Playthings — Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Playthings

I am working on a few other code-based playthings focused on word games and language constraints. They foreground my interest in intuitive, constrained, chance-based composition and a deep desire for collaborative writing. I am calling these invitations and games petite and lo-fi-coded playthings. I am basically creating homework assignments for myself because I have always been that person (— like that time in elementary school when I thought my teachers were not assigning enough homework so I *publically* asked for more homework and went on to literally create my own worksheets…needless to say, I was not a popular child!) The first writing constraint system I (consciously) created was in the summer of 2020 when I was doing a short-term residency at Tiger Strikes Asteroid.

Will You Help Me Find New Words?

Each cycle, players gift Kameelah a new word. She uses these words to create new writing. In Cycle 2, beginning on 18 January 2025, you can also submit new sentences.

Updated: 2025 March 3
Published: 2024 January 23
Author: Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Host: CodePen
Made With: HTML, CSS, JS
Designer: Kameelah Janan Rasheed

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ PLAY! ︎

Conjure a New Sentence

After generating a random sentence from Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973), drag individual words and punctuation to create a new sentence.

This was created as part of a course at the Little Octopus School launching in mid-June.

Updated: 2025 March 3
Published: 2024 June 15
Author: Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Host: CodePen
Made With: HTML, CSS, JS; Python (for text tokenization)
Designer: Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Coming Soon!

Writing Alongside Água Viva

After generating a random prompt for writing alongside Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973), begin writing a new text of shape a new image.

This was created as part of a course at the Little Octopus School launching in mid-June.

Updated: 2025 March 3
Published: 2024 June 15
Author: Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Host: CodePen
Made With: HTML, CSS, JS;
Designer: Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Scores by: Students in the Little Octopus School course

Thank you, Agnes Pyrchla! Their suggestion to slow down the clicking and slowly engage with the prompts led to the creation of the google document extension that invites players to write and share before proceeding to a new prompt!

Coming Soon!

Designing what I call petite and lo-fi-coded playthings (both simple code and more analog versions) is a reminder that at the heart of these playthings is the invitation to other possibilities; what other forms are possible? How can the constraint offered, open us up? I believe unpredictability can be offered as a language of liberation. By unpredictability, I mean the welcomed disruption of the expected program, the pleasurable unfamiliarity with the unfolding part of the story, and the inability to name the thing that now exists because no language can even begin to capture it. I do not think liberation is as simple as breaking syntactical structure; however, the analogy of a writing system offers up the schema of “waywardness” (in the way both Emily Dickinson and Sadiya Hartman talk about) and internal rebellion.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner from East Palo Alto, CA