Babylon Mood Ring styles and randomizes shards of language from "Frozen Custard in the City of Babylon" -- a sample poem of mine written years and years ago.
The site scrambles the poem's linear order in favor of a more stochastic reading experience. It reveals lines at different screen coordinates and shifts colors interactively with your cursor, which mimics the poem's nonlinear and fractured depiction of memory at the level of its design. As it samples verse and styles text, it invites the fleeting and seemingly random persistence of memory over time.
The thinking here comes in part from the Oulupo group, a loose band of experimental writers and mathematicians in 1960s France interested pushing the limits of literature through constraint-based writing excercises (e.g. N+7, palindromes, acrostics). It also draws on Kenneth Goldsmith's concept of "uncreative writing," which challenges traditional notions of originality and points to acts of selection, appropriation, combination, and context as more timely forms of (re)creation these days. The website's mechanism for selecting lines at random puts this to work through the stochastic display of verse in ways that also recalls Johanna Drucker's work on "stochastic poetics", which centers randomness in the production and reception of literary works. The unpredictable, algorithmic display of lines activates these approaches to reflect on the amorphousness of memory and the fractured ways our past can manifest in the present, as if at random.