Kate Compton: Bot Poetics // Interrupt 4

There’s a ton of procedural generation research going on out there, and I’ve only been able to post a small fraction of it. For example, Interrupt 4: A Digital Language Conference is a two-day conference that’s going on right now and has talks by Kate Compton, Darius Kazemi, everest pipkin, Ramsey Nasser, and more.

Kate Compton’s talk above is just one of them. I do like the discussion of how constraints and limited possibility space make a safe space for interacting with the bots.

Her larger point, about the poetics of bots, touches on something I’m intensely interested in: what can we do with these generative things? We have all these amazing generative things, but I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of how we can can use them to convey meaning and evoke feelings.

In many cases we don’t need new generative technology; a better understanding of the poetics of generativity will open up whole new spaces.