FROM DADA TO JAVA: conversations about generative poetry & Twitter bots

A short documentary about bots and generative text that is very, very relevant to my interests.

Paul Kneale’s comments on intent touches on something I’ve been struggling with in all my talk about order and structure here. How do you give the reader the same sense of intent via an entirely generative process? The attempted answer I’ve been exploring is that structure and constraints substitute for intent. 

Or, perhaps, are the meta-language by which intent is conveyed. By creating a bot that speaks according to a system of constraints, or generates a world with a constrained set of relationships, we can create a dialog between the reader and the hidden, possibly algorithmic author.

The discussion of a different way of reading generative works, building an internal mental model interests me for similar reasons. The idea that the end of our reading is the moment of our understanding has a lot of resonance for me. (It would: I have a long allegiance to the idea that the basic unit of games and generative cybertext is the aporia and epiphany that resolves it.)

There’s a lot of other ideas crammed into the dense twelve minutes, and it’s one of the best introductions to generative text I’ve seen. Do watch it.