Two of my classmates at ITP made this incredibly fun sendup of the game Plinko from The Price Is Right. It’s called Plinko Poetry and I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with it over the past few days. I’ll let the creators, Deqing Sun and Inessah Selditz, explain what it’s all about:

Drawing source text from current @nytimes and @FoxNews tweets, players can absurdly re-contextualize news headlines that are often overloaded with meaning. With roots in The Price Is Right and experimental blackout poetry—every player can be both a winner and a poet!

The interface of Plinko Poetry uses Processing to display alternate scrolling lines of current tweets from the New York Times and Fox News. When a user drops a chip, it randomly hits pegs on the way down. The word under each peg that is hit is highlighted, with the untouched pegs automatically darkened. Plinko Poetry uses openFrameworks camera color tracking to determine which pegs have been encountered. When the chip comes to a stop, the user is left with a trail of blackout poetry which is then live tweeted to @PlinkoPoetry. Ultimately users will create a new corpus of ever changing poetic text based on the zeitgeist of current headlines.

Plinko Poetry will be on display at the ITP Spring Show 2012 next week in New York City. If you’d like to try your hand at making Plinko poems or you want to check out more of the incredible work from the students at ITP, stop by!

ITP Spring Show 2012
Monday, May 14, 2012 – Tuesday, May 15, 2011
5pm – 9pm on Monday, 4pm – 8pm on Tuesday (Free and open to the public. No RSVP required.)
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York