Liza Daly

Composite artwork: overlapping illustrations of figures, pottery, and floral patterns from historic book plates

My work centers on playful ways in which machine-generated randomness can augment human creativity, whether by outputting unreadable books, composing algorithmic "poetry", synthesizing surrealism, or providing new ways to tell interactive stories.

I'm a software engineer and executive with experience in web development, digital publishing, and data warehousing. I'm also an amateur researcher of 19th century utopian novels, and a regular participant in National Novel Generation Month. I work primarily with progressive political tech teams and academic libraries. More →

Procedural art & code

2014

Seraphs: A mysterious codex

A computer-generated book based on the Voynich Manuscript. Featured at MIT Libraries as part of Author Function, a 2018 exhibit on computer-generated books.

2022

A letter groove

Produces cut-up images in the style of artists' books out of rare and interesting manuscripts. Each run generates unique compositions from historic texts.

An illustration of a flightless bird with words cut out

A page from a manuscript with cut-out text

A page with words excised and a portrait visible below

2025

The numbers, one to 50 thousand

A generated book containing the numbers one to fifty thousand as extracted from scanned books on the Internet Archive. An entry in National Novel Generation Month 2025.

Detail showing extracted number typography from historic texts

2023

The figure 10 in gold

An animated digital poem for Taper #10: Powers of Ten, inspired by Charles Demuth's Precisionist painting of William Carlos Williams's poem "The Great Figure."

Golden numbers 10 emerging from a grey canvas with angular light rays

2015

Random chance: Computer-imagined surrealist montages

Generated compositions that resemble photomontages in the style of early surrealists. The program combines public domain images into unexpected juxtapositions.

Surreal composite of a man in a top hat and an octopus

Composite of an egyptian statue and some text

2020

Color problems

A generator based on the works of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939), who hoped her original color analyses would inspire others to study "whatever originals may be at hand." A collaboration with Mel Dollison.

Try it

Randomized color grid from the Mona Lisa

2016

The days left forebodings and water: Generated blackout poetry

Creates artwork in the style of Newspaper Blackout Poetry using natural language processing and optical character recognition. Featured on Waxy.org in 2016.

Scribbled red and black lines with visible words

2017

A physical book: Undigitization

Makes a digitized book "physical" by rendering it in a simulated space where properties like gravity, friction, and velocity are applied to the letterforms.

2021

A pickler for the nowing ones

A translator and generator to produce text in the style of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1802) by noted eccentric Timothy Dexter. An entry in National Novel Generation Month 2021.

2017

No solitude in the caves of spring

An alliterative poem by a neural net: "Ants and all ages are all about—active as buds are bound by black, bubbles burn by maple blackbird body..."

2015

Saga III: Recreating the first computer-written teleplay

A reimagining of a 1961 computer program that generated the screenplay to a Western, filmed by CBS television. Source code and history of the project. Invited contribution to the Workshop on the History of Expressive Systems.

Interactive fiction

2017

Harmonia

An interactive mystery, playable in a web browser, about utopian ideals and bookish delights.

Harmonia is one of those rare pieces of interactive fiction where the author has woven a unified experience out of crosshatched decisions in writing and systems design. — Bennett Foddy, designer of QWOP and Baby Steps

Best Use of Innovation and Best Use of Multimedia, 2017 XYZZY Awards. Finalist for Best Story and Best Implementation. Third place, 2017 Interactive Fiction Competition.

Image like a 19th century postcard of a large house, with a tear at the bottom. The word Harmonia is in handwriting.

Four screenshots from Harmonia showing the game interface

Detail of a mechanical device from Harmonia

2016

Stone Harbor

An interactive detective story, playable in a web browser. Interview about the development of the piece with Emily Short. Source code. Portuguese translation by José Carlos Dias. Spanish translation by Neido Translations.

Fourth place, 2016 Interactive Fiction Competition, and finalist for three 2016 XYZZY Awards including Best Writing.

The title Stone Harbor over a picture of a beach in shadow

A dimly lit reading room with bookshelves

2019

The Ballroom

A short "mutable story" in which a complete narrative is always present but can be manipulated by the player in sometimes surprising ways.

Modifying something that seems trivial can overturn the whole chain of events, adding entire stretches of paragraph to the page and radically changing the existing ones. — Interactive Licktion review

Best in the Back Garden audience ribbon, Spring Thing 2019 festival

A two-tone image of a chandelier with the words The Ballroom Liza Daly

2012

First Draft of the Revolution

An interactive epistolary story I commissioned from Emily Short. I worked on the design and implementation with inkle (80 Days, Heaven's Vault).

A marvel—an exploration of the space between the mind and the page the likes of which I've never experienced. — Kotaku

Best Use of Innovation, 2013 XYZZY Awards.

Utopian novels

Old French Fairy Tales, illustrated by Virginia Francis Sterrett

Her stories

A survey of early utopian and dystopian works by women, from the period between 1850 and the early 20th century.

Arqtiq

1899

I went deep into the biography of an obscure author of this period: Anna Adolph, her novel Arqtiq, and a uniquely American personal history.

Unveiling a Parallel

1893

An exuberantly feminist and sex-positive utopian novel by Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Robinson Merchant.

Black and white detail of an eyeless figure and a 19th century man in a cave

Etidorhpa

1895

A triumph of the hollow earth genre, Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd takes the reader on a hallucinogenic journey with instantly memorable illustrations.

Journeys to the Planet Mars

1903

A deeply-felt hoax by spiritualist Sara Weiss, written and illustrated under the direction of "spirit guides." In 2023 I wrote an interactive fiction piece, The ecology of the waterways of Mars, based on her cosmology.

Red and white book cover showing an ostrich

The Ostrich for the Defence

1912

William Hile's novel-length advertisement for a doomed venture to achieve world peace through ostrich farming.

Green book cover with the words Freeland and a decorative illustration of a tree

Freeland: A Social Anticipation

1889

Theodor Hertzka's immensely popular novel led to a disastrous attempt to realize his utopian plan in Kenya.

Red book cover with an image of a being floating over the earth

Loma: A Citizen of Venus

1897

A clairvoyant being from Venus saves the young mother of the messiah. "Doctor" William Windsor wrote Loma to capitalize on the utopian trend and sell phrenology, quack science, and curiously modern gender politics.

Young West

1894

Solomon Schindler, a radical Reform rabbi in Boston, authored this surprisingly good sequel to Edward Bellamy's classic utopian novel, printed in a uniquely colorful series of editions.

Client work

A computer interface showing an old manuscript

University of Pennsylvania · 2018–2022

Manicule

An open source React webapp for exploring the physical structure of rare manuscripts. Developed under the direction of Whitney Trettien as part of Digital Book History.