| Title: |
Pandaemonium – Generating the Unexpected |
| Speaker: | David Link |
| Date: | Thursday 17th April 2025 |
| Time: | 14:30 |
| Location: |
25 Copthall Ave, London EC2R 7BP and |
About the seminar
The lecture will focus on “Pandaemonium”, a book of mine published in June 2024. The whole text was created by a machine, the text generation algorithm “Poetry Machine”, which I have been actively developing since the year 2000. The basis of this software are semantic networks, huge databases that analyse human associations in the internet. Each chapter is devoted to a certain topic and freely associates about it. Since the computer cannot decide about the quality of its output, I selected interesting and poetic passages for the book from the text generated.
I will provide a short overview of the history of mechanical text generation, followed by a detailed description of “Poetry Machine”. I will concentrate on how algorithms can be conceived that freely generate surprising and unexpected output and the important role played by incompleteness. This stands in contrast to the current development of so-called generative Artificial Intelligence, which only reproduces the well-known: what is to be expected statistically. “Poetry Machine” aims to generate serendipity.
The theoretical part will be followed by a lecture of selected passages of “Pandaemonium”.
About the speaker
David Link, born in Düsseldorf in 1971. Artist, media theorist and programmer. Lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
His artistic works are shown at festivals and in museums worldwide. Exhibitions (selection): Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2010); dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel (2012); Microwave Festival, Hong Kong (2012); YCAM, Yamaguchi, Japan (2013); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2015, 2018, 2019-2022); CCCB, Barcelona, Spain (2016); Manchester Art Gallery, UK (2016); MAK, Vienna, Austria (2019); Crone Gallery Wien Berlin (2021, 2022); Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art, China (2023).
His theoretical work can be found in: David Link, Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2016).
More information at alpha60.de.
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