be to have it run concurrent with a cocktail party, book launch, workshop or other such gathering of a variety of people. Alternatively, designated zones could be established throughout the city, encouraging people to run the software in certain areas, increasing the chances of interaction between participants.

Each person is supplied with a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone running custom client software written in the Java programming language. Each participant selects from a predefined list of options
the characteristics of their ideal sexual mate from within the software. While the software is running, every time another phone comes within range, a “love” metric is calculated which is a representation of how close the incoming person matches the participant’s ideal mate. If the match is close, the phone will emit a raucous mating call that will be unique to that participant.

The concept behind the triggered mating calls is to attempt to undermine the silent technology of messaging and email with vocal communication that expresses the user’s desires through a public
broadcast, a broadcast that harks back to more primitive exchanges. The ridiculous sounds should function as social ice-breakers, and the unwilling couple may want to discuss what it is that they have in common that triggered the noise.

A fully functional prototype of True Blue Love was developed for dLux Media Arts and the Mobile Journeys exhibition in 2005 (http://dlux.org.au/mobilejourneys/pierreproske.html).

Project web-page: http://www.digitalstar.net/projects/truebluelove/