The Griot Sings Haibun

A griot is a revered storyteller in many parts of the African Diaspora. "The Griot Sings Haibun,"is an improvised performance of music, poetry, image, and computation. Live musicians fuel collective improvisation with Harell's GRIOT, a cybernetic system on which a human "plays" an ever-changing polypoem, an interactive multimedia polymorphic narrative poem. The core of GRIOT is the novel Alloy algorithm to generate new concepts and metaphors by blending, based on recent research in cognitive linguistics, computer science, and semiotics. A polypoem is not the output of a single GRIOT execution, but the space of possible poems and/or the code that makes them. In this work, GRIOT generates (neo)haibun: combined narrative prose and haiku-like poetry of everyday experience, influenced by Basho, and the traditions of beat poetry and African call-and-response; tonight our collective griot sings qualia, the qualitative feel of this human life world.