Thursday, October 8, 2009

...or why not a whole paper?

...like, say, "The Collapse of Reality: Textual deappropriation and social realism," which I just generated using The Postmodernism Generator (reload the page to generate more essays).

Representative sample:

“Class is fundamentally meaningless,” says Lyotard. However, the premise of patriarchial narrative states that consensus is a product of the collective unconscious, but only if Baudrillard’s model of the preconceptualist paradigm of reality is valid. Derrida promotes the use of textual deappropriation to analyse and read society.

If one examines patriarchial narrative, one is faced with a choice: either reject social realism or conclude that the goal of the artist is deconstruction.


(A lot of these kinds of projects work using Markov chains and statistical analyses of language. For example, a common approach is to break an block of text into three or four word chunks, then reassemble the chunks by using statistical predictions of which words are most likely to follow other words. This produces strangely readable, sometimes actually meaningful, sentences and passages; the illusion of machine intelligence is generated here in a manner similar to Weizenbaum's famous ELIZA program. I wrote a program using some of these concepts to generate random dreams, using a journal I kept of my own dreams as the seed material. You can look at that project here.)

4 comments:

  1. Please explain more of this to us in class tomorrow! I was actually amazed at how often I could make (impose?) sense on the sentences the Virtual Academic 'wrote.' It did get me thinking about the status of interpretation in the humanities. I also enjoyed reading the tiny 'How this Works' on the virtual academic page.

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  2. Anyone interested in this subject should check out Noah Wardruip-Fruin's excellent new book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games and Software Studies.

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  3. remotedevice, is this a "sponsored" blog comment? Kim Kardashian is doing it: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-onthemedia7-2009oct07,0,1996158.column

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  4. Yes, I work for Noah Wardruip-Fruin as a guerilla marketer.

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