The Public Tarot: Generative Fortunes

A generative tarot reader by Marilyn Roxie. The Public Tarot was made with open-source, interactive fiction software Twine. Purple text indicates word associations with the 78 Rider-Waite tarot images given by 31 survey respondents who ranged in familiarity or lack thereof with the tarot. These responses were then remixed with text from A.E. Waite's The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), which is now in the public domain.

The tarot card images are of the 1909 Rider-Waite deck illustrated by Pamela Coleman Smith, originally scanned by Holly Voley and sourced from the Internet Sacred Text Archive. These images are in the public domain and have been passed through a 16-bit color filter.

Special thanks to survey-takers, troubleshooters, and play-testers:

Hune Ceaulage, ChapelR, Barbara D’Aversa, Devon, the Digital Futures class at Manchester Metropolitan University, feodoric, GoblinSpaceWizard, Nolan Harris, Kelly Jones, Michelle Jones, Ciel King-Williams, Ryan Daniel Koenig, litrouke, The Mad Exile, Ruth Miller, Natari, Ocean, Fex Orumwense, Daisy Polaski, Elsie Profilio, qdot, Ruune, Ant Shea, Tala, Nicholas van der Waard, Wendy, Nam Vo, Bishop Xiong, and all anonymous survey respondents.

The background image is a photograph taken by Rodion Kutsaev and the cursor icons are by MadameBerry, both licensed in the public domain.